Doll-A-Day 126: Alice's Pop-Up Wonderland

Today I'm sharing this Alice in Wonderland playset, Alice's Pop-Up Wonderland.

I originally bought one for Ivy because I thought it was so cool, and what would I do with it?

Then later I caved and bought one for myself. I have a collection of different versions of the Alice books, so it fit right in really.I might as well just have bought myself one anyway, because as it turned out, Ivy didn't enjoy the Alice books. We got about 3/4 of the way through the first one and she didn't want to hear any more of it because it was "boring". *Sigh* Oh well. Emma liked the Alice books when I read them to her.

The pop outs are two sided. Pop out figures count as dolls, right?

 You get regular AND shrunken Alice. The ugly Duchess, in the upper right hand corner was supposedly based on a painting of a REAL lady.

 In fact, the painting is called The Ugly Duchess, or A Grotesque Old Woman, by a Flemish artist named Quentin Massys. It's debated if the painting is really of 14th century Duchess Margaretha Maultasch, Princess of Carinthia, since it was painted in 1513, and she had died 200 years before.Maultasch was a name she was given due to her appearance. It means 'pocket mouth'.She got her unique appearance because she was suffering from a rare form of Paget's disease, osteitis deformans, which enlarged her jaw bones, extended her upper lip and pushed up her nose. It also affected her hands, eye sockets, forehead, chin and collarbones.For years it was thought the painting was copying a Leonardo Da Vinci drawing, but in the end  research proved Leonardo's work was a copy of this painting. You wouldn't think Leo would need to copy from anyone, but apparently even he had slow days when he had to steal ideas...

You can see the resemblance between the Duchess and the painting.

 In the 1972  movie Alice in Wonderland the Duchess was played by actor Peter Bull. He looked alot like the illustrations though!

Peter Bull as The Duchess and Fiona Fullerton as Alice.

I knew a lady once who looked like them too.Believe that or not.

Back to the pop-ups. They have condensed the story down to about 6 pages.

This playset was printed in 2000, by MacMillan Children's Books.

It has six different settings, and over 30 press out pieces to use with it. It even has a game you can play.

It uses the John Tenniel illustrations except, as is often done, they have added stripes to 'Wonderland' Alice's stockings. Only 'Looking Glass' Alice had stripes on her stockings in the original illustrations.

The table and half the chairs from the Mad Tea Party don't stand up properly. Well, it was a "mad" party.

That tab on the right is supposed to make the Cheshire cat disappear, but as usual, he was being difficult.

Tomorrow we'll see another actual Alice doll.