Doll-A-Day 127: Disney Alice by Mattel

Today's doll is Mattel's Disney Alice, from 1994.

Her shoes don't fit very well, and as soon as I put them on her today they split.

She's wearing a fairly traditional blue Alice dress and white pinafore, with the addition of some stars and sparkley stuff. Disney was big on this print at the time. It also appears on Beauty and the Beast Belle's aprons,amongst other things.

She even has her hair band.

 These hair bands were popularized by John Tenniel's illustrations of Alice in the original printing of Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There.

 They became so associated with the character that they became known as 'Alice bands'.

Sir John Tenniel's version of Alice talks to a somewhat unusual shopkeeper in Through the Looking Glass.

 She uses the big eyed Skipper head mold and body that were in use at the time

 

Talk about pencil necks! If they were going to make her head so big, maybe they should have beefed up the neck a little.

The arms on this body can stretch out to the sides as well as move up and down, which makes for a bit more poseability.

 Whenever they make Barbie into some famous character she's always "Barbie as...". Not so with Skipper.They just stole her head and made Alice, as well as Wendy from "Peter Pan". Poor Skipper. She's the Rodney Dangerfield of dolls.(She "don't get no respect.")

Generally I don't like Disney's Alice. I watch any version of Alice that's made into a movie, but I'll never be satisfied with any of them. None of them can match up to the images of the books that I have in my head. I hate versions that try to make the story too silly. There is madness there, but it's a serious madness. Make it too self consciously silly and you lose the whole feeling. I hope that made sense!

I also hate it when they try to modernize it, make Alice an adult, or make everyone American. I want my Alice to be an 1800's little English girl, like she originally was.

Tomorrow is another Alice.

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.