Childhood Shenanagins

As a child the Disney movie "Alice in Wonderland" was one of my favorites. I am a huge Walt Disney animated movie fan. In fact I have quite the collection started. I want to be able to share with my children the Disney princesses I grew up loving, Cinderella, Belle ("Beauty and the Beast"), Snow White, Ariel ("Little Mermaid"), Aurora ("Sleeping Beauty"), Jasmine ("Aladdin"), etc. Children movies today just aren't the same as when I was growing up. 3-D art has become the new fad for children movies, such as the PIXAR movies "Cars" and "Toy Story." Now, mind you, these are still super cute, I however prefer my animation.

However, one movie I am beginning to question whether I will show my children is "Alice in Wonderland." It's really quite silly, and if you have ever watched it you know exactly what I am talking about. A small girl falling down a rabbit hole, chasing the talking white rabbit, meeting various strange creatures and animals along her way. Weird mumblings and sayings going about while no one questions their validity, they simply let their children watch it.

These weird mumblings and sayings go hardly unnoticed in the Disney version, because its still light-hearted and hidden well enough to keep it a kid-friendly movie. However, TIM BURTON, comes along and creates a new movie with real-people telling the second part of Alice's story. This is where my world has turned upside-down.

I was super excited to go and see this movie, until I was reading more about it and looked a the list of characters. I noticed a character called: The Jabberwocky. I don't recall anyone by the name jabberwocky in the Disney version. So, I had to dig a little deeper to find out where this jabberwocky character was coming from.

Lewis Carroll, the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, had actually written a poem of nonsense about a jabberwocky and put it into the sequel to the first book: Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There. If you have the time to look up the poem and it's meaning, I do encourage it. It's quite bewildering the way Carroll's mind was able to create a total nonsense poem and develop his own words to create it. However, I applaud Walt Disney for leaving that out of his version of the story. Although, he did allow the Cheshire Cat to sing part of that wretched poem, although I never understood what he was singing until today:

"'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogroves,

And the mome raths outgrabe."