I am a fan of all things Alice in Wonderland, so of course I'm going to see Once Upon a Time in Wonderland (2013-2014), even if I have to buy it.
It features Alice but,not the real Alice Liddell (1852-1934), daughter of Dean Henry Liddell, professor of Greek at Oxford University, who inspired the stories. This is an alternate world Victorian England which co-exists with many other fantasy worlds, including Oz and Wonderland.
It has the same absurdly complex genealogies as the original Once Upon a Time series (remember that Henry Mills is the son of Snow White, the grandson of Rumpelstiltskin, and the great-grandson of Peter Pan? And his adopted mother marries Robin Hood):
The plot gets rather convoluted, with back story upon back story, surprise character connections ("he's your father?"), and an obsessive need to throw in everybody and everything from the books.
1. The main protagonists are Alice and the Knave of Hearts (Michael Socha), aka Will Scarlett, who was born in Oz and spent time among Robin Hood 's Merry Men. They have a back story where Alice restores his heart, which was stolen by the evil queen Cora, so he owes her.
2. Their main quest is to rescue Alice's True Love, Cyrus the Genie (Peter Gadiot, left), who is being held captive by the evil magician Jafar.
3. Jafar (Naveen Andrews) wants to get Cyrus back into his bottle, because then he would have all three of the world's genies and ultimate power. To do this, he must force Alice to use her three wishes, so he keeps putting her ior her friends into life-or-death predicaments. But the Power of True Love always triumphs.
4. He has an uneasy partnership with the Red Queen, whose twin assistants are the Tweeedles (Ben Cotton, left, Matty Finochio). She wants ultimate power in order to undo her past mistakes and reunite with her True Love, who happens to be...you guessed it...Will Scarlett.
The obsessive Alice in Wonderland references become annoying, since the writers usually squeeze them in weird ways, or get them utterly wrong. The Caterpillar as an underworld don.. The Lizard as a female thief with a crush on the Knave. Borogroves turn into the Lotus-Land Borogrovel. The magical monster is the Jabberwocky -- everybody knows that the monster is the Jabberwock; "Jabberwocky" is the title of the poem!
5.. The original series had very poor gay representation. Two lesbian characters, Red Riding Hood and Mulan, who hook up, kiss, and then vanish from the series forever. Here it's even worse. Heterosexual True Love everywhere. The White Rabbit becomes a wife-and-kids Family Man. Grendel, the monster from Beowulf., becomes The Grendel for some reason; he became a monster after the Red Queen separated him from His Wife.
I'm only about halfway through. Maybe I'll see what's on Netflix.
That last hunk looks like a classic "soap hunk", which is not a bad thing at all. 🤷♂️😏
ReplyDeleteSteve Bacic has been in Hollywood since 1991. No soaps, but a lot of romcoms, "Christmas hookup movies," and adventure stories where he has to wear a skimpy barbarian outfit.
DeleteMichael Socha, who looks like a British Jake Gyllenhaal, seems to have plenty of nude scenes
ReplyDelete