These are just a few of the countless appearances of Alice in a range of media – if you know of anything interesting that we’ve missed out, do let us know.

Films

At the end of 2005, IMDB (the Internet Movie Database) listed 48 big and small-screen adaptations and spin-offs from the Alice stories – from an eight-minute 1903 silent version, right up to a horror-movie “sequel”, called Alice, due for release 104 years later in 2007, starring Sarah Michelle Gellar (aka Buffy the Vampire Slayer) in the title role.

One early film version, of 1933, sees not only WC Fields as Humpty-Dumpty and Gary Cooper as the White Knight, but a young Cary Grant in the role of the Mock Turtle. Grant calls someone a “mock turtle” in one of his greatest films, His Girl Friday, in what is almost certainly an allusion to this part.

Thirty-three years later, Jonathan Miller directed his own version of Alice In Wonderland, an extraordinary and haunting film with an incredible cast (John Gielgud, Peter Cook, Michael Redgrave, Alan Bennett, Peter Sellers…) and music by Ravi Shankar. You can hear Jonathan Miller discussing his film with the ICONS team here.

• The BBC television version of 1972 was just as starry, though many of the famous faces (Dudley Moore, Ralph Richardson, Spike Milligan, Michael Hordern, Peter Sellers again) are hard to recognise behind their animal masks and make-up. This version featured music by James Bond composer John Barry, with characters bursting into song at surprising moments: “Curiouser and curiouser, I find I grow curiouser…”
• “It’s more like a pig than a baby, oh my! Will it sleep in a cot, or sleep in a sty?”
• Other strange castings include Ringo Starr (another Mock Turtle), Caterpillars Sammy Davis Jr and Ben Kingsley, Whoopi Goldberg and Telly Savalas as Cheshire Cats and a Richard Burton White Knight. (No, really.)

Besides these film versions of Alice, many movies refer to her as characters find themselves trapped in senseless and confusing worlds. A recent example of this is The Matrix, in which Neo (Keanu Reeves) follows “the white rabbit” and is led to Morpheus, who says, “I imagine that right now you’re feeling a bit like Alice, tumbling down the rabbit-hole…”, and offers Neo a choice: “You take the blue pill, the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill, you stay in Wonderland, I show you how deep the rabbit-hole goes…”

Animations

Perhaps more famous even than the book itself is the 1951 Disney version.

And then there’s the 1966 Hanna-Barbera version, subtitled, “What’s a nice kid like you doing in a place like this?” With Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble playing a two-headed caterpillar, Sammy Davis Jr voicing the Cheshire Cat and Zsa Zsa Gabor the Queen of Hearts, it’s as weird as it sounds.

Jan Svankmajer’s Alice (1988) mixes live action with some seriously sinister puppets.

And have you seen Terry Gilliam’s Jabberwocky? Or how about the 1987 American TV animated version of Through The Looking-Glass where the Jabberwock is voiced by Mr T?

Books

Quite apart from the many versions of Alice that marry Lewis Carroll’s text with new pictures, there are countless other books that dispense with the text altogether, using only aspects of it, or ideas from it, as a jumping-off point to tell their own story.

Frank Beddor’s brilliantly imaginative novel The Looking Glass Wars claims to tell the true story of Alice In Wonderland – in which Princess Alyss Heart is heir to the throne of Wonderland, but her wicked Aunt Redd kills the King and Queen and takes the throne for herself. Alyss flees to Oxford, home to one Charles Dodgson…

Even more peculiar, perhaps, is Jeff Noon’s Automated Alice, a sequel to the sequel of Alice In Wonderland, a multi-layered, sort-of futuristic, sort-of surreal story of Alice vanishing into the insides of a grandfather clock and appearing in 20th-century Manchester.

Jean Ure’s Bad Alice tells the disturbing story of a troubled girl who escapes from her troubles first by reading Alice In Wonderland, then by re-writing it for her own purposes. Read Jean Ure’s interview with the ICONS team here.

Dodgson himself features as a character in Tennyson’s Gift, Lynne Truss’s comic novel about photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, poet Tennyson and a number of other Victorian notables. It begins with Dodgson arriving at the Isle of Wight home of Julia Margaret Cameron; as he approaches her house, he overhears various members of her household rushing around the garden painting the red roses white…

And other things

Artist Meera Chauda is one of many who have used Alice for inspiration – in her case producing vividly coloured and striking collages that combine Alice illustrations with images of Hindu gods. Read Meera’s interview with ICONS here.

And then there’s a Gwen Stefani pop video – for What You Waiting For? – that’s inspired by Alice, a Jefferson Airplane song ("White Rabbit") and so much more. English fashion designer Vivienne Westwood has even produced an Alice-inspired collection!