2009/2010 a.k.a. the Year of Alice

For the past year and a bit, with all this hype leading up to the release of Tim Burton’s almost-sequel, Alice in Wonderland, the media has been going pretty Alice-crazy.

I thought at one point, ‘maybe it’s just me- maybe I’m just now seeing all of the Alice things that are out there’… but then I pondered it over a bit more and saw that it was much more than my lack of observational skills.

Clever marketing. Last year, SyFy Channel released their version of Alice in Wonderland, simply titled ‘Alice’, starring Caterina Scorsone as Alice and Andrew Lee Potts as Hatter (with Tim Curry and Kathy Bates thrown in there). It’s a modern depiction that I love dearly, with a casino as the Red Queen’s castle and flying flamingo-crafts.

But that’s not my point. My point is that even though it was originally aired sometime last November, it didn’t come out on DVD until March 2nd, just a few days before Tim Burton’s opened in theatres. Clever… very clever, indeed. Why shouldn’t they release it then? Lots of impulse buyers, looking to get their hands on anything and everything Alice before the big day, hoping to educate themselves on it a bit more I suppose.

And it’s not just recent editions of Alice that have surfaced; I’ve seen DVD-ified versions of Alice from the 80s, the 90s, even the 50s or 60s, I believe (not the cartoon- the very first live-action). And speaking of the cartoon, that’s supposed to be coming out on DVD for a while, then heading back to the ‘Disney Vault’.

So, bottom line, well done, marketing industry. You’ve done well for yourselves in the Year of Alice.