Monday, September 25, 2017

Character Insight No. 255: Alice and the White Rabbit

Welcome back to Character Insight!  This week, we review Alice and the White Rabbit, two characters who surprisingly show up on two episodes of Star Trek.

https://archive.org/details/CharacterInsightEp255

Kirk's Enterprise crew never visited pleasure planet Risa, but they found the next best thing in the episode Shore Leave.  An amusement park planet that can create characters and experiences right out of your own memories and thoughts!  What an amazing and terrifying concept, all at once.

Alice and the White Rabbit, well known characters from Lewis Carroll books and the 1951 Disney movie Alice in Wonderland, show up after Dr. McCoy says that the beautiful shore leave planet was like something out of that same Alice in Wonderland movie.  The characters turn out to be robots created by the planet, but it was a fun trip to Disneyland as the crew must figure out the mystery of this planet.

The crew sees these characters again in the TAS episode Once Upon a Planet.  As you might expect if you're familiar with Carroll's original works, Alice is chasing the White Rabbit, who is always concerned about being on time.  In this episode, McCoy and Sulu have a picnic with these fairy tale characters and a dragon.  Because if we've learned anything from Game of Thrones, it's that everything is much better and more believable with a dragon.

QUOTE (from Conspiracy):
Remmick: "We mean you no harm...we seek peaceful co-existence"...(Picard and Riker shoot him).

To date, these are the only Disney characters to invade Star Trek.  Given how Paramount and CBS are on the opposite end of the spectrum from Disney and ABC...it's probably not likely we will be seeing any Disney princess crossovers in Discovery or otherwise.  Some TOS episodes become memorably wonky, and Alice and the White Rabbit accomplish that for sure.

The White Rabbit was played by William Blackburn in TOS and voiced by James Doohan in TAS.  Blackburn also played Lieutenant Hadley, the Gorn Captain, and other guest characters on TOS.  He was a profession ice skater before being an actor and costume director, and those slick moves come in handy when running away from little girls from fairy tales.  Alice was played by Marcia Brown in TOS and then voiced by Nichelle Nichols in TAS.  Brown did not have any other notable acting roles, so one might consider this a one hit wonder...from wonderland.

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