Adaptation Vol. 7, No. 2, pp.

191–211
doi:10.1093/adaptation/apu007
Advance Access publication 2 July 2014

Tie-Intertextuality, or, Intertextuality as

Incorporation in the Tie-in Merchandise to
Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (2010)
Kamilla Elliott*

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Abstract Tie-in merchandise for Walt Disney’s and Tim Burton’s film, Alice in Wonderland (2010),
dislocates and modifies prior theories of intertextuality in adaptation studies with the intertex-
tual practices of corporate entertainment franchises. Poststructuralist and postmodern theories
of intertextuality construct it as a subversive and democratizing operation, dispersing meaning
among texts, dismantling high/low art hierarchies, and redistributing interpretive authority among
artists, professional critics, and ordinary audiences. Even when tie-in merchandise for the Disney-
Burton film is subversive of mainstream Disney aesthetics and ideologies, Disney and its licensed
tie-in merchandising affiliates engage in rhetoric and practices that reincorporate dispersed and
contesting intertexts, producing a portmanteau of ‘tie-intertextuality’. Consumers as well as prod-
ucts are tied in or incorporated as corporate intertexts through a rhetoric and iconography of act-
ing, interactivity, inspiration, incarnation, and fidelity. The effect is more one of capitalist dialogics
than of the Marxist dialectics academics have traditionally championed in theories of intertextuality.

Keywords Intertextuality, tie-in merchandise, franchise entertainment, Tim Burton, Walt Disney,
Alice in Wonderland.

On 1 September 2009, six months prior to the release of Tim Burton’s much-­anticipated
film, Alice in Wonderland, two enormous fabric-wrapped, ribbon-tied parcels inscribed,
‘Mad Tea at Three’, stood tantalizingly beneath a large clock at the Magic fashion trade
show in Las Vegas. At three o’clock, a whistle blew and cirque de soleil-style performers
costumed as Alice-themed characters unwrapped the packages to reveal furniture and
crockery for a mad tea party. While performers ‘drank’ invisible tea, they seductively
dangled and donned visible jewellery. As the performance ended, banners bearing the
Disney logo, the film’s title, and the words, ‘You’re invited to a very important date,
March 5th, 2010’, unfurled from a balcony. Yet this was not so much a promotion for
the film as for Disney Couture’s tie-in merchandise. The video description posted by
Disney Living on YouTube the following day ‘announces new Wonderland-inspired
fashions now available … featuring luxury jewelry inspirations from Tom Binns’ (‘Alice
in Wonderland Official Disney Fashion Tea Party’). As the Las Vegas Magic convention
performance concluded, another banner unfurled, declaring, ‘Alice is the New Black’.
The YouTube video description asserts: ‘Tim Burton’s interpretation of this classic
changes the way you think of fashion’. The claim offers the generic ‘you’ (individually

*Department of English and Creative Writing, Lancaster University. E-mail: k.elliott@lancaster.ac.uk.

© The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com 191
192 Kamilla Elliott

pointed and universally dispersed), a revolution reassuringly rooted in a ‘classic’, with

its connotations of timelessness, tradition, and quality.
If this film and its tie-in merchandise have not changed the way I think of fashion,
they have changed the way I think of adaptation. Clare Parody has pondered ‘how far
contact with the protocols of franchise production dislocates and modifies adaptive
practice from its paradigmatic forms’ and ‘how they are appropriating it, blurring its
boundaries, and forcing expansions and clarifications of its definition’ (212, 217). My
essay considers how tie-in merchandise for the Burton-Disney Alice in Wonderland film

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‘dislocates and modifies’ prevailing concepts of intertextuality, inspiration, and infidel-
ity in adaptation studies.
The OED defines intertextuality as ‘The need for one text to be read in the light of its
allusions to and differences from the content or structure of other texts’; this definition,
however, does not encompass the theories and debates that have constructed intertex-
tuality in humanities academia. Julia Kristeva coined the term in 1966. Radicalizing
Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogics by joining it to Derridean poststructuralism,
Althusserian political ideology, generative grammar, and Lacanian psychoanalysis,
she challenged then dominant views that located meaning in deliberate speech acts,
conscious author intent, and agenda-driven cultural discourses with a theory in which
intertextuality is a feature of all texts and in which meaning is therefore variable, con-
tested, and unfixed, continually renegotiated among authors, texts, readers, and cul-
tural contexts, which are themselves unstable. Subsequently, Roland Barthes became
intertextuality’s best-known spokesperson1:
a text is not a line of words releasing a single ‘theological’ meaning (the ‘message’ of the
Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them
original, blend and clash . . . a text is made of multiple writings, drawn from many cultures
and entering into mutual relations of dialogue, parody, contestation, but there is one place
where this multiplicity is focused and that place is the reader, not . . . the author. (‘The Death
of the Author’ 148)

In humanities academia, dialogic, dialectic, poststructuralist, and postmodern theories

figure intertextuality as a democratizing force, dispersing agency, meaning, and author-
ity from producers to consumers, in the process undermining mainstream ideologies
and power structures in society.
Pioneered in literature and film studies by Keith Cohen and Christopher Orr, inter-
textuality did not become mainstream in adaptation studies until the late 1990s, when
it was heralded for dismantling distinctions between high and popular art and one-
way translation models (Cartmell and Whelehan), deconstructing hierarchies between
originals and copies (Stam), and dismantling formalist segregations of arts and media
(Leitch).
However, recent studies of corporate franchise2 intertextuality suggest that intertex-
tuality may not be inherently or ineluctably radical, democratizing, anti-capitalist, or
postcolonial, but that it is just as likely to foster conservatism, monopolies, and corpo-
rate capitalism, with its quest for global domination. David Thomson views franchise
films as exploitations of consumer passivity that promote escapist illusions to preclude
real-world political challenges to capitalism (332–372). Similarly, against theories of
 Tie-Intertextuality: or, Intertextuality as Incorporation 193

intertextuality’s dispersion of authority and power, Paul Grainge considers the pro-
cess of corporate intertextuality to be one of ‘interlocking products and services’
through the corporate brand (47). More specific to this study, Christopher Anderson
perceives Disney constructing ‘a centrifugal force that guide[s] the viewer away from
the immediate textual experience towards a more pervasive sense of textuality, one that
encourage[s] the consumption of further Disney texts, further Disney products, further
Disney experiences’ (155).3
Yet even in the domain of corporate intertextuality, scholars still champion the radi-

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cal potentialities of intertextuality. Henry Jenkins characterizes corporate intertextual-
ity as a ‘convergence culture’, defined as ‘the flow of content across multiple media
platforms, the cooperation between multiple media industries, and the participatory
behavior of media audiences’ (2). Countering Thomson, he argues that convergence
culture ‘depends heavily on consumers’ active participation’ (3), a participation of pro-
duction as well as consumption, as fans engage intertextually with corporate franchise
representations by producing fan fiction, YouTube videos, mashups, remixes, games,
reboots, apps, blogs, online discussions, and more. For Jenkins and other critics, such
intertextual consumer engagements disrupt capitalism’s alienated labour and commod-
ity fetishism, as consumers productively modify what they consume and invest it with
their own desires, agency, and ideologies. P. D. Marshall observes the dialectics of
an industrial strategy of patterning and guiding the audience and its opposite, the risk of
entropy where the cultural commodity becomes lost in less patterned interconnections pro-
duced not by the industry, but by the audience… [which] is itself venturing into unserviced
and uncommercial areas of cultural activity. (69, 74).

In such analyses, the intertextual engagements of consumers with corporate products

are deemed to redistribute authority and agency, subverting capitalism not only ideo-
logically but also economically, as current battles over fair use attest (Aufderheide and
Jaszi).
Using tie-in merchandise to Disney’s Alice in Wonderland (2010) as a case study, this
essay argues that the process of corporate intertextuality is more fully illumined by a
rubric of incorporation than of convergence (Jenkins) or interlocking (Grainge). To
converge means ‘To tend to one point from different places’; to interlock means ‘To
engage with each other by partial overlapping or interpenetration of alternate projec-
tions and recesses’; to incorporate means ‘To take in or include as a part or parts of
itself ’ (OED). While convergence and interlocking describe the intertextual relations
of various media and products to each other within a corporate franchise, incorporation
defines their relationship to the corporation. Convergence figures corporate intertextual-
ity as a coming together of various representations that does not bind or hierarchize
them; interlocking conveys a greater degree of corporate constraint, with the corpo-
rate brand as the interlocking force; incorporation denotes the absorption of corporate
intertexts, including consumer appropriations and reviews of corporate products, into
the corporation.
Jenkins considers corporate convergence to be a centrifugal force; Grainge coun-
ters that corporate interlocking is a centripetal one. Corporate intertextual incorpora-
tion operates both centrifugally and centripetally. On the one hand, through franchise
194 Kamilla Elliott

licensing, corporations disperse branded company characters, images, diction, and

soundscapes through as many affiliate companies and across as many platforms as they
can to reach the widest possible markets. On the other hand, franchise tie-in merchan-
dise operates centripetally, as dispersed intertextualities return to the corporation where
they are reincorporated not only as profits, but also as representations pointing and
returning to their corporate point of origin. They are dispersed only to be tied in more
tightly to the corporation. At the end of the licensing period, the corporation evapo-
rates or absorbs them into itself; any intertextual ‘blurring [of] boundaries’ (Parody),

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hybridities, or contesting representations do not so much promote the radical political
dialectics that scholars desire as they do a capitalist dialogics, in which capitalist inter-
ests collude and contend. In a similar vein, this essay argues that discourses and prac-
tices according consumers agency and creativity join those encouraging infidelity to the
corporate brand to consolidate rather than undermine corporate power. However, a
few loose intertextual ends remain, as the end of this essay attests.
More specifically, this case study of tie-in merchandise for the 2010 film of Alice,
through which these larger arguments are unfolded, identifies incorporating corporate
intertextual practices as tie-intertextuality. This word is a portmanteau of sorts, a term
coined by Carroll in Through the Looking Glass and defined by him as ‘two meanings
packed into one word’ (187). Unlike homonymic puns, which Carroll also engaged
enthusiastically and which destabilize the emergence of meaning through phonetic dif-
ference, the portmanteau rivets two phonetically and semantically dissonant words,
forcing them into collaborative signification.
The Burton-Disney film revels in Carrollian portmanteaux (e.g. frabjous, a blend of
fabulous and joyous) and at least one reviewer has both made this word part of his byline,
further describing the film as ‘a cinematic portmanteau’ (Scott). Portmanteaux are,
moreover, pervasive in marketing and media rhetoric (infomercial, advertainment, adverto-
rial, etc.). Even so, my subheadings retain the hyphen to keep visible the fault lines of
corporate tie-intertextuality, as well as to harness them to this essay’s focus on tie-in
merchandise. Beginning with ‘Tie-in merchandise’, the subheadings of this essay epito-
mize various ways in which corporate tie-intertextuality unfolds materially, phenom-
enologically, culturally, and economically, as well as discursively and representationally.

Tie-In Merchandise

‘DCP [Disney Consumer Products] develops Disney entertainment franchises into 365 day-
a-year product opportunities at retailers worldwide.’—Disney Consumer Products (DCP)
press release
‘Today, Disney continues to reign as the world’s largest licensor.’—The Walt Disney
Company, ‘About Us’

Publications addressing tie-in merchandise tend to divide sharply along capitalist and
anti-capitalist lines. Books on marketing and advertising highlight profitable intertex-
tual practices for businesses (e.g. Marich), while humanities and social sciences aca-
demic works generally adopt an anti-capitalist stance (e.g. Thomson). Disney features
prominently in both capitalist and anti-capitalist accounts, serving as both exemplary
superhero and excoriated arch-villain, cited fifty-two times in Robert Marich’s Marketing
 Tie-Intertextuality: or, Intertextuality as Incorporation 195

to Moviegoers: A Handbook of Strategies Used by Major Studios and Independents and forty-two
times in Edward S. Herman and Robert W. McChesney’s anti-capitalist The Global
Media: The New Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism. Both camps agree that ‘Disney leads
the world in the production and distribution of popular culture’ (Artz 75).
Tie-in merchandise produces and distributes the culture of Disney beyond the
cinema. Established in 1929, Disney Licensing today ‘is aligned around five strategic
brand priorities: Disney Media, Classics & Entertainment, Disney & Pixar Animation Studios,
Disney Princess & Disney Fairies, Lucasfilm and Marvel’, claiming to ‘deliver[] innovative

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and engaging product experiences across thousands of categories from toys and apparel
to books and fine art’ (DCP, ‘Disney Licensing’).
Tie-in merchandise is an economic as well as semiotic and aesthetic mode of adap-
tation; films that lose money at the box office can still make significant profits through
tie-in merchandise. Decades before the Star Wars franchise that is often held to be the
starting point for accounts of tie-in marketing, Disney pioneered tie-in merchandise for
Mickey Mouse films in response to the economic challenges of the Great Depression
(Hardy 68). Indeed, some films have a larger budget for tie-in merchandise marketing
than for film production (Hardy 65–66). Alice in Wonderland was an economic success
quite apart from its tie-in merchandise; it was the second highest grossing film of 2010;
its worldwide total was $1,025,467,110, making it the sixth highest grossing film world-
wide in 2010 (Box Office Mojo). Even so, it made substantial additional profits from its tie-
in merchandise, which included a novelization, guidebooks, DVD and Blu-ray formats,
videogames (Nintendo DS and Wii), a Facebook game, a computer game, two music
CDs (one, the soundtrack; the other, a compilation of songs by modern rock and alter-
native artists), posters, board games, playing cards, home décor, crockery (especially tea
sets), bed linen, T-shirts, tote bags, wallets, handbags, belts, key chains, hair accessories,
costumes, dolls, stuffed animals, stationery, stickers, lunch boxes, pencil cases, buttons,
pins, postcards, calendars, edible cake toppers, tea, perfume, car mats, screensavers,
mouse pads, and ringtones (see Christene). While much of Disney’s film tie-in merchan-
dise was produced in-house, the company also licensed other companies to produce
tie-in merchandise for its films for a limited period in return for a share of the profits.

Tie-Incorporation

The postmodernisms have, in fact, been fascinated precisely by this whole ‘degraded’ land-
scape of schlock, kitsch … materials they no longer simply ‘quote’, as a Joyce or a Mahler
might have done, but incorporate into their very substance.—Frederic Jameson

As the epigraph indicates, academic discourses of intertextuality often figure it as a

process of incorporation rather than dispersion. Burton scholars do likewise, nominat-
ing him ‘a director of fables, fairy tales, and fantasies, with an aesthetic that incorpo-
rates the Gothic, the Grand Guignol, and German Expressionism’ (He 17). So too do
marketing blurbs for tie-in merchandise to his film of Alice in Wonderland: ‘To re-create
this delightfully fantastical world, Burton has masterminded a powerful concoction of
cinematic techniques incorporating live actors, motion capture, and fully animated CG
characters’ (‘Ultimate Sticker Book’). In all three contexts, intertextuality is seen as an
incorporating rather than a dispersive force.
196 Kamilla Elliott

The incorporation of corporate intertextuality, however, is not simply a process of

absorption and mixing; it is both a process of incorporating its imagery, brand, and ide-
ology into an array of media and products and distributing that incorporation widely.
Tie-in merchandise to Alice in Wonderland incorporates the film’s imagery, diction, sound-
scape, and characters in a wide array of media, clothing, and household products and
distributes them globally. It does so in a variety of ways. Sometimes, Disney intertexts
serve simply as labels and packaging for products relatively untouched by the Disney
film. OPI, for example, sold familiar nail polish colours marketed with Wonderland

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rhetoric, calling consumers to
Choose from ‘Thanks so Muchness’, a gorgeous, berry pink, ‘Off With Her Red’ … a crack-
ing crimson, perfect for all wannabe Red Queens, ‘Absolutely Alice’ … a blue glitter, perfectly
matching the sapphire shade of Alice’s classic dress, and ‘Mad as a Hatter’ … a rich rainbow
of purples, pinks, blues, greens, gold and silver. (Boxwish)

Consumer intertexts were relatively unimpressed with the product as a tie-in to the film.
Blogger Vampy Varnish writes: ‘I must say that I thought that this collection would be a
bit more fun. I love red, but a collection based on Alice could have been so much more’;
however, she was impressed with the labels: ‘I actually could get Mad as a Hatter just
for the name’ (Vampy Varnish).
Urban Decay similarly took its ‘best-selling eye shadow shades’ and renamed them
‘with quirky Alice-inspired monikers such as “Muchness,” “Midnight Tea Party,” and
“Curiouser”’ (Boxwish). However, its ‘Book of Shadows’ packaging went further to cre-
ate a virtual world in which consumers could apply their makeup:
The palette opens to reveal a pop-up scene from the movie, colourfully depicting Alice sur-
rounded by massive mushrooms … Behind all of this is a mirror allowing you to carefully
apply the make-up and yet still inhabit the weird and wonderful world of Alice. (Boxwish)

The high street accessories chain, Claire’s, created a pop-up shop at its Mayfair branch
(26 February to 5 March 2010), offering a virtual world for the purchase of products. The
fantastical shop was crammed with props, sets, and décor evoking the film; shoppers
were given a golden key to unlock a door holding Wonderland merchandise marketed
as ‘presents’ (see ‘Visit Claire’s’).
Unlike Urban Decay and OPI, Claire’s tie-in merchandise incorporated imagery
from the film in the merchandise itself, which included miniature top hats, fingerless
gloves, striped knee socks, Alice headbands, jewellery, glasses cases, tote bags, umbrel-
las, stationery sets, T-shirts, handbags, makeup bags, cases, notebooks, and pencil boxes
decorated with watches, hearts, roses, teapots, cards, and keys. Going further than
companies who merely renamed their existing projects, they changed their own name
through Carrollian word play: ‘Claire’s becomes an anagram of itself and turns into
Alice’s’. The unincorporated letter ‘r’ of the anagram gestures to the company’s simul-
taneously retained and jettisoned registered trademark, while the full sentence con-
taining it stretches to incorporate consumer desire: ‘As Claire’s becomes an anagram
of itself and turns into Alices, this is the perfect pop-up shop for any Alice wannabe’
(‘Claire’s Alice in Wonderland Pop-up Shop’). Both Claire’s and consumers, it claims, wan-
nabe Alice.
 Tie-Intertextuality: or, Intertextuality as Incorporation 197

Tie-In Character and Tie-Interacting

She gave me a good character.—Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (105)

‘Alice’ is the name of a character as well as inhabiting the titles of Carroll’s book,
Disney’s film, and Claire’s pop-up shop. In the case of the affiliated companies who
develop tie-in merchandise, it is not the corporate Disney brand for which they seek a
license but branded Disney characters. In 2014, Matt Edwards, chief executive at mar-
keting and advertising agency WCRS, attests:

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In the 80s, the actor was what we’d call the ‘talent brand’. People would go to see the new
Tom Cruise film. Now ‘character brands’ have displaced actors: people say they’re going to
see the new Iron Man film, and the actors are secondary to the fictional character. (Barber)

Disney was decades ahead of this trend: Disney characters have dominated tie-in mer-
chandise since the 1920s.
In new media studies, scholars have tended to focus more on world building than on
characters (e.g. Hutcheon 2012, xxiv). Characters, however, are more central to Disney’s
intertextual incorporation of products and consumers—so central that Disney’s home
page makes ‘Characters’ a main menu link along with movies, TV, music, events, holi-
days, shop, win, videogames, parks, and travel—as though they are themselves products
and experiences rather than copyrighted content inhabiting other products. Characters
lie at the heart of tie-in merchandise, essential not only to its construction and produc-
tion, but also to its reception and consumption. Rich Ross, chairman of Disney Studios,
considers that a franchise film ‘starts with the human connection to the story and char-
acters, but downstream there are opportunities to own the DVD, see live stage versions,
buy apparel, toys, or other licensed products’ (quoted in Kung and Schuker). What’s
implied in this statement is that consumer identification with characters and their sto-
ries produces consumer desire to consume them in/as tie-in merchandise.
Disney Consumer Products not only produces those ‘opportunities’, it further seeks
to incorporate production and consumption by producing consumers as Disney charac-
ters via its products. Beyond the imaginative identification of characters and projective
identification with characters available to consumers of books, live performances, film,
and television, tie-in merchandise enables consumers to act as characters. Barbie not
only offers consumers an opportunity to possess its Mad Hatter doll as property, but also
to own ‘the incomparable Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter’ (‘Mad Hatter Barbie Doll’).
Depp here serves not only as model for the doll but also for ways in which consumers
can act as the Mad Hatter by donning clothing, accessories, and makeup to get ‘in char-
acter’. Claire’s was confident in 2010 that, ‘As Tim Burton’s film hits our screens this
spring, there are bound to be plenty of Alice in Wonderland fans eager to replicate her
look’ (View London). Marketers for Urban Decay, OPI, and Paul & Joe touted their prod-
ucts as ‘a charming threesome guaranteed to give you the ultimate Alice makeover’.
More broadly, they affirmed that ‘The oodles of top tie-in merchandise has helped us
dress the part with graphic tees and mad-cap costumes, accessorize our outfits with belt
buckles and handbags and sparkle in gorgeous jewelry from names such as Swarovski
and Tom Binns’ (Boxwish). The ‘part’ here evokes both playing a part and the process
of incorporation in which the part is absorbed by the whole. In this case, consumers
198 Kamilla Elliott

are incorporated—become part of the corporate whole—not only by purchasing its

products, but also by becoming its branded characters. For all Jenkins’s and Marshall’s
celebrations of consumer individuation from and agency in franchise culture, here they
become branded corporate intertexts themselves, serving as living advertisements for
the corporation.
The incorporating production of consumers as franchise characters finds a recipro-
cal, inverse counterpart in designer Tom Binns’s claim that objects create characters:
‘I tried to create a character, giving them a personality with the things you put on

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them’ (‘Tom Binns for Walt Disney Signature’). Since the characters in the film do
not wear his jewellery, ‘them’ refers to the consumers whom he creates as characters
through merchandise. The merchandise creates ‘character’, endowing consumers with
an object-based ‘personality’.
Such interpenetration of persons and objects to create character and personality
is underpinned by a longstanding Disney tradition in which characters and costumes
inhere in each another. For all its claims to ‘change the way you think of fashion’,
Disney has clad Mickey Mouse in the same trademark shorts and shoes through nearly
100 years of changing fashions. In Alice in Wonderland, whether book or film, the Hat is
an integral part of the Hatter’s nominal identity (the first syllable of his name, Hatter);
it is equally part of his iconographic identity (without his hat he does not look like a
Hatter). Losing his hat in the 2010 film produces a loss of identity; when his hat is
finally restored to him, he is told: ‘You look yourself again’. Extending this interpen-
etration of body and clothing to tie-in merchandise for the film, Disney’s official Mad
Hatter’s hat comes with hair attached, fusing clothing and body part.
The film incorporates clothing and body parts at many other points, commodifying
the body and personifying clothing, emblematizing the duo of dehumanizing alienated
labour and commodity fetishism that are the chief targets of Marxist critics. Mirroring
the return of the Hatter’s hat to him is the return of the Bandersnatch’s eye to him, sug-
gesting equivalence between hats and eyes, bodies and clothing. Conversely, the fake,
detachable body parts that drop from the Red Queen’s courtiers commodify bodies,
while heads decapitated by her serve as stepping stones across her moat.
Disney solidifies its incorporation of products and persons by personifying its mer-
chandise. Its YouTube video of the Las Vegas Magic fashion convention tea party
opens with a title card displacing the pronoun for a non-sentient being with one for
a sentient being: ‘What Who Will You Wear to the Tea Party?’ and closes with a title
card rendering nominal identity synonymous with fashion: ‘Alice is the New Black’.
Together, the two title cards creating a looking glass effect, personifying fashion and
depersonifying character as fashion (Alice is fashion; fashion is Alice), an identification
that extends from characters and merchandise to consumers (You wear ‘Alice’). The
phrase, ‘Who will you wear?’ further elides character and tie-in designer names, from
Tom Binns to Alexander McQueen, who produced tie-in clothing and accessories for
the film.
Confusions of ‘what’ and ‘who’ begin in Carroll’s book: playing croquet with fla-
mingo mallets and hedgehog balls, Alice laments, ‘You’ve no idea how confusing it is all
the things being alive’ (Carroll 75). They continue in the film. Encountering Alice (Mia
Wasikowska), the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) asks, ‘What is this?’; ‘It’s a who’
 Tie-Intertextuality: or, Intertextuality as Incorporation 199

replies the White Rabbit (Michael Sheen). Beyond the trademark Disney animation
of inanimate objects, the vorpal sword is accorded knowledge and desire and personi-
fied as the Jabberwocky’s ‘ancient enemy’: ‘The vorpal sword knows what it wants. All
you have to do is hold onto it’, Absalom (Alan Rickman) tells Alice. Desire here passes
from persons to possessions (‘it wants’); all that Alice and wannabe Alices have to do
is to resolutely possess possessions to be endowed with their power and agency. Why is
an animate raven like an inanimate writing desk? In Carroll’s book, no one answers.
In Burton’s film, the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp) confesses, ‘I haven’t the slightest idea’.

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But Disney has an idea that confusions between the animate and inanimate encourage
the incorporation of Disney characters and consumers via tie-in merchandise.

Tie-Interactivity
Tie-interacting expands to tie-interactivity in tie-in games, in which consumers not only
dress as and look like branded characters, but furthermore act as characters in interac-
tion with other characters in character worlds, thereby taking the incorporation of con-
sumers and merchandise one step further. The interchange of inanimate and animate
entities in gaming begins in Carroll’s books, where live animals are croquet mallets and
balls and where, conversely, chess pieces and playing cards are animated, sensate, talk-
ing characters. It continues in Burton’s film, whose animate and inanimate creatures
often follow the structure of a videogame (‘flee the Bandersnatch; get the vorpal sword;
slay the Jabberwocky’—Elliott 195).
Videogame scholarship is heavily invested in probing the degree to which player
agency can subvert the agency of the capitalist corporations that produce them
(Gregersen and Grodal). Yet marketing for tie-in games to the 2010 Disney Alice is
equally heavily invested in touting gamer agency. The advertisement for the DVD-
ROM game calls consumers to:

• E nter the vividly imagined world of Wonderland, based on the Tim Burton
movie and inspired by the classic book by Lewis Carroll.
• Step into the shoes of classic characters like the Mad Hatter, the White
Rabbit, and the Cheshire Cat.
• Assist Alice in her journey through Wonderland as she makes her way towards
the final battle against the Jabberwocky.
• Master abilities like altering perception, making objects invisible, and manipu-
lating time.
• Roam through an intriguing world filled with whimsical settings, optical illu-
sions, challenging puzzles, and formidable adversaries. (CPU Gamer)

Against Thomson’s critique of franchise entertainment, as well as widespread cultural

assumptions that videogames are passive, mindless, illusory, time-wasting consumer
activities, the player is called to enter a game world infused with a Romantic rhetoric
of inspiration and imagination, take on a character identity through a metaphor of
clothing, and engage in the action. Instead of being passively consumed, the game
claims to offer players opportunities to ‘master abilities’, defy ‘optical illusions’, solve
‘challenging puzzles’, and conquer ‘formidable adversaries’. Yet these claims render
200 Kamilla Elliott

consumers complicit with producers, who also seek to master and conquer markets,
alter perception in advertising, and make products disappear through consumption.
In contrast to profiteering producers, consumers are to become masterful and develop
creatively through consumption; indeed, all gamer agency is directed towards consum-
ing the product.
Here and in general, videogames construct narratives in which acquisition is essen-
tial to survival, as well as to access and progress through spaces, triumph over enemies,
and maintaining allies. Players cannot progress in the game without engaging in virtual

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consumption and victorious competition through acquisition—both hallmarks of cor-
porate capitalism. The agency given to players in gaming, then, renders them complicit
and identified with capitalism—a far more invasive and insidious incorporation of con-
sumers than passive consumption.
Again, the effect is strengthened by an inverse, reciprocal, looking glass counterpart.
Shopping is conversely figured as gaming. The web site marketing the Nintendo DS
game forges a daisy chain of clickable buttons engaging intertextually with the com-
mands to consume that Carroll’s Alice follows automatically (‘Eat Me’; ‘Drink Me’,
etc.). The game, for children Alice’s age (seven) and up, similarly commands child con-
sumers to engage in a series of gaming moves leading to a button requiring adult eco-
nomic agency: ‘Watch Me. Unlock Me. About Me. See Me. Order Me’. Clickable links
on the Facebook gaming app go further to turn consumers (‘Grab Me’) into advertisers
(‘Share Me’).

Tie-Incarnation and Tie-Inspiration

‘Great brands find our characters very inspiring.’—Johanna Mooney, director of health and
beauty business for Disney Consumer Products, (quoted in Howard)
The arresting settings and characters in Tim Burton’s interpretation of Alice in Wonderland
provided great inspiration and have made it possible for us to work with a group of renowned
designers to create a truly unique collection of lifestyle products that will continue to position
Disney at the forefront of fashion trends.—Pam Lifford, Executive Vice President of Global
Fashion and Home at Disney Consumer Products (Disney Dreaming, ‘Charlotte Tarantola
Alice in Wonderland Fashion Collection’)

Consumption and production of tie-in merchandise are incorporated not only by

breaking down the barriers between consumers and characters, consumption and
production, and consumption and advertising but also by an interpenetrating rhetoric
of incarnation and inspiration that elides mercantile possession with spirit possession,
interchanging interiorities and exteriorities to tighten the link between consumers
and corporate products. The trajectory from inspiration to incarnation is epitomized
by Sue Wong’s claim, ‘I relived all the fantasy aspects of the tale and I was able to
interpret the tale into a 3D product, which is … this collection here’ (‘Sue Wong
Inspired’).
Tie-in merchandise enters a longstanding discourse of adaptation as a process of
incarnation or realization. Since at least 1856, a ‘desire for realization’ resulting ‘from a
tendency to idealized materialism, is grown almost a passion with our young artists and
poets’ (quoted in Meisel 36). Meisel defines realization as
 Tie-Intertextuality: or, Intertextuality as Incorporation 201

both literal re-creation and translation into a more real, that is more vivid, visual, physically
present medium. To move from mind’s eye to body’s eye was realization, and to add a third
dimension to two was realization, as when words became picture, or when picture became
dramatic tableau. (30)

‘Idealized materialism’, a merger of inspired imagination and incarnated production, is

as central to the Walt Disney Company as it was to mid-nineteenth-century artists: ‘As
the world’s largest licensor, DCP inspires the imaginations of people around the world
by bringing the magic of Disney into consumers’ homes with products they can enjoy

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year-round’ (DCP, ‘Disney Licensing’). Tie-in merchandise carries idealized material-
ism beyond the audiovisual senses engaged by film to tactile, olfactory, and gustatory
senses, and beyond the cineplex and theme parks into everyday domestic activities,
as consumers eat and drink from, sleep on, wear, carry, and store possessions in their
‘lifestyle products’ (see epigraph above). It makes a portmanteau of incorporation and
realization: incorporealization. However, incorporealization depends on inspiration to
take effect.
The epigraphs illustrate the pervasive rhetoric of inspiration with which Disney sur-
rounds and infuses its incarnated merchandise. Designers of tie-in merchandise fig-
ure as mediums inspired by and capturing Disney character ‘spirits’ and channelling
them into products: ‘Capturing the spirit of each character in the film, the [Swarovski
jewellery] line features a host of vintage and gothic details inspired by the outlandish
personalities found down the rabbit hole’ (Sweet). Branded characters carry inspiration
from the domain of imagination into the domains of spirit possession and the occult.
The rhetoric of inspiration is not limited to high-end designer merchandise but
extends to mass-produced, high street products. Indeed, Claire’s carries the rheto-
ric further than upscale merchandisers, creating a chain of inspiration running from
Carroll through Burton through Claire’s tie-in merchandise to Claire’s consumers:

The Claire’s Alice in Wonderland pop-up shop invites you into a wonderful world of acces-
sories inspired by the theme of Alice in Wonderland. One of the world’s favourite classic
children’s stories has been reinvented by Tim Burton, and now you can be inspired by this
famous heroine too. (View London)

Inspiration here is not only a starting point for designer production but also for buyer
consumption. Claire’s went further still to figure inspiration as a product of consump-
tion, calling its customers to turn consumption into competitive production aimed at
economic reward: ‘Visit your local Claire’s store for the secret password and be inspired
by the new collection. The most magical outfit will win a private screening of Disney’s
Alice in Wonderland at a tea party held especially for the winner and 20 friends’.
Joining the Nintendo DS videogame, here was another game designed to encourage
consumption and identification with capitalist processes.
Following Disney’s sophistic rhetoric figuring mass-produced merchandise as ‘truly
unique lifestyle products’, Claire’s broke down boundaries between individual creation
and mass-produced merchandise, claiming to stock ‘everything you need to create your
very own Alice style’ (View London). ‘Own’ here resonates doubly and opposition-
ally as ‘individuality’ and ‘ownership’ of standardized, assembly line products; one’s
202 Kamilla Elliott

individual, ‘own Alice style’ is to be created by consuming mass-produced merchan-

dise. However, the sheer number and variety of Claire’s accessories allows for a poten-
tially infinite number of intertextual combinations, so that no two contestants need
look alike. And yet even as the intertextual possibilities pull towards infinity, a Claire’s
spokesman constrains them with a simile of capitalist exchange: the ‘inspiration and
creativity [of Claire’s stores] is just like our Claire’s customer’ (ITN, emphasis added):
pop-up stores and popping in customers are to endlessly reflect each other in a hall of
mirrors exchanging and incorporating inspiration and incarnation, recasting creative

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production and/as mass consumption.
Claire’s tightened the incorporation of consumers and products by turning the rhe-
torical looking glass and representing its customers as spiritualized by its merchandise
even as they conversely possessed Wonderland characters as spirits. It positioned its pro-
totypical customer inside Alice, looking out through her eyes: ‘It’s really all about her
world and that what she’ll experience through the eyes of Alice’ (ITN). However, the
consumer can only possess the character of Alice as spirit by possessing the Claire’s mer-
chandise that constructs her body as Alice. Marketing blurbs for Charlotte Tarantola’s
tie-in fashion collection made similar claims: ‘Like Alice peering through the looking
glass, you can see flowery friends, tea-time treats, pocket watches, lace and mysteri-
ous keys, elements from the film’ (Disney Dreaming, ‘Charlotte Tarantola Fashion
Collection’). Consumers who would be Alice must possess her possessions. Through the
looking glass, spirits constructed by objects and objects possessed by spirits incorporate
consumers and merchandise from the outside in and the inside out.
The animation of merchandise extends from branded characters to corporate
brands. Naomi Klein locates a shift in the 1990s from brands as inanimate labels to ‘the
brand as experience, as lifestyle’ (21). Former Disney CEO, Michael Eisner, contends
that ‘A brand is a living entity, and it is enriched or undermined cumulatively over time,
the product of a thousand small gestures’ (quoted in Kotler and Armstrong 268). As
Binns bestows personality on objects, branding consultants accord the living brand per-
sonality. Perry Chua and Dann Ilicic, for example, insist that ‘Defining a personality is
the first step to creating a strong and meaningful brand identity’ (15). The living brand
not only seeks to inspire lifestyle products, it also seeks to produce consumer lifestyles,
remaking them in its branded image, its personality, whether in the form of clothing for
consumer bodies, home products for consumer environments, or entertainment to fill
consumer minds. It seeks to possess them body, soul, and world.

Tie-Infidelity

‘Are you the right Alice?’—The White Rabbit, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (2010)

The intertextuality of incorporation, somewhat surprisingly, is strengthened rather

than diminished when tie-in merchandise is unfaithful to the franchise film and the cor-
porate brand. Indeed, infidelity is essential to the corporate intertextual incorporation
of consumers and products and the branding of consumers via corporate products.
Much of the tie-merchandise for Burton’s film is unfaithful to the film’s characters.
Tie-in merchandise must be unfaithful in order to flow across the widest possible range
of platforms and attract the greatest possible number of consumers. It must and does
 Tie-Intertextuality: or, Intertextuality as Incorporation 203

adapt to consumer personalities, lifestyles, and desires in order to serve the bottom
line corporate quest for profit. One size does not fit all; as in Carroll’s book, there are
various sizes of ‘Alice’; Alice costumes, produced in sizes spanning toddler to child to
tween to teen to adult to plus sizes, epitomize the drive to adapt merchandise not only
to the film but also to consumers. Neither does one gender fit all: Mad Hatter costumes
were produced for females as well as males. Most of these costumes are not faithful
to the film’s representation of Alice or the Mad Hatter. Beyond age, size, and gender
differentiations, costumes were designed and marketed to target a variety of consumer

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attitudes about body image and sexuality, as well as various consumer personalities
and fantasies. Teen sassy, showgirl, sexy, adult sexy, women’s sexy, sexy plus size, totally
sexy, and pretty plaid Mad Hatter costumes conform neither to Depp’s portrayal of the
character nor to the ‘decency’ touted as a hallmarks of Disney ‘Culture’ (‘Buy Alice in
Wonderland Costumes’).4
The film’s gaming tie-in merchandise is similarly unfaithful to the film’s plot and
characters in order to satisfy consumer expectations of that media platform. The
Nintendo DS game restores the conventional Disney sexism that Woolverton’s screen-
play is deemed to mitigate.5 Nintendo gamers, only allowed to operate male characters,
gain power at Alice’s expense:
For the most part, Alice skips along contentedly behind them, but occasionally players will
need her to stay in one place as they scout the terrain up ahead. … Alice also can’t jump as
high or as far as her Wonderland friends, so the player will need to stop and offer her the odd
helping hand up to a platform or across a large gap. If they don’t, Alice becomes stranded
and if she is left on her on her own for too long, she will burst into tears. (Cowen)

In contrast to Alice’s repeated insistence in the film, ‘I make the path. This is my dream’,
Alice is physically, narratively, and emotionally disempowered in the game. Children
too young for videogames are also invited to interact with Wonderland against their
characterization in the film. An advertisement for Plush Toys markets ‘The endear-
ingly insane Mad Hatter in a cuddly, plush retro style’, crying to child consumers that
‘Lewis Carroll’s beloved Alice in Wonderland characters are ready for some love!’ (‘Alice
in Wonderland Plush’).
Beyond consumer expectations, much of the tie-in merchandise to the 2010 film is
unfaithful to the aesthetics and ideologies of the Disney brand. Like translation theo-
rists, brand consultancy firms determine the success of tie-in merchandise as the prod-
uct of a two-way, reciprocal fidelity to both adapting and adapted brands: ‘I think
[Clipper Teas’] design for a limited edition Alice blend works really well because it sticks
faithfully to the brand’s house style’ (Amos). Press releases, interviews with designers,
and promotional videos insist that tie-in merchandising artists retained their ‘signature
style’ even though they had ‘teamed up with Disney’ (Bumpus). And yet in many cases,
their signature styles are non-Disney—even anti-Disney.
Disney articulates its six core values:
• innovation and technology
• quality (‘We maintain high-quality standards across all product categories.’)
• community (‘positive and inclusive ideas about families’)
204 Kamilla Elliott

• s torytelling (‘stories [that] delight and inspire’)

• optimism (‘entertainment is about hope, aspiration and positive outcomes’)
• decency

(Disney Careers, ‘Culture and Diversity’)

While a great deal of tie-in merchandise to the 2010 film is generic, resembling tie-in
merchandise for other Disney films, director Tim Burton attracted elite and countercul-
tural designers who produced high-end, collectable, unconventional, limited editions in

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contrast to the usual cheap to mid-range, disposable, mainstream, mass-produced mer-
chandise associated with Disney films. Joining Tom Binns, winner of a Fashion Designers
of America award, Stella McCartney developed eco-friendly jewellery; Alexander
McQueen designed a couture dress; Anna Lou of London, Sue Wong, and Temperley
released Alice in Wonderland collections; Versace’s Alice platform shoes sold for nearly
$1200; Furla’s Alice handbag retailed at $500 (The Week). Against its middle America
aesthetic, Disney also licensed a range of trendy, vintage, retro, and Goth merchandise
for the Burton film in keeping with Burton’s aesthetic: jewellery by Goth designer Zac
Posen, T-shirts by Junk Food and Hot Topic, makeup by Urban Decay and OPI, and
Living Dead dolls: ‘Mezco’s Living Dead Dolls have travelled through the looking glass
and been re-imagined as characters from Alice in Wonderland! Each disturbingly detailed,
11-inch doll features a Goth outfit’ (Nitro Comics). All of these are unfaithful to or at
odds with the Disney brand and aesthetic. The ‘signature muted palette’ (Weinstein)
of eco-friendly Stella McCartney’s tie-in jewellery is similarly at odds with Disney’s
bright colours and conservative politics. These designers were licensed because they
were deemed to have aesthetics in common with Burton’s. Johanna Mooney, director
of health and beauty business for Disney Consumer Products, explains: ‘With an inter-
preter like Tim Burton, we saw a huge opportunity’ to attract consumers that Disney
does not usually reach (quoted in Howard).
More pertinently, Burton’s aesthetic is itself at odds with Disney’s. Against Disney’s
emphasis on quality, Burton has been intrigued with filmmaking failures (Ed Wood);
his ‘storytelling’ is darker, more nightmarish, and Gothic than Disney’s; his grotesque
stop-motion animation in films such as The Nightmare before Christmas is diametrically
opposed to Disney’s bright, daydreaming, sentimental cell and computer animation;
his rejection and revelation of the dark underbelly of suburban American in films such
as Edward Scissorhands alienates Disney’s main US market; his concerns with marginal-
ized outsiders who cannot be integrated strands his narratives outside Disney’s ‘happy
outcomes’ and ‘inclusive families’.
Intriguingly, Burton began his career hired and fired by Disney; yet subsequently,
as mainstream tastes shifted towards the Gothic, Disney was keen to partner with and
profit from his mass popularity. Although Disney produced The Nightmare before Christmas
(1993), David Hoberman, president of Disney at the time, recognized Burton’s disso-
nance with Disney aesthetics: ‘This was an opportunity for us … to say, “We can think
outside the envelope. We can do different and unusual things.”’ The aesthetic discrep-
ancy remains nearly twenty years on, epitomized by the contrast between Disney’s 1951
bright blue, pompously didactic caterpillar and Burton’s 2010 faded, decrepit, drug-
addled Gothicized one (see Elliott 197).
 Tie-Intertextuality: or, Intertextuality as Incorporation 205

The contrast extends beyond aesthetics to a conflict of franchises and brands.

Intriguingly, Box Office Mojo lists ‘Tim Burton-Johnny Depp’, not Disney, as the
‘Franchise’ and ‘Brand’ of the 2010 Alice. Noting Burton’s re-use of actors, composer,
and crew, reviewers and critics more often read the film as a sequel to other Burton
films than to Disney’s 1951 film. When they do address the Burton-Disney partner-
ship, most assess that Burton sacrificed his aesthetic to Disney’s brand, aesthetics, and
the conventional blockbuster script of Lion King screenwriter, Linda Woolverton (see
Elliott).

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Intriguingly, however, not a single reviewer complained that Disney had sold out to
Burton’s aesthetic, even though that argument could certainly be made. While Disney
was undoubtedly seeking to exploit new markets made mainstream by the mass popu-
larity of contemporary Gothic and Burton, as well as to reach the high-end market that
remained relatively untouched by the global recession and by generic Disney products,
the company nevertheless allowed these artists to redesign its own image, brand, and
logo, a redesign emblematized by the Gothic recasting of the Disney logo in the film’s
titles, credits, and marketing. Disney was remarkably unperturbed by these intertextual
incursions on its ‘culture’, confident that its firmly established brand could weather as
well as profit from its association with countercultural, even counter-Disney brands,
fully aware that the ephemeral nature of tie-in merchandise, limited editions, and end-
dates on franchise licenses would allow it to reassert its brand and aesthetic in the global
marketplace as though it had never engaged in such un-Disney intertextualities. In the
end, however representationally diverse, widely adapted, mistranslated, or opposition-
ally remediated franchise intertexts may be, all translate into the universal symbols of
monetary value that drive and feed the capitalist corporation.
While to some extent the partnership of Disney and Burton produces an effect of
portmanteau, Disney emerged from this portmanteau and those with other tie-in mer-
chandisers having incorporated or evaporated rival intertextualities. The 2010 film,
nominated ‘Disney’s newest instalment of Alice in Wonderland’ by Disney Living (‘OPI
Alice in Wonderland’), is billed as a sequel not so much to Carroll’s books as to Disney’s
1951 film. In spite of Burton’s canny, tongue-in-cheek intertextual incorporation of ele-
ments from that film and of Disney theme park castles, in the end, Disney Consumer
Products more decisively incorporated Burton’s film, turning it into tie-in merchandise
to the ‘original’ Disney film, marketed on the Disney Store website in the forms of
DVD, Blu-ray, and music CD discs. All other tie-in merchandise bears the iconography
and classical Disney aesthetic of the 1951 film, its characters grinning triumphantly
from clothing, ornaments, teacups, and toys.
In spite of her many changes, at the end of both books, Carroll’s Alice returns to
inhabit the identity she occupied at their start. Disney similarly allowed its brand to be
modified for a season by the anti-Disney aesthetics of Tim Burton and other designers
because, for all its rhetoric of life and spirit, tie-in merchandise has a short market life.
Eighteen months after the release of Disney-Burton’s Alice, limited editions were sold
out and withdrawn from licensee websites; web links to merchandisers were defunct;
consumers were re-merchandising their tie-in purchases on eBay; no tie-in merchandise
to Burton’s film remained on the Disney Store web site apart from DVD, Blu-ray, and
music CD. By contrast, following the 60th anniversary of Disney’s 1951 film on 28 July
206 Kamilla Elliott

2011, merchandise for the earlier Disney film resurged, which Burton’s film has served
primarily to establish as ‘classic’ Disney.
In spite of its etymology (freedom, immunity, privilege—OED), a corporate franchise
license is not free. The freedom to market products based on Disney films and charac-
ters with immunity from prosecution must be paid for, and a portion of the profits must
be returned to the corporation. Neither is a franchise permanent; limited editions, sold
for a limited time only, mark the end dates of franchise contracts; at the end of all of
these contracts, franchised merchandise sells out and vanishes from the marketplace,

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along with its dispersed and contesting meanings, while the corporation determines
which products and meanings remain more durably visible and available for purchase.
Critics desire happy endings as much as filmgoers (which is to say, some do; some
don’t). Although this discussion of tie-infidelity cannot provide an unequivocal one, it
can point to some loose ends in Disney’s incorporation of rival intertextualities. Disney’s
foremost value is quality, touted everywhere in Disney PR. Although the equation of
quality with fidelity has been challenged in adaptation studies, it remains entrenched
in culture. Disney’s in-house tie-in costumes for the Burton film span a socio-economic
spectrum from ‘Deluxe’ to ‘Prestige’ to ‘Authentic’. For all the emphasis on economics
and profit in academic discourses of Disney (including mine), the Deluxe costume is the
least expensive, while the Authentic costume costs the most. Such pricing places greater
value on fidelity in tie-in merchandise than on luxury or quality. Between the two lies
‘Prestige’, a word indicating status. Prestige and Authentic costumes are marketed and
priced according to their degrees of fidelity rather than quality, although their inher-
ence is implied in the pricing: ‘Look just like Johnny Depp from Tim Burton’s Alice in
Wonderland movie in this Prestige Mad Hatter costume!’; ‘Get a look that is a near perfect
replica of Johnny Depp’s character in the 2010 release of Alice in Wonderland with this
Authentic Mad Hatter costume for adults!’ (‘Mad Hatter Costumes’, my emphases).
Both the quality and fidelity of Disney’s own tie-in merchandise have been chal-
lenged by consumers, who not only expect tie-in merchandise to be faithful to the film’s
representations, but further expect Disney to be faithful to its own claims about itself
representations. Reviewing the official Disney Deluxe Alice costume, FunnyLilBunBun
charges Disney with infidelity to its own brand and marketing:
There is NOTHING ‘Deluxe’ about this costume. I am VERY disappointed with Disney for
making such a substandard product. The costume, compared to what is seen on the packag-
ing advertisement, is VERY different … this costume was a huge waste of money and time.
It looked like it was made for 15 cents at a sweatshop overseas. Thanks for nothing DISNEY.
You really let me down. (FunnyLilBunBun)

The intertextuality here is not Marxist dialectics but capitalist dialogics, in which com-
peting capitalist interests contest. FunnyLilBunBun is not challenging corporate capital-
ism as an institution; she is demanding that corporate products be faithful to corporate
rhetoric in order to maintain Disney as a credible corporation from which she would
consume future products. Another consumer, dissatisfied with the too-ready detach-
ability of the official Disney Mad Hatter eyebrows, adopts the moniker 1AngryHatter
to post a negative review, word-playing on ‘mad’ as angry rather than insane and play-
ing intertextually on the name of a Disney character to prevent other consumers from
 Tie-Intertextuality: or, Intertextuality as Incorporation 207

buying Disney character merchandise (1AngryHatter). He thus violates the expecta-

tion that consumers act as unpaid advertisers for Disney products. Tellingly, while the
product remains on the site, the review has been removed, disappeared rather than
incorporated into Disney’s corporate representations.
Joining the disappeared intertexts of unfavourable consumer reviews that challenge
the fidelity of Disney merchandise to the Disney brand is another process of production
and consumption that effects a reverse colonization. Burton’s film ends with its heroine
rejecting the conventional Disney marriage and sailing off to colonize China. I have

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linked this to Disney’s attempts to capture the Chinese market as the film was being
made: Disney began construction of Shanghai Disneyland Park and the ‘largest ever’
Disney store in Shanghai in 2010 (‘Disney to Enter Mainland China’). But in the wake
of Alice in Wonderland, Shanghai has been capitalizing on Disney and outdoing its claims
to both quality and fidelity in tie-in merchandise. One eBay seller from Shanghai was in
2010 (and is still) selling a ‘Tim Burton Alice in Wonderland Red Queen Dress Costume’;
its marketing rhetoric and photographs both outdo the quality of Disney costumes
and counter the usual connotations of ‘made in China’: ‘This is a high quality screen
accurate replica made dress, made in hand, custom-made, not cheap mass produc-
tion. … Made in your own measurements, limited quantity as it takes so much time on
making one’ (Cosplayying [sic]). Against Disney’s exploitation of cheap foreign labour
and mass-production of tie-in merchandise (Klein) and against stereotypes of Chinese
merchandise as cheap, mass-produced, sweatshop affairs, Chinese entrepreneurs like
Cosplayying are both turning the looking glass upon Disney’s global operations and
trumping Disney’s own claims to quality and fidelity in adaptation. The empire is not
just writing back; it is sewing back.

Tie-‘In Conclusion’

‘I said you were not hardly Alice. But you’re much more her now. In fact, you’re almost
Alice.’—Absalom the Caterpillar, voiced by Alan Rickman, Alice in Wonderland (2010)

Tie-in merchandise for the 2010 film conjures the phrase, ‘Almost Alice’, spoken as
dialogue in the film and the title of a tie-in CD whose songs are not heard in the film
(only one plays over the credits). ‘Almost Alice’ suggests ‘not quite Alice’, a state that
keeps adapters adapting, designers designing, producers producing, and consumers
consuming. In contrast to Anderson’s view of Disney’s ‘all-encompassing consumer
environment’ and ‘total merchandising’ (134), its corporate intertextuality depends on a
concept of adaptation that is almost, but not quite, what it adapts. As long as an adapta-
tion or tie-in product is not quite what it adapts, more adaptations need to be made; as
long as tie-in merchandise is not quite what it ties to, more tie-in products need to be
produced.
‘Almost’ is a portmanteau modifying ‘all’ with ‘most’. Like the ‘near perfect rep-
lica’ of Disney’s Authentic Mad Hatter costume, corporate franchise intertextuality
depends on a sense of nearly, but not quite perfectly replicated tie-in merchandise to
foster the slight dissatisfaction necessary to fuel ongoing consumption. Complete dis-
satisfaction would drive away customers, as it did FunnyLilBunBun and 1AngryHatter.
Complete satisfaction would equally put an end to consumption; slightly dissatisfied
208 Kamilla Elliott

consumers, however, remain hungry, eager to consume more. The vast array of tie-in
merchandise multiplies the Almost effect by dispersing Alice amongst so many prod-
ucts that are Almost, but not quite, Alice. The more products there are, the closer
Alice seems; yet from the other side of the looking glass, the more products there
are that are not quite Alice, the more Alice recedes. In addition to the incorporating
dynamics that this essay has traced, such multiplying, even poststructuralist dispersals
of near misses feed the franchise, creating desire for more sequels and more tie-ins.
In the final analysis, corporate intertextuality not only incorporates its varied and

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often antithetical tie-intertexts; it equally incorporates consumer dissatisfaction with
those texts to generate consumer desire for further consumption. All of the dynam-
ics addressed in this essay challenge prevailing views that intertextuality, together
with any other modes of breaking down and rendering interchangeable hierarchies,
sequences, categories, and oppositions, is inherently and essentially a radical, coun-
tercultural operation that diminishes the social, economic, and political power of
dominant, mainstream structures and cultures. In corporate franchise entertainment,
broken boundaries, deconstructed binarisms, inversions, ruptured sequences, and
diversified audiences serve and solidify capitalist interests through a process of inter-
textual incorporation that extends beyond texts and merchandise to consumer bodies,
minds, and actions.

Notes
1
See Allen and Juvan for a fuller account.
2
I use corporate in the sense of an incorporated company of traders legally authorized to act as a single
individual; I use franchise in the sense of a general title, format, or unifying concepts engaged to create and
market a series of products. Both definitions can be found in the OED.
3
Anderson refers to Disney in the 1950s; the process is not, however, limited to that decade but remains
operative today.
4
Not all of these costumes were licensed by Disney; costumiers capitalized on the fact that Carroll’s books
were in the public domain in 2010 and claimed to be adapting them rather than the film. However, the
‘Buy Alice in Wonderland Costumes’ website blazons lettering, iconography, and graphic design imitating
those of the Disney-Burton film.
5
She casts Alice in traditionally male roles: androgynously costumed monster-slayer in Underland and
British empire builder in ‘Overland’ (Elliott’s term).

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