CAKE

This morning I decided to watch some of the Today show as I do on very rare occasions. While watching, I saw one segment in particular that piqued my interest. The segment can be found here.

The segment is about the sudden explosion of Christmas media by writer/journalist Karen Schaler, notable for being the writer of A Christmas Prince. While watching it, I reflected back to the Jenny Nicholson aka @spiderjewel video about the movie and its sequel. And then I realized, the world in A Christmas Prince isn’t just a dystopia.

Aldovia is an introspective representation of its creator, Karen Schaler.

In order to keep to the spirit of Jenny’s original video, I put my explanation into a short numbered list.

1. “Christmas” Karen

In order to understand how A Christmas Prince is introspective, we need to understand the creator.

Karen Schaler, after releasing three Christmas movies and three Christmas books in the same year, garnered the title of “Christmas Karen.” But her history with Christmas has deeper roots than that.

In the video, she explains that her great aunt was born on Christmas day, and her name was Merry Christmas Day. With this fact, Karen believes that the Christmas spirit is deeply rooted into her own personal being.

This ties into the royal family of Aldovia, with them having an almost obligatory need to celebrate Christmas in every part of their lives, and in the lives of their country’s citizens. The best example of this is Prince Richard, who, like Karen’s great aunt, was born on Christmas day. The very idea of having Christmas be integral to the lifestyles of the royal family shows how Karen projects herself into the Christmas Prince story. But that’s not the only aspect of Karen that she uses in the story.

2. Christmas 24/7

It’s very interesting how throughout the Today segment, Karen emphasizes her imagination where it’s Christmas year-round. She wants to imagine herself in a fantasy where it’s Christmas 24/7. Sound familiar?

Aldovia is a physical manifestation of her dream, an alternate universe where it’s perpetually Christmastime. Of course Aldovia can’t be a Christmas-eccentric dystopia without the “dystopia” part. Which leads into my final point...

3. Troubling times and financial crises

As Aldovia acts as a playing out of Karen’s fantasies, it also acts as a form of escapism. She compares trying to drown out the troubles of real life by means of Christmas as going down a rabbit hole which she decided to never leave.

And so Aldovia is used as a getaway of reality’s problems. But it doesn’t stay as a harmless utopia for long. It starts to tear at the seams. The world is riddled with deception, facades, and wrongness. What is supposed to be a cheerful sleigh ride ends up being a sleigh ride through deserted plains almost as barren and undesirable as Antarctica. What is supposed to be a joyous coronation ends up being a revelation involving fraud and a lifetime’s worth of lies. Even in the sequel, the country is plagued with a financial crisis (although Karen wasn’t involved in the making of the second movie, but it still feels true to the themes of the original).

After I first watched the 2016 MCU movie Doctor Strange, I noted a huge connection between the movie and the titular comic book character and the early works of the popular psychedelic rock/progressive rock band Pink Floyd (R.I.P Syd and Rick). I wrote down every connection I could find here.

1. Pink Floyd used Doctor Strange comics for the cover of their sophomore album

The very first connection between Pink Floyd and Doctor Strange has to do with Storm Thorgerson. Thorgerson is the artist for almost every Pink Floyd album cover ever. His most popular work was for the iconic cover for their 1973 album The Dark Side of the Moon. Artwork for the Doctor Strange comics, including the character himself, makes an appearance in the cover for Pink Floyd’s (back then they were known as the Pink Floyd) second album in 1968, A Saucerful of Secrets:

In case you can’t see it, this will make it easier:

2. Direct reference to Doctor Strange in Pink Floyd’s next album.

As if putting Strange in an album cover wasn’t blatant enough, the Pink Floyd later on made a reference to him on a song in their next soundtrack album from 1969, More. The lyrics stated, “And suddenly it strikes you / That they’re moving into range / And Doctor Strange is always changing size”

3. Benedict Cumberbatch and David Gilmour

This is probably a coincidence, but in 2016, David Gilmour (guitarist for Pink Floyd) had Benedict Cumberbatch (who plays the titular character in Doctor Strange) sing the lyrics to the song “Comfortably Numb”, a song off of Pink Floyd’s album The Wall:

4. The soundtrack of the Doctor Strange movie

Now we’re moving on from Pink Floyd referencing Doctor Strange to Doctor Strange referencing Pink Floyd.

Scott Derrickson, one of the main creators of the Doctor Strange movie, made a post on Reddit saying that the movie will have a Pink Floyd song from the 60s. He also said that it would be a song from the Syd Barrett era, meaning that it would be a song from Pink Floyd’s 1967 debut album, The Piper at the Gates of Dawn. The song chosen for the movie was the instrumental “Interstellar Overdrive” and it played during the car crash scene:

5. Scott Derrickson tweet

Scott Derrickson later on tweeted this:

Derrickson is quoting lyrics from the opening track of Pink Floyd’s album A Saucerful of Secrets (keep in mind the album cover), “Let There Be More Light”.

HAHAHAHAHAHA!!! My cat was never like this!