9/7/12

what the dormouse said




This trailer for the 2007 XBox videogame Lost Odyssey features the Jefferson Airplane tune "White Rabbit," a landmark slice of sixties psychedelic rock and one of the more well-known counterculture appropriations of imagery from Alice in Wonderland for the sake of drug-related themes. The combination of sound and image in this videogame trailer reflect a parallel between the hallucinatory world of the drug trip and the enveloping universe of the videogame. A similar link between Jefferson Airplane-era psychedelia and the computer world is explored in great detail in John Markoff's 2005 book, "What the Dormouse Said: How The 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry." The very title of Markoff's book, tellingly enough, is an overt reference both to Lewis Carroll's original 1865 children's story and the lyrics to "White Rabbit."

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