The music video for Tom Petty's "Don't Come Around Here No More" featured the late, great singer as Alice In Wonderland's Mad Hatter, and it scarred a whole generation of MTV viewers. Lewis Carroll's Alice In Wonderland is one of the most popular fantasy novels ever written and follows the titular heroine as she falls through a rabbit hole and emerges into a world populated by all kinds of bizarre creatures. Since it was first published in 1865, Carroll's seminal work has been adapted into just about every medium.
While it received mixed reviews, Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland - which cast Mia Wasikowska as Alice and Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter - was an enormous financial success. The book also received a cult video game in the form of American McGee's Alice, Rose Reynolds played the character in the final season of Once Upon A Time, and even the original Resident Evil movie is a loose adaptation of the novel. Milla Jovovich's character is named Alice who awakens in a bizarre, underground facility and faces off with an A.I. dubbed the "Red Queen," who likes to decapitate victims.
If an Alice In Wonderland soundtrack existed, it would be filled with the many, many songs it has inspired, including Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" and "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" by The Beatles. "Don't Come Around Here No More" is one of Tom Petty's most famous videos, and while the song itself wasn't penned with Alice In Wonderland in mind, the video is a major ode to Carroll's work. The song itself was featured on Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers album Southern Accents, and the title came from an argument producer Dave Stewart witnessed between Stevie Nicks and an ex, with Nicks uttering the phrase.
The Tom Petty Alice In Wonderland video was a staple on MTV back in the day and it gives off a distinctly trippy tone. Actress Wish Foley plays Alice, who sits across from the Tom Petty Mad Hatter at a recreation of the Mad Tea Party passage from the book. She drinks from a cup of tea - which is prone to changing sizes - as Petty's Hatter leers at the camera. The hallucinations come thick and fast around the midway point, with scenes such as Alice trapped in a cup of tea as giant lumps of sugar are thrown in the cup, or seeing an image of herself turning into a pig.
"Don't Come Around Here No More's" Alice In Wonderland homage ends with the fairly unsettling image of Alice being turned into a giant cake. Tom Petty's Mad Hatter and his guests then proceed to eat her alive, with the final image being Petty swallowing Alice and burping. While it's fairly tongue-in-cheek and tame by modern standards, the sight of Alice being turned into a living cake scarred some viewers back in 1985 and is said to be partly responsible for Tipper Gore co-founding the Parents Music Resource Center. In a retrospective interview with Yahoo! the video's director Jeff Stein laughs about the video even being accused of promoting cannibalism with the sequence.