Headscratchers / Madeline

• Okay this has bugged me for years. In the live action movie Madeline is said to be an orphan,having been abandoned in a church as an infant or something.
  Yet in the very first book when Miss Clavel and the other girls visit her after her surgery the toys and candy in her room are stated to be gifts from "Papa".
  Further more in MADELINE'S CHRISTMAS after she helps the old man and he uses his magic so everyone can spend the holiday with their family there is a scene that appears to be Madeline at home with her parents and a younger sibling.
  It's not just between the movie and books either. One of the specials/animated movies (LOST IN PARIS I think) totally confuses the issue, in the beginning Madeline is contacted by a family member(a cousin maybe?)and she has a necklace that belonged to her mother and the context seemed to give the impression the mother had died but there were other still-living relatives. That's like three different backgrounds! WTH?!
  • Regarding the DiC version, it's similar to The Simpsons, where the continuity is retconed a lot. But in canon, Madeline's parents are alive, since I remember a Christmas special which shows both her parents alive and well. As for the film adaption, it's got nothing to do with the DiC continuity, especially since it takes place in the 1950s rather than the 1930s.
    • The DIC episodes with Madeline as a orphan post-date the live-action movie, so the Retcon must have been some misguided attempt to synch the two continuities together. "Lost in Paris" makes no sense after watching episodes like the one where Madeline's country cousin comes to visit.
• In the movie, one of the nurses ask Ms. Clavel if she was Madeline's mother. Why would she assume that a nun would be a mother? Have there been women who had children before becoming a nun?
  • Maybe the nurse didn't know Miss Clavel was a nun. She wasn't wearing her nun attire in that scene.
• Why is it that Madeline spends most of her life with Ms. Clevel at boarding school? Did her parents not want her?
  • Her life outside the boarding school wasn't explored much afaik, but she wouldn't be depicted as an unwanted child either. If it was so she would've hated them and showed no emotion over their demise in the film.
  • There are plenty of reasons why Real Life children go to boarding school, which have nothing to do with being unwanted. Sometimes the parents think the boarding school will provide the best possible education. Sometimes they both have full-time jobs and think the child will be better off in a boarding school than home alone or with a nanny most of the time. Sometimes they want to teach the child to live independently, or to improve their social skills and friendships by having them live with their schoolmates. Sometimes the child has special needs that the boarding school can provide for better than a day school (given Madeline's hyperactive and mischievous tendencies, her parents might have had to search long and hard to find her a teacher as patient and understanding as Miss Clavel). Sometimes it's the child who chooses to go. Any of the girls in Miss Clavel's school could be there for any of those reasons.
• If there’s one thing about Madeline and the Costume Party that has confused me from 1994 to today, it’s how Madeline and her friends even contracted the wretched chickenpox in the first place. We viewers didn’t even get a clear explanation in that regard. Think about that. It also doesn’t help that the scenes when the girls are having their temperatures taken kinda tend to freak me out a wee bit, but I don’t freak out like some irrational germaphobe.
  • They were probably exposed to the germ somewhere while out on their daily walk. Maybe they stopped to play at a park where a child who unknowingly had the virus was also playing and caught it from touching the same swings or jungle gym. The question remains though: how did all twelve girls, plus Pepito, manage not to have caught the chickenpox yet by age 7-8? Of course it's Rule of Drama, but in real life, wouldn't a few of them most likely have already had it when they were younger?
    • One would think they would’ve, but as Edward the Blue Engine so often says at the end of an episode of Victor Tanzig’s “The Stories of Sodor” miniseries on YouTube, “That is a story for another day.”
• Why did Nicole and Janine draw letters on their tummies instead of scars at the end of the appendicitis episode?
  • When Madeline shows the girls her scar in the hospital, they all name various things they think it looks like, including letters. Nicole things it looks like a C and Chloe thinks it looks like a Z. That probably explains why Nicole and Janine draw letters.