When I went away to college, one of the few possessions that I brought with me was a recording of Maurice Sendak's 1963 picture book, Where the Wild Things Are. The story was read by singer, actress, and theatre performer Tammy Grimes, whose voice — which the NY Post has described as "half velvet, half gravel, and all magically rusty" — was utterly unmistakable, and, frankly, thrillingly scary. The first time I played it, my roommate immediately stiffened and told me how she had broken the record in half and hidden it under the sofa when she was five — apparently, the story still incited a visceral reaction some 15 years later.

Because the book went on to win the Caldecott Medal in 1964 and eventually became a bestseller, it's easy to forget that Where the Wild Things Are was initially quite controversial. Children's book reviewers thought that Sendak's drawings of wild beasts with fangs and claws would scare young readers, while psychologists wondered if Max's acting out — hammering nails into walls, shouting orders and having wild rumpuses — would set a negative example. It is of note that the most harmless-looking "wild thing," with human rather than clawed feet and square rather than pointy teeth, is the one featured on the book's cover.

Since 1963, the book has been recorded and re-recorded (with the Grimes version available now only on cassette), adapted into a children's opera as well as a ballet, and numerous attempts have been made to animate the story. Though it took him five years (due to extensive back and forth with Sendak), Czech animator Gene Deitch completed a seven-minute-long adaptation of the story in 1973 — Deitch called the source text the "Mt. Everest of children's books" — and Disney used the tale as the basis for an early CGI test in 1983, but nothing ever came of the project.

As many excited fans now know, WTWTA's newest incarnation is as a feature-length, live-action film written by David Eggers, directed by Spike Jonze, and starring Forest Whitaker, James Gandolfini, and Catherine Keener. The Internet has been abuzz with rumors about the film since last fall, with New York magazine giddily raving about the script and bloggers going ga-ga for a mistakenly attributed "film clip" — Jonze later described it as "a very early test" — that featured neither the real actor, nor the real costumes.

Warner Bros. has pushed the original May 2008 release back to, at last report, October 2009, and there's plenty of speculation circulating about why. Initial suppositions had it that Warner was unhappy with the actor who played Max as well as the tone of the film, but the new consensus (which, of course, no one will give us a quote to confirm) seems to be that the studio's primary concern is that the film is too scary. Is WTWTA the movie experiencing an unfortunate reprise of reviewers' original misguided reactions?

Of course, anyone who has ever been a kid knows that the scariest thing, the wildest thing, is one's own imagination. WTWTA succeeds by tapping directly into our ability to fashion our own fantastical narratives. The opening panel of the book essentially portrays Max building the set for the story — knotted fabric pieces will bloom into a forest canopy; a bedspread thrown over the line will become his kingly lair; a teddy bear dangling from a hanger mirrors the tree-swinging that will happen during the "wild rumpus." Children easily connect with the story because it mimics the flights of fancy that are part and parcel of entertaining oneself when no one else is around.

In an NPR interview in 2005, Sendak said that he doesn't write for children, which really seems to be just another way of saying that he doesn't pander to anyone's expectations — and certainly not to an adult's sanitized perception of what's appropriate for kids. At the end of the day, he knows that books are just vehicles. If you rephrased WTWTA's title and asked, "Where are the wild things?" the answer is obvious enough — they're in your mind.

-J.K. Glei