The long-lasting fascination with 'Alice'

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It was in 1865 when Alice first chased an anxious rabbit down a magical hole to a Wonderland populated with the iconic Mad Hatter, Cheshire Cat and a hookah-smoking caterpillar.

Ever since, the diminutive girl in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has been furiously pursuing the White Rabbit in just about every artistic medium of popular culture, from Disney's celebrated 1951 animated movie to a 1976 musical porn film and even, in 2000, a gory video game.

Now, celebrated movie director Tim Burton will release his own interpretation of the Lewis Carroll classic. From advance trailers, Burton's "Alice in Wonderland" appears both whimsical and freakish. The movie opens March 5 in Utah theaters.

On page XXXX, we offer examples of how this beloved children's story has taken on unique perspectives from artists who seemingly slid down that rabbit hole along with the iconic Alice.

, Lewis Carroll with Martin Gardner »

The granddaddy of them all, and still the best place to start. Just don't let the footnote annotations of Gardner, a trained mathematician and expert logician in the Carroll mold, bog you down. Read one chapter at a time through, followed by Gardner's "gee-whiz" notes. The classic John Tenniel illustrations are rich icing on this classic cake.

Ben Fulton

, Lewis Carroll with prefaces by Zadie Smith and Will Self »

There are many editions of Alice with alternate illustrations apart from those of Tenniel, including collectors' editions featuring freakland drawings by Ralph Steadman (a pen familiar to Hunter S. Thompson fans) and Barry Moser (rarefied but still intriguing). This 2001 edition features the light-sketch touch of artist Mervyn Peake, which lends Carroll's figures a bracing, hallucinatory edge. The introductions by Brit-lit bad-boy Will Self and novelist-prodigy Zadie Smith approach the texts from the refreshing angle of "imagination literature," rather than dwell on the history and riddles of the book.

Ben Fulton

, Fredric Brown » A nice dessert after you finish the main course, Fredric Brown's tightly wound little book is a must for Carroll fans in love with Alice 's

nonsensical side. Doc Stoeger is newspaper editor struck with a slow news day, but cured the night before his weekly edition is published when a raft of incredible news stories appear out of thin air. But this being a book anchored in references to Carroll's trap-door world of literary inversions, those stories slip away.

Ben Fulton

, Robert Sabuda (pop-up book, 2003) »

Pop-up book artist Sabuda created a complex but colorful title that mixes Carroll's original text with sophisticated, interlacing pop-up construction. There are only six set pieces in the book, but they are glorious, intricate dioramas. Especially notable: the opening page where Alice is sitting by the river bank with her sister next to a tall forest of trees, and the last page, which depicts Alice caught in a whirlwind of flying playing cards. The book also has smaller pages of pop-up dioramas within each main setting, adding more miniature 3-D artwork to marvel at.

Vince Horiuchi

"American McGee's Alice" (video game, 2000) »

American McGee ("Doom II," "Quake") was one of the first video-game designers to see the truly dark, morose underpinnings in Carroll's story of a little girl lost in her own imagination. McGee, a top-tier game designer, produced a third-person shooting action game for the personal computer that tells a more demented version. After the first two stories, Alice becomes suicidal and catatonic, then is placed in an asylum after her family is killed in a house fire. Abused by the workers there, the Rabbit returns to take Alice on a trip through a much different Wonderland, steeped in violent, gruesome imagery and designed with an organic, mist-covered architecture representing Alice's insanity. Not only that, the player controls Alice and kills most everything in her path to rid her of her depression and restore her mental health.

Vince Horiuchi

"White Rabbit" (song, 1967) » When people seek parallels between the '60s drug culture and Lewis Carroll's fantastical ideas, the bridge most often cited is Jefferson Airplane's much-played single in which "One pill makes you larger / and one pill makes you small." In a 2009 CNN interview, Airplane lead singer Grace Slick said that she saw the link between the '60s and Alice in Wonderland . "I came out of the '50s," Slick told CNN. "Alice came out of Victorian times, which were very rigid -- and she went down to Wonderland, down the rabbit hole, and I went into the '60s."

"White Rabbit" has become a staple of movie soundtracks and is heard in the Vietnam dramas "Coming Home" and "Platoon," as well as episodes of "The Simpsons" and "The Sopranos."

Sean P. Means

"Phoebe in Wonderland" (film, 2009) »

Childhood is as bizarre an experience as falling down the rabbit hole in writer-director Daniel Barnz's underappreciated gem, which debuted at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Phoebe (played by Elle Fanning, Dakota's little sister) is a little girl who's just a little too preoccupied with Alice in Wonderland . It's Phoebe's favorite book, and her overstressed mom (Felicity Huffman) is writing her doctoral thesis about Carroll's classic. When an enigmatic new drama teacher (Patricia Clarkson) starts casting for a school production of "Alice," Phoebe auditions. But as rehearsals progress, Phoebe has difficulty separating reality from Wonderland.

Sean P. Means

"Radio Hour: Alice" (play, 2009) » Utah playwright Matthew Ivan Bennett presented a stage adaptation in the form of an hourlong radio play, exploring the tale's more twisted, dark side. Commissioned by Salt Lake City's Plan-B Theatre Company, Bennett said he was inspired by the text, plus his own generally "metaphysical bent." He considered the meat of the story to be "the totally nonrational, dark, spiritual questing feeling of Alice ." Hence, in his radio adaptation, which played to sold-out local audiences last October, the characters are a bit more grotesque and bizarre, with a heightened sense of peculiarity. He considers Alice to be "wildly alive" in popular culture, as its images and characters are known even to people who haven't read Carroll's original story.

Roxana Orellana