You should all read these books. They are probobly the best books ever...LOL. Disney is going to make some movies of them. I hope they don't ruin them.

I havent read the Chronicals since I was a kid, but I just started C.S. Lewis' book "The Screwtape Letters" the other day which is pretty damn good so far.

Well, it's C.S. Lewis. What do you expect?

I've read all the Chronicles of Narnia. Good books. I saw a trailer for the new "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe" in a theater. It looked pretty good. I hope that wasn't just great editing for the trailer.

I've never read the books. Would I be correct in saying that it's LotR for the Harry Potter age group?

That trailer looked fucking great!

Kind of.

The series has fantasy elements with mythical and Christian symbolism thrown in just like LotR, but each book is a self contained story and not as epic as LotR.

It's been so long since I read the Narnia books, but I remember the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe being the strongest of the seven.

I am just going to agree with what he said, and not add another post of description.

It does, and I'm thrilled that the Henson compaines are doing the effects. It should be at the very least, wonderful to look at.
Anyone see Hitchiker's guide? The Volgons were amazing!

Disney is in charge, so I hope they can bring themselves back up from what they have been doing these past few years.

Yeah, that makes me nervous too.

If they blow this, they have ruined the books and themselves forever. It's a big project and is going to take a lot of work.

Maybe in your eyes. I don't think a majority of people are going to start saying "Fuck Disney" for screwing up Narnia. If people still have faith in the Disney corporation, I'm not quite sure what it's going to take to turn them off, but it's certainly got to be more significant than a shitty book-to-screen adaptation.

Well what I was trying to say is that the books were written expressing Christianity, and more so than LotR. And I think if they don't present that well. They will lose the whole point of the books.

The Narnia books are alright. Not great. Abolition of Man I keep coming back to. I find myself debating with the book a lot.

The movies are already ruined for me, they want to appeal towards a Christian audience. And before someone tells me "well that was the author's point when he wrote them" I know that, but to appeal to a demographic that I can't particularly stand really sours the whole thing.

my thought is that Disney would adapt the film in such a way that it would appeal to a wider demographic than just the Christian audience.

Disney makes a marketing appeal to evangelicals for Chronicles of Narnia

By Mark I. Pisnky
The Orlando Sentinel
Posted May 21 2005

In a marriage of modern mythmakers, the Walt Disney Co. is marketing a film based on C.S. Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia. And in doing so, Disney will take a page from Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, based on Lewis' novel for children and Christian allegory, will be released Dec. 9.

For Disney, the Christian marketing campaign represents a sharp break with corporate policy. Apart from Disney World's annual Nights of Joy concerts, the film is the company's first undertaking with the religious community. For some evangelical leaders, it represents the effective end of their Disney boycott.

The entertainment giant, which bills itself as a Magic Kingdom, has carefully avoided religion for most of its history. Yet Disney has launched a 10-month campaign aimed at evangelical Christians to build support for Narnia, a $100 million, live-action and computer-generated animated feature it is co-producing with Walden Media.

Disney has hired several Christian marketing groups to handle the film, including Motive Marketing, which ran the historic, grass-roots efforts for The Passion. That film has grossed $611 million worldwide and is now in re-release.

The entertainment world realizes there's a big audience "that embraces a spiritual world view," says Armand Nicholi, who for decades has taught a Harvard seminar on C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud. How well these groups interact "will determine how successful this marriage is."

Another Christian firm, Grace Hill Media, has also been hired, and several groups have joined the marketing effort. For instance, the Christian Web site hollywoodjesus.com launched a feature on its site recently devoted to The Chronicles of Narnia.

For its part, Disney is trying to play down the Christian marketing approach, noting that it will also reach out to the science-fiction and fantasy communities.

"We don't want to cater to one fan base over the other, or at the expense of another," says Dennis Rice, Disney's senior vice president for public relations.

Leaders of the religious boycott, launched with great fanfare in the 1990s, accused Disney of betraying its family-values legacy by providing health benefits to same-sex partners, allowing Gay Days at theme parks and producing controversial movies, books and TV programming through Disney subsidiaries.

Financial analysts said the boycott had no effect on Disney's bottom line. The Disney-Narnia campaign, however, appears to acknowledge implicitly that the Disney boycott has been a failure.

One of the groups that led the boycott, Colorado-based Focus on the Family, has been included in the early stages of the marketing campaign.

Bob Waliszewski, the head of teen ministries for Focus, attended a Disney presentation for Narnia at the Burbank studio.

"We have still told families there are disappointing elements at Disney," he says. "We haven't changed that disappointment in Disney. But with Eisner leaving, we're all hoping that Disney will be a better company."

Disney chief executive officer Michael Eisner plans to retire Sept. 30.

For its part, Disney is circumspect about the boycott's apparent end.

It won't be over "until the Southern Baptists, American Family Association, Concerned Women for America and others actually decide to call it off," says Bob Knight of Concerned Women for America.

However, "the departure of the prickly, anti-Christian Michael Eisner, and the advent of the Narnia project might open lines that could lead to a new understanding," he says.

Since it was published in the 1950s, Lewis' Narnia series has sold 85 million copies worldwide. Disney's animated features have been international staples for nearly 75 years.

In the Narnia story, a lion named Aslan is a Christ-like figure who offers himself as a sacrifice to save another character. He is tortured and killed, and then resurrected to transform Narnia into a heaven on Earth.

So far, small groups of Christian leaders and opinion makers from Western states have been invited to Disney's Burbank studios for briefings and screenings of sequences from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Ted Baehr, founder of the Christian-oriented Movie Guide, called the presentation a "wonderful dog-and-pony show. I think they're going to do a great job marketing to the church."

There is reason for skepticism about how Lewis, who is beloved by Christians for his religious commitment and his collection of essays, Mere Christianity, will be treated in popular culture.

Any efforts to de-emphasize the religious aspects of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe film are bound to backfire with Christians, according to Barbara Nicolosi, of Act One, a program designed to bring Christian writers and executives into the entertainment industry.

"Disney and Walden Media are aware that there's a proprietary sense about The Chronicles of Narnia," she says. "C.S. Lewis is our guy. They better not take that away from us."

The Orlando Sentinel is a Tribune Co. newspaper.