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At last, in less than two weeks, The Chronicles of Narnia will appear on the big screen for the first time ever. However, this much-hyped movie does not quite mark the first time that cameras have rolled on The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. The book, first published in 1950, has been dramatized at least three times before—but always for television.

Each of these earlier productions was made with much less money than the typical big-screen movie, and all of them were made at least a couple of decades ago, before computer-generated images had become the norm. So, on a visual and technical level, they are not nearly as impressive as the fantasy films that we have since become used to.

They were also made with an explicitly young audience in mind, and as such, they tend to paint their characters in rather broad strokes. The White Witch does a lot of shrieking, and the children sometimes deliver their lines rather earnestly or deliberately, as though they were still memorizing their dialogue but had not yet learned to speak it naturally.

According to the Internet Movie Database, this story was first broadcast on British television as a ten-part black-and-white mini-series in 1967, less than four years after C. S. Lewis's death. This version does not seem to be available on video. Two later adaptations, however, have been released on VHS and DVD multiple times, and are easy to find.

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In the summer of 1979, the CBS network broadcast a cartoon-animated version produced by the Children's Television Workshop (Sesame Street, The Electric Company) and the Episcopal Radio-TV Foundation. It was directed by Bill Melendez, a former Looney Tunes animator who had since become well-known as the producer of numerous Charlie Brown specials.

At 95 minutes, this is a fairly brisk and economical adaptation. While it covers all the major plot points and much of the character development from Lewis's book, it leaves out some of the more minor details, such as how the children enter Narnia almost by accident while hiding in the wardrobe from Mrs. Macready, or how a robin leads the children to Mr. Beaver; instead, Mr. Beaver leads the children away from Mr. Tumnus's ransacked home himself.

This version also makes one interesting deviation from the structure of Lewis's novel, at the very beginning. It skips over the children's arrival at the Professor's house entirely, starting instead with Lucy emerging from the wardrobe and telling her three older siblings that she has been to Narnia. When they don't believe her, Lucy retreats to her room and reminisces about her first meeting with the faun Mr. Tumnus, which is then shown in flashback.

The most conspicuous omission from this film is the scene of Father Christmas giving the Pevensie children their gifts. While we hear about Father Christmas and the gifts he gives to others, we never see him, himself; instead, it is Aslan who gives the children their gifts.

Some of the performances tend to be over-the-top; and the characters occasionally look at the camera when someone says something particularly unusual or scary, or they make subtle asides to it, as though they were participating in a panto or some similar form of children's theatre in which the characters address the audience directly.

When Edmund meets the White Witch, she yells her lines at the very moment when she is supposed to be enchanting him. And the wolf who leads the Witch's secret police growls ostentatiously before, after, and during most of his lines. At least Aslan's booming baritone conveys his power and authority, as well as his warmth and even humor.

The animation is somewhat crude, even by the standards of a quarter-century ago, and it occasionally falls back on questionable devices; for example, when the White Witch turns her enemies to stone, her wand seems to shoot laser beams at her victims (a consequence, perhaps, of the fact that Star Wars came out only two years earlier?).

However, some of the gimmicks are kind of fun—like the portrait in Mr. Tumnus's house which comes to life for just one second, to blow a note on the faun's flute. And when the grown-up Kings and Queens of Narnia pursue the White Stag, that sequence surges with life thanks in no small part to the Emmy-winning score by Michael J. Lewis.

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