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Buy It

Until now, the only readily available live-action version of this story has been a three-hour dramatization produced by the BBC in 1988, and shown in the United States on the WonderWorks program. This version owes its great length partly to the fact that it has retained almost everything from Lewis's book, but it is also rather slowly paced.

The script, by Alan Seymour, also introduces some new material. This time, the story begins in London in 1940, as the Pevensie children are put on a train and sent to the Professor's house in the country. Edmund, who will go on to betray his siblings to the White Witch, reveals his wicked tendencies when he complains that their parents are "spoilsports" for sending them away instead of letting them enjoy the excitement of the war.

However, once the children are inside Narnia and Edmund heads for the White Witch's castle to give them all away, he begins to wrestle with his own conscience, depicted here as a sort of ghostly copy of himself that emerges from his body to talk to him every now and then. At one point, after talking to this doppelganger, Edmund tells it to "disappear."

Once again, the production values are more like those of a night of children's live theatre than those of a movie, per se. The fauns, who are supposed to be humans with goats' legs, look instead like humans wearing baggy, shaggy pants. And because the Beavers are portrayed by regular-sized people—and not by, say, dwarves or midgets, or Yoda-like puppets—they look monstrously huge. Aslan, for his part, is a big let-down—more of a giant, soft-spoken plush doll with a loud purr than the roaring king of beasts.

Interestingly, some of the more fantastical creatures are depicted not through puppets or costumes, but through old-fashioned hand-drawn animation, which is then superimposed on the live-action images. In a way, this is a lot like the current way of doing special effects, which consists of animating creatures on a computer before adding them to a shot.

The BBC version includes the Father Christmas episode; however, like the cartoon, it leaves out some of the mythological references in Lewis's original novel that might rub some Christians the wrong way. These include the bit where Mr. Beaver explains that the White Witch is not human because she is descended from Lilith—a demonic being who was Adam's first wife, according to medieval Jewish legend—as well as the bit where Mr. Tumnus regales Lucy with stories of how the Roman god Bacchus and his drinking buddy Silenus feasted with the forest people. (This last element becomes especially important in Prince Caspian, but the BBC eliminated it from their adaptation of that book, too.)

Seymour's script also adds a curious bit of dialogue after Aslan comes back from the dead and explains the Deeper Magic. Susan and Lucy ask why he didn't tell them that he knew he would rise again (a fair question, since Jesus had predicted his own resurrection to his disciples), and Aslan replies, "I knew of the old incantation, but it has never been put to the test, until now." The girls then marvel that Aslan took such a "risk"—as though he had been uncertain of the outcome. Some critics, like Steven D. Greydanus, have said this line is "rank heresy" against Aslan's omniscience.

This BBC production was followed by two sequels—one a compression of Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and the other an adaptation of The Silver Chair—and the production values get better as they go. (A boxed set of all three BBC productions is available here).

Here's hoping that the upcoming big-screen version of the story gets the production values and the basic story right, right from the start, and that it is a big enough success to generate a new set of sequels.

Image of 1988 cast © BBC

© Peter T. Chattaway 2005, subject to licensing agreement with Christianity Today International. All rights reserved. Click for reprint information.

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