Last week, I posted about reading C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, and I wondered in that space how the Disney folks would handle Aslan.
Now we know what the book marketers are going to try to do. Thanks to Evan Erwin (misterorange)and his comment over on Gary Lamb’s blog, we see this article about that very topic.
This from the Slate article…
Fifty years later, Lewis is surely looking down from heaven in horror. The New York Times recently reported that his beloved “Chronicles of Narnia” series will soon be supplemented by new, secularized installments; HarperCollins plans to bring us, as the title of Doreen Carvajal’s article put it, “Narnia Without a Christian Lion.” All the Narnia books, new and old, will be marketed aggressively, and according to a memo obtained by the Times, “no attempt will be made to correlate the stories to Christian imagery/theology.”
And this…
…Narnia’s “Christian imagery” goes beyond a sprinkling of biblical allusions; the entire story line mirrors the Christian salvation story. The Magician’s Nephew tells the creation story and the way evil seeped into Narnia; The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe tells of the crucifixion and resurrection of Christ; Prince Caspian tells how right religion was corrupted and then restored; and so on, until the final volume, The Last Battle, where Ape (the Antichrist) tries to take over Narnia, which leads to Aslan’s second coming. In addition to all the usual challenges of attempting a sequel to a classic, HarperCollins will have to figure out what it could possibly add to such a complete, iconic tale. Will the publishing house insert amusing anecdotes and preteen adventures amid all the divine revelation?
I’ve often wondered why “we” have to “baptize” everything in order to get a message across. And now I’m wondering why “they” feel the need to screw around with an absolutely riveting tale, just to avoid the fact that it just might say something of real and lasting value. Go figure…
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*What Would C.S. Lewis Think?
