Let's go to Narnia

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Voyage was a decent movie with a good message, as far as movies good. It just wasn’t a good or faithful rendering of the book. The only part they got right, in my opinion, was the very ending with Reepicheep continuing his adventures and Aslan sending the three children back to our world. They managed to maintain the Christological link to Aslan, which is always a pleasant surprise in modern movies.

Apart from that, the movie can hardly be considered an accurate portrayal of Voyage.
 
I recommend reading The Hobbit before trying to tackle The Lord of the Rings. Not is it the prequel to Lord of the Rings, but it’s also much more light-hearted. Lord of the Rings, while certainly a brilliantly told story, tends to be much darker and more ponderous than The Hobbit or even the darkest of the Narnia books (if any of them can actually be considered dark).

Also, rather than the movie I highly recommend the old BBC radio drama of Lord of the Rings. It’s pretty accurate, overall, it leaves a great deal to your imagination, and it’s a ton of fun to listen to. I must’ve listened to it dozens of times when I was a boy. That’s what got me to read the books.
 
Amen.

It felt more like a money grab riding the coat tails of Lord of the Rings than it did an attempt to faithfully render Tolkien’s story for film. It’s too bad, really. I honestly like The Hobbit as a book better than Lord of the Rings (not that I don’t love LotR).
 
I was a casual reader of Lewis before the LOTR hit the college campuses so heavily. In my case, around 1965. Even before the Ballentine paperbacks were available and all that was around were the pirated Ace printings. Which I bought, as I found them, individually, at the newsstand. And I found them in reverse order. Wanting to get an idea of what all the excitement was, I read them in the order I bought them. Backwards. I don’t recommend reading LOTR in that order, whatever might be the “correct” chronological order to read Narnia.

That was the start of my Tolkien hobby, extending to reading much commentary on LOTR, and finding mention of Narnia. Started with DAWN TREADER, the first I found. And Lewis joined my collecting mania.

Lots of stuff in my collecting mania these days.
 
Concur on both suggestions (though I suggest the LOTR movies too, flawed as parts might be). I’m still listening to it. It is superb, though I would have preferred a few more episodes, and a few things I missed being included. There is another good adaptation, that was sold by (I think) a group called MIND’S EYE. Not as classy as the BBC, but still listenable. And as far back as the mid 70s, there was an adaptation of THE HOBBIT, serviceable and professional, from something called The Drama Project. Some names were pronounced oddly, though.

Generally, I’ve sought out audio presentations of Narnia and Middle Earth wherever I can find them. These days, mainly for car trips.
 
I remember listening to an abridged and slightly dramatized audio version of The Hobbit as a boy. My brother and I had the entire encounter with the trolls memorized word-for-word and voice-for-voice. We used to sit in our kitchen and recite it/act it, much to the amusement of my parents. It became somewhat of a party piece for us and we’d be asked to recite it at family get-togethers. 😂
 
I listen to them on audiobook when I’m driving, and I’m almost 40. I still get a lot of them, even though I’ve heard them probably a hundred times.
 
I Don’t Want This Thread to close, so I’m commenting on it.
 
Well since we’re trying to keep this thread open, we’ve finally started accelerating through The Magician’s Nephew (we were going at a slow pace, as we, or at least I, found the book to be a little dry in the middle chapters). Tonight we got into the creation of Narnia, which we found a lot more interesting than previous chapters. I used this as an opportunity to explain to my kids, in an incredibly amateurish way, the parallels with Genesis, and read them an account of the Creation Story from a children’s book of bible stories. They were also very excited to make the connections with the origin of the lamp-post from LWW.
 
OK, a Narnia trivia question. Who was the character whose arm got really sore from wearing a too-tight gold arm band?
 
The wardrobe from the Professor’s house may likely be seen …where?
 
OK, I give up. Where is the wardrobe likely to be seen, other than in the Professor’s house? Unless you mean The Magician’s Nephew where we learn about how the wardrobe was made from the apple tree that grew from the special Tree in Narnia.
 
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