Well, folks, another April Fools has come and gone. This year, I kept it simple and only did one. However, because our Facebook page had been hacked last year, that meant that many of our loyal readers on the book of faces got to miss out on our shenanigans last year, and our fearless leader and web-master, Paul, elected to share last years with all of you. Can’t say I blame him. They were rather brilliant and fun to write, especially coming off of a three-year-hiatus following the Pandemic.
You can read last years disclaimer here:
To reiterate: to the best of our knowledge, the Narnia series coming from Netflix is NOT going to be an animated series. Thus, Jodie Benson, Linda Larkin, Paige O’Hara, Ming Na-Wen, and Idina Menzel are not being considered for Jadis, and Robert Powell, Diogo Morgado, and Jonathan Roumie are not being considered the voice of Aslan.
Now for my Easter Eggs, obviously Powell, Morgado, and Roumie are all actors who have played Jesus in various television mini-series since 1977. Personally, I think it would be rather brilliant to cast an actor who played Jesus as the voice of Aslan, but that’s just me.
Finally, some of the sources I cited are direct references to some of my favorite animators, or animation teams from child hood on.
“Charles Jones” is a reference to the legendary “Chuck Jones” the animator behind countless Looney Tunes shorts and the classic How the Grinch Stole Christmas.
“Frank Ollie” is a reference to “Frank Thomas” and “Ollie Johnston” to head animators for Disney from the companies beginning until their retirement in the 70s.
“Bruce Dini” is a reference to Bruce Timm and Paul Dini of Batman: The Animated Series, Superman: The Animated Series, Batman Beyond, Justice League, and Justice League Unlimited fame.
“Dante Konitezko” is a reference to “Michael Dante DiMartino” and “Bryan Konitezko” of Avatar The Last Airbender.
“Gilroy Filoni” is a refernee to “Henry Gilroy” and “Dave Filoni” of Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
And last but not least “Bill Leland” is a reference to “Bill Malendez” and “Leland “Lee” Mendelson, who were not only behind the Peanuts holiday specials but the original animated Narnia from 1979.
Thank you all once again for humoring Paul and I in our annual shenanigans. Will there be more next year? You never know. best to keep your eyes open, and just remember, on April Fools Day, “Once a Court jester in the palace of Narnia, always a court jester in the palace of Narnia.”
Paul here. Just wanted to also chime in and explain the art that I included in the stories. Yes, most of it is AI-generated. Kudos to those who noticed. I had a lot of fun coming up with that stuff. I thought the Aslan was stunning. Jadis went through a lot of iterations, and took about 4 runs before I was able to create one that was modestly dressed. Also, for those who haven’t kept up with developments in AI-generated content, they are starting to release generators that are trained on particular gaming engines. I wouldn’t be surprised if they didn’t also train on public domain content as well. That is to say, while this is controversial and has a lot of implications impacting artists such as myself and many of my friends, I am also looking at ways that it can help me to improve my craft. I didn’t have a lot of time to put the art together for the story this year by hand, with everything going on in my daily life, but that would take hours to type up, and we need to get this announcement up.
We look forward to next year, and we have a list of ideas and concepts that we pull from when we plan for the April Fool’s Day jokes that we post. We’re also greatly anticipating the start of production on Netflix’s Narnia productions. Those are going to be live-action films, Greta Gerwig is writing and directing at least one or two of them. And we know that she’s a controversial choice to write and direct a Narnia film, but so was Andrew Adamson, coming from Shrek. We like to give them all the benefit of the doubt, and will only judge the final work on what happens in the actual film as the credits roll. We like to watch something we are highly anticipating at least twice. We’ve found that watching a film we want to see this bad twice allows us to relax more on the second viewing because we know what is going to happen, and our own pre-conceived ideas aren’t distracting us from what the movie actually contains. That helps me to judge the film on its’ own merits, and not based on what I thought it should be. I find that I enjoy more movies that way.
Anyway, hope you had fun this year. Hopefully we’ll have more Narnia news coming soon, from casting to the start of production, to release dates for new Narnia content!