The Chronicles of Narnia has been in the works for a very long time. With an animated version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe released nearly thirty years ago in 1979, and the BBC putting together four of the chronicles for TV in the mid-to-late 80s, Narnia had been attempted before.
The Chronicles of Narnia property was in different hands until the late 1990s, and now we have an idea of why it changed hands at that time.
Frank Marshall is a producer that is no stranger to children’s movies. His credits include E.T., Indiana Jones, Back to the Future and An American Tail to name only a few of the 84 films on his producer credits list to date.
“Nothing was impossible for Frank,” Bogdanovich says. “You’d say, ‘I need a couch.’ And the next thing I’d know, I’d have a couch. Of course, he took it from his parents’ living room.”
There was one problem, Marshall says, that he couldn’t solve: adapting C.S. Lewis’ fantasy series “The Chronicles of Narnia.” Kennedy/Marshall had the property at Paramount from 1993-99, but in the pre-CG age, they couldn’t create the imaginary worlds.
“The centaurs were going to be animatronics, but they didn’t really look great,” Marshall says. “And people were nervous about the story being too Christian-based. The option lapsed, and then the technology hit.”
There will be no letting go, Marshall insists, when it comes to “The B.F.G.,” the Roald Dahl children’s story about a big, friendly giant they’ve been trying to adapt since 1991. It’s one of many projects the producing team has in various states of development, a slate that also includes Wayne Kramer’s “Crossing Over” and the next “Bourne” movie.
So that’s an interesting bit of information: people were nervous about it being “too Christian.” We know now, however, that it being so Christian was nothing for them to be afraid of. To the tune of over $700 million for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and more than $400 million for Prince Caspian.
But what would it have been like to have had yet another Narnia series based in animatronics and puppets? I wonder why they believed it was prior to the age of CG, as Jurassic Park opened that up in 1993. I suppose, however, that as the 90s went on, 1995’s Toy Story and 1997’s Star Wars Trilogy: Special Edition releases didn’t have good enough CG to make the Narnia books filmable material yet.
And then there’s the removal of Christianity from the story? The move of the start of the story from World War II England to Los Angeles, CA after an earthquake was only part of it. But there’s not much more known about what it might have been.
Makes you think though. Would Paramount, had they gotten the franchise instead of Fox, have still been apprehensive about the Christianity contained within the story?
Addendum: My pal Lord Figtree that I met at LionCon e-mailed to remind me of the 1968 edition of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. It ran in ten 25-minute segments, shown only in England. Who knows what the content of this mini-series is? Is it any good? How faithful to the novel is it? We may never know!
Jurassic Park is one thing. The Narnia stories demand far more complicated effects, and more of them.
I think there are effects designers that would disagree, at least as far as the technical achievements of Jurassic Park. Sure, Jurassic Park was only Dinosaurs, but it was many types of Dinosaurs created on much slower computers. However, I do agree that there are far more complicated effects in Narnia. It’s amazing how far we’ve come since Jurassic Park, and yet Jurassic Park still stands up against the test of time.
For a taste of the very best in 80’s technology watch the original Neverending Story film from 1984. The luck Dragon – Falcor – is the highlight of the piece but there are several others too. Very enjoyable in a retro sort of way.
Close up shots of single stationary creatures work well with animatronics, but a large high speed battle scene does not. The producers were right to wait for the technology to catch up – trying to make the films in the mid 90’s would not have worked.
Excellent movie, Dan. I just watched that again last weekend, for what was probably the 1000th time I’d seen it since I was very young. It’s one of my most favorite movies of all time. The music in it and everything is really great. I think that movie spoiled me, and that’s why the Narnia BBC editions were lacking. They didn’t have Wolfgang Peterson and the creative team behind The Neverending Story to make them, and since I knew it was possible, even as a child, I knew that there was something missing.