Netflix Has the Rights to Narnia - God Help Us!

 

Some "somewhat darker" developmental artwork for a Narnia series.

Netflix, it seems, has secured the rights to the "Chronicles of Narnia" several years ago. The notoriously "woke" streaming service has evidently been developing the beloved Christian allegorical children's' book series by Christian apologist C.S. Lewis into a TV series.

They say it's going to be "a little darker" like "Anne With an E". I tried to watch "Anne with an E", but gave up after the second or third character turned out to be gender fluid. It's faithlessness to the book made it an almost unwatchable series that turns a children's book by pastor's wife Lucy Maud Montgomery into a tiresome wokeness lecture and turns Anne and her circle of friends into 19th century progressive reformers. To make it authentic, they should have thrown in something about sterilizing and/or euthanizing the "mentally deficient". That would have fit with the progressive thinking and practice of the day. 

Lucy Maud Montgomery, if she weren't dead and incapable of turning over in her grave, would, alongside CS Lewis, be spinning in her coffin in frustration and fury. I mean for crying out loud. How about simply telling the story the author wrote instead of turning it into a Puritanical Progressive lecture series?

I read updates on Netflix's progress with the development of a Narnia series and as far as I can tell from the article on "What's on Netflix?", there is a distinct chance Netflix Narnia may stray pretty significantly from the Narnia Canon. I mean the original pitch to Netflix talked about how "Netflix would be adapting Narnia into a Universe, positioning the series to go up against the likes of Game of Thrones and the Marvel Cinematic Universe albeit for a more family-orientated audience."

Mark Gordon, who signed on to do "The Silver Chair" dropped the ball and the movie never got made. Douglas Gresham, Lewis' stepson, says he trusts him but so far nothing has been completed. Now Mark Gordon has joined up with Netflix to either do the series as the books are ordered or to do a series of spinoffs based on characters in the envisioned "Narnia Universe" (like the Game of Thrones, Marvel, DC, Lord of the Rings or other "universes").  Either way, nobody is saying for certain.

Narnia fans are rightfully suspicious. Comments about all the character development that could be done with ancillary characters in the Chronicles makes us skeptical that this is a good faith attempt to bring us the stories we love and were denied because Disney and Fox were "uncomfortable with the Christian flavor of the stories. Telling us it would be a "little darker" and include deeper character development makes us nervous. Having got a look at the trailers for Amazon's "Lord of the Rings" universe offerings. the more we see, the more it looks like they didn't really look at the vast mass of Tolkien's stories in "The Simarillion" and all those minutely detailed books and notes he made in preparation to write the "Lord of the Rings".

My complaint in all of this is twofold. First, I like stories to be faithful to the originals. I can't think of a classic novel or story that has been improved by diddling with the story, save the cleaning up of the Grimm's Fairy Tales by Walt Disney. Some of those old fairy tales were kind of grisly. Disney did us a favor there. Unfortunately, after we lost Walt, Disney veered left and gradually began turning movies into lectures on wokeness. Admittedly they did some nice work with such films as Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and Tangled. Frozen was a bit feminist in the way it marginalized male characters, but wasn't terribly in-your-face. Having got away with some mild lectures on progressivism in their films, however, Disney went "woke" and lost $63 billion since the first of the year from people canceling their subscriptions and not watching movies or buying their stuff.

Disney already tried to tone down the Christianity in the Chronicles of Narnia. Liam Neeson, the voice of Aslan even came out in public stating that Aslan "...could be Mohammed or the Buddha." Mark Gordon needs to toss Neeson if he's going to undermine C.S. Lewis' work like that. How he's going to keep faithful to the source material working for WokeFlix I do not know.  If he doesn't and succumbs to pressure to throw in a few gay or trans characters in order to "woke" up the material, he's going to lose more than half his audience. As it was the last couple of Narnia films did their best to disguise the fact that the whole series was about Jesus. Give me a break people. If they don't stop, someone's going to have to do something as good and then keep the progressive left from screwing it up.

Tolkien took a few hits with Lord of the Rings, although he originally did such a good job of disguising his Christianity that folks in this era seem to have missed the message buried in the stories. The Christian themes and the messiah story is just too good to not use it. Even openly progressive J.K. Rowling couldn't resist inserting a messiah story into her Harry Potter series. Just look and you'll find major characters sacrificing themselves to save others. The Jesus story is such an overpowering part of the human meta-narrative, that writers just can't leave it alone. In recent fiction such novels and films such as Dune, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Stranger in a Strange Land, the Matrix, Orson Scott Card's Ender series and, of course, Lord of the Rings. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of stories and novels and films that incorporate messianic themes.

The idea of the epic hero who lays down his life to save the world is like catnip to writers. I think we like to imagine ourselves as the ultimate good guy saving the world with our words, but without the whole messy crucifixion business. Just pray that Netflix doesn't assign Barak and Michelle to produce the Chronicles of Narnia but with ancillary "woke" characters CS Lewis would NOT recognize. Half of them would be sure to be LGBTQROFLMAO and one of the dwarfs would wind up in a romantic relationship with a centaur.

© 2022 by Tom King