For this week’s Mailbag, I looked in my inbox and realized a couple of things: first, there was only one e-mail for this week’s mailbag.  I could take this to mean that it’s not a good feature to bring back, but that would be ridiculous.  I enjoy the chance to answer e-mails and also to put my own voice into the site just a little bit.

On a related note, I share Andrew Adamson’s birthday.  Who knew?  Andrew, if you’re reading this, that must be the reason we have similar creative minds.

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The Lions Narnia Braille Trail opened on April 15th in Kingsport at Darrell’s Dream Boundless Playground. We asked for any readers to respond to the story, and someone has taken us up on that.  John Choate took a few pictures and wanted us to share them with you all.  If you live near by and weren’t convinced before, you should definitely consider it!  Take a look at this gallery of photos if you need further convincing.  Especially if you have someone special in your life who hasn’t the capacity to see.  The trail features  set pieces from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

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Variety.com asked Harry Gregson-Williams, who served as composer for both The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian.  What he said about Narnia really shows the humility of the man.  I hope to one day get a proper interview with him.

Here, he recounts a memorable moment in his life as a composer:

“The hush as I picked up my baton before the first note of the concert I did with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra (a suite from ‘The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’). That was totally thrilling and also incredibly alarming. What in heaven’s name am I doing here? I’m a film composer, not a concert composer. It was fantastic.”

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Today was the grand opening of a new part of a playground meant for children with and without disabilities.  It’s called The Lions Narnia Braille Trail.  It is a new addition which surrounds the existing playground in Kingsport, located at Warriors’ Path State Park.  The park is called Darrell’s Dream Boundless Playground, which is described as a place where children of all abilities can enjoy nature.

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Here is the official news release about the Exhibition, in full for those who wanted more information.  Thank you to Mark Sommer for reminding me that this was available!

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Exhibition will open Memorial Day weekend at Union Station Kansas City. The Station becomes the third museum and first in the Midwest to host this exhibition. The Becker Group, Ltd., which recently combined operations with Exhibitgroup/Giltspur, produced the exhibition in partnership with Walt Disney Pictures and Walden Media. Based on the blockbuster film series and C.S. Lewis’ beloved fictional books, the 10,000-square-foot, state-of-the-art entertainment and educational experience offers visitors the opportunity to tour scenes from the famed literary world of Narnia. Through authentic costumes, props and set dressings from the magical Narnia films, visitors will enter a three dimensional world that combines the wonders of science with aspects of fantasy. Tickets are on sale now at unionstation.org.

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Part C. S. Lewis-biography, part literary analysis, The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia is, at its heart, the story of a journey. The first step came when its author, Laura Miller, was given a copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by her second grade teacher. Today a well-respected writer and literary critic, Miller looks back at the spell this book cast on her and at how it shaped the reader and the person she has become.

Like all journey stories, some parts will be familiar and some will not. Most Narnia fans will be able to relate to Miller’s account of how the Chronicles of Narnia changed the way she looked at the world. They will identify with Miller’s deep desire to be Lucy, “that rare creation, a character who is good without being a prig or a bore.”

But these are side trips, not the main path in a book which promises to reclaim Narnia “for the rest of us,” this meaning readers who, like Miller, loved Narnia as young people but then felt “tricked, cheated, and betrayed” after they discovered that many Narnian themes mirrored themes found in Christianity.

Anyone not belonging to this “rest of us” group may find it hard to understand why this discovery produced so much anger and bitterness in Miller. Although she devotes most of her book to describing her rocky relationship with the Narnia books, she is never able to articulate exactly why learning that they represent C. S. Lewis’s attempt to put his most foundational beliefs into story form “horrified” her.

Would she have felt so horrified had she discovered Lewis was a Buddhist?

Read the rest at the C.S. Lewis Blog

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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.

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In a Penguin Books survey, the White Witch tops the list of scariest characters of all time in children’s books.

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I have been meaning to write about these DVDs from Disney Educational Products, but I couldn’t remember what they were called.  I kept searching for ‘Teacher Edition’ or ‘Educator Edition’ or ‘Education Edition.’   I finally decided to try the term ‘Classroom’ to describe it, and there it was.

On December 2 of this month, Disney Educational Products released both of Disney and Walden Media’s Chronicles of Narnia films in special Classroom Editions.

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This post is partially about satiating a geeky desire and partially about looking at what went right and wrong in the two Narnia movies (specifically the marketing aspect). This will not be in-depth, just to warn you.

First, let’s take a look at the “teaser” trailer (it’s a long teaser at around two and a half minutes) for The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and see what stands out.

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