Narnia as Cash Cow

From the Guardian comes this article about Disney's production of C. S. Lewis' Narnia series. Apparently, the success of the secular Lord of the Rings series has made such the potential profit of such a venture extremely high.

Now do not get me wrong; I loved the Narnia series when I was a child. Except for a number of scenes in the first book (whence Aslan, the Jesus figure, is resurrected), I never really noticed the Christian allegoric element of the books. The important thing was the plot - which was amazing throughout the series, except at the end of the seventh book, where:

all of the major characters from Earth die when the two trains they are riding on crash into each other,

the reader is shown several snippets of Narnian history, all of which sound interesting, but are never elaborated upon, and

there is a very idiotic scene involving leaving Narnia by traveling to the west and getting to the "True Narnia" which really annoyed me when I was young.

The live adaptation of the first four books made by the BBC in the late 1980s and early 1990s is pretty good, despite the fact Aslan looks stuffed, and they stray from the plot a bit (tough cramming an entire children's book into two hours). It was upon watching this that I realize that I was pronouncing "Aslan" wrong (do not ask me how I was pronouncing it; I no longer remember).

One thing I began to bother me in high school was the name "Aslan" itself. A simple search on Google for "Aslan" brings up a the obnoxious Flash-based site for a prentitious Irish band (Actual Quote: Tony McGuinnes as if you didn't know is the bass player with Aslan. Born on the 7th Dec. his star sign is Sagittarius. Growing up in Ballymum, Tony decided that music was going to be his first love.). However, it did have the useful snippet of information that the word "Aslan" is Turkish for "lion," which explains why some people who are most definitely not Christian have it as their name. This news is slightly disturbing, though.

International Philosophy