Thoughts on This Production of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe

First of all, this seems to have been the first ever filmed and televised production of this program, and it's a real shame it was not preserved for posterity. It was made for the ITV network by ABC Weekend TV, a British company which has nothing to do with ABC, the American Broadcasting Company network. The animals were all portrayed by actors in costume, not unlike the 1988-1990 BBC adaptations except those had a more realistic lion. Only two episodes, the first and eighth, are known to still survive today. An audio recording of episode 7 also survives.

So, having watched all the other filmed adaptations (videotapes of stage plays and radio broadcasts excepted), I bit the bullet and watched this, what there was of it. YouTube has only the beginning of Episode 1, less than a minute and a half, which establishes that the story is narrated by the Professor, who has a very small role in the book, that all reference to World War II has been scrapped, and the Professor says the children's parents went on an archaeological expedition. YouTube also has all of Episode 8 and that's it. This is a very poor quality video of what is essentially a filmed stage production. The 1988-1990 versions knock it out of the park and this makes them look like Hollywood extravaganzas in comparison.

My impressions of this version are, it's not too bad to have the Professor narrating the opening and perhaps the lead-in to each episode, although probably unnecessary, but they seem to have kept this up during the action of probably the entire series. The Professor narrates things which could have been shown in the same amount of time and even repeats things which were shown! It is annoying in the extreme to keep having the action interrupted by narration and would have been very hard to sit through ten episodes of this. Peter, as in the 1979 and 2005 versions, is too old. Any boy whose voice has changed is too old for Peter. Only the 1988 production got this right. The other three kids were all right as far as I could tell but between the video being such poor quality and it being only one of ten parts it is hard to say very much so I won't compare them to actors in other versions (except to say the 1988 version still has the worst Lucy, that is including the cartoon version). The costumes were, I guess, all right for what they had to work with. The costuming forced some changes. For instance, Aslan has the girls hold his paws rather than his mane as they walk to the stone table. If there were more of this I'd watch it though it doesn't compare well to other versions.