“Narnia the flamethrower — the kids love this one!”

Just a few quick thoughts about the marketing of the new Narnia movie.

1. I saw an ad in the newspaper yesterday, letting people know that they can buy advance tickets to The Chronicles of Narnia and King Kong, both of which open in the next ten days. The ad had a picture of Aslan, the lion, next to a picture of Kong, the gorilla. And I suddenly realized that, just as The Lord of the Rings invited comedians and TV shows like Saturday Night Live to make all sorts of jokes and pop-culture references about Gollum and Frodo and Gandalf and so on, so too we might end up seeing, e.g., skits and editorial cartoons in which Aslan and Kong duke it out for box-office supremacy. And I wondered if Christians were ready to see Aslan become just another pop-culture figure. And, assuming some of them aren’t, I wondered if there might be something almost idolatrous — Aslanolatrous? — about this. Just a thought.

2. Last night, I went to the local Chapters and discovered that a whole slew of movie tie-in books have already been released — including a children’s novelization of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe which includes descriptions of scenes from the film that are not in C.S. Lewis’s original book. As my friend and colleague Steven D. Greydanus has pointed out, it kind of makes you wonder why there has been so much talk about the movie being so “faithful” to Lewis’s book; and it also makes you wonder why Walden Media, a firm that specializes in films based on books with “educational” value, is authorizing dumbed-down versions of Lewis’s original story that will essentially be competing with it for the book-buyer’s dollars. I mean, really, did anyone publish novelizations of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings movies?

3. I’m still getting used to the fact that the first song that plays over the closing credits is sung by Alanis Morissette.

DEC 5 UPDATE: Re: my second point, Jeffrey Overstreet sums it up well: “It’s faithful to the book. But we’ve published our own alternative version of the novel, to reflect all of our changes.”