@davidd I assume that as well, which was why I listed the dwarf as the first possibility, but I just thought that first choice of outfit for him (on the left of the second pair of sketches) was somewhat amusing.   (And then on the right, he — assuming it's the same character — appears to be wearing a giant ice cube, with either a tasselled lightning bolt or a snow-covered Christmas tree on his head, which is arguably even more bizarre and intriguing.) 

@courtenay Indeed! Your comment made me laugh a lot. Thanks.

Makes you wonder how many other secret Narnia adaptations are waiting to be discovered... 🤭 

I have a theory that in the hypothetical Chuck Jones cartoon, the White Witch was going to zap minions who annoyed her with ice and that's what happened to the dwarf in that picture who looks like he's stuck in an ice block.  

@col-klink Could be! Maybe he thought freezing her opponents in blocks of ice would be a more logical thing for an eternal-winter-ice-queen villainess to do than turn them into stone, which, in a way, it is. (But then there's the problem of having her victims stay frozen even after the eternal winter is broken, as they need to for the plot to work with Aslan freeing the statues, and with her using her wand in the final battle until Edmund breaks it. Maybe she could do both ice and stone... ) 

What a lovely find! I'm a fan of traditional animation and so finds like this are very intriguing. The concepts in themselves are lovely little pieces of art. (Lucy perhaps looks too modern.) Chuck Jones was of course known especially for his comical Looney Tunes cartoons, but I'm sure quite capable of adapting to a more serious animation, as well. Whether his animation style of very exaggerated movements would ultimately have worked for a Narnia story, I'm sure there would still have been things to admire! 🙂 

I like the Chuck Jones character designs for the Pevensies a lot better than the ones in the 1979 animated LWW but I think I like the 1979 design for Aslan better (relatively speaking anyway.) 

Chuck Jones also did the animated The Grinch Who Stole Christmas TV special, so he was capable of more weighty material. 

As per today's news story, we now have confirmation that BBC did think about doing The Last Battle, and seemingly went so far as to notify or talk to the cast about it (even people like Sophie Cook and Richard Dempsey who would have already departed the overall production by this point).

It's perhaps no surprise that they turned down the option on a book as epicly scaled as The Last Battle, but as @col-klink noted in the comments page though, it's perhaps odd that they didn't pivot to something smaller and more intimate like MN. They seemingly had the rights to all seven if they had wanted to.

Well, I’ll go ahead and give my thoughts on each of the options.

The three remaining BBC adaptations. It would have been interesting to see the BBC continue on after The Silver Chair. Though I suppose doing a side story with The Horse And His Boy would have been tricky with the budget they were working with. Then the prequel The Magician's Nephew, which I reckoned that Barbara Kellerman would have reprised her role as Jadis, as it explains how she originally came to be in Narnia, would have been fun. Finally, The Last Battle would have been the darkest and most sombre of the bunch, capped off with a melancholic yet hopeful finale. Now, I guess now from what I understand, the BBC planned to do The Last Battle, but I guess they’ve thought it was too complex to adapt or something. Oh, I actually get that, because I’d argue it’s perhaps the most complex book in the series. Maybe the BBC didn’t want to go through with it and that’s understandable.

The mid-1990's "Modern Day" version of LWW. I’m not so sure about this one. The idea of the Pevensie children are exiled to England due to Edmund’s habit of stealing CD’s from a store, and the White Witch tempts Edmund with cheeseburgers instead of Turkish Delight sounds ridiculous, but apparently it was considered. There were other ideas like a giant water spirit, flocks of evil ravens flying out of Jadis’ mouth, aerobatics by the Witch’s sleigh, and A “cynical humanistic philosophy”. Well, how exactly would that work? Lewis’ entire point was the opposite of cynicism, so this just sounds like an unworkable mess. Although I wouldn’t have a problem with our world being set in the 90’s, but the rest of it just sounds like a bad idea.

The "Leaked Script" version of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Probably not. Supposedly, this one featured the Lady of the Green Kirtle, a soul eating cave, and Caspian-Lucy romance. Though I enjoyed the Walden trilogy (though I kind of preferred the first two to the third), this would have been too much. The Walden film of Prince Caspian already messed with the Caspian-Susan romance (and we know as Narnia fans, all felt about that), but Caspian-Lucy? Absolutely not. Then the Lady of the Green Kirtle is from The Silver Chair. The final product had the Green Mist that was set up for the Lady of the Green Kirtle (and we know what a mess that turned out to be). The soul eating cave sounds like something from a generic fantasy film, and it feels way off tone for the original novel. So I don’t think this would have been any better than what we got in 2010.

The Joe Johnston / David Magee version of The Silver Chair. Well, I think it would have been nice to a continuation of the Walden trilogy being taken over by a different company, the Mark Gordon Company, but apparently it was cancelled in 2019. In the script, it featured Jill as an action girl, which was not approved by Lewis' estate (apparently), and then they cancelled it. Is Jill even an action girl in the book? Not really, she's mostly just terrified and confused, but she does get braver over time. So I think if they had stuck to the book's characterization, it could have worked.

The Matthew Aldrich Netflix adaptations. Now, this one’s a wild card—Netflix announcing a full Narnia reboot in 2018 felt like stumbling into a wardrobe and finding an entire new world. The initial buzz suggested they’d tackle "The Magician’s Nephew" first, flipping the chronological order, which could’ve been brilliant or disastrous. Imagine starting with the birth of Narnia itself, the Deplorable Word echoing through the void, Jadis’s chilling origin laid bare before we ever met the Pevensies. But then, silence. Years of it. Rumors swirl about creative differences, budget blowouts, or maybe just Netflix’s infamous indecision. The question isn’t just *what* they’ll adapt, but *how*—will it be a gritty, "Game of Thrones" take, or stick to Lewis’s quieter, theological roots? It’s hard to say which would be worse or better.

Posted by: @icarus

As per today's news story, we now have confirmation that BBC did think about doing The Last Battle, and seemingly went so far as to notify or talk to the cast about it (even people like Sophie Cook and Richard Dempsey who would have already departed the overall production by this point).

It's perhaps no surprise that they turned down the option on a book as epicly scaled as The Last Battle, but as @col-klink noted in the comments page though, it's perhaps odd that they didn't pivot to something smaller and more intimate like MN. They seemingly had the rights to all seven if they had wanted to.

Ah, now that's interesting — here's the link to the news item for those who haven't seen it. (By the way, I miss the way NarniaWeb used to display recent news articles down the side of the forum webpages, at least on a full-sized screen (not on mobile devices)... can that possibly be brought back, if any of the website gurus can be asked about it? I often miss NarniaWeb news items now, because I don't know they're there and I don't always think to check the news pages.)

I don't think it's a surprise at all that they turned down The Last Battle, but it's intriguing that it did come up in conversations between the producer and director. "Just a step too far" and "extreme fantasy" are pretty good descriptions from Alex Kirby. Even just off the top of my head, I can think of several reasons why it wouldn't have worked:

• The scale of special effects needed, especially given that the BBC had such a low budget for children's programming. A realistic talking unicorn, a battle on a massive scale, not to mention the wonders of Aslan's country... I can't see how they could have pulled those off.
• Villains who, in the book, are colour coded and can easily come across as a racist stereotype. (I can assure you, even back in the 1990s, the blackface scene would have been totally unacceptable and the Beeb would have been in HUGE trouble if they'd done that — I could cite an instance from Australian TV at about the same time that I remember well, but it would be way off topic.) Plus the fact that the Calormenes can also be taken as a stereotype of Muslims — there's good evidence that they are not intended to be that, or not entirely, but plenty of critics have read them that way, and it really would have been very volatile territory for the BBC to get into, especially in a children's programme. (And again, yes, we really were having many of the same debates about racism and representation and so on back in the '90s as we are now. It's honestly nothing very new.)
• A plot that is extremely dark, almost relentlessly so, until the very last part of the story. There could have been all sorts of complaints about this being far too upsetting for young viewers.
• The ending that is, essentially, "Everyone dies and all our heroes go to heaven." It's beautifully done in the book, but again, this is really sensitive material for the nation's public broadcaster to be dealing with in a children's show.
• Oh yes, and lest we forget... the legendary Problem of Susan. Need I say more??

So, yes, I find it easy to understand why the thought of doing The Last Battle never got further than a few preliminary conversations. But it's also very interesting that they had those conversations at all, and it shows how committed to the project those in charge of it were (and that they apparently did have the rights to do all seven of the books if they wanted to).

I don't really think that The Magician's Nephew would have been a good alternative, though, for reasons I know I recently mentioned elsewhere — mainly, again, to do with the scale of the special effects, including the need to have a convincing flying horse, and to do any sort of justice to the magnificent creation sequence. They simply did not have either the money or the technology available at the time, and I think it's safe to assume they were aware of that and so they didn't try.

Of course, the proposed animated version of The Magician's Nephew wouldn't have had so many restrictions — even if, given the quality of the animation in its predecessor (1979 animated LWW), it might also have struggled to make the story, and especially the creation of Narnia, feel really awe-inspiring. But I think, overall, that's the "lost" Narnia adaptation I most wish we could have had.