@lentenlands 

I don’t know what C. S. Lewis would have thought of changing the reasons for the Pevensies staying at the Professor’s house from the air raids to the archaeological expedition of their parents. The 1967 production was a loose adaptation that was more like a play than a strict version of the book. Still it is not all bad, and I wish all of the episodes had survived.  If they had more money they probably could have had better costumes and sets, but I think what they had was still serviceable. They probably should have kept the World War II time period at the beginning. I don’t remember that references to any time period were mentioned, but the series looked very old fashioned.  At least the setting didn’t look too modern in appearance. 🙂

@narnian78 that was the production that was originally going to be a sort of narrator + some actors (known as 'Jackanory') style, but it grew bigger. However it wasn't budgetted for lots of fancy costumes or effects.

It does seem kind of unrealistic when the clothing is updated and the characters use old fashioned English. This has been done in live Shakespeare plays, and I think it would be out of place in Narnia whether it was in a play or movie. If the characters are speaking like people would in the 1940’s they should appear like they came from that time period. That is the best way to preserve the dialogue from the books.  Of course the Pevensies did act more like medieval royalty later in the story, but that was long after they reached Narnia.  The Narnian world actually changed their character and made them more like they were living in a medieval time. It was the advantage of being once a king or queen in Narnia and always remaining that way.

Interesting discussion and thoughtful points made. 

I pretty much said my thoughts in, I believe, another thread (or was it this one - hmm) that I'm very keen for the 1940s setting to be kept.

((Warning: the following text may be hard to follow as I'm not great at voicing my thoughts articulately and it may seem a tad ramble-y... There are also probably a few points I have forgotten to make, as well, but I shall have to make another post to add to this if necessary.))

I must admit that the podcast on the matter did get me questioning just why it was so necessary for me that it stick to the original timeline. I suppose a lot of it is my fascination with the past, and sometimes/most times I find modern life hard and value the escapism that a slice of history can bring (obviously I don't mean escapism in a way of saying that everything was much better then!). Though saying that, the War years and earlier 20th Century England overall, particularly in its depiction of rural life, has been painted as simpler, more idyllic times, where people would help each other out (pulling together particularly during the War) and just push through the difficulties of life. How much this ideal has been fabricated or not - times were certainly tough in many ways, but there is something to be said about this idea - the wistful feeling towards such times is strong. I'd bring the word 'traditionalism' here, too. There is also through this a sense of innocence that fits the 'fairytale' aspect of the Narnia stories.

As others have covered, the character of the children of these times fits the greater Narnia narrative with a particular sense of wonder and reaction to the land which would not be the same reaction that modern children would have. To be modern about it would have the children questioning their situations more with contemporary ideas that could make other scenes more awkward, or very much changed. Why can't people accept stories set in the not-so-distant past, anyway? The 1940s were already some time back by the time I was getting into Narnia and it didn't bother me as a child. I didn't need it to be contemporary to get things from it. I think I feel it just might be a bit too jarring to change the setting. However, I wouldn't completely write it off if they planned to do it in very considered way.

(I hope I made some sense! 🙂 )

Watching the new Wallace & Grommit movie the other day, I think it also provides another good example of a movie which is perfectly able to capture a truly timeless quality in it's temporal setting.

As with all the Wallace & Grommit stories, it is clearly set in the modern day, and yet everyone still uses rotary dial phones, watches TV on old-fashioned CRT televisions, drives cars from the 1960s and live in houses from the 1950s, for no other reason than that's the vibe they wanted to evoke and so that's the world as presented.

Yes, it's an animation and my suspension of disbelief is going to be a little bit higher than for other films, but I still think it proves the point that "modern day setting" doesn't have to be all cell phones and memes and Gen Z slang.

Looking back, I seem to be misremembering how much the time period affected the story in the books.  Other than a throwaway line to the 'air raids' in LWW, it seems to have never been mentioned again.  That being said, I'd be much more open to an ambiguous timeline setting such as the Wallace & Grommit film, rather than an intentional 21st-century overhaul.  We don't want "skibidi toilet rizz" being the new "by Jove".

Posted by: @icarus

As with all the Wallace & Grommit stories, it is clearly set in the modern day, and yet everyone still uses rotary dial phones, watches TV on old-fashioned CRT televisions, drives cars from the 1960s and live in houses from the 1950s, for no other reason than that's the vibe they wanted to evoke and so that's the world as presented.

Yes, it's an animation and my suspension of disbelief is going to be a little bit higher than for other films, but I still think it proves the point that "modern day setting" doesn't have to be all cell phones and memes and Gen Z slang.

I've just watched it myself (cracking film, eh lad? ) and enjoyed the "timeless" feel of it too, although I wouldn't quite say it's "clearly set in the modern day"... more like in a sort of quintessentially Northern English never-never land where certain forms of 21st-century technology — like rechargeable electronic devices and hackable computer networks — exist where they need to for the purpose of the plot, right alongside the retro 1950s / '60s vibe and delightfully over-the-top steampunk gadgetry that's indispensable to the Wallace & Gromit atmosphere (it's Gromit with one 'm', by the way).

That's just fine (or in Northerner terms, just fab?) for W&G, as their world is obviously meant to be this blend of cosy and downright wacky, and the key thing is, we're not supposed to take it seriously. It's not really meant to be any period of history in the real world; it's all played for laughs, and the anachronisms are part of the fun. Whereas in the Narnia books, we are meant to believe that the main characters (most of them, anyway) are ordinary children from a real time period in the same world we're living in now. What that time period should be is possibly questionable, but the relatively few this-world scenes still have to be credible in themselves.

I say "possibly questionable" because we've now been reminded, just earlier in this discussion, that the lost 1960s adaptation of LWW was, like the 1979 animation, also set in what was then the present day, with the children sent to stay with the Professor because their parents were away on an archaelogical expedition, not because of the war. (I had watched that excerpt before, but had forgotten that key detail!) And the thing is, putting it in those time settings doesn't have any impact on the overall plot, which is mainly set in a fantasy world apart from ours anyway. Of course there were major changes in society between the 1940s and the 1960s and '70s, but none that had such a huge impact on what we might call "typical middle class British childhood experiences" that the story of LWW couldn't be set credibly in those later eras.

(Obviously children growing up in 1960s or '70s Britain had not experienced living through a world war as children growing up in the 1940s did, but for the umpteen-zillionth time, WW2 has no bearing on the actual plot of the story that Lewis wrote, apart from that one reference in the second sentence of the first chapter.)

My point is... well, for a comparison — and I don't think I've brought this up before — in 1978-79, there was a TV version made of another popular classic British children's series, Enid Blyton's Famous Five. The original books were written in the 1940s and '50s and ostensibly set in that era, although they never feature the war, or food rationing, or any such things, even though the first of them was published in 1942 — that was a deliberate decision on Blyton's part, as she figured the children she was writing for were living through the war and its aftermath and she wanted to give them happy escapism, not dreary realism. But the late 1970s TV series, though it was based pretty closely on the original books and their plots, was unabashedly set in the then present day, with '70s fashions and haircuts and bikes and cars and the whole lot.

Then in the mid-1990s, there was another TV series made of the Famous Five, again following the original books quite closely, but this time the setting was definitely the 1950s. I've always suspected that the reason for that, apart from the fact that a "modern" setting of it had been done before, was that by the 1990s, we had computers and mobile phones and the internet already, and it was obvious by then (and I speak as a 1990s teenager!!) that the capabilities of these technologies would just keep on growing and growing and would have a huge impact on the lives of children as well as adults, as indeed they have done.

So — and I'm drawing here on discussions we've had many times on the Enid Blyton Society forums, of which I'm also a member — the deeper issue here is that, to quite some extent, you can take certain classic children's stories out of the 1940s (or '50s) setting and update them to the '60s or '70s, and probably even the '80s, without a huge impact on the plot, as long as there isn't anything essential in those stories that really fixes them in a very specific era. As there isn't with Enid Blyton, and there isn't with most of the this-world scenes in the Chronicles of Narnia. But as soon as you hit the mid-1990s and beyond — and I know we HAVE said this here before — modern technology just becomes too inescapable.

I'm not saying "Gen Z" kids who've had internet access and smartphones and social media (and so on) all their lives couldn't possibly have a fantasy adventure in another world. There are probably already modern kids' / YA fantasy books that do that (as I know I've also said before). But it's such a totally different atmosphere from what we see in the this-world sections of the Narnia books — and the impact of modern technology on the way people think and act and interact is a huge factor as well — that I really can't see how a remake of Narnia with child characters from the 2020s (or even the 2010s) could work well and still feel like Narnia.

And (also for the umpteen-zillionth time) I still can't see how doing that — setting the new adaptations in the present day — would really add anything worthwhile to the series.  

When The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was written the Second World War was still fresh in people’s minds. That may have been the reason why Lewis chose the time setting instead of going back in time more than a few years or ahead in the future. Lewis wanted something for the children to escape from, and the air raids worked for the beginning of the story.  Updating the time would not work so well for a story or a film.  It would be far better to preserve what is in the book since what happens at the beginning is usually the best way to capture people’s interest.

Courtenay makes a very good point. The point in time where humans have access to technology that gives them powers inherent to legendary beings -- instant communication! -- instant information! -- the whole setup becomes less compelling.

Bit.... As a writer myself I've been playing around with the idea of how this could work in the modern day of 2024 soon to be 2025. The parents are, again, away on a scientific expedition. The professor, being suspicious of technology's adverse effects on young minds, makes the children check their cell phones in at the front door, usable only for emergencies and to talk with their parents. Or, maybe the house is in a valley, and cell phone reception is spotty at best. There's a computer, but the professor keeps it in his study and that is locked. One of the kids, maybe, seeks in a gameboy or some other device. Kids being kids. But the kids fight over it and its broken. So they decide to go explore the house.

When Lucy finds the wardrobe, she accepts it immediately as being a "parallel universe" like she's read so often about. The other kids accept it too, citing black holes, portals, alternate realities, and other scientificobabble. So in this aspect, they'd likely be more credible about Narnia than you'd think!

When they trek inside, they wear down jackets and parkas, not furs, from the closet. I think the rest of the story would procede from there, as normal,and they don't think about returning through the wardrobe because they are just so caught up in the adventure.

You'd need a very good writer to make this work, though. And it should steer clear of modern slang.

All this is to say this is one way it could work, not that I truly think there should be such an adaptation.

@cobalt-jade Very interesting ideas there, and I agree, that set-up could work in the hands of a really good writer / director. For me, though, the main problem — with this or with any other suggestions of "how a modern-day setting for LWW could work" — is that, as this scenario shows, there would need to be so much effort with making the modern-day setting work (mainly in doing something about the kids' smartphones and other 21st-century technology) that it would just be a distraction from the actual story and what it's about. Especially since LWW is already familiar to just about everyone as a story from the 1940s, or at least the mid-20th century, a present-day version really couldn't be done without standing out blatantly as Look What We Can Do to Set This Classic Story in the Modern Era!!! — which, in the end, is really not the impression most of us want viewers to get from a Narnia adaptation. (And, once again, for what gain??)

So, like you, I also don't think there should be such an adaptation.

I don’t think that it could be set in modern day at all. As Cool Klink said MN spends a decent amount of time in our world and it is fairly evident of the time period. Along with there not being a modern event to separate the children, the only one I could think of would be foster care and that seems too dark and not true to C.S Lewis.

@brinmarie it would certainly be a huge change to Narnia as we know it, if the first thing Lucy sees there is a modern street light, (with Tumnus carrying Amazon boxes) as the old fashioned lamppost is so iconic. 

I just thought of a recent film adaptation of a classic story that updated its time period, not to the present day but to an era within living memory — the 2020 film of The Secret Garden. The original story and most adaptations are set in the Edwardian era, but this version moved the setting to 1947. I haven't seen it, though I'd like to.

The story opens with young Mary Lennox being orphaned and abandoned in British India and brought back to England to live in her uncle's manor house in Yorkshire — so in this case, changing the time period to 1947 means it's taking place during the end of the British Raj and the conflict-ridden partition of independent India and Pakistan. Of course, most of the action isn't set in India, but I can see that moving it to that period would give some extra "edge" to the story.

Even in the original book, Mary starts out as a very selfish young white girl who has always had native servants do everything for her, and when she makes some strident racist comments about "blacks" in front of Martha the young housemaid, Martha rebukes her strongly. (It's a scene in the book that I'm sure some modern critics would pick at for the choice of language and so on, but for 1911, I'd say it's way ahead of its time.) Whereas in this most recent screen adaptation, Martha and her brother Dickon are dark-skinned — having not seen the film, I don't know what their ethnic background is, but it would make sense if they and/or their parents were Indian. (Perhaps someone who has seen it can help me out here! ) Obviously, this would mean Mary needs to confront her colonialist attitudes much more directly and unlearn her prejudices, especially as she and Dickon need to become friends for the purposes of the plot.

Going by the summaries I've read online, those aren't the only changes that were made to the story for this version. But regardless of any other good or bad points of it, that's a film adaptation where one can see some point in them setting it in a different era — because there's a theme (racism / imperialism) that is in the background of the original story but only briefly hinted at, and changing it to a more recent period with relevant historical significance means that theme can be brought out a lot more sharply. It probably also helps that The Secret Garden has been adapted several times previously for film and TV and stage, so it's natural that the makers of a new version would want to do some "different" things with the story.

But — back to our own topic here — I can't think of any themes in either LWW or the other Narnia books that could likewise be brought out in a new way by updating the setting, so I still can't find any valid reason for supporting the idea!!

My feeling is that part of the attraction to the original story of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is its nostalgia. There is the more serious theme of redemption from evil, but the old fashioned quality of the would be enough to attract people’s interest at the beginning once they are drawn into the adventure the deeper parts such as Edmund’s betrayal and redemption will engage the reader and the viewer of the movies.  That is why the preservation of the story’s time periods will help to lure interest in both the book and movie. 

Posted by: @narnian78

My feeling is that part of the attraction to the original story of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is its nostalgia.

Does that mean people didn't enjoy the book when it was first published?