A montage of scenes from the special.
This press release, included with all the others, is a short biography of C. S. Lewis and how he came to write The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. While the life of Lewis’s colleague J. R. R. Tolkien was widely known by then because of the The Lord of the Rings, Lewis’s was not. Despite the popularity of the Narnia books, which were library staples by the 1970s, knowledge of his life and career was limited to theocratic, SFF, and Medieval studies circles. Which made for some odd juxtapositions. The Screwtape Letters and Perelandra were featured in the library of my late uncle, who was a member of First Fandom and collected Arkham House first editions — Cthulhu and such. So this press release served as an introduction for many adults as, no doubt, the animated series did for children.
It gives the basics and is not at all bad.
The early “dressed animal” stories were collected in the anthology Boxen which I’m currently reading. The Boxen stories displayed a fascination with India, which later made its way into Narnia as inspiration for the nation of Calormen.
