No Imagination Part II

I lamented the loss of imagination in today's playthings in a previous post, and I feel compelled to voice my malcontent about the other area of imagination under seige.

By now, some of you will have seen movie trailers for an adaptation of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe. You may remember the magic that was this series by C.S. Lewis when you first read it, perhaps in fifth or sixth grade. It is one of a few great works of children's literature that has not been chewed up and regurgitated in the form of a movie.

One by one, the greats have fallen, including Matilda, by Roald Dahl, The Witches, also by the venerable Mr Dahl (as the Brits would punctuate), Holes, by Louis Sachar, the entire Harry Potter series and now The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe. It really makes me sad, not because it's not fun to watch a movie of a book that you've read, to see how someone else might interpret it, but because a lot of children these days' only experience with the literature is through the book - which not only removes their imagination from the equation but also, many times, removes any incentive to acutally read the work that inspired the film.

I truly hate this trend of moviemakers, to avoid coming up with original film ideas, steal from established and one-of-a-kind works of literature, especially children's literature. It's hard enough to convince kids to read, but if you take away the most persuasive of those reasons to be a lifelong reader, what else have we got? "The Baby Sitter's Club"? (I loved that series too, but it's no Narnia)

Well, at least for the time being, we still have The Hitchhiker's Gui... Oh, wait... nevermind.