Into the Wardrobe

Hey you Wardrobians!

I just recently found out (forgive me if this is old news) but there is a Narnia Exhibit in Sugar Land, Texas, US. I just wanted to let you guys know. The Narnia Webbers want to meet Oct 17. I **probably** won't be able to go, unless it's a Christmas present, but maybe Wardrobians that live in TX could put something together.

Never really thought of it that way before. So, it was done out of desperation......

Three books on science have been written using Terry Pratchett's Discworld as a starting point and contrast.

But the author participated. I suspect that Narnia is too distant in its structure from Earth, and that its author would not have been sufficiently concerned with (indifferent to? hosrtile to?) a presentation of science using Narnia as a contrast.

Yeah, just on the science-teaching ground alone it's so bizarre and hopeless. "Surprising similarity between our world and that of Narnia" my foot!

Look at the kid in the photo. He's cute, he's smiling for the camera, it's great, but in what bizarro universe can we conjecture that he is going to pause thoughtfully over the very fine print posted to the side and pick up some sound scientific knowledge about "frozen frogs"? Can it even be believed that he has been, as the promotional gush promises, "transported into another world to experience Narnia like never before"? I notice that the Witch's palace has acquired a pretty dingy carpet during the transport process . . . By the way, do I mistake, or is there no mention of any icy "throne" on which the Witch sits in the actual Narnia books? And so the movie-makers and their imagineering staff supplant the real thing with their hokey cliché constructions . . .

Basically I read this as a self-promotional gig for Walden Films, Disney, and of course CS Lewis Pte., the company that owns the Lewis rights. The science museum, meanwhile, ups its visitor count (proving its institutional viability and importance) and turns a much-needed buck on the tickets. Perhaps the museum people delusionally imagine that some of the visitors will emerge holding some scrap of science literacy they didn't have on the way in. But you can't trick or entertain people into understanding a way of thinking, and science is a way of thinking or it is nothing but a low-value grab-bag of disconnected factoids. Frozen frogs indeed.

"Too bad. Too bad! Oh, too bad!" -- as Lee said after Gettysburg . . .

L

Disney and the science museum are the beneficiaries here. I'm sure there's no great value to CSL Co.

I went to this exhibit in Kansas City. There's a room at the beginning with a few pictures and a letter written by Lewis on a desk. But after that it's all about the movies. And the connection to science is VERY tenuous. I just wanted a picture in the white witches chair, which I got despite the 'no photos" rule:

Very well posed -- great shot -- a much better picture than the happy-sappy one I linked to --

and don't "no photos" rules get your goat? What, are they afraid people are going to grab national-security secrets by photographing their precious plastic props? Of which they themselves have already posted photos on the web?

I hate the corporate mind.

Cheers,

L

Thanks Larry. Yes, the no photos rule is very silly. BTW, the chair was actually cold.