Episode 2: Nylons Suck

Pre-Raphaelite Edward Burne-Jones’s frontispiece to 1894 fantasy novel The Wood Beyond the World by William Morris.

Details, credits, errata: Episode 2, Nylons Suck, is written by Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson, produced by Sam, and distributed by Alissa. This episode is about the most important text in a child’s life, C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, and its constituent books’ various adaptations, mostly Michael Apted’s 2010 film of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. We also talk about the BBC’s 1990 unapologetically weird adaptation of The Silver Chair, which Alissa loves, and Neil Gaiman’s extremely disturbing short story about The Last Battle, called The Problem of Susan. There’s a nice graphic novel edition of The Problem of Susan that Sam likes here; the prose version is available in Gaiman’s short story collection Fragile Things. Sam and Alissa both like Philip Pullman’s Narnia-adjacent His Dark Materials fantasy cycle, too. Alissa grew up with the creepy Chris Van Allsburg covers for the Narnia Chronicles; Sam had the Pauline Baynes editions. Harper has reordered the books so that they go from the beginning of Narnia to the end of Narnia, but the correct and true reading order is:

* The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

* Prince Caspian

* The Voyage of the Dawn Treader

* The Silver Chair

* The Horse and His Boy

* The Magician’s Nephew

* The Last Battle

Sam and Alissa want to stress that no other reading order is acceptable.

All links go to local bookstores where possible. The Silver Chair miniseries is not available to stream anywhere in the US, but the whole thing is on YouTube. Our theme song is Louis Armstrong and His Hot 5’s Muskrat Ramble, made freely available by the Boston Public Library and audio engineering shop George Blood, LP through the Internet Archive. Our header image is the frontispiece to William Morris’s fantasy novel The Wood Beyond the World, an influence on C.S. Lewis, made freely available by the Alexander Turnbull Library through Wikimedia Commons. Fox’s The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, BBC’s The Silver Chair, and Sony Pictures’ Ghostbusters are all property of their respective rightsholders. Brief audio clips are used herein for review purposes. All other content is copyright 2020 Sam Thielman and Alissa Wilkinson.

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