by Kenneth Andrews

Created on: August 11, 2008   Last Updated: July 02, 2009

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is the best-remembered of C.S. Lewis's many books. The tale of some 1940s evacuees finding a magical world through a wardrobe in a forgotten attic, it has been endlessly reference in popular culture ever since.

As the other respondent in this topic notes, Lewis died just the day before the BBC's brilliant Doctor Who began broadcasting in November 1963. Just like the wardrobe, the police box TARDIS is a door into a whole new world of magic (well, science) and adventure. But the similarities don't end there. Just as Aslan the lion is restored to life after his murder by the White Witch, so the Doctor exhibits the power to regenerate his body - only without so many clunking Biblical allusions.

In Lance Parkin's Doctor Who novel The Dying Days (1997) this similarity is acknowledged overtly when one room in the Doctor's country house is revealed to have a dead bluebottle on the window sill (a detail taken straight from the Narnia book).

In Marc Platt's novelisation of Ghost Light, the Doctor's companion Ace comes close to drawing a pair of spectacles on a statue of a lion, as Edmund does when he believes a such statue to be Aslan.

Casting the net wider but still remaining within British TV, All Creatures Great and Small, the series based on the books by country vet James Herriot, contained several references to the books as it was set in the 1950s when they were being published.

Cult novelist Jasper Fforde took a swipe at the Biblical allegories when, at the end of one of the Thursday Next books, Thursday is offered the chance to hide from the Goliath corporation in an alternative world in an exact parody of Aslan's 'I have another name there' moment.

Terry Pratchett meanwhile takes a pop at Narnia so often in his series of Discworld novels, that it's futile to pick out a single example. Generally all the various talking animals and trees and magical creatures appear in the books, but as vicious bloody-minded nuisances rather than romantically idealised noble creatures.

Toby Frost's Space Captain Smith novels are set in the far future of the British Space Empire, but this didn't stop him from slipping in a quiet scene of research scientists attaching sensors to a wardrobe, in Wrath of the Lemming Men, the third novel in the series that was published in June 2009.

Several key scenes of the novel, especially the meeting between Lucy and Mr Tumnus, have passed into popular legend. These can be seen painted on plates in children's boutiques across the UK.

In terms of film, the novel has been turned into a BBC TV series (around the end of the 80s but still quite watchable, a very lavish adaptation), a cartoon and most recently a Disney film. Outside of these direct adaptations it doesn't necessarily have a huge number of filmic references to it. It could be argued that the Lion King makes pays unconcscious homage to C.S. Lewis by including a virtual resurrection of Simba's father.

The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe has also been adapted several times for the stage, generally as a children's production around Christmas due to its festive elements. The most notable remains the Royal Shakespeare Company's 1998 adaptation, which has been revived several times.

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