Narnia

A few weeks ago I signed up for a free “Narnia screening” at USC. I took this to mean I’d be watching the actual film, but then a few days ago I read the fine print and realized that they were just showing a 10 minute trailer, as well as some featurettes, all of which can be seen here. The trailer they showed was longer than the one available online, being the special “college only” version, but it’s mostly the same footage (and, annoyingly, it had the word “college” printed in white block text in the lower left-hand corner throughout). There was a surprisingly large turnout. Actually, it’s not so surprising considering that 80% of the crowd seemed to think they were there to watch the actual movie.

The organizers raffled off free shirts, wool caps, and — tauntingly — tickets to the actual advance screening. Some people were chosen randomly and some won by answering trivia questions. I was sure I’d be a strong competitor in the trivia contest, having recently read a biography of Lewis and a book about the Inklings, and imagining that they’d ask softball questions like, “What’s the lion’s name?” But the first question: “Who illustrated the original The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe?” As you can imagine, dead silence greeted that one. Next was, “Name all the books in the Narnia series.” One guy very impressively rattled them off. If you’d given me a full minute, I could probably have come up with all the others, but I never would have remembered The Silver Chair. Then we had, “In what city was C.S. Lewis born?” More silence. I didn’t win anything, but I did manage to score one of the wool knit caps that they were just handing out to people who asked afterward. It’s actually pretty cool — it’s black with a red lion rampant on the front and on the back it says, “Aslan is on the move.”