In his latest installment of the “Narnia Nostalgia” series, Mark Sommer reviews BBC and Focus on the Family’s radio plays of The Magician’s Nephew. Below is an introduction to both plays.

Walden Media was not the first to bring The Chronicles of Narnia to film. The first four articles in this series examined the 1979 animated version by the Children’s Television Workshop, and the BBC-TV series based on The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; Prince Caspian, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and The Sliver.

The Narnia books have also been produced as radio plays. All seven books were adapted by both the BBC and Focus on the Family.

BBC Radio 4 aired The Magician’s Nephew and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe in 1988. A few years passed until the series was taken up again in 1994 with The Horse and His Boy, and finished in 1997 with The Last Battle. These were produced originally under the series title “Tales of Narnia.”

Focus on the Family Radio Theatre began their series with the more popular Lion, the Witch in 1998, but went back “to the beginning” with Magician’s Nephew in 1999. The series was completed in chronological order with The Last Battle being aired in 2002. (CD sets of the Focus series are numbered in chronological order, beginning with Magician’s Nephew.)*

And the latest in NarniaFans’ “Tumnus’ Bookshelf” series is a review of C. S. Lewis’s Narrative Poems (2002). You can read it here.