A Majestic ROAR

Disney today released the teaser trailer for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. It’s going to be, quite literally, AWESOME!!!

Disney’s strategy for this, one of (if not the most) expensive movies’ they’ve ever made, is to be as true as possible to the original book by C.S. Lewis. They are not going to downplay nor enhance the Christian themes of the story and will market it much like The Passion, by letting faith groups self market to a large degree (hey, I’m doing it now). They are going all out on special effects, including an Aslan that’s completely CG and nothing like The Lion King. We’re not talking some wimpy, no teeth, claws pulled stuffed animal here; we’re talking a photo realistic, graceful, powerful, “not safe” (as C.S. Lewis made such a point of) LION!

I am quite literally trembling with excitement over this one. December 9th can’t come too soon. If there’s going to be a midnight showing; I’ll be there (forget finals). If the movie lives up to the book and this trailer, I think it has potential to equal LOTR (Lord Of The Rings). Not joking.

Now, you want to see the trailer? There are lower quality versions of it than I’m going to give you, but this one is completely worth the 54Mb download time. Apple Quicktime is required to watch it (it’s free, to get it without iTunes, download the one for Win 98/ME, it should still work on XP: http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/win.html). To download it, right click on the link below and select “Save Target As” from the menu that pops up (“Save Link As” on Firefox). Choose a place to save it on your hard drive. Then wait forever as it downloads. Here’s the tricky part: For some idiotic reason, they made the downloadable video you just saved with a filename too long for Quicktime to play. So you have to rename the file. I named it “Narnia.mov,” it’s really not important what you call it as long as it’s reasonably short and still has the .mov extension. Then double click to open it up and enjoy!

Here’s the link:
http://tinyurl.com/bmdhh

If you absolutely, positively, must have one with a smaller file size, you are free to beg for one in the comments area and I will consider the request. This is just too awesome to not watch with the best possible quality. Rumor also has it that they might add this trailer to the lineup of trailers before Star Wars Episode III (which comes out Wednesday night/12:00am Thursday morning, at which time I'll be in the theater).

Tonight is the traditional end of the year bonfire for SCF/Elevate at Elgin Community College. Should be fun. If you're coming, make sure to bring a change of clothes and/or things you don't mind being wet in. There are usually random attacks with water balloons and the occasional person getting thrown into the pool.

If you're reading this and you still haven't added your two cents to the open thread (previous post), you still need to do that. There are no exceptions (even relatives)! If you have comments on the trailer, please put them on here. I want to know if others are as excited as I am about it.