In a 2003 online chat with Mary Pope Osborne hosted by the New York Public Library, the author of the widely read children’s series Magic Tree House was asked, “Will anybody make a movie about the Magic Tree House?”
Osborne was firm in wanting her books to be just books: “I don’t want any movies to be made. I want kids to have these adventures in their imaginations. This, I believe, is best accomplished by reading a book.”
Fast forward to 2016: an announcement came this month that Osborne had sold the movie rights to her series to Lionsgate, the movie maker who also brought both the Hunger Games and Divergent book series to the screen. Osborne will be an executive producer on the project.
“I’m thrilled to have partnered with them on bringing the Magic Tree House books to life in a series of films that kids, parents and grandparents will all get to enjoy together,” Osborne said.
So why the change of heart? The undisclosed financial terms of the agreement for Osborne surely hold half the answer. For Lionsgate, which has selected book 29—Christmas in Camelot—in the 54 volume series as the subject of the first film installment, the books provide a vast audience and topics that are always ripe for the screen.
The popularity of the series is known to most any parent with a first grader beginning to tackle the world of early chapter books. One of the books in the series sat alongside Harry Potter on the New York Times Bestseller list in 2006 for over 70 weeks. “We’re always looking for magical worlds to expand into potential motion picture franchises and this is an iconic property that is beloved and recognizable around the world,” said Erik Feig, Lionsgate Motion Picture Group co-president.
But the movies, no matter how technically savvy and visually mesmerizing they turn out to be, won’t come close to achieving what Osborne does most efficiently—magically—in her books with a pen and fewer than 100 pages.
The first Magic Tree House book—Dinosaurs Before Dawn—was published back in 1992. Early readers were introduced to Jack and Annie, two young siblings (ages eight and seven) who stumble upon a tree house in the Pennsylvania woods, like Jack onto his beanstalk. It is the contents of the tree house—volumes and volumes of books with pages marked by colorful bookmarks—that become the fuel for their adventures.
Osborne worked through a number of ideas before she came up with a tree house—a magic cellar, magic whistles, magic artist’s studio, and a magic museum. As for the books as transporter, Osborne said, “We thought it’d be cool to have the tree house filled with books, because books are magic.” In Osborne’s rendering, the pictures in the books act as an adolescent reproduction of H.G. Wells’s time machine. After opening a book and pointing to a picture of a Pteranodon and wishing they could see it “for real,” Jack and Annie are whisked back to prehistoric times. All it took was a book and a wish. And like Wells’s time traveler, the children again and again are rattled about in their tree house, shaken with fear, and tumbled out onto distant shores.
Returning from his travels at the end of The Time Machine, the time traveler, confused and stunned, asks, “Did I ever make a Time Machine, or a model of a Time Machine? Or is it all only a dream?” Jack and Annie wonder this very same question about their books when they return from a faraway place to their home in Frog Lake, Pennsylvania.
Each book in the series offers a first introduction to many of the well-known curiosities of childhood: dinosaurs, knights and castles, leprechauns, pyramids and mummies, China, the Titanic, saber tooth tigers, and the American Revolution—to name but a few. Osborne, a devotee of the theater and literature, didn’t hesitate to invoke Arthurian legend in her books with the appearance by Morgan Le Fey, ancient riddles, Merlin, and Camelot.
The beauty of Osborne’s series is that a child with fervent curiosity can leap across hundreds and thousands and even millions of years of history in a single day. The holder of one of Osborne’s books can feel like both a scholar and an adventurer, the very things teachers across the country try to imbue in students day after day in the classroom. Sure, these volumes hold just a dusting of history with a sprinkle of mythical legend, but how else does a young child learn to fly across time and words? Osborne has said of her approach:
My ideal is they read our fiction, read our nonfiction, and then, if they still are interested, they go and read more difficult books about the subject. And they’ll always own it. When they really hear about Shakespeare when they get to their teens, they’ll feel they’re already friends with Shakespeare, or any of these—Mozart, Louis Armstrong. That imprints so much when you’re seven and eight.
No matter how visually stimulating and packed with special effects, no movie can produce this effect—something Osborne knew early in her writing career. So when the Magic Tree House movies arrive at your local Cineplex, do yourself and your kids a favor: go to the bookstore or library and pick up a few of the books instead.
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