The Sword in the Stone
The Sword in The Stone by T.H. White, the first book of The Once and Future King, is a novel about a young boy named Arthur who befriends a magician named Merlin. The Walt Disney Company made an animated movie about it in 1961. This movie introduced Mad Madam Mim who later appeared in a lot of Disney comics. The movie is entertaining, but ignores White's carefully-constructed moral lessons in favour of visual gags.A BBC radio adaptation in 1982 starred Michael Hordern as Merlin. Hordern had already starred as another great literary wizard, Tolkien's Gandalf, in the BBC's Lord of the Rings (1981).
