It’s always tricky, dealing with that, because the things that made them “weird” to the author and the first generation to read the original story were just normal life to the first generation to watch this film. Especially if it’s an American audience (many American readers, especially of my generation and younger, don’t react to the Experiment House as if it’s amusing satire, but either shrug it off as perfectly normal or shudder because they recognize it as their own middle school).

Elements of stories that reflect attitudes that no longer exist (or more likely are less common) are hard to adapt. Lord of the Rings had it a bit easier in part because the world was more removed from our own.
I enjoyed reading your Narnia posts and friended you. It is nice to see a Narnia fan on IJ. (It surprises me a bit that fandoms like Narnia don't seem to have moved to IJ, but they seem to have remained on LJ so I play in both places.)