When fourteen-year-old Jo Tiegan is given an antique mirror by a mysterious antique-shop owner in 1995, she finds she can travel through the mirror's surface into her bedroom as it was in 1919. She and the house's previous occupant, Louise Iredale, become firm friends, but find themselves caught up in two interlocking mysteries: the presence of a container of toxic chemicals in Louise's neighbour's well (which seriously injures two of Jo's classmates during an archaeological excavation in 1995) and the entrapment of Nicholas Romanov (the Tsesarevich Alexei Nikolaevich) by Louise's neighbour, who has smuggled him out of Russia in the hopes of selling him to the highest bidder.
Mirror, Mirror was a co-production between Australian-based Millennium Pictures (founded five years earlier by show creator Posie- Graeme-Evans) and New Zealand-based Gibson Group.
The program was successful and highly awarded, and was followed two years later by a loose sequel, which shares nothing with the original series but the basic premise of time travel through a mirror.
Mirror, Mirror : An Adventure Through Time
Sydney
:
Hodder Headline
,
1996
Z121380
1996
single work
novel
young adult
fantasy
'Looking through her antique mirror, 13-year-old Jo discovers that she can see into Louisa's world, a world many years before her time. To her surprise, Jo discovers that it is also possible for her and Louisa to step through the mirror into one another's time.
'At first, the mirror is a source of wonder and delight, but the two girls quickly discover that they must alter the past so they can avoid a catastrophe in the present.
'While they struggle through the layers of space and time, Jo discovers Nicholas - a boy whose identity is a mystery - living in Louisa's time. Captivated by each other, Jo and Nicholas work together to save their friends and to find a way of spanning time so they can remain together. (Publication summary)
Mirror, Mirror II
Posie Graeme-Evans
,
( dir. John Banas
et. al. )agent
Rosewood
New Zealand
:
Millennium Pictures
Gibson Group
,
1997-1998
Z1848708
1997-1998
series - publisher
film/TV
children's
fantasy
young adult
Mirror, Mirror II was a sequel to Mirror, Mirror, but only in so far as both programs involved travel between two time periods through the agency of a magic mirror, allowing people who live in the same house at different times to interact with one another. The two programs were closely linked aesthetically, including identical title sequences. However, the programs had very little overlap in script-writers.
In this series, Daniel and Fergus McFarlane (from the late 1990s) and Constance de Lutrelle (fom the 1860s) travel between each others' time periods, experiencing culture shock from such events as sealing (in the 1860s) and school discos (in the 1990s). As with the original series, there is also a significant object over which the protagonists struggle: in this case, a mysterious crown.
