By coincidence, I was watching a CSI rerun this morning in which Hudson Leick appeared as a sexy dentist with a tooth fetish! ("Bite Me.")
Hercules and Xena...thoughts?
- Thread starter RoJoHen
- Start date
By coincidence, I was watching a CSI rerun this morning in which Hudson Leick appeared as a sexy dentist with a tooth fetish! ("Bite Me.")
"Hercules: The Legendary Journeys" had some quite enjoyable TV movies that proceeded the series.
The series itself has two good leading characters, and like said, some camp. "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" had a certain level of camp in it's first season, but ultimately was playing toward the series. Here, Herc plays far, far more with the camp but does try to inject some seriousness.
After a while it was more about set piece brawls, but then for some reason the show decided to take a dark turn (which worked) and killed off two characters. The last season, as I recall, had Hercules traveling the world trying to get back in touch with himself and comes to terms with what had happened. He fought baddies over the world and got some meaning back into his life. It was actually quite good.
It should be noted, for those who didn't watch both shows, the baddie who ruined Herc's life, crossed over into Zena -- Day Hawk, where he ultimately did serious damage there, too.
The show had some really good scoring from Joseph LoDuca ("Evil Dead", "Xena", more recently "Legend of the Seeker" and the upcoming "Spartacus: Blood and Sand"). The beautiful opening cue in this YouTube video is from the last seaso of Hercules; it's called "Faith's Song", and it gives you an idea of the change in tone the last season:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBv2uVvc4xc
The second cue used in that video, is from the proceeding season where Hercucles has adramatic life changing encounter with Day Hawk.
The music is set, coincidently, to a crummy TV series called "Legend of the Seeker", which LoDuca also scores (you can hear samples at his website).
Xena was not so good, though an enjoyable rompr from time-to-time. Whereas Herc was a strong lead who you believed for the role and had a dramatic presance, Xena was more like Angelina Jolee trying to be Tomb Raidera -- just out of place. But to give LAwless credit, she did try to change that later on.
The show got swallowed up in love and mellowdrama later on and was way too self involved with aspects which were, quite frankly, not working and boring as hell.
Hercules has a spin off series with one of it's more interesting characters. I say "spin off" a little loosely. While it had the same creators (And composer) as Herc and Xena, and he played the same character on Herc and Xena, the character in the spin off show, "Jack of All Trades", had a different name. But he was basically the same guy as in the other two shows.
Some mroe score from Hercules:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPgXDoIOxJg&feature=PlayList&p=5221F705C91386C2&index=24
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzLToOF0EN4&feature=PlayList&p=5221F705C91386C2&index=27
The series itself has two good leading characters, and like said, some camp. "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" had a certain level of camp in it's first season, but ultimately was playing toward the series. Here, Herc plays far, far more with the camp but does try to inject some seriousness.
After a while it was more about set piece brawls, but then for some reason the show decided to take a dark turn (which worked) and killed off two characters. The last season, as I recall, had Hercules traveling the world trying to get back in touch with himself and comes to terms with what had happened. He fought baddies over the world and got some meaning back into his life. It was actually quite good.
It should be noted, for those who didn't watch both shows, the baddie who ruined Herc's life, crossed over into Zena -- Day Hawk, where he ultimately did serious damage there, too.
The show had some really good scoring from Joseph LoDuca ("Evil Dead", "Xena", more recently "Legend of the Seeker" and the upcoming "Spartacus: Blood and Sand"). The beautiful opening cue in this YouTube video is from the last seaso of Hercules; it's called "Faith's Song", and it gives you an idea of the change in tone the last season:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XBv2uVvc4xc
The second cue used in that video, is from the proceeding season where Hercucles has adramatic life changing encounter with Day Hawk.
The music is set, coincidently, to a crummy TV series called "Legend of the Seeker", which LoDuca also scores (you can hear samples at his website).
Xena was not so good, though an enjoyable rompr from time-to-time. Whereas Herc was a strong lead who you believed for the role and had a dramatic presance, Xena was more like Angelina Jolee trying to be Tomb Raidera -- just out of place. But to give LAwless credit, she did try to change that later on.
The show got swallowed up in love and mellowdrama later on and was way too self involved with aspects which were, quite frankly, not working and boring as hell.
Hercules has a spin off series with one of it's more interesting characters. I say "spin off" a little loosely. While it had the same creators (And composer) as Herc and Xena, and he played the same character on Herc and Xena, the character in the spin off show, "Jack of All Trades", had a different name. But he was basically the same guy as in the other two shows.
Some mroe score from Hercules:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPgXDoIOxJg&feature=PlayList&p=5221F705C91386C2&index=24
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzLToOF0EN4&feature=PlayList&p=5221F705C91386C2&index=27
Me, I always preferred XENA. Xena struck me as a much darker and more complicated character than Herc, and her relationship with Gabrielle had, er, a lot more layers to it.
You're absolutely right about the music, though. That was great stuff. I have all four XENA soundtrack albums and still listen to them fairly often. (I find they're really good for writing WONDER WOMAN scenes!)
disc 1. Movie 1 - Hercules and the Amazon Women ; movie 2 - Hercules and the Lost Kingdom
They don't have Circle of Fire (movie 3), Underworld (movie 4) or Maze of the Minotaur (movie 5 / clip show).
They also don't have season 1 on dvd, but they are all available on view instantly. I did check youtube, and it seems the 5 movies are all available there, but I can't vouch for their quality. I just checked, didn't watch.
Again, the early HERCULES movies are fun, but not obligatory. The opening credits to the tv show pretty much tells you all you need to know. He's HERCULES, he's the son of Zeus, he fights evil, etc.
Just to avoid confusion, the Amazon played by Lucy Lawless in AMAZON WOMEN is NOT Xena. They just brought Lawless back to play XENA a few years later . . . .
Just to avoid confusion, the Amazon played by Lucy Lawless in AMAZON WOMEN is NOT Xena. They just brought Lawless back to play XENA a few years later . . . .
Total crap. Hercules should not be portrayed as a Cali surfer boy.
Okay, good. I'll check out the first episode, and if I'm confused, I'll look for the movies.
That crappy surfer image was mainly Young Hercules (even a skatring boarding -- though "hover" boardin -- contest in one YH episode). Skip YH.
To elaborate on what others have said:
Hercules: The Legendary Journeys started out as part of the Universal Action Pack "movie wheel," an attempt to revive the old TV-packaging concept of having several different movie series in rotation in a single time slot. The others were: an adaptation of William Shatner's TekWar novels (starring Greg Evigan, Torri Higginson, and Shatner), a series based on the film Midnight Run, a series called Bandit based on the Smokey and the Bandit films, an original martial-arts series called Vanishing Son, and Knight Rider 2010, a Mad Max-style premise with virtually no connection to Knight Rider aside from having a talking car of sorts. They had varying numbers of episodes, some getting only two (KR2010 had only one).
H:TLJ had two movies in the first season, Hercules and the Amazon Women (with Lucy Lawless in a supporting role) and Hercules and the Lost Kingdom (with future Xena co-star Renee O'Connor as a woman named Deianeira). In the next season, there were three H:TLJ movies. The first, Hercules and the Circle of Fire, confusingly introduced Tawny Kitaen as another Deianeira, this time the one who marries Herc and bears his children. This was followed by Hercules and the Underworld, loosely based on the myth of Hercules' death (don't worry, he got better). The fifth movie, Hercules and the Maze of the Minotaur, was, of all things, a clip show. There was an original frame story featuring Herc and Iolaus (the first time we'd seen Iolaus since the first movie), but most of it was the two of them reminiscing about past adventures which were illustrated by lengthy clips from the first four movies. They must've gone over budget for the season on Circle of Fire and Underworld, or something.
Anyway, most of the Action Pack projects bombed, but H:TLJ and Vanishing Son got turned into hourlong weekly series as the new Action Pack block while TekWar became a USA Network series. When Xena was introduced in H:TLJ's first season, they decided to give her a spinoff, and since the Action Pack block was only two hours long, Vanishing Son was cancelled to make room for it.
Are the Herc movies worth seeing? Well, the first two aren't great, and the clip show is kind of pointless, but at least Circle of Fire and Underworld are worth seeing and important to the series mythos. And there are elements and characters from the first two movies that show up in the series, notably the Blue Priest from Lost Kingdom.
Actually that's Dahak, perhaps based on the Zoroastrian deity Azhi Dahaka, though he was presented more as a Satan equivalent (at least until Xena went off the rails and brought in actual Judeo-Christian mythology into its polytheistic universe).
I wouldn't say that. Yes, they were both Bruce Campbell characters, and that means they had certain traits in common, but they were hardly the same character. Autolycus was a thief with a heart of gold, while Jack was a US secret agent-cum-masked hero. And I found Jack of All Trades to be a thoroughly dreadful show.
It's worth noting that Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzmann, writer-producers of the new Star Trek movie as well as Fringe, got their start on Herc/Xena and eventually became the showrunners of both series as well as Jack of All Trades. And frankly, I didn't like what they did as showrunners at all. Either they've gotten much better in their years with J.J. Abrams, or they're just not cut out for comedy.
I dimly remember these series. Mostly I just made fun of them - being a nerdy kid who spent way too much time reading translations of Greek myths I tended to mock Hercules and Xena for their goofball presentation, but honestly, don't think I watched more than a half-hour of either one. Interesting skimming here that opinion was divided as to which was the better show, I thought Xena was more well liked (or is that just Lucy Lawless is more well liked than Kevin Sorbo? Hrm.)
Zoroastrianism isn't polytheistic, aber. And surely Ahriman/Angra Mainyu would have been a better fit for this role?
By coincidence, I was watching a CSI rerun this morning in which Hudson Leick appeared as a sexy dentist with a tooth fetish! ("Bite Me.")
Callisto/Hudson Leick was awesome....
I thought it was interesting--if no one has mentioned it already--how Xena became the popular show over Hercules....
Which is probably for the obvious reasons...
Callisto being just one of those reasons...
In terms of publicity and public awareness, XENA definitely eclipsed HERCULES a bit. At the height of its popularity, there was a ton of media attention and merchandise. The XENA craze even made the cover of Ms. magazine!
Why, some opportunistic authors even churned out their own books on the phenomenon . . .
(Now sadly out of print.)
Why, some opportunistic authors even churned out their own books on the phenomenon . . .
(Now sadly out of print.)
Well, to be fair, if Hercules and Eolis did what Xenas and Gabrielle did, both would have been on equal public awareness levels. ;-)
Well, that's getting the cause and effect backward. I'm pretty sure there was no deliberate lesbian subtext in Xena until after it became popular with lesbians. And the show carefully kept it implicit and ambiguous so that viewers could draw their own conclusions. It became more overt in the final season, when the writing staff was joined by a prominent author of Xena/Gabrielle romantic-slash fanfic, but even then they stopped short of confirming it outright.
By the way, I wanted to comment on this reference from before:
It wasn't so much historical inaccuracy as deliberate ahistoricity. Since the whole thing was myth and fantasy anyway, they just felt free to ignore real-world chronology and throw together any mythical or historical characters that caught their fancy -- just another part of their gleeful abandon and lack of limits. For most of the shows' run, they only treated characters from the B.C. era as fair game, but eventually they ignored that limit as well; even a variant of Count Dracula appeared in Hercules. (And that's not counting the various clip shows with zany frame stories featuring lookalike descendants of the shows' cast in more modern eras, from Revolutionary France to the 1930s to the present day.) But that was okay, since it was in keeping with the mythology on which the shows were based. The tellers of ancient myths didn't hesitate to merge characters and events without concern for chronology or continuity. (Continuity wasn't exactly ironclad in the shows either.)
Am I the only person who actually read this, the very first line in this thread?
Considering that ended the Star Trek reign and kicked DS9 butt in ratings I would say they that they would not get much love here.
Did you guys forget how Hercules began? I can't think of anything worse that could happen to a man. The fact he got over that is a testament to the show. Iolaus was not a sidekick he was a freaking hero man, a lot braver than Hercules. One of the best ever.
I think you guys are loving that Xena man hate too much.
Did you guys forget how Hercules began? I can't think of anything worse that could happen to a man. The fact he got over that is a testament to the show. Iolaus was not a sidekick he was a freaking hero man, a lot braver than Hercules. One of the best ever.
I think you guys are loving that Xena man hate too much.
And Hercules has a wonderful episode that took place in modern day, where studio executives were planning a show (I think a "Hercules" show), and it had a funny moment where they are all in the bathroom, backs facing us, using hte wall urinals and they all end up humming the Hercules theme.
One should note, like Disney, this Hercules changed some of the details to make it mroe friendly.
One should note, like Disney, this Hercules changed some of the details to make it mroe friendly.
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