It's important not to be afraid to look goofy

chimeric

I've made a number of joking threads here, but this time it's actually something I want to say. I was looking through some pictures of old favorites from "Xena: The Warrior Princess" and "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys," and I opened the list of episodes for a couple I wanted to download and watch again, after so many years. I scanned the names of episodes, and suddenly it struck me that those shows really had something going throughout, or at least for the first few seasons, that kept them together, something beyond lucky finds of actors and costumes, or just the fact that they were created in an atmosphere friendlier to creativity and when TV was more carefree. All of that I had known, but now I saw that they had had a constant style, a faith or maybe an enthusiasm that carried on from one episode to the next.

I asked myself what that "special something" had been, and my answer, thinking of Kevin Sorbo and all those other people, was: it must have been that they were not afraid to look silly. They were not in the slightest deterred by camp, even cheese; I can't say that cheese was ever a good thing, and I doubt the actors, directors, designers who could tell the difference would have approved of it either if asked, but they kept making adventures, one after another, just wading in, shoulder to shoulder. Giants? Let's have giants. Chariot races or a rewritten mythology? Go ahead. Just like Monty Python or, say, Bioware with its first games.

This has got to be important when creating something - not to fear looking silly, outsized or out of sorts. To do it even if it is not perfectly balanced, if it is idealistic, naive, if there is no word for it at all - still do it.

Pteran

You mean like the Xena war cry? "Ayiyiyiyiyiyiyiyiyiyi!!"

Those were some great shows...

Kurona

Yep there's a certain charm to these campy shows that didn't take themselves too seriously. Not only on TV, I remember Frank Langella saying that playing Skeletor in the He-Man movie was an awesome experience. Nowadays the industry is way too obsessed with its "gritty reboots" when it comes to comics adaptations alas.

chimeric

I'm more concerned about the Netflix choose-your-own experience bubble and the like. Fatal customization that keeps us separated. Those old shows, books and movies were, first and foremost, broadcast - sent out over radiowaves or published, on objective real paper no less, and whole generations of fantasy fans were united in knowing and loving them (or hating them). Part of it was that people could not pick and choose which channel to turn on, which plot line to follow. They had to digest the whole thing and get the rich unfamiliar taste willy-nilly. But the medium is the message, and now even if somebody were to make a new "Xena" or write a "Dragons of Autumn Twilight" - or "The Hobbit," which was Tolkien at his goofiest - how would they distribute these things? To whom?

But! I don't want to repeat "alas." That just turns the wheels of sadness in my head. I'd rather repeat "Ayiyiyiyiyi"!