From: owner-chakram-refugees-digest@smoe.org (chakram-refugees-digest) To: chakram-refugees-digest@smoe.org Subject: chakram-refugees-digest V7 #80 Reply-To: chakram-refugees@smoe.org Sender: owner-chakram-refugees-digest@smoe.org Errors-To: owner-chakram-refugees-digest@smoe.org Precedence: bulk chakram-refugees-digest Sunday, July 22 2007 Volume 07 : Number 080 Today's Subjects: ----------------- [chakram-refugees] "Following" tradition [KTL ] [chakram-refugees] Thelma as Xena on Hex [KLOSSNER9@aol.com] [chakram-refugees] book Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture [KLOSS] ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Date: Fri, 20 Jul 2007 23:48:11 -0800 (AKDT) From: KTL Subject: [chakram-refugees] "Following" tradition I just watched Renee's little video on her fan club site about getting a distributor for "Diamonds and Guns". It's here: http://www.reneeoconnorfanclub.com/dgdvdannounce.mov Iris plays a big role in it. What a beautiful baby Iris is. (No wonder Lucy is wary that Rob appears to want to make one of these for their own.) Even better, Iris seems to be a little pistol. She takes off down the sidewalk behind Renee, charging away with great purpose, on her way to somewhere. Watching her, it suddenly struck me that she looked just like a miniature Gabrielle, heading out to find Xena. I could just imagine her thinking, "That big kid with the black hair and the gorgeous blue eyes left me behind again. I'm gonna catch up with her and make her take me with me if it's the last thing I ever do!" Kid's on a mission for sure. KT ========================================================= This has been a message to the chakram-refugees list. To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@smoe.org with "unsubscribe chakram-refugees" in the message body. Contact meth@smoe.org with any questions or problems. ========================================================= ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2007 22:30:23 EDT From: KLOSSNER9@aol.com Subject: [chakram-refugees] Thelma as Xena on Hex In the final episode of Hex, just seen on BBC America, Thelma the funny lesbian ghost (Jemima Rooper) was disguised as an angel. She appeared to a girl and told her "I am the angel Xena. I was always a fan." The series ended in the UK in 2005, 4 years after Xena ended. That's not bad. Plenty of shows are totally forgotten after 4 years. Boeotian ************************************** Get a sneak peek of the all-new AOL at http://discover.aol.com/memed/aolcom30tour ========================================================= This has been a message to the chakram-refugees list. To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@smoe.org with "unsubscribe chakram-refugees" in the message body. Contact meth@smoe.org with any questions or problems. ========================================================= ------------------------------ Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2007 23:40:10 EDT From: KLOSSNER9@aol.com Subject: [chakram-refugees] book Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture, by Gideon Nisbet, a 2006 British book, is rather overclever, with the author showing off his erudition about both ancient history and lore and the modern films and other representations. Nisbet is a British academic and prefers some of the B-films, comics and TV shows to some of the big film epics. Nisbet's points are that ancient Greece has been much less successful than ancient Rome in films and that many films set in Greece are really full of Roman details. He dislikes both Troy and Alexander, two recent big films. (Most people disliked Alexander but I generally liked Troy.) Nisbet discusses Roger Corman's peplum Atlas, Sergio Leone's peplum the Colossus of Rhodes and Robert Wise's Helen of Troy. He largely ignores Harryhausen's Jason and the Argonauts and Clash of the Titans. He spends time on the Frank Miller comic 300, but wrote too soon to include the film made from Miller's work. He spends more time on the Hercules TV series than on Xena because he is interested in the development of Hercules as a character over 3000 years. After noting that the Hercules series was careful not to make Hercules and Iolaus too close, he adds "On this point, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys stands in stark contrast to its successful spinoff Xena: Warrior Princess. Although constrained by what the networks would stand for, Xena consciously courted a lesbian audience via increasingly heavy hints -- most famously in the episode 'A Day in the Life' -- about the relationship between the heroine and her sidekick Gabrielle. Audiences responded enthusiastically to this erotically charged subtext. The implicit romantic tension clearly helped the show expand its market share, broadening its appeal beyond the obvious, and still indispensable, core demographic of teenaged boys. (The TV series Buffy, the Vampire Slayer enjoyed a similar mid-run rejuvenation when it brought Buffy's best friend, Willow, out of the closet.) Receptions of the show in unofficial media, too, embraced the idea of a hidden relationship between Xena and Gabrielle. It became a favourite topic for female-authored slash fiction online. Meanwhile, a string of 'unauthorized' episode guides and series companions titillated the guys by cataloguing the show's double entendres and smoldering glances. None of this fan activity transferred back to the original Legendary Journeys, which shared Xena's commercially essential core audience of male adolescents. The scriptwriters' assumption -- almost certainly correct -- was that this audience would find Xena's hinted lesbianism alluring but would switch channels at any hint of a gay leading man." (p. 63-64) "Sincerely tongue-in-cheek, Legendary Journeys and Xena were worthy successors to the Herculean excesses of the sixties pepla. They represent the latest growth spurt of a Hydra-headed monster that has swallowed the myths of other Greek heroes and continues to gorge on everything from gladiators to kung fu. The ancient Hercules franchise has been rejuvenated." (p. 65) While criticizing the film Troy, Nisbet writes "The literal horseplay of the final reel signals Troy's final descent into genre-confused bathos; we might expert Xena, Warrior Princess to show up at any moment. Indeed, in Xena's own cheekily revisionist Girl Power version, Xena and Helen stow away in the horse and make a clean getaway, rolling out of the burning city towards new adventures. Certainly Xena would feel pretty much at home in Troy [the film]. This is surely the last thing the production designers intended; but the film's insistently 'ethnic', Pacific rim-oriented mise-en-scene makes the comparison inevitable. ... Xena might be visually a shoo-in for a Troy cameo but, on this evidence, she'd have rapidly become very bored there. Her own franchise is, unsurprisingly, happily multi-ethnic." (p. 83-84) At the end of his book, Nisbet writes " The miracle is that other receptions are creeping in. Xena and the rest have proved that Greece can be commodified for a mass audience and can turn old myths ("Hercules" and "Western Tradition" alike) on their heads. We've seen that an ever more diverse and participatory popular culture is leaving the old claims of academic mastery and cultural ownership looking increasingly threadbare." (p 139-140) In his annotated bibliography, Nisbet writes that Quality Popular Television: Cult TV, the Industry and Fans, a 2003 UK book edited by Mark Jancovich, is "a usefully diverse collection of essays, including some Xena material." (p. 149) I guess I'll have to look for Jancovich's book next. Boeotian ************************************** Get a sneak peek of the all-new AOL at http://discover.aol.com/memed/aolcom30tour ========================================================= This has been a message to the chakram-refugees list. To unsubscribe, send a message to majordomo@smoe.org with "unsubscribe chakram-refugees" in the message body. Contact meth@smoe.org with any questions or problems. ========================================================= ------------------------------ End of chakram-refugees-digest V7 #80 *************************************