Between you and me, the first time I saw Xena the Warrior Princess on the TV screen, I was bowled over. I do not believe I was alone in that regard. Here was this beautiful, exotic, strong, well-armed and well-formed woman that you would want on your side if you got into a bar brawl. And afterward you would be pleased to take her home to meet the folks for Sunday dinner, all of which is an unbeatable, if highly unusual, parlay.Xena is, of course, played by Lucy Lawless, a New Zealander who recently married Robert Tapert, executive producer (with his fellow Michigan State alumnus, Sam Raimi) of the hit syndicated series from Studios USA, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. This is the series from which was derived Xena: Warrior Princess, and now, for the Fox network, the new Young Hercules, both also exec produced by the team of Tapert and Raimi.
And what was Tapert's reaction when he first set eyes on Lawless? "Well, it wasn't love at first sight," he says. "Seeing her for the first time I just liked her as an actress. I saw her in the dailies for Hercules and I said, 'She really is the Warrior Princess.'"
But she wasn't the producers' first choice. "Oddly enough," Tapert says, "circumstance played its part here. The woman who was supposed to play Xena fell out. That left us with two days to get a replacement before we had to start filming. I had already met Lucy at a wrap party after Hercules in New Zealand, but I didn't envision her as Xena until I saw her that particular morning in the dailies. She was playing the girlfriend of a centaur."
And now Lawless as Xena has burst into the fore as the centerpiece of a television and sociological phenomenon. And just who, exactly, is this Xena woman?
Turns out she's a Bulgarian. "Technically," Tapert explains, "Xena, as we created her, is from is the ancient name for the country that would eventually become Bulgaria. They were pretty tough, those Thracians. The warriors in Thrace were the ones who gave Greece a lot of trouble long ago. We have a song in the beginning of the show - it's a Bulgarian woman singing in, of course, Bulgarian. It's possible that not too many viewers recognize the song as Bulgarian."
Now, as for that weapon that Xena employs to dispose of villains, it is known, Tapert says, as a chakram. "The word is Persian and it is a weapon that dates back to the fourteenth or fifteenth century. You use it to kill your enemy, which it does, and then it comes hurling back to you like a boomerang. I've always been interested in history, and that helps in coming up with these weapons."
And what of Xena's highly individual war cry?
"I said to Lucy one day, 'We need for you to have some sort of distinguishing yell, a war cry. Something like the yell that Tarzan used to do. It has to be aggressive and guttural.' Lucy nodded and then, with no further discussion, she gave out this war cry. It was perfect. 'That's it,' I said. 'That is definitely it.' "
There is throughout these shows the small matter of time: its strictures remain nonexistent by normal standards. The stories and the characters - including Xena and her colleague in adventure, Gabrielle (Renee O'Connor) - are permitted to move around throught the centuries.
"We stick close to the pre-Chrisian time," Tapert says. "That is to say, we don't deal in A.D. - we go with B.C. and that gives us enough space to move around. In that sense, we're like Star Trek moving around through the different galaxies. We just didn't want to be fixed in any one century. We didn't want to be limited in our storylines."
If Tapert had in mind a goal for his shows about Xena the Warrior Princess, he says it can be summed up in a sentence: 'We wanted to do a buddy story with women. That was it. It would be Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid with women. It would be Thelma and Louise with Xena and Gabrielle. It might be Cagney & Lacey set in older times. There would even be some Laverne & Shirley going on here.
"We are dealing with the profound changes in our society. We're concerned with women's empowerment. And we're out to tell stories and be entertaining. We're out to reach young girls and also to have our two women alluring to guys."
And of course they are indeed.
