Hercules surrounded by an "army of darkness" in the episode "Vanishing Dead".

Since its introduction in January 1995, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys has been a consistent ratings winner in the United States, the crown jewel among Universal Television's offerings, and the sole unqualified TV success of Renaissance Pictures, the outfit behind television's M.A.N.T.I.S. and American Gothic, as well as the feature films Darkman and Army of Darkness.

The show caught viewers' attention with a combination of pugilistic mayhem, sly humor, and the innovative use of the new generation of digital visual effects. All that, and especially the natural "good guy" appeal of Kevin Sorbo, have helped executive producers Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert breathe new life into the "sandal epic" genre, known to previous generations as a domain of overblown Hollywood epics, and bottomline Italian movie moguls. And now, the show's success has spawned a spinoff series poised for equal success. Xena: Warrior Princess stars Lucy Lawless as the title character, repeating her role from three well-received Hercules episodes of last year.

Tapert, whose partnership wlth Raimi extends back to their college days, comments on the birth of Hercules. "We were approached by Universal Studios to do some Hercules movies for their 'Action-Pak' series of television films; we wanted to do Conan, but the rights weren't available.

"So we watched the old Steve Reeves Hercules movies, and realized that we couldn't use that stilted dialogue and guys-in-togas. So we invented our own Golden Age mythology, with green pastures, no togas, and a conscious effort to modernize the dialogue - without making it 'hip.' We also didn't want to emphasize Hercules' feats of strength. Musclebound guys are hard to relate to, so we opted for a more athletic, good-looking kind of guy, someone you felt you could talk to."

Sorbo definitely has an athete's body - he's 6 foot 3 inches tall and weighs 215 fatless pounds - but he's unlikely to be mistaken for a world-class weightlifter. "People are so used to Steve Reeves or Lou Ferrigno, they think that Hercules must have huge muscles," Sorbo says, "but the show's producers didn't want to go that way. Critics originally didn't like that, they just didn't understand what the show was all about. Once they realized he is supposed to be more of a decathete, they loved it. People can identify with Hercules and say, 'Hey, he's like me,' and, 'I wish I could be like him.' He's approachable, attainable, the kind of guy you can share a beer with."

Part of the show's charm relies on a rudimentary emulation of the wild and wooly Hong Kong cinema style of fight choreography. Tapert explains, "Hong Kong action has always impressed me, particularly Tsui Hark's Once Upon a Time in China, Ching Siu Tung's Swordsman, and Ronny Yu's Bride with White Hair. We wanted to emulate them, but quickly found out that we couldn't incorporate a lot of the acrobatics, because it didn't fit Herc's character. He is the ultimate brawler and that precludes a lot of that."

Nevertheless, among the three trainers who helped prepare Sorbo for the role was fighting master Douglas Wong, who includes Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story among his credits. Wong put Sorbo through an accelerated version of his own "white lotus" martial arts training system, with the results of that training evident whenever Sorbo falls, rolls, or fights with sword or staff in the show's many action sequences. At the same time, Sorbo pursued similarly intense regimens in weightlifting and horseback riding.

Lucy Lawless as the princess from Amphipolis, the majestic Xena, in the "Prometheus" episode.

Although his period of intensive preparation is well behind him, Sorbo still lives a high-action lifestyle. "It's very physically demanding," he says. "I'm not a martial artist, but I do about 90 percent of my own stunts. In one fight, I was inside a temple on a scaffolding system and fought fifty doublesword-wielding guys. It was hard work, but I loved the fight - we did it in two days, and I'm quite proud of the results.

"I've seen the Hong Kong stuff, they're crazy - Rob and Sam are fans of those movies. I get hurt in Hercules, but in those films l'm sure people get injured. We have that style of action, our own tongue-in-cheek humor, and scripts with strong dramatic elements."

Upon the great success of Hercules and after the rating non-performance of Action Pack's subsequent Vanishing Sun shows, Universal turned again to the Renaissance partnership, and Tapert proposed a spinoff show, based on a character from the Hercules series. Xena, a warrior woman who, after doing her best to put Herc's head on a pike, was abandoned by her army when she learned that, deep down inside, she was really a compassionate person. Although no longer fighting for territory and the spoils of war, she remains a warrior, in defense of the defenseless and combatting the darkness of her barbaric times.

"At the start, the biggest problem was that the syndicators were leery about a female action show. Plus, they worried she would be a female Hercules", says Tapert. "We did everything we could to make her different."

Again, Tapert took inspiration trom Hong Kong films. "I have to give a great deal of credit to Bridget Lin. In some respects, we westernized her character from Swordsman and Bride with Whiite Hair films. A volatile dark character, yet still very feminine; you never know what she's going to do next."

Lucy Lawless, a New Zealand native, brings a natural thirst for adventure to the role. At 17, she abandoned college in midstudies in order to travel the world, grape picking on the Rhine and gold-mining deep in Australia's outback. She returned to Auckland, not yet 20, married, and mother to Daisy, now 7 years old. "Xena is as strong as any man or woman," Lawless says of her alter ego. "She's a bit dysfunctional, yet she understands the dark side of human nature. She's actually the person I could've been if I was born to different parents."

Lawless, too, was introduced to the "white lotus" system under the tutelage of Master Wong in preparation for her series. "Doing the fights is like doing a dance," she says. "They can be difficult, but when I see the results on the screen, well, it's really fabulous and quite rewarding."

Tapert adds, "With Xena, we stepped outside the boundaries of fight reality. In fact, when we pitched Xena, I made a demo reel of four Hong Kong movies, to show Universal the kind of action sequences we wanted to do in the show. Our rule in Xena is that you can't actually defy gravity, but we try to heighten the action beyond what most Americans have seen. Because she isn't a goddess, we can use more martial-artsy shuff, like a fighter running on top of people's heads, acrobatic flips, running up trees, fancier weaponry. It appeals to the Hercules audience, but the stories are geared to a slightly older audience."

Xena learns that, in ancient Thessaly, "watch you back" was rule one.

Another highlight of both shows is the generous use of visual effects, including some work that is sharply reminiscent of Ray Harryhausen-style stop-motion work. "Technology has changed so much over the past few years," says Tapert. "In regard to desktop animation, it is now easier for us to go to CGI [computer-generated imaging] than to spend six or eight weeks building and working with models and prosthetics. Our FX guys are really on the cutting edge working under incredible time constraints, yet they continue to excel, and deliver state of-the-art effects on a TV schedule and a ridiculously low budget. They've allowed us to incorporate the Ray Harryhausen-style animation into the shows, when five years ago we couldn't have done that. They are really the unsung heroes."

Leading this troop of unsung heroes into the magical realm of visual imagination is the show's visual effects supervisor Ken O'Neill (Dracula and Cliffhanger), working with two veteran 3-D animators. Doug Beswick first learned the techniques in Art Cloaky's Gumby studios, and has subsequently worked on scores of FX-laden features, including Star Wars; Kevin Kutchaver's credits include Return of the Jedi and The Addams Family.

"Although l've done FX work since 1985," says O'Neill, "our effects company, Flat Earth, has been around for one year. We are a garage for visual effects that concentrates on 3-D creatures, like the stuff you see in Jurassic Park and Jumanji, yet we do it in a particularly cost-effective and timely manner. We generate up to 63 shots per episode of 3-D animation on a TV budget."

From "Cast a Giant Shadow" - digital prestidigitation, or clever use of perspective?

Until very recently, those who wanted to stay on the cutting edge of CGI technology had to maintain a staff of researchers and programmers, like the team at Lucasfilm that later evolved into Pixar Studios. But increasingly powerful "off-the-shelf" software has become available that allows film-oriented creators to make magic happen on the computer desktop. "We are what they call 'alpha' and beta' testers," says O'Neill, "the first or second users to receive software from companies that develop software for specific hardware platforms - sort of like a test pilot."

The earliest episodes of Hercules included a fair amount of location-based puppetry special effects, but the production has since gone over to the primary use of CGI for creature creation. And what creatures they are: giant snakes, pterodactyls, three-headed dogs, half-human snake demons, centaurs, assassins made of fire and water, two-headed fanned-lizard serpents, bird women and, recently, eight (count'em) sword-wielding skeletons. Not only do Sorbo and Lawless have their hands full, but so does O'Neill.

According to O'Neill, the creature creation process begins with a series of sketches submitted for approval, until the staff comes up with an agreed design for the creature. "Next, I have a sculpture made up of the creature - a three-foot sculpture of the whole body - and a separate, larger-scale head is made, with more details, for closeups. The sculptures are painted and sent to a scanning house, which is a place that takes a 3-D, physical object like a creature head, and digitizes it into data, a computer model. We can then manipulate it in the computer. We'll take that scanned data and flatten it out like a bear rug, and place a skeleton inside, which can then be used to define the way we want the creature to move around."

Cetainly the biggest challenge was a pet project of producer Tapert. "Jason and the Argonauts is my favorite mythological film," he says. "I directed a sort of 'revisited episode' from Jason, which of course features the famous skeleton fight. It's really cool."

Sorbo agrees that the episode, and that particular sequence, was quite a rush. "It was a dream episode. Even as a kid, this was a fantasy for me, watching those skeletons rising up out of the soil and then fighting Jason. I thought, 'Of all the six billion people in the world, I'm the only one fighting the skeletons!' This was definitely my faxorite episode. We had seven fights in it; and this is by far the biggest action episode."

While you may have heard of shopping on the Internet, you certainly never heard of shopping for skeletons on the Internet - yet that is one way that Flat Earth managed to bring the sequence in economically, without compromise. A few discreet inquiries in the appropriate Usent newsgroups located a fellow animator who had created a detailed digital skeleton for another project. "We bought that skeleton model," explains O'Neill, "and modified it to match the skeleton that we used in the practical photography. "

From producer Tapert's "pet project," a digital homage to Harryhausen's finest moment.

O'Neill marshaled all available resources to face the challenge of creating a sequence that would stand up to the masterful Harryhausen original, a bar-none classic in the annals of cinema effects. " I went back and researched what they did on Jason," he recalls, "then sat down with Rob and explained what we could do. Earlier this year, we had Hercules fight a character made of fire. For that episode, I had a guy dressed in a green suit, and choreographed all the action with him and Kevin's stunt guy. We then filmed it with the green suit guy fighting Kevin, then had Kevin do the fight by himself.

"In this episode, for each of the eight skeletons, I had guys wear numbered white T-shirts; we rehearsed the sequences until everyone had a feel for the choreography, then filmed it once with the T-shirt guys, then again, with Kevin fighting by himself.

"Once the material got back from location, I had the editors cut together two versions, one with the T-shirt guys, then one with Kevin fighting by himself that matched exactly, shot-for-shot. The animators then studied the T-shirt guys version and animated the skeletons with reference to the action of the individual T-shirt guys.

The numbered T-shirts helped the editors to recognize the continuity from shot to shot, allowing the sequence to be edited smoothly and rapidly, and provided a template that could be followed in editing the shots of Sorbo fighting alone; and the animators were able to use the T-shirt version as a reference, tracking each animated character's movements and appropriate reactions to Sorbo and the set.

But the T-shirt version was a guide, not a straightjacket; the animators stretched out with some moves never performed by the human actors - or any human actors. "These skeletons are running around themselves, throwing swords back and forth," says O'Neill. "Each had its own quirks and character. Some of them have got these little brows that are shaded so they can have their own personality. And I talked Rob into doing a shot where, during the fight, one of the skeletons loses its sword. Instead of picking it up, it reaches down and breaks off a rib and uses it like a sword."

Tapert left us with his thoughts for the future of both legendary heroes. "I love the fights in Xena but the Hercules fights are getting just a little bit dull, and too repetitive. It's hard with a guy who punches people to continue to come up with new brawls that are interesting without going into too much kung-fu. But we are continuing to try, still being careful not to use too many gadgets.

"For both shows, we'll start to raise a few stories from the Bible. We're going to break out of some of the ruts in Hercules that we are falling into. Lucy is becoming more comfortable with Xena and becoming a much better actress. We plan to do a pure slaystick episode, and perhaps a few dark ones. So going light, then going real dark, we are expanding in all directions, and trying to give the audience an interesting mix."