from Hercules and Xena Yearbook (Topps) 1998 pgs. 4-7

ercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess have taken Greek gods, heroes, and adventures to popular heights beyond all expectations. Their triumphs in ratings wars over sitcom families, police officers, and other familiar titans of syndicated series have left programming heads pondering, how did Athens and Amphipolis conquer Hollywood? The answers say much about how television, America's electronic bard, has cunningly refitted the ancient tales to speak to our own age, our own hopes and desires.

Beginning with five TV movies in 1994, Hercules: The Legendary Journeys has topped cinematic traditions that had stood since the "sword and sandal flicks of the 1950s. Those earlier epics and their legion of low-budget sequels (Son of Samson, The Son of Spartacus) had imagined a world of humorless Ancients living in a dry, dusty clime and speaking stilted "period" dialogue. Taking this as a model of what not to do, the new Hercules series has avoided high-flown phrases in favor of casual, contemporary speech. And in place of sandy suggestions of Greece, viewers have been treated to the unfamiliar beauty of New Zealand's lush forests, rivers, and snow-capped mountains. It is a primordial look for a timeless mythic world - one the Greeks themselves might have embraced had they the chance to leave their rocky isles for and Elysian paradise.

Hercules has also evolved from the physically and emotionally muscle-bound he-men of countless movie "spectacles" into a sleeker champion; as star Kevin Sorbo explained, "a quarterback rather than a lineman."

Unlike the most memorable screen Hercules of an earlier generation, Steve Reeves, Sorbo appears approachable rather than intimidating, charming rather than glowering. Forgoing the club and arrows for which the mythic Hercules was famed. Sorbo's Olympian for the '90s brandishes instead a surprising sensitivity and sly sense of humor. Ready to befriend as well as to defend people in need, he is at once courageous and compassionate, physically invincible yet emotionally vulnerable.

Nice guys finish first: Kevin Sorbo's Hercules has been rescuing imperiled mortals since his very first telemovie, proving himself a champion in the ratings arena. Above: some classic cliffhanging from'...And Fancy Free."

The heart of Hercules' story, of course, remains adventure, and the new tales offer a sensual blend of rousing stories and stunning production. The legendary journeys let Hercules (and audiences) encounter exotic lands, beautiful women intent to pare clothing costs to a minimum, flamboyant villains (some human, others not so), and startlingly hip Olympians like Aphrodite, the Goddess of Love, who surfs in her clam shell, strums beach party music, and speaks the latest Valley Girl lingo. Fight scenes inventively mix hints of Eastern martial arts with roundhouses worthy of John Wayne that may send the rough-and-ready New Zealand "stuntees" flying twenty feet or more. And computer-generated marvels like the half-human, half-equine Centaurs, sword-wielding skeletons, and a flying (and talking) dragon pay exciting homage to the pioneering special effects wizard Ray Harryhausen, whose mythical creatures in Jason and the Argonauts (1963) awed film-goers a generation earlier.

In September 1995, the series Xena: Warrior Princess launched its own dizzying triple-somersault toward ratings success, cult status, and critical praise in such diverse pillars of Americana as TV Guide, the Village Voice, and (in the cover story of its 25th anniversary issue) Ms. Magazine. Fans of Hercules could connect with many familiar pleasures on Xena: the verdant New Zealand scenery, the mix of action and humor, the casual use of modern expressions instead of stilted "classical" speech, and above all, the presence of a towering hero whose adventures unfold in a golden age of myth. Beyond these Herculean virtues, Xena offers delights found nowhere else.

There is, first, the Hong Kong-flavored action that goes far beyond anything ever before seen on TV. Whereas Hercules is champion of brawn, Xena is all slashing movement: quick, powerful, full-extension kicks, tosses of her deadly chakram (a weapon dating to sixteenth-century Persia) that bank unerringly off two, three, many surfaces to find their targets, and airborne acrobatics that would be the envy of Olympic gymnasts.

The boldest departure from Hercules is the character of Xena herself - flawed, brooding, and dangerous. While Hercules and Xena may roam the same mythic universe, Xena does not share either his mythic pedigree or his moral purity. Originally a guest villain on Hercules whose life expectancy spanned only a three-episode story arc, Xena changed from a murderous schemer to an honorable if errant warrior and finally, a genuine heroine. Yet as played by Lucy Lawless, a performer of extraordinary range and presence, Xena's lethal impulses as a one-time conqueror are never far from the surface. The series therefore centers on her struggles to overcome not only predatory "gods, warlords, and kings" but also the sins of her past and the savagery in her blood.

A memorable sequence from Xena's "A Day in tha Life." The Xena-Gabrielle relationship has been discussed at length, and is carefully presented to allow various interpretations.

Xena indeed most closely resembles the Hercules of ancient lore: a vaunted but dangerously volatile hero who slew not only monsters and warlords but also his wife and children during a bout of madness. Such horrific deeds fit the ancient Greek view of a world marked by mindless violence as well as courage, and by terrible human weakness as well as great strength and moral purpose. The producers of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys understandably passed on this bleak vision of the world's strongest man. But they understood that there was no escaping Xena's moral ambiguity. Instead her hard and uncertain climb toward virtue would be central to her legend, offering dramatic possibilities the Ancients would have relished.

According to executive producer Rob Tapert, while Hercules stands out for his decency, Xena is a character in transition, who has still to find herself: "The best episodes of Xena are those where we peel away and see a little bit of the inside of her character. They're inherently more dramatic situations because she's such a conflicted character." "[Xena's] got the devil on her shoulder," Lucy Lawless said, "and that's why you watch her. You never know which way she's going to jump."

Both Hercules and Xena have preserved the Greek mythic landscape but with renovations attuned to modern values and concerns. Just as the shadowy realm of The Twilight Zone let Rod Serling tell stories with a social edge, so, too, the legendary journeys have led through a dense thicket of current issues. The idealism of the American civil rights movement finds mythic resonance in "Centaur Mentor Journey," when Hercules joins the Centaurs in a nonviolent march toward drinking fountains reserved for humans. "Let the Games Begin" gives Hercules' legendaey founding of the Olympics a pacifist twist, as he gets nations to compete in the arena instead of on the battlefield (make sports, not war). And America's "War Wounds" from Vietnam are echood in a tale of Greek soldiers who find themselves shunned on their return from Troy and, with Hercules' help, demand respect for their bitter sacrifice.

While the Greek tales took a largely tragic view of human nature, the reinvented legends on Hercules and Xena look always toward redemption. Xena's turn toward good under the guidance first of her mentor Hercules, then of her friend Gabrielle, is an ongoing testament to this distinctly American faith that people can remake their lives. So are the recurring adventures of Jason, a tragic figure in Greek myth but a hero reborn on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. According to the Ancients, Jason won glory by capturing the fabled Golden Fleece but later lost his crown and family in scandal, then spent his days grieving on his old ship until killed by a falling beam. Hercules echoes this tragic tale in "Once a Hero" by showing Jason as a drunkard haunted by past failures. But through the nurturing friendship of Hercules, Jason recovers his self-respect and his throne, along with the Golden Flecce. And he realizes that the inner strength of a hero endures.

The character Xena has been so cleverly woven into the ancient myths of Amazons, Centaurs, Olympian deities, the Fates, the Furies, and Hercules himself, that one may forget she sprang, like Athena, full-grown from the producers' brainstorming just a few years ago. Still, her modern, feminist sensibilities infuse every tale: "Beware Greeks Bearing Gifts" fixes not on Helen of Troy's beauty but her soul as she struggles, with Xena's help, to break free of a domineering husband; "Miss Amphipolis" stages - and skewers - history's first beauty pageant (this, for the title of "Miss Known World"); and in "Ulysses" Xena secretly helps the famous warrior-wanderer string his bow (which Homer relates only he could bend), suggesting that behind every male legend there stands a Warrior Princess.

Feminist themes were at best muted in the ancient tales but they form the heart of the modern mythmaking on Xena: Warrior Princess. The presence of an indomitable female warrior sharply departs from the male-centered heroics of The Illiad and The Odyssey - and, indeed, of American television. So, too, does the friendship between Xena and Gabrielle, whose terms of endearment have deepened as Gabrielle has grown from simply a spirited runaway into Xena's indispensable counselor and companion. Some viewers have speculatod about a romantic "subtext," a claim fueled by the characters' growing professions of mutual affection. What is undeniable is that Gabrielle's love of stories, people, and life has inspired and comforted a Warrior Princess seeking to rediscover her humanity.

Perhaps as remarkable as the popularity and longevity Hercules and Xena have enjoyed is their refusal simply to repeat past glories. The recently completed fourth season of Hercules let its hero experience loss (the death of his beloved mother, Alcmene), godhood (through a reunion with his father, Zeus, on Mount Olympus), and, not least, ballroom dancing (with the veteran cast member and eminent Shakespearean Michael Hurst as his female dance instructor). The third season of Xena meanwhile confounded every expectation, as the friendship between Xena and Gabrielle unraveled through deception and distrust, the two heroines purged their anger in an all-musical episode, and Gabrielle toppled from her lofty moral perch by killing a woman, gave birth to a demonic daughter, and later plunged (with her child) to apparent death to save Xena. Long past the point when many series become wholly predictable, the legendary journeys of both Hercules and Xena still gleam with possibility.

In addition to being a noted TV historian and critic (he wrote Doubleday Books' Official Guides to both Hercules and Xena), author ROBERT WEISBROT has penned several mainstream texts, including Freedom Bound: A History of America's Civil Rights Movement. A professor of American history at Colby College, he lives in Waterville, Maine.

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