THIS WEEK IN XENA NEWS... TWXN 94 08/01/97 Friday The advance sheet of XENA MEDIA REVIEW (XMR): http://xenafan.com/xmr Excerpts from the following cites will appear in future issues of XMR. From the editor: 1. WHOOSH! No. 11 hits the web today. Interviews with Hudson Leick (Callisto), Michael Levine (director), and Robert Field (editor). Features include: Maslow's Theories and THE PRICE; Callisto and the Furies; Volcanoes as a restraining device for gods; a Lesbian appreciation of XWP; declining bodycounts; and Xena as a role model. Series include: Changing Times and the Gabrielle Scrolls. Check it out at http://thirdstory.com/whoosh 2. A solo article for the weekend and kind of fun. Ron Wolfe tries to make sense of our society' current obsession with ancient Greece. 3. On Monday, Xena becomes fodder for a Florida opinion editorial; a Hollywood Reporter story reveals how HERC and XENA are saving Universal's behind; yet another character in a movie is compared to our warrior princess in a review; we are shown how to order a catalog from the fanclub; and an very suspicious name is reported for a new baby. And now to the Greek Revival... [ ] 03-11-97 ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE. Tuesday. Page 1E. 1698 words. "Greek Revival" By Ron Wolfe (Arkansas Democrat-Gazette) REPRINT: Talk about a thunderbolt. The hottest new in-crowd is Hercules, Homer and a sudden celebrity lineup of other ancient Greeks and their gods and heroes. They're back, but not the way you learned in school. No more struggling over Homer's epics line-for-line of tiny print, until the words drift like the Wandering Rocks that nearly pulverized Odysseus. These are ancients for the '90s: slick, hip, fast, user-friendly. Now, the once-anguished Hercules (Heracles, the Greeks called him) is Mr. Nice Guy all the way. This summer, he will be singing. And now, TV does better than the Oracle at Delphi for spotting trends, and Greeks come bearing gifts all over -- gifts that may have hidden meanings. Like these: The best-rated TV series in weekly syndication is "Xena: Warrior Princess," a spin-off from the also-hit series, "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys." In the works: "Young Hercules." May 18 and 19, NBC television will cast off its four-hour miniseries "Odyssey" with Armand Assante as the wandering king of Ithaca. Meantime, an updated musical version of Homer's tour de force is sailing toward Broadway. June 27, Disney will open its cartoon version of "Hercules," a musical the studio dubs an "irreverent and wacky new animated epic comedy." Young "Herc" must learn heroic ways with the help of a stubby satyr named Phil, voiced by Danny DeVito. Robert Fagles' new translation of Homer's "The Odyssey" might be an oddity any other time, but now it comes amid a chariot's load of new books about the classics. Among them, the "Classical Cookbook" serves up ancient recipes, and Oxford University Press has new editions of "Frogs and Birds" by the playwright Aristophanes, the Neil Simon of his day. Even among staid academics, Martin Bernal's "Black Athena" strikes sparks like the Olympian blacksmith Hephaestus. Bernal claims the Greeks snitched their vaunted civilization from Egypt, a black African culture -- prompting the question, was Socrates black? Latest fuel on the fire: "Black Athena Revisited" from the University of North Carolina Press. "Star Wars" (1977) is set in the nevertime of science fiction, but its story of the dewy lad-turned-galactic-hero might as well be Greeks in space. It follows the ancient formula of the heroic quest. Mythologist Joseph Campbell described that formula in "The Hero With a Thousand Faces" and other studies of mythology, movie director George Lucas learned it well, and Darth Vader found out too late. The current re-release of "Star Wars" makes it Hollywood's all-time biggest money-maker in the United States, close to $ 400 million. This is the tale I pray the divine Muse to unfold to us. -- Homer All in all, not even Odysseus came back with so much commotion as Greek culture, history and mythology right now -- old times are being refined into Greek Lite. Hercules, for example. In old mythology, the mighty half-god killed his wife and three children in a drunken rage. His sentence was slavery under nasty King Eurystheus, who stuck him with the world's 12 worst jobs. Old Hercules' raging guilt drove him from one killer task to another, tormenting lions and picking off dragons with a Type A workaholic's obsession. The ancient Greeks revered him, but they lacked the gaudy cover of TV Guide to say so. "He's stupendous!" the magazine's Feb. 1 cover heralds. "He's spectacular! And America's HOT FOR HERCULES!" TV's Hercules is something else, though -- played with macho charm, camp humor and flowing Fabio blond hair by TV actor Kevin Sorbo. Far from Mount Olympus, he grew up in Minnesota watching muscleman Steve Reeves' tons beefier "Hercules" movies. In TV Guide, he concedes that "Xena" star Lucy Lawless "could probably beat me up pretty easily." But even in such a playful version of the myth, people may be searching for -- and finding -- deeper meaning. "I think it's tapping into a hunger for myth, a hunger for something to nurture the spirit," says Dr. James Rush, chairman of philosophy and religion at Philander Smith College in Little Rock. This nation of materialists is headed toward the millennium with a sense of "great spiritual exhaustion," he says. "There's a spiritual side to us that's been neglected for so long, and now it's starting to come back again. I think we're grasping." Almost traditionally, Americans in search of heroes have looked to cops and cowboys. But the ancients fill a deeper need, Rush says. "The West doesn't nourish us anymore," he says. Mystery stories may divert us, but they don't answer spiritual longings. "They aren't deep enough." The success of "Star Wars" startled industry analysts ("has studio execs buzzing over the impact," Variety reports), but Rush could have told them. "'Star Wars' is an archetypical battle between light and darkness, good and evil," he says, "like the battle inside of us." People may think they want snazzy special effects as they queue up for "Star Wars." But Rush suspects what they really want is reconnection with myth and spirituality. "Everything is in transition now," he says. "Time seems compressed. In the midst of this, (the ancient myths) feel solid. They haven't changed. They've always been there." We're on a mission from God. -- The Blues Brothers Greek myths explained nature before science could. Lightning was King Zeus lobbing his thunderbolts. The sea roiled when angry Poseidon stirred the water with his trident to wreck ships. But they also dealt with questions still unanswered -- all the mysteries of life that haunt the questions: Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? Often, the Greeks looked for answers in their tales of heroic quests like Jason's in search of the Golden Fleece. These stories teach how to boldly go -- sometimes literally -- into hell like Orpheus, who plunged into the dire Underworld to bring his wife back from the dead. The classics can be grim going. (Orpheus fails, and he plays such sad music after that, the audience kills him.) Taken too seriously, the stories themselves can be risky, Rush says. "If you take them too seriously, then you hold grudges and get into judgments and harmful thinking," he says. The pessimist's moral to every quest story is that all roads lead to hell, and you'd best be on your way. Modern comfort-seekers naturally sidestep the Greek originals in favor of TV's tamed mythology. "Although it's very light, there's still a resonance there, and you can feel it or experience it in a way that is nonthreatening," Rush says. In fact, audiences have been going after candied quest stories for ages. "Hansel and Gretel" is one, and movies from "The Wizard of Oz" and "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" to "The Terminator" are just different spins on the same old idea. Each is the story of someone who leaves home, like it or probably not, with a tough job to do in a strange and hostile land. Sympathetic metaphors abound. Jason's quest is like that of everyone else who leaves home for work, risking another day's battering. It is every person's story from the dawn of time: sailing from birth to death, caught in rapids and whirlpools, and hoping like crazy the trip is worthwhile. A myth is a female moth. -- Wrong answer on a school quiz If more people are rediscovering the old myths now, the late Joseph Campbell's teachings are one Herculean reason. Campbell collaborated with interviewer Bill Moyers for the PBS series, "The Power of Myth," and a best-selling companion book in 1988. The series has sold steadily on home video ever since, and is available from Mystic Fire Video, New York. "What we're dealing with is a society perpetually fighting fragmentation," says Mystic Fire representative Joshua Leonard. "We have such a breakdown of actual, hand-to-hand communication in this age of communication. I think as we get more and more into technology, there's a resurgence of the visceral, and theology and myth, and how that all compiles to make us." Myth goes back to "basic elements," he says. "You remember what it was like to survive alone, to live on instinct. We've forgotten that." No wonder if some of that primordial punch comes through in "Star Wars." "Lucas did an amazing amount of research with Joseph Campbell before he made 'Star Wars,' " Leonard says. Steven Spielberg, John Boorman and George Miller are other movie directors clearly influenced by Campbell, Hollywood story analyst Christopher Vogler writes in his "The Writer's Journey: Mythic Structure for Storytellers and Screenwriters." The book is a how-to guide for writers who want to "tap into the mythological core which exists in all of us." "When we writers apply the ancient tools of the archetypes and hero's journey to modern stories," he writes, "we stand on the shoulders of the mythmakers and shamans of old. When we try to heal our people with the wisdom of myth, we are the modern shamans." It works. "Xena's" TV producers made up a myth to fit alongside that of TV's Hercules: the story of the peasant girl whose quest for power has brought her to wisdom. Now, as the story goes, she is "an ally to all who need a strong arm and a pure heart." And heavy ratings. It may work other ways, too. Personal mythology is a therapy technique that encourages patients to imagine their own life stories -- to live the meaningful lives they imagine. Downsized workers might imagine themselves as mythical heroes, forced to cast off and seize the Golden Fleece somewhere else. The old magic might work two- and three-times watered down in TV's burgeoning other series that try to mimic "Hercules" and "Xena." Make way for Sinbad and Robin Hood. And who knows? It might even work to turn off the TV, go back and read the classics. "I just think there's a lot of wisdom in myths," Rush says. "They strike deep at a part of ourselves that is not being nourished by mundane, everyday life. There is a deep need. We're just getting started." [Because of the length of this article, the Notices have been left off. Please refer to the previous issue for a complete set of notices]