Yet, you should note that while these bimbos and their shows don’t give any real insights into antiquity, they DO give quite interesting insights into today’s modernity…

I’m seriously considering becoming an evil overlord, it seems to be a funny and very rewarding career, and some day you may get lucky and have your grandiose final battle against one of these fertile hollywood-grown L.A. bimbos… and taste defeat from their hands…

I hate to to tell you that I watched both of these shows, which I thought were supposed to have been camp, not actual depictions of the old classics.

Unfortunately these days, many public school students in the US are not taught about Greek and Roman mythology and folklore. This is also true of most Protestant and Catholic schools in this country.

Sadly, you may be right that most people who watched these two TV series did not realize that they were camp, and had no knowledge of the actual stories.

@Leonardo: If I were you I would send my application overlord to Hollywood asap. Who knows? Maybe they are just looking for a guy like you?!

@Judi: Shame on you!

I agree without the proper education you can’t enjoy the ‘campness’ of such shows. That’s the danger or power of Hollywood: fiction becomes ‘reality’.

I think it’s pretty extreme to say that people who take creative liberties with history or mythology should be “crucified for their sins” - in this day and age, there are hundreds of thousands of variations and renditions of many types of stories and genres from all over the world. This is something that is not in the individual’s control - people are going to continue to change and create their own versions of history and mythology. With this said, the only think we can control is our individual education and awareness.

Shows like Hercules/Xena/etc. were not created to be offensive to people or to history, nor are they supposed to be regarded as accurate historical resources - they are variations that spawn from different creative minds. Take Disney, for example - most of their fairy tale films are heavily tweaked, and that’s accepted because they are targeting a certain type of audience.

A lot of people are quick to blame Hollywood and other types of media for things like teaching our children bad morals or not accurately depicting history or mythology, when ultimately it’s the parents’ (and the individual’s) responsibility to do that. If someone is watching shows Hercules/Xena as an accurate source of history or mythology, I would say there is a bigger problem than those shows being inaccurate - anyone can look up accurate historical and mythological references on the internet in less than 5 minutes. Thing is, today most people expect that such information be hand-fed to them, and ultimately this is the biggest problem at hand - we are just lazy. We live in an era where information about ANYTHING is readily available, so blaming something that’s obviously targeted as to being nothing but fun is irrelevant. If the individual fails to educate themselves in history/mythology/etc, the fault lies in nobody else but the individual.

@jk: Thanks for your detailed response.

I can understand your argument that fundamental story types, hero archetypes and story lines get reused and constantly tweaked.

But …

I think so many historical stories or original myths are so MUCH better than the twisted stuff.

There is still no good movie or TV series about the Trojan war - and it has all the action, blood, sex and drama Hollywood so much loves. Wolfgang Petersen’s version was a joke - so was the “Alexander” movie.