#xena 1x13

[lesbianelsas]

How long would you be gone? - Maybe four or five years, or… Maybe a little less, if I study real hard.

Xena: Warrior Princess - 1x13 "Athens City Academy of the Performing Bards"

#xena #xenaedit #xwp #xwpedit #xena 1x13 #xena s01e13 #Athens City Academy of the Performing Bards #guess who's doing a rewatchhhh #my gifsets

[faithandbuffy]

Going into 1x13 I was like aw man a xena-lite episode there’s gonna be nothing gay but literally the whole episode is gabrielle going around like “Have you heard about my girlfriend? My girlfriend is so cool. Did I tell you what my girlfriend did the other day?”

#watching xwp

[warriorbard-always]

“I only remember one story told me when I was young. It was about two orphans who decided to search the world for their families. And it’s all about their adventures and how they kept searching. But the part I remember most is the end.” “And when the first man-” “reached the end of his journey, he found himself-” “at the beginning.”

#xwp #xwpedit #xena x gabrielle #1x13 #season 1 #xena and gabrielle #renee o'connor #lucy lawless #rewatching xwp😍 #my gifs #xena: warrior princess

[mikereads]

I’m currently watching 1x13 of Xena. Xena tells Gabrielle “your like a sister to me”. She often refers to her as family. Kara says the same thing about Lena and did so in s3. Xena and Gabrielle end up being one of the greatest love stories. The parallels are obvious come on cw.

#xena x gabrielle #supercorp endgame #supercorp #supergirl #xena the warrior princess #even Xena s creator pointed it out #s6 pls

[xenawarriorpodcast]

We have a second Xena influence to talk about this week. It’s...Spartacus! (No, I am Spartacus! I am Spartacus! I am Spartacus...). A big hit when it premiered in 1960, Spartacus was one of the huge-budgeted Hollywood sword and sandal epics that Italian Pepla were trying to imitate on the cheap. While other successful historical dramas of the time like Ben-Hur and The Ten Commandments had feted luminaries William Wyler and Cecil B. DeMille in the director’s chair, Spartacus is notable because it was entrusted to a relative ingenue: Stanley Kubrick, then only thirty years old. Star Kirk Douglas fired the film’s original director, Anthony Mann, in the first week of production and brought in young Kubrick to replace him. Hence Kubrick didn’t have the same meticulous level of control over Spartacus as he usually had on his films; he didn’t care for the script, clashed with the cinematographer, and relinquished final cut of the film to the studio. The resulting blend of roaring emotional spectacle and perverse Kubrickian detachment makes for a strange but effective film. Spartacus is both conventional and decidedly unconventional, much as Xena is.

1x13 “Athens City Academy for the Performing Bards” makes its own case for the ways in which Spartacus influenced Xena. The clip show episode features a crazily lengthy montage of clips from Spartacus, including the “I am Spartacus!” scene (which Xena homages in “The Black Wolf”) and a tearjerking crucifixion scene (which Xena will homage in “Destiny”... and ever after). But there are other resonances between Spartacus and Xena. Spartacus was written by Dalton Trumbo (yep, the guy Bryan Cranston played in that movie) one of the so-called “Hollywood 10,″ a screenwriter blacklisted for his involvement with the Communists. Until Spartacus, he’d been forced to write his scripts under a pseudonym, but Kirk Douglas fought to get him credit on the film, the first instance of the blacklist being defied in Hollywood. Spartacus can be read as an allegory for McCarthyism with its anti-authoritarian overtones and revolutionary hero -- just look at that scene above and think about all the Communist sympathizers who refused to turn in their own friends to the House Un-American Activities Committee. Xena, too, has a healthy distrust for authority, whether that authority is a god or a warlord at the head of an army.

The final connection between Xena and Spartacus is a mutual love of a good gay bath scene! The above scene between Laurence Olivier as General Crassus (if that name sounds familiar, it’s because the character of Crassus also appears on Xena, where he’s the third wheel in the Caesar-Pompey triangle) and Tony Curtis as Crassus’s slave Antoninus didn’t get past the censors, even though its homoeroticism is (sorta) coded in the famous exchange about oysters and snails. The scene wasn’t restored to the film until the 1991 re-release; by that point the studio had lost the original audio track, so the actors had to re-record their dialogue. This was easily done for Tony Curtis, then in his 60s, but Olivier had died in 1989. Anthony Hopkins, known for his dead-on Olivier impression, agreed to step in. Kubrick reportedly sent him a few pencil-written lines of direction to help him get into character. Well worth the effort; this tense, slightly surreal scene is one of the movie’s most memorable, and it provides important subtext that later informs Antoninus’s relationship with Spartacus.

Spartacus and Xena! Too great tastes that taste great together.

#xena #xena warrior princess #spartacus #lucy lawless #stanley kubrick #laurence olivier #tony curtis #anthony hopkins #xena influences #xena warrior podcast

[xenawarriorpodcast]

This week in Xena influences, it’s Peplum! In the late ‘50s, right before the Italian film industry started making spaghetti westerns, they were churning out sword-and-sandals epics otherwise known as peplum, plural pepla (taken from the name for the drapey Grecian robe). These movies, like the spaghetti westerns soon to follow, were made on the cheap, filmed in Italian, and later dubbed into English for international audiences. Pepla featured Biblical or Classical strong men figures like Samson, Goliath, and Hercules, muscle-bound and scantily clad as they faced off against armies and beasts both real (lions! tigers! bulls! oh my!) and mythological (dragons, vampires, and...moon men?). 

Easy to see how these movies’ irreverent b-movie treatment of classical myths went on to inspire Xena and Hercules. Speaking of Hercules, the biggest hit to come out of Peplum was also called Hercules. Released in 1958, it made more than $5 million at the US box office. The film starred charismatic American bodybuilder Steve Reeves, the Arnold Schwarzenegger of his day. Here he is in Hercules fighting the Cretan bull -- love the fun shots where the camera is sitting on the animal’s back!

Reeves would go on to star in a sequel, Hercules Unchained, as well as many other pepla including Goliath and the Barbarians, The Last Days of Pompeii, The Giant of Marathon, and The Thief of Baghdad. Sergio Leone even approached him to play the lead role in A Fistful of Dollars, but Reeves turned him down: "I turned the part down because it seemed to me impossible that the Italians could make a western.” A shoulder injury while filming a chariot race in The Last Days of Pompeii would eventually put an end to Reeves’s career as an action star. 

Xena episode 1x13 “Athens City Academy of the Performing Bards,” which we discuss in the current episode of our podcast, features clips from Steve Reeves’s Hercules whenever action-loving bard Stallonus and the stutterer Twickenham tell their stories. The poor quality of Hercules’s film transfer and the chintzy production values are used to represent the storytellers’ inexperience: Hercules is as close as they can get to bringing their tales to life. Poor Peplum!

#xena #xena warrior princess #hercules #steve reeves #xena influences #xena warrior podcast