Xena: Warrior Princess - series review

Xena was a successful show which has aired in more than 108 countries around the world since 1998. In 2004 and 2007, it was ranked #9 and #10 on TV Guide's Top Cult Shows Ever and the title character was ranked #100 on Bravo's 100 Greatest TV Characters. However, no decent series review exists online. Therefore, I have written one...

Xena: Warrior Princess - a series review

 

Nice review. I like the show. I used to watch it on occasion.

 

Nice review! I started losing track of the show after the first few seasons, and don't really know how it all ended up. There were definitely some awful, skippable episodes, but then again there were plenty of excellent ones as well. The Callisto episodes are my favorites, especially "Return of Callisto".

A local station has been rerunning it weeknights at 7, back-to-back with Hercules, and I've been catching a few here and there. They're getting to the end of season 2 now, so I'll be looking forward to season 3 with Maternal Instinct, The Bitter Suite, etc. Fun stuff!

 

Used to be part of my late 90s Saturday afternoon off ritual-along with Hercules. They called the two Actionpack. Enjoyable...

 

I have the entire run in the brick pack seasons. Never got to see the last season until the DVDs came out. The "Action Pack" stunk out the joint and our station dropped it.
"BRING ME HER HEAD!!!!!"

Seriously, My opinion of the show is that everyone has the story backwards. Its not the story of Xena, its the story Gabrielle, the battling bard of Potadia and her journey from simple village girl to an Amazon princess, warrior and consorter with Gods. Keep that in mind as you watch the last episodes.

 

Loved Hercules, but Kevin Sorbo has ruined it for me. Every time he shows up on TV anymore he makes me hate him.

 

It is one wacky show. I remastered about 50 episodes for the producer, and the thing is all over the place. I'll say this: the show has some heart and some outright (deliberate) laughs in spots, and the music is not bad.

 

By Joe DeLuca. Another Detroit connection to the show. He did the music from his home up here.

 

I loved the show and have the episodes on DVD (both UK and US releases) and watch it every few years. Much prefered it to Hercules, but I suppose two very good looking women was a big plus.

It would have been nice to have a Blu-Ray release but I know that the film quality wasn't there, particularly in the earlier seasons. I believe that it was shot in 16x9 in the later seasons but the effects were framed in 4x3, so it would be prohibitive to re-do them.

 

Aphrodite

 

It was discussed, but the HD remastering costs would be mind-numbingly expensive -- I'm guessing $40K-$50K per episode. Assuming 134 episodes, that'd be roughly $6 million, maybe $5 million on the low side. And that would be if they could round up all the effects shots and do them cheap.

I actually remastered a whole bunch of Hercules, Xena, and Highlander at the same time, and the company was mainly concerned about Highlander. They were very exacting on how they wanted those shows to look.

And I think got nominated for an Emmy here and there.

 

Xena was fantastic. Everyone hamming it up, and such amusing dialogue and inventive action. The Raimi-verse. So good. And it was huge in the gay (lesbian) community too.

I didn't make it to the last season, but I've watched the first few seasons more than once.

I remember trekking to Best Buy every few months to drop $40-$60 per season on DVD each time a new season would be released. (It had to be Best Buy because they always had a bonus disc there.) That kind of outlay speaks to how good a show it was.

I don't really feel the need to have Xena or Herc in HD - unlike Highlander, which I'd absolutely revisit in HD.

There was some kind of upscaled version of the first season of Highlander released on BluRay - sold only by mail order from a company that was "Legendary" for its pushy customer service. Oddly, it was only upscaled to 720, leaving everyone's TV sets to do a second wave of up scaling. I don't mean to disparage the effort (especially if Vidiot had a hand in it) but response was not good. At the time, the remaining producer said a remastered (rebuilt) version would never happen because the film elements had all been destroyed in "a fire" but it was generally assumed that this was just a bull* story intended to get fans to stop asking him about it.

If the film elements were organized (which we can assume they aren't, even if they aren't ashes) I'd have thought a more lucrative way to test the interest in Highlander BluRays would have been be to reassemble a few of the more intense two-part episodes, or maybe the first episode which guest-starred Christopher Lambert - since you just know that some fraction of fans of the original films would buy an episode with Lambert.

But home video is dead so I think we will never see this, unless rebuilding becomes incredibly cheap somehow.

 

One of the folks working on doing the DVDs asked Panzer about the negatives and said the negatives were toast (or at least a very large chunk of it) so it goes back a long while. Not sure if Davis has said anything but I recall Donald Paonessa later on, way after Panzer had passed away, saying the negatives were still safe and stored away. Given the load of BS that has come out of that camp over the years and the crap they pulled with the blu-rays I don't hold much credability with Paonessa.