Now Magazine
(Canada)

1 May 2003

BUTCH XENA

LOTS OF SUBTEXT IN SEASON ONE

Contributed by Jennifer

 

xena: warrior princess – season one

(Anchor Bay, 1995) Prod: Sam Raimi, w/ Lucy Lawless, Reneé O'Connor. Seven discs. Rating:

NNN

it's no surprise that xena: warrior Princess sprang to life from Sam Raimi's other syndicated series, Hercules. Kevin Sorbo's Hercules is a large, amiable and kind of dull hero. Lucy Lawless's Xena is a force of nature, and cut loose in the midst of Raimi's mixmaster version of the mythological and historical past, she cuts a very wide swath.

I have a preference for the last couple of seasons of Xena, when Raimi and company ran out of reasonable stories and began doing remakes of The Producers and modern-dress versions of the characters in reincarnation stories. Late Xena is completely nuts.

But, in its favour, early Xena is fairly nuts, too, with its wonderfully cheesy effects, Stunts R Us approach to action and rampant lesbian subtexts, which became less sub the longer the series stayed on the air.

One of the funny things about Season One is the speed with which the show established the butch-femme dynamic between Xena and her sidekick, Gabrielle (Reneé O'Connor), even before the friendship was established.

Xena fans will want this, but I do have some complaints. Despite the Deluxe Collector's Edition banner, it just ain't that deluxe. The transfers are not very good – I spent about half an hour fiddling with my TV controls trying to sharpen the image on the night and torch-lit scenes and couldn't, which suggests that Anchor Bay is using a secondary source.

People with older and smaller TVs will get a cleaner picture than those with the latest tech. There's also a lack of extras – no commentaries, no featurettes, no booklet. The seventh disc is a DVD-ROM series guide, with character and actor bios, clips and full credits, but it would be nice to have an episode guide that doesn't require you to fire up the computer.

 

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