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Q: Given the recent trend in remaking/adapting Greek myth movies/books, are any more due to be made? — Bee

A: By Athena, yes! The unexpected success of 300 (which, of course, wasn’t “Greek” and didn’t involve myths, but was set in the ancient world) and the strong buzz for the upcoming Clash of the Titans, which opens in April, has inspired a veritable mare-of-Diomedes-like stampede of Greek-myth-themed movies.

Dawn’s rosy fingers may soon rise on these projects:

Clash of the Titans

• Jason and the Argonauts, now in development at Universal, which, unlike Clash of the Titans, isn’t a remake of a Ray Harryhausen classic, but instead tells the story of Jason’s journey home after capturing the Golden Fleece (which is where Harryhausen’s movie leaves off).
• Dawn of War, now in pre-production, tells the exploits of Theseus, including his battle with the Minotaur, but is to be done in a “Renaissance painting style action,” with a Baz Luhrmann-like mix of ancient and modern worlds.
• Odysseus, in pre-production at Warners, is based on the end of Homer’s famous epic, the part when the king returns home after 20 years of fighting in the Trojan War, to find his wife, son, and kingdom under siege. Rumor is, this one will include major 300-style gore.
• Speaking of which, a prequel to 300 is in the works, based on a still-being-written graphic novel by Frank Miller (who wrote the famous 300 graphic novel). 300 director Zack Synder has expressed an interest in directing, assuming he likes the source material.
• A sequel to Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief called The Sea of Monsters (based on the book series) has long been in the works. The relatively disappointing showing of The Lightning Thief means this one may never get made.
• Scarlett Johansson was once attached to a movie called Amazon, but it seems to have stalled for the time being.

You’ll note that these movies are still in development. Why? Because Hollywood is waiting to see how Clash of the Titans performs (the film was once in a mad race with Dawn of War to be the “first” of the new wave of Greek-myth-based movies).

Why does it matter how Titans does? Because, in Hollywood-logic, if Clash of the Titans tanks, it won’t be because it’s a crappy movie, poorly conceived or executed.

No, it’ll be because it’s based on a Greek myth!

It’s all complete nonsense, of course — movies tend to succeed or fail because the movies themselves succeed or fail. But it’s easier to blindly follow the latest fad than to, you know, actually make a good movie, so the above kind of thinking makes everyone in Hollywood feel better.

Q: With all this talk about the Wizarding World of Harry Potter at Universal Studios’ Islands of Adventure theme park, no one ever says when it will open! When will that be? — Sophie, St. Paul, MN

A: That’s because, in the mad rush to get everything ready for a “spring” opening, even the park itself didn’t know. They still haven’t announced an actual “opening date,” but Fox News Orlando received a press release from Universal Studios saying they’re offering vacation packages for the attraction starting May 28th. So the attraction will at least be open by then!

Q: This is a test of your fantasy-knowing prowess: Without doing an internet search, what movie includes the Widow of the Web? — MAGPIE, Toronto, Canada

A: The 1983 fantasy film, Krull.

Please. You’ll have to get up much earlier than that to fool the All-Knowing Fantasy-Questioning-Answering Oracle. It was the one cool scene in an otherwise crappy film.

I confess, I did have to do a search to find the scene on YouTube:

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We knew it was inevitable. In the wake of the Clash of the Titans remake, someone was bound to exploit that other Ray Harryhausen Greek myth epic, Jason and the Argonauts. But here’s something interesting: rather than a remake, Jason and the Argonauts: The Kingdom of Hades takes place after the first film, and centers on the Argonaut’s journey back from Colchis to Greece.

Greek myths being the kaleidoscopic sources that they are, it’s impossible at this point to identify exactly which characters will be used in this film, but we can certainly take an educated guess. So with no further ado, we present TheTorchOnline.com’s casting for Jason and the Argonauts: The Kingdom of Hades.

Jason — Jake Gyllenhaal

Jason is one of the most prototypical heroes in Greek mythology, and should be played by a young man who possesses not only matinee idol good looks, but an intense charisma and a strong physicality. Jake Gyllenhaal’s got the goods, and now that he’s headlining Prince of Persia, he’s sending a clear message that just because he’s Oscar-worthy, he’s not too good for a sword-and-sandals genre picture.

Medea — Rosario Dawson

Medea was an amoral sorceress from Colchis, where the Golden Fleece was located. She was an exotic beauty, as Dawson most certainly is, and possessed great magical powers. Though the character goes bat-crap crazy later on in the myth, at this point she is still a very helpful ally to Jason and his crew. Dawson has proven herself a fine young actress, and who wouldn’t love to see her wielding some awesome magic spells, Gandalf-style?

Pelias –Robert Downey Jr.

Pelias is the wicked uncle who usurped the throne of Thessaly from Jason’s father, and urged him to find the Golden Fleece. By all accounts, he is a sneering, manipulative villain, convinced that Jason would never return alive. Now that Robert Downey Jr. has proven he can pretty much play any role imaginable (did you see Tropic Thunder?), wouldn’t it be fantastic to see him play a scenery-chewing villain? And how cool would an epic smackdown between him and Jake Gyllenhaal be?

Theseus — Orlando Bloom

After Hercules, who left the group before they reached the Golden Fleece, the most famous Argonaut is probably Theseus. The young king Theseus was an adventurous hero and notorious ladies’ man, and Orlando Bloom would fit neatly into this supporting role. Having proven time and again that he works best in fantasy films (and not that well in more mainstream fare), it would be nice to see him return to his roots and pick up a bow and arrows. Plus he has a huge debt to pay to all the Greek myth fans for the tepid Troy.

Atalanta — Emily Blunt

Though in many versions of the myth, Atalanta was banned from being an Argonaut due to her gender, there do exist some traditions where she sailed off with Jason, and in this age of cinematic female action heroes, it stands to reason she will be included. The gorgeous Emily Blunt almost got her shot at an action hero role when her name was tossed around to play the Black Widow, so how about giving her another chance as one of the first recorded tomboys in history?

Zeus — Brian Cox

Though I hate to use him again so soon after casting him as Thorin Oakenshield, when I picture Zeus in my head, he appears very much like Brian Cox, a burly, imposing old British man with a fiery temper and a Shakespearean voice. And wouldn’t it be awesome to see him hurling thunderbolts?

Hera — Lindsay Duncan

The beautiful Lindsay Duncan proved that she could be both soft and feminine as well as vengeful and cruel in HBO’s Rome. This description certainly fits the goddess Hera, who, like many deities, has a tendency to change her personality depending on the needs of the myth in which she’s involved. Though the main antagonist in the life of another hero, Heracles, Jason was fortunate enough to earn the favor of the goddess.

Hades — Viggo Mortensen

Well, his name’s in the title, so it’s a pretty good bet that the King of the Underworld will feature somewhere into the story. But rather than portray Hades as a mustache-twirling baddie, how cool would it be to see him as a handsome, seductive god? (Mortensen took a similar approach when he portrayed Lucifer in The Prophecy, and proved to be the only truly memorable part of the entire movie.)

So there you have it: TheTorchOnline.com’s final casting choices for the upcoming Jason and the Argonauts: The Kingdom of Hades. We’ll be expecting our check in the mail any day now.

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It’s no secret that man has long been drawn to riddles, puzzles that we have to work out through logic and reasoning. The satisfaction one gains at completing one of these mindbenders is addictive, and keeps us hungering for more.

Riddles are a mainstay of fiction, and they’re especially common among fantasy stories. Often the catch that makes them so irresistible is when the answer proves to be so simple it’s just overlooked, as in the famous riddle in The Lord of the Rings, when the fellowship approaches a door that’s inscribed in Elvish, “Speak friend and enter.” Spells and passwords are thrown at the door until finally the answer is stumbled upon: they simply must say the word “friend” in the same language. “Speak friend and enter.”

Tolkien’s love of riddles is prevalent in his earlier novel, The Hobbit, as well, in the iconic chapter in which we first meet the villainous Gollum. Bilbo and Gollum get themselves into a game of riddles, each trying to top the other. The game is ended with Bilbo’s cop-out riddle, “What have I got in my pocket?” which as we all know, is not a riddle, but a mere question. And the answer, of course, is fantasy’s most famous bling, the One Ring.

Tolkien took much of his influence from the mythologies of the ancient world, so it’s no surprise that riddles can be found as far back as Greek mythology, and possibly even further.

One of the first riddles I ever remember hearing as a child was the famous riddle told by the Sphinx, a fierce monster from a distant land who came to Greece. She was sent by one god or another to guard the entrance to the city of Thebes, and ask anyone who passed her way the riddle. If they couldn’t guess an answer, she devoured them.

The Thebans lived in terror of the beast until the young Oedipus came along. She asked him the now iconic riddle, “What has four legs in the morning, two in the afternoon, and three in the evening?” The answer, of course, is man, who crawls in infancy, walks about in his prime, and leans on a crutch in his twilight years. And thus Oedipus became famous for killing the Sphinx…and, later on, for having a notoriously peculiar taste in women.

Riddles are also a fun way to bring an audience further into the story, even making us feel like we’re a part of the action. After all, how fun is it to be struggling for an answer to a puzzle in real time along with the characters in the story? In fact, hasn’t Dan Brown made a living doing just that?

Who can forget the scene in The Labyrinth when Sarah confronts the obstacle of the two doors? Each door hosts two guards, who in true Jim Henson-style oddness, are stacked on each other in what can only be described as a chaste version of a numerical sexual position. They explain to Sarah that one of the doors will take her farther along her journey, and one leads to (bum bum bum bum) certain death. She can ask them questions, but they caution her that one of them always tells the truth, and one of them always lies.

A pickle, indeed.

But Sarah, clever vixen that she is, logics her way past this. Of course, twenty years later, I’m still trying to figure out if she got it right or not.

Mankind will never tire of riddles, and for storytelling they’re ideal, for they’re a way to turn a story into an interactive game. I’ll never forget being a child and my father telling me a riddle he had heard:

A young boy and his father are driving in a car when their car is hit by a truck. The father, tragically, doesn’t survive, but the son does, and is taken to the hospital immediately. He is brought in and put on the operating table, but the surgeon on duty, distraught, leaves the room, saying, “I’m sorry, I cannot operate on this boy. He’s my son.” Who is the surgeon?

I thought about this for a long time, as did the adults in the room, trying to figure out where the paternity could have been misconstrued, or if “son” could have been a figurative term.

As always, the simplest answer is usually correct.

The surgeon was his mother.

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Have a question about something fantasy-related? Ask the Oracle! (Be sure to include your first name and the city, state, and/or country you are writing from.)

Q: I’m a big fan of the Robert Sawyer novel Flash Forward (about how the whole world has a vision of their futures at the same time). You say it’s becoming a TV series this fall on ABC, and I’m curious if the explanation for the “flash forward” phenomenon will be the same as in the book, and also how they’re going to keep the show going if they answer the central mystery at the end of the first season, as you said they promised. — Yogi, Albuquerque, NM

A: The Oracle cautions you that I was told by the producers that they’ll answer most of the questions raised in the pilot by the end of the first season — but not all of them, and not the central mystery behind the flash-forwards.

“The over-arcing sort of cause of why the blackout happened, that’s kind of like our background radiation mystery of the whole series,” says co-creator David S. Goyer.

Will the explanation be the same as in the book? Truthfully, I can’t imagine what other explanation there could be for it.

“We had an amazing time figuring out how to adapt it from the book,” says executive producer Jessika Borsiczky Goyer. “The book — the flash-forwards are 21 years into the future. We’ve adapted it to, obviously, about six months. We took some other liberties, came up with new characters.”

But if the flash-forward is now only six months ahead, what happens when the series catches up to the would-be future? A second flash-forward?

This is pure speculation, but I’m thinking yes — if only because otherwise the title doesn’t make sense any more. But — and again, this is just speculation, based on comments from the producers and my reading of the book — I predict that any future flash-forwards will be experienced by individuals, not the entire world.

Anyway, as important as the phenomenon itself is to the story, I wouldn’t get too caught up in that. As in the book, I think most of the episode-by-episode action will be on the level of human drama.

Q: What’s Lucy Lawless really like? – Andrew, Hartford, CT

Q: Your question is, no doubt, prompted by the fact that the Oracle recently interviewed the Xena star (since it was mostly about her new show Spartacus: Blood and Sand, most of the interview with run closer to its January air-date).

Lucy is beautiful — and looks remarkably fit and youthful for 41 — but it is a very approachable beauty, not like some celebrities I’ve interviewed who are so flawless, almost godlike, that it seems a little creepy.

But what struck me the most is how she is nothing like Xena. Of course I knew that that’s just a character she played, but on some level, I guess I thought it couldn’t be too far from who she really is.

Unlike Xena, Lucy is the opposite of serious. She is smart and quick and light and very irreverent. The best word I can use is impish, almost seeming to take delight in saying provocative or quirky things.

Granted, I only spent 20 minutes with her one-on-one, but I can absolutely see how she would love doing the comedy Xena episodes — the more outrageous the better. I can also see how she could (reportedly) frustrate a method actor like Renee O’Connor a little bit, because I suspect she’s very loose and casual in her approach to most things in life.

Which isn’t to say she isn’t an absolute pro at what she does, both on-screen and off. The Oracle was a total fan before meeting, and is even more so one now.

Q: Okay, I know the Minotaur had the body of a man and the head of a bull. But was there one Minotaur — or was it a species of creatures, like centaurs? — Abby, Halifax, Nova Scotia

A: Thanks to the magical and capricious nature of the Greek gods, it’s somewhat difficult for the Oracle to say.

The Minotaur was the offspring of King Minos of Crete, who angered the god Poseidon by refusing to sacrifice a beautiful snow-white bull in the god’s honor. In response, Poseidon enchanted Minos’ wife to fall in love with a different white bull. She had sex with it  — if you must know, she was disguised as a cow at the time, hiding in an exquisitely constructed wood decoy — and the result was the Minotaur, who grew into a monster so horrible that, upon the advice of my own close personal friend, The Oracle at Delphi, was imprisoned in a vast labyrinth.

But was the Minotaur a separate species? Since the mating of a human and a bull cannot usually result in conception, magic was necessarily involved in the creature’s creation. Did the magic merely create a human with the head of a bull? Did it allow the creation of some kind of human/bull hybrid, like a mule? Or did it actually re-write the creature’s genetic code to create a separate species?

No Minotaur DNA remains to test — there aren’t even any ruins of the labyrinth itself (though there was an actual King Minos, and some say his Palace of Knossos was also the fabled labyrinth).

There aren’t even any clues from the myth itself. Had the Minotaur had a female paramour, we might have learned the answer. Had the two of them sired human off-spring, we would have known that, in fact, the Minotaur was essentially human. Had the couple been infertile, it would have meant the Minotaur was most likely a hybrid. And had the Minotaur’s tracked down a Minotaur wife — after all, Poseidon wasn’t the only capricious god! — and given birth to baby minotaurs (ouch!), it seems likely it would have been a separate species after all.

Alas, the Minotaur was killed by Theseus before he had a chance to reproduce.

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We all have a particular focus of our geekdom. Some can recite every line of The Silmarillion. Some know all rules of Quidditch. Some got their undergrad at UC Sunnydale.

Personally, I’m a  Greek myth man. I love reading stories about Aphrodite, Perseus, the Argonauts. It’s a world I can live in forever and never grow bored.

And that world is vast. There’s a reason that you can major in Greek mythology in college: the stories from the ancient world are so numerous and varied that it’s practically impossible to observe them all.

I’m the first guy to get excited when a new Greek myth movie comes out, and as stated in a previous article, that’s about to go down in a big way. A lot of movies are on the horizon that are based on myth in some fashion.

The one rule of thumb is that when I see these films, they inevitably deviate from the stories I know so well and recall so fondly. Sometimes the differences are slight, other times they’re barely recognizable.

And you know what? I’m cool with that. Here’s why.

For one thing, there is no set official source of Greek mythology; there’s no one true “bible.” These stories began in the oral tradition, passed down from one generation to the next and, as is the way of things, the tales tended to change depending on who was doing the telling. What we in our modern world have is a sort of kaleidoscope of myths, in which the edges blur and blend into each other, often in a contradictory way.

For example, let’s take a look at the mythical warrior-king Theseus, who’s set to have his own film soon called War of Gods.

According to some sources, after he slayed the Minotaur but before he settled down for life as a king, Theseus was an Argonaut, accompanying Jason on his quest for the Golden Fleece. During this adventure, Jason met Medea, a sorceress who became his consort. Years later, Jason betrayed Medea by marrying another woman, and Medea, in revenge, killed their children. She then fled from the kingdom and headed to Athens, where she married Aegeus, the king. Their union was shaken with the arrival of Aegeus’ son, a boy just on the verge of manhood.

The problem? Aegeus’ son was Theseus. So unless Medea traveled back in time some twenty years, these stories cannot be part of the same canon.

What’s more, writers who are using Greek myths as their inspiration are also in a bit of no-win situation. If they try to remain faithful to the stories they know, it will inevitably be a different version than what someone else is used to. Furthermore, how interesting or challenging is it as a storyteller to simply reiterate exactly a story you’ve already heard?

Clash of the Titans is a good example. The movie takes some elements of the legend of Perseus, slayer of Medusa. But does it even try to seem like a text book account of the legend? No, it knows what it is: a popcorn movie. The writers went for what would sell tickets, not what would give you the answers to a test. But the movie is still great fun (or, at least, it is if you’re under ten, and are too young to be put off by Harry Hamlin’s wooden acting).

In my other life as a playwright, I myself dipped my pen into the Greek myth ink when I wrote a play called The Wrath of Aphrodite. It was a very liberal interpretation of Hippolytus by Euripides, and I felt more than justified in changing the storylines as I saw fit. Euripides had already written his work 3,000 years ago, and I certainly wasn’t going to improve upon it, so I used the blueprint of his story as a launching pad. When characters and plots were added, I tried to keep them true to the spirit of the original legends.

But the play wasn’t really about gods and heroes; it was about how religion affects us, often adversely, when we cling to it too tightly. I used the Greek stories to comment on the world around me, just as the original myths were used to observe and ponder the world around the ancients.

So keep an open mind when you see War of Gods, or the remake of Clash of the Titans, or any of the other films on their way. Remember, these movies are pop culture entertainment, not history lessons. It may not look like the story you remember, but it might be a fun ride.

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Lord Voldemort

Maybe it makes sense that Voldemort doesn’t feel anything for his father. After all, he was conceived while his father was under the control of Merope’s love potion, so his father, Tom Riddle, wasn’t “feeling” anything for his mother either. Later, Merope assumed Tom had fallen in love with her for real, so she stopped giving him the potion.

Bad idea. Realizing he’d been tricked, and feeling no love in his heart, Tom abadonned her — and her child. Would Voldemore have turned out differently if his mother Merope had lived and raised him herself?

Maybe so, but Merope didn’t live. Without a mother and abandoned by his father, Voldemorte is forced to grow up in an orphanage.

Which sort of makes you understand why the guy might resent the hell out of the rest of the “normal” world — not to mention kind father figures like Dumbledore, no?

Dorothy Gale in The Wizard of Oz

We don’t really know what happened to Dorothy’s parents — she’s being raised by Uncle Henry and Auntie Em — but we do know she has an extraordinary unconscious desire for a father figure.

How do we know this? Well, first there’s all the time she spends in the company of male farmhands, not to mention traveling magicians. Does the girl have no female friends?

Then when Dorothy appears in Oz, who is she immediately attracted to? More male father figures: a scarecrow, a tin woodsman, and a lion. Please note: she doesn’t even bother asking Glenda to accompany on her journey to see the wizard! And when Dorothy finally returns home at the end of the story, what does she do? She immediately leaves and hooks up with Kenny Rogers.

Okay, I made up that last part. But it’s still true that Dorothy has a big-time daddy fetish.

Commodus in Gladiator

Did Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix) have issues with his daddy, the emperor of Rome, before the emperor chose Maximus (Russell Crowe) to rule in his stead rather than him? Oh, definitely. Commodus knows the father in Ridley Scott’s 2000 film senses he is bad news.

And sure enough, the father is right. Upon learning that he’s not to be emperor, Commodus kills his father — and presto! Commodus is emperor now. He then asks Maximus for his support, which, being the upstanding guy that he is, he refuses. Commodus is bent on revenge — something that sets the whole plot of the movie in motion.

Commodus literally spends the whole movie seething with resentment that his father loved Maximus not him — not to mention the fact that Maximus is the cool, manly gladiator, not him.

The Mythical Greek King Oedipus

This one kinda goes without saying, doesn’t it?

Nathaniel/John Mandrake in The Bartimaeus Trilogy

What is it about a wizard characters that they’re always being abandoned by their parents as children? Well, it makes for great psychological motivation, for one thing.

Nathaniel is a spiteful, petulant kid in The Amulet of Samarkand, the first book in The Bartimaeus Trilogy. Then again, wouldn’t you be if you’d been forfeited by your parents into the service a petty, third-rate magician like Arthur Underwood?

Again, Nathaniel’s lack of a true father figure sets the whole plot in motion. If you deeply resent all the adult males in your life and have no control over your own destiny, what better way to seize control — while also psychologically subduing the father-figure demons of your past — than to summon an all-powerful, 5000 year-old genie who must obey your every command?

This being a trilogy, things don’t go quite as planned. But without Nathaniel’s daddy issues, there’s no book to begin with.

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