If one chooses to believe the following notion, there are certain scenarios that have yet to be perfected in film.  Specifically, in the fantasy realm.  Now there has been admirable attempts at the below forthcoming points.  But it’s not quite there yet.

So without further delay — and worthless banter — here’s a look at six fantasy ideas that we desperately still need to see in film.

1.  A Fantasy Epic Where Evil Wins (Muhahaha)

What if Frodo kept the ring?  How cool would it be if Hades won?  Although I consider myself a film historian (on training wheels), it is tough to recall when something this monumental has taken place.  It probably has somewhere in random underground fantasy flicks throughout history.  Yet the recent mainstream products keeps their distance from this idea.

What scribes are blatantly missing in their storytelling is that just because it is a happy ending, that does not necessarily mean it is a good one.  Even though this will hurt my cool factor (although I’m writing for a fantasy site), this idea entered my gem-of-a-brain after completing a Star Wars videogame (losing female Facebook friends as we speak).  Specifically, Knights of the Old Republic.

After playing it through and being a good little Jedi, I took in the cinematic ending for my accomplishments. Then I went back and played through again — basking in pure evil.

Upon completion, the “dark side” movie and storyline was extremely better than the typical good guy celebration.  Why?  Because the writers embraced the evil themes instead of dabbling in it.  Being able to say, “WOW” is just as satisfying as leaving with a smile on your face after the good guys win.

Of course we ultimately cheer for protagonists such as Frodo.  Yet part of me kind of wanted to see Sauron appear and wipe out the noble heroes.  Curiosity and change is the spice of life and exploring a new side of drama couldn’t hurt.  So having said that — in an epic arena — how would that creative concept come off?  I believe there is a way to do this without disappointing the audience.  Have the good guys go down using the old western “blaze-of-glory” concept.

Although the odds are stacked against them, by depicting an “all-in” battle, where good does some damage — yet eventually loses — could be crafted to drive home the above mentioned “WOW” response from the viewer.  Because in the end, a filmmaker truly just wants to get a reaction from his viewers — and something this unexpected would definitely provoke.

Admittedly, the physical storytelling would have to be impeccable for this idea to work.  Plus, the filmmaker must resist all urges to avoid showing a silver-lining after the evil victory.  No coddling allowed, my friends.

2.  Satan vs. God

Now this has been attempted in subtle ways, but no one can seem to truly bring this up to a level it needs to be (South Park doesn‘t count).  People are fascinated with the end of the world and if there is an anti-Christ walking among us.  Problem is, there has never been a full-scale epic that tackles every angle of the biblical apocalypse.  End of Days made a feeble attempt with this theme.  It brought in the devil but couldn’t muster up a worthy opponent (sorry, Governor Arnie) or atmosphere.

What I truly want to see is a creative writing scenario that encompasses an audacious battle between two actual immortals.  I’m tired of seeing a mismatch where a human’s morals somehow always end up saving the world.  Complete horse-crap.  Let’s get to the part of the book where the anti-Christ is unleashed and a great battle happens on earth.

No more demons possessing people to do their fighting.  Create a workable demon character — with minimal human likenesses — and form an army to take on angels.  Now the image of an angel is fairly well known.  So dump the logic and take liberties with the character.  Make angels twelve feet tall.  Then usher in the leads — God and Satan — in their true form.  We all think we know what Satan looks like, so surprise the hell out of us.

As for God, unless you can create a tricked-out version of Keith Richards or Ozzy (who are convinced they’re immortal and God-like), drop the old-man with the beard stigma and go for the outrageous.  God is subjective, so even if the great being is in the form of an unusual creature, who’s to argue?

Now, the trick is to have them fight all over the world and stop working in ridiculous subplots.  Sure, we need a mankind perspective, but  maintain the focus on the two stars.  Spend at least $100 million on this sucker and do it right.  The definitive apocalypse flick that brings the meat instead of dancing around the idea and teasing us.  Have you noticed that all of the flicks that have tried to depict this subject matter are low-budget and go direct-to-DVD?  Time for a change.  Prophecy had its storytelling moments, but way too subtle in its approach.

Yes this sounds like a Clash of the Titans rip-off, but the one element that sets this idea apart is the actual characters being depicted (God and Satan).  Sometimes less is more, but this is film, dammit! Sometimes more is more too.

3.  Adapt the Fable Videogame

All one hears on comment boards is who will create a fantasy flick as memorable and sophisticated as The Lord of the Rings.  This past decade, so many second-tier fantasy novels have half-assed their way onto the big screen.  Judging by the endings of all them (The Seeker, Eragon, etc.), they were hoping to continue.  Not so much my friends.  The respective studios chopped up the story and refused to spend the money.  Yet strangely, they have no problem blowing a $100 million on another lackluster rom-com that fails to arouse any profits at the box office.

The Fable story is rich and already has legions of fans.  Scoop it up, drop a ton of money on it, and the people will come.  It’s not that complicated.

4.  Create the Next LightSaber

As in, who will create the next iconic weapon that all of us will dream about having?  Even at 31, I still wake up swinging my blue blade (or is it blue balls from my imaginary  lady friend?). Moving along, Harry Potter’s wand does zilch for me.  Susan’s Narnia bow is stale and overused.  He-Man’s sword in the ’80s cartoon was interesting, but in the end, it’s just a sword.  All the wizard’s staffs look fun if I was confined to just walking around New York City.  Seriously, imagine the fun you could have with that “walking stick.”

There was a time I began thinking the X-Men flicks would come up with some innovative device.  Although they are mainly armed with super powers, I was banking on Hollywood not sticking to the source material and inserting their arrogance within the product.  What better place than the weapon department right?  Instead, it is all super powers.  And even if I wanted a super power, it would have been Superman’s X-ray vision.  Yet that is now worthless to me.  Why?  A plane ticket to Amsterdam isn’t all that expensive and there are plenty of windows.  If you know what I mean. (For the younger audiences, Google Amsterdam Windows.  You’ll thank me later).

Where was I?  Oh yeah…Weapons.  Clearly I could not come up with anything myself.  Any thoughts, or did I miss a great weapon since the lightsaber?  Didn’t the Blade franchise have some cool gadgets?  I shall go watch those again.  And I will be doing a noble deed in doing so.  Heard Wesley Snipes is having some cash flow issues.

5.  A Dragon Movie…That Isn’t Pathetic.

Not sure if this is possible actually, for the character may not be workable in a feature script.  Definitely could see recurring patterns where the flick drags due the dragon is not being captured on camera.  Two flicks come to mind that were tolerable at the very least though.  1981’s Dragonslayer and 2002’s Reign of Fire.  Intriguing stories and the CGI work for their respective times was admirable.  Aside from those two, the only flick that looked pristine was How to Train Your Dragon.  An animated film.  That was a nice movie, but I’m looking for something gritty and dangerous.

Believe it or not, Dragonslayer was a Walt Disney Picture that brought in an element of danger.  In contrast, Reign of Fire was supposed to be dramatic and dangerous.  As it went on, though, it became a platform for the CGI nerds to have fun with the technology.  And the lead characters’ acting ability transitioned into something out of a bad porno (if there is such a thing).

Seeing complete trash such as D-Wars and whatever childish flick Sean Connery voiced the dragon (too lazy to look it up and still trying to repress the memories) is making my ass itch (it‘s just what happens).  I believe the dragon character could find a proper vehicle in cinema with someone who had the right vision and respect for the material.  Paging Guillermo del Toro…

6.  Torch’s Choice ________

Authors must be honest with their readers and vice versa.  And trust me, my readers have been very honest and graphically descriptive over the years, in my archive of comment boards.  Especially when I give Twilight just 3 out of 5 stars (my apologies milfs, but feel free to grow-up anytime now).

Coming up with other moments that need to be seen in an epic fantasy flick should  be relatively easy.  However, picking a final topic has become quite the task for yours truly.  I was thinking about giants.  Then I jumped to how a filmmaker needs to shoot an epic battle scene in Iceland.  The landscape just feels magical.  Looks a lot like Middle-Earth too.  Also started thinking about what not to do.  I have an extremely hard time grasping that escapism feeling when magical forces are on display in a present day big city such as New York or Chicago.  Just doesn’t have that same old feeling when executed in a period piece.  Felt that on the last Harry Potter flick (Deathly Hallows) and the recent Sorcerer’s Apprentice debacle.  Modern landscape fails to provide the appropriate atmosphere in pleasing us dreamers.

Anyway, rather than force the issue, let’s yap, Torch followers.  If that doesn’t sound enticing, feel free to rip on me below. Suggestions for blind dates are also appreciated — cause once the legion of females see my name on the byline for this article, I’m going to need all the help I can get.

This article was originally published in May 2009.

When I was a kid, the country went through a full-fledged Dungeons & Dragons hysteria, where the fantasy role-playing game was accused of everything from turning kids onto Satanism to encouraging them to kill themselves.

Decades later, we’ve now reached a point where D&D is seen as sort of a harmless, if incredibly geeky pastime.

But isn’t there a third option? Dungeons & Dragons isn’t a dangerous, evil force in the world, nor is it just harmless fun; it’s actually one of the most worthwhile activities ever created, and there is literally nothing better for turning a kid into a thoughtful, creative, passionate, open-minded adult.

Almost everything I know today I learned from Dungeons & Dragons. And almost everything I’m passionate about, I first discovered while playing the game.

I started playing Dungeons & Dragons at age twelve, when my friend Tim asked for, and received, a “starter” box set of the game for Christmas.

I immediately loved it. It gave a focus to all those lazy afternoons with my friends. It was something for us all to be passionate about, an endless countryside for us to discover and explore — endless because we made it up ourselves.

But it didn’t just focus those afternoons with my friends; it focused the rest of my life too.

Before the game, I’d had little interest in reading for pleasure. For me, books were something that were assigned in school — staid, musty tales that said nothing about the things I was interested in and had absolutely no relevance to my life.

But because I was so enamored with the world of D&D, I started reading fantasy books. For the first time in my life, I realized, “Hey, books aren’t necessarily boring! Sometimes they can even be really, really interesting!” It was a revelation. In months, I was devouring every fantasy book I could get my hands on — even long, complicated sagas that I wouldn’t have looked twice at before (Stephen R. Donaldson was, and still is, my favorite author).

In school, I’d always hated history. It had always been presented to me as nothing more than a long list of dates to be memorized.

But in the world of D&D, in the adventures we were concocting for each other, history came alive. And why wouldn’t it? We were literally living it! And like almost every virgin D&D player, I immediately embarked on my own extracurricular study of weaponry, of myths and fables, of medieval life — even castle-building.

Philosophy and ethics? At my Catholic grade school, that meant just another list to memorize, this time of picky little rules to follow.

It was while playing D&D that I discovered the notion of “alignment” — the idea that everyone has a point-of-view in life, and that few people think of themselves as “evil.” Instead, ethics necessarily follow from one’s perspective. This acknowledgment of the obviously relative nature of all things made my head feel like a balloon; I could almost feel it expanding on my shoulders.

Even better, by implicitly granting me the right to make my own ethical choices, and by having me role-play different choices and then forcing me to accept the consequences of my actions, I think the game made me a much more ethical person. It definitely made me a far more broad-minded one.

In school, I had absolutely no interest in debate or public presentations. My sixth grade presentation was on Bolivia, and I literally could not have cared less.

But because D&D involves such an elaborate set of rules, many of which are, uh, ambiguous, an essential part of Dungeons & Dragons means arguing a case, both to your fellow players and to the dungeon master.Year later, in college, professors would always say, “You did debate in high school, didn’t you?” I never knew what they were talking about — until it finally occurred to me that I had, in fact, spent every weekend of my high school years engaged in passionate debate with some of the most intelligent people I’ve ever met.

Before D&D, I’d never thought of myself as a storyteller, or a performer in any way. But when you’re the dungeon master, you’re required to be a performer, acting out the role of the narrator and dozens of other characters — and you’d better be an incredibly quick-thinking performer at that, since most of what you do is improvisation in response to something your players did that you didn’t expect.

If you write your dungeons yourself, as we usually did, you’re also forced to confront the notions of character motivation, the importance of a good antagonist, of theme, of rising tension and resolution.

In short, if he’s going to keep the attention of his players, a dungeon master must quickly intuit all the elements of dramatic structure.

Best of all, you tell your stories in direct engagement with your audience. If that doesn’t tell you exactly what does, and doesn’t, work when it comes to storytelling, nothing will.

Finally, there’s math. I didn’t like that either as a kid — more memorization, natch. Truthfully, I still hate it, but when you spend countless hours adding up dice-rolls in your head, you’re suddenly a whiz  — and when your character’s life is at stake, you pick up statistics pretty quickly too!

Dungeons & Dragons would have been worth playing even if it built no “character” whatsoever — if it did nothing but entertain. And maybe this essay will do nothing but make today’s generation of kids less likely to play it; that’s probably how I would have reacted.

But the truth is, the game does so much more than entertain, and it’s about time it got credit for it.

As an adult, I’ve done a number of things for a living: teach at the high school and college level, and write novels, plays, and screenplays. Now I edit this website.

If it weren’t for Dungeons & Dragons, I couldn’t have done any of these things well.

If I hadn’t found D&D, would I have discovered some other passion as a kid? Video games? Sports? Horticulture? It’s possible. But it’s almost impossible to imagine that any of these activities would have given me such a long and varied list of skills and interests.

As an adult, I occasionally run into parents who mention that their children have discovered Dungeons & Dragons. They usually roll their eyes and shrug, as if to say, “At least they’re not out robbing liquor stores.”

I always tell them they’re wrong to dismiss the game so casually; I try to tell them all the things I’ve written here.

They never listen to me. They always say something stupid like, “What kind of game is it if you can’t ever win?” The stereotypes run too deep. To them, D&D means being silly, dressing up like an elf and rooting around in sewers. They can’t dismiss it fast enough.

In a way, I’m sad — sad that they don’t appreciate and support the passionate, creative, intelligent, interesting kid they’re probably raising (no thanks to them).

But mostly I’m sad that they themselves have to go through life with such a narrow, limited perspective. That wouldn’t be the case if one of their friends had ever introduced them to D&D — but now, of course, it’s probably too late.

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Five Torches (Out of Five)

This article was originally published in April 2009.

Xena: Warrior Princess is probably television’s best fantasy show ever. Its six year-run was a veritable creative explosion as the show veered boldly between genres, tackled complicated themes, and created an intense action pace that had never before been seen on the small screen.

Not to mention the fact that the show completely redefined the notion of the female action hero.

But by the show’s sixth and final season, most agree it had gotten a little tired. The brilliant heights of the gloriously operatic third and fourth seasons were behind them, and a notoriously spotty fifth season had left fans restless. The ill-conceived “Eve” storyline was sputtering to ignoble end.

In the DVD extras for the sixth season, one of the producers describes the last season as “tying up loose ends” — which sounds like it could be interesting in theory, but which is, of course, a radical departure from the bold, over-arching storylines of each previous season. In retrospect, “tying up loose ends” seemed to mean “spinning our wheels until we wrapped the show up.”

Then came the “Norse” trilogy.

This series of three episodes — “The Reingold,” “The Ring,” and “Return of the Valkyrie” — came smack in the middle of the sixth season, first airing in November of 2000.

And if fans had any concerns that the show’s fire might have gone out, they were immediately put to rest.

The episodes tell a single story: that of Xena’s return to the northern lands of the Norse gods, where 35 years ago (10 years ago, plus the 25 she was frozen in ice by Ares) she was a Valkyrie in the service of the god Odin. But this being the Xena of her own dark past, she didn’t stay in Odin’s service for long. She plotted to steal the precious “rheingold,” which, when shaped into a ring, grants the wearer great power. But that power comes at a cost: by exercising the power of the ring, the bearer loses that which they most value.

Unless, of course, the bearer of the rheingold has forsaken love. Then the power of the ring can seemingly be used without consequence.

If anybody had ever forsaken love, it was the Xena of 35 years previous: first, she’d been double-crossed by Caesar, then she’d traveled to the Chin Empire, where her trusted mentor and lover Lao Ma had been executed.

The Norse trilogy is Xena’s usual audacious blend of legend and history, in this case loosely mixing Norse mythology with the stories of Beowulf and the Das Rheingold opera. But of course, the legends of history left out the central role Xena played in all these stories. Beowulf shows up, sure, but he’s merely a supporting player in his own legend.

The theme of the episodes — written by R.J. Stewart, Joel Metzger, and Emily Skovop and directed by John Fawcett and Rick Jacobson — is a return to the classic theme that made Xena, both the show and the character, so interesting to begin with: her having to make amends for the sins of her own dark past.

Years ago, the beautiful and noble Valkyrie Grinhilda chose to try to defeat Dark Xena by putting on the ring of the rheingold. Not only didn’t she not succeed, because she had not forsaken love, she was transformed into a hideous monster, losing the things she most valued: her beauty and her nobility.

So, as with her arch-nemesis Calysto, Xena must do battle with a monster that she herself literally created all those years ago. But it’s always easier to open the box of monsters than it is to get those monsters back inside. Before the episodes are over, Xena is forced to don the ring once again — but this time, it comes at an extremely high cost: she loses her memories of being a warrior, and — more importantly — her love for Gabrielle.

In other words, forsaking love all those years ago hadn’t saved Xena from the consequences of the ring; it had merely postponed them. Such is the wonderful irony so often seen in well-told fantasy.

There are debts that must be paid in life, Xena tells us again and again, things that must be put right. And unless and until we do make things right, we will be unable able to move forward in life, suffering again and again at the hands of the monsters we created.

It’s a theme that is both classic in its idea of self-sacrifice and modern in its notion of choice and individuality.

Six Feet Under and Damages are both great shows, but I’m not sure I recall them ever tackling anything quite this profound.

The episode is terrifically acted (except for the actor who plays Beowulf, who is a little wooden), especially Brittney Powell, who plays Brunnhilda. The special effects, especially the monsters, are as good as any Xena episode ever — on par with the fifth season’s Fallen Angel, which includes some of the series’ best effects ever.

Another notable element in the Norse trilogy: it’s definitely the most overtly “lesbian” of all Xena episodes, even the finale, when the true nature of Xena and Gabrielle’s love is revealed.

There’s none of the show’s vaunted “lesbian subtext” here. The Valkyrie Brunnhilda falls openly in love with Gabrielle, and everyone talks openly about Xena’s “love” for Gabrielle. And in the opening teaser, check out how Xena signs her farewell note to Gabrielle: with a big, lipstick kiss.

Meanwhile, the Rhinemaiden’s also fall “in love” with Xena. And when Xena wakes Gabrielle up from her year-long sleep, she does it with — what else? A kiss.

Okay, so the Norse Trilogy may not be the best fantasy even seen on television — that honor might go to Xena episodes such as “The Debt” or “The Ides of March,” or maybe even an episode or two of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

But still: these episodes gotta be right near the top.

Interesting in purchase the sixth season of Xena (or any other media)? Support TheTorchOnline.com by purchasing it through this link.

A fan-created trailer for Xena’s Norse Trilogy

There are many things I love in life. I love my parents. I love my friends. I love playing online Tetris for free. I love a tall, ice-cold pint of beer. I love that the space bar will pause Youtube, Hulu, and Netflix Instant viewing.

I love all of these things and never have to defend that. But one thing I occasionally do find myself defending is my love of fantasy.

In a way, I get it. Fantasy is, on its surface, a genre packed to the gills with elves, dragons, and wizards — not exactly grown-up fair. How can a story with magic spells and dashing princes compare to the very realistic plays of Tennessee Williams, the written works of Jack Kerouac, or the films of Gus Van Sant? What makes fantasy so great?

In a word: metaphor.

For those not too proud to explore a work of fantasy and not too dense to look beneath its surface, the fantasy genre is a rich addition to the literary, film, and television canon because it explores very real human problems and desires by creating allegories through which to explore them.

Name any fantasy work that has withstood the test of time, and you will find in it a fable full of lessons of all too real applicability.

Michael Ende’s landmark novel, The Neverending Story, which was turned into a decent movie in the ’80s, is about a young boy named Bastian Balthazar Bux, who is neglected by his father and bullied by his schoolmates. He finds a book that transports him into another world called Fantasia, a world that is the embodiment of all the dreams and fantasies of the real world, which is being destroyed by an enemy called the Nothing.

The story is moving and absorbing not due to its host of magical creatures, but because it taps in all of us that longing to be a child again, to be able to lose yourself in worlds of your own creation, before the dark, unimaginative specter of adulthood falls upon us.

This theme of the wonder of a child’s imagination is explored many times over in fantasy, from The Wizard of Oz to The Chronicles of Narnia to Labyrinth.

While passionate, romantic love is a theme explored in virtually every genre imaginable, has there ever been a better representation of the honest, pure love between friends as there was in The Lord of the Rings? The entire sprawling epic that is Tolkien’s masterpiece essentially hangs on a single conceit: that we as an audience accept that Sam will do anything for Frodo.

This is a hard sell for some, because the notion of the power and beauty of platonic love is not a prevalent idea in our culture. Their relationship isn’t romantic so there’s no promise of sex. Frodo is hardly royalty so there’s no allure of vast treasures. Sam is committed to Frodo, with no reward expected, because that’s just the kind of person he is, and who wouldn’t want a friend like Sam? Who wouldn’t want to be a friend like Sam?

Toss in the fact that it’s two lowly hobbits, humble and small in stature, who succeed in saving the world, and you have a classic for the ages. It takes a story about hobbits to make us see the wonder in our fellow man.

This past year, the high fantasy television show Legend of the Seeker came into its own when episodes began appearing that were not necessarily part of the larger plot, but instead focused on characters by throwing them into fantastical situations that mirrored real life problems.

Kahlan, a young woman who was torn between her sense of duty and her love for her companion, Richard, was in one episode magically split into two people, and through this spell we came to learn much about her and how difficult her burden really was.

Another episode featured Cara, a woman who was abducted and brainwashed and turned into a killer. As she attempted to regain her humanity, she was turned into a Baneling (basically a sentient zombie), thus making her metaphorical fight to be a regular person quite literal.

The point is that we could have simply watched biopics of Margaret Thatcher or Patty Hearst, and I’m sure some would be content to do just that, but those projects are limited to the real and mundane. By steeping a story in allegory, you have a much larger canvas on which to paint.

I suppose the fantasy genre will always be overlooked by those who wish to appear highbrow. After all, magic and flights of fancy are a hard sell to the academic.

But for those of us in the know, fantasy has a way of engaging our suspension of disbelief by accessing the emotional truths in stories about hobbits and goblins, and reflecting the realities of our world through a supernatural lens. Like opera and musical theater, which engage our emotions through music rather than realism, fantasy will forever be a step removed from reality, but never so far that we can’t recognize it. And it’s because of that very distance from reality that the genre is able to remark on it so keenly.

A couple of weeks ago, we here at TheTorchOnline.com argued that the “superhero” and “vampire” media trends are both rapidly coming to an end. In the “comments,” some people agreed with us, but others took issue with some of our various arguments.

Now TheTorchOnline.com reader TomB has used “xtranormal” technology to animate the debate!

What do you think?

This is it! We’re officially calling it: the “vampire” and “superhero” media trends are forever after over.

I’ve long made my opinion known that while I am, or was, a fan of both fantasy genres, there’s also such a thing as overkill.

Since 2000, an astounding 42 big-budget superhero movies have been released, nine in 2008 alone — this from an industry that only releases 50 or fewer mega-budget movies in any given year.

It’s not just that there are too many superhero movies for the market to sustain; there are too many superhero franchises.

As for vampires, by my count, there have been thirteen vampire TV series just since 2000 — and four (True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, The Gates, and Being Human) are still on the air!

And this doesn’t even include shows like Supernatural that regularly feature vampire characters.

As for the movies, I count 24 major vampire theatrical releases just since 2000 — and literally hundreds more that were made-for-TV or went direct-to-DVD. There are at least 14 vampire movies currently in production.

Now we’re even getting the inevitable wave of parody movies — for vampires, that means Vampires Suck, coming in August, and for superheroes, the (latest) movie-parodies are Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World and Megamind, both coming later this year.

When the parodies come, you know it’s time to stop.

Seriously. The madness must end. For every new vampire or superhero movie or TV show that gets greenlit, that means some other movie or TV show does not — which also means some other newer, fresher genre or story continues to be ignored.

Worse, everything interesting that could possible be said about superheros or vampires has long been said. For example, every possible use of vampires as metaphor has already been done: the power of sexuality (Dracula), homosexuality (Anne Rice), assimilation (True Blood), teenage angst (Buffy), immortality (The Hunger), delinquency (Lost Boys), boring suburbia (Fright Night), teenage love (Twilight), even the Israeli/Palestinian situation (Underworld) and the unsustainable exploitation of the environment (Daybreakers)!

And regarding superheroes, we get it: with great power comes great responsibility — and yeah, we’re all superheroes in our own way, with our “secret” identities.

Either that or superheroes are exactly like us, with all our same flaws, despite the colorful costume and superpowers. Or maybe superheroes are just a metaphor of elitism, either good like in The Incredibles or bad like in Watchmen.

Whatever you’re saying, it’s been said.

Even though the superhero and vampire media trends are now officially at an end (because we say so!), here are a couple of things this doesn’t mean:

It doesn’t mean there will never be another superhero or vampire movie. I wish it did, but there are (a) a number of popular franchises, like Twilight and Iron Man, that are still playing themselves out — quite successfully, I might add, and (b) there will still be the occasional extraordinary superhero or vampire project from time-to-time. Just because westerns have been dead since the 1970s, that didn’t mean Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven wasn’t a fantastic movie.

And, of course, there will always be the die-hard superhero and vampire fans, people to whom these genres speak on a deeper level, and they will keep the flames of these genres forever flickering in the form of books, graphic novels, and other less expensive media. More power to em!

But our official announcement does mean that vampire and superhero projects will no longer be given the cultural benefit of the doubt. From this point on, they won’t be considered hip and trendy and zeitgeist-y, and won’t automatically be greenlit by TV or movie executives.

No, the pre-existing bias will be that vampires and superheroes are tired and derivative — unless their creators somehow prove differently.

Basically, the All-Vampire-All-the-Time Era (and the All-Superhero-All-the-Time Era) are, thankfully, blessedly, over.

There’s absolutely nothing more to see here, folks, so let’s all move on.

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I’ve just about had it with Fringe.

If it weren’t for the fact that this Thursday’s episode, “Jacksonville,” promises to shed major light on the series’ overall William Bell/dual dimension plotline, I think I’d be done with it completely.

What’s the bee in my bonnet? Two things about the show are driving me absolutely bananas:

First, there’s the fact that Dr. Walter Bishop was apparently intimately involved in every experimental research project ever conducted and is the world’s top expert in dozens of disparate scientific fields.

This is despite the fact that he’d spent the 17 years prior to the start of the show in a mental institution. In the real world, scientific knowledge reportedly doubles somewhere between every five and ten years. In the world of Fringe, not so much.

I understand how he would be privy to knowledge about the show’s central mystery, since he and William Bell were the one’s responsible for creating it. But does his previous research have to be the driving force behind virtually every mystery the show confronts? When did the man sleep?!

But mostly what’s driving me crazy about the show is that its science is just so unbelievably bad.

Here’s the thing: I am far from a science “purist.” I always tuned out the blowhards who criticized the science of Star Trek, since they clearly didn’t understand that, first and foremost, the show existed to entertain. Clearly, it also tried to provoke thought about issues both scientific and social, but I actually think it was (mostly) a good thing that they never let themselves get too bogged down in science, because it made the show accessible to a broad audience.

But in spite of all of Star Trek’s inaccuracies and inconsistencies, I believe they at least gave the science some thought. And the visionaries behind Star Trek clearly had a deep love of both science and the future — which is precisely why so many scientists claim to have been inspired by it.

By contrast, it’s clear that the producers of Fringe don’t give a f*** about science.

I understand that the gimmick of the show is that it deals with the paranormal which, by definition, stretches the boundaries of science. But they clearly want to highlight the simplest, most attention-getting (and most dumbed-down) “scientific” phenomena possible — and they don’t give a whit about actual science.

Consider:

• In “What Lies Below,” the January 21st episode, Walter confronts a preposterous “thinking” virus that infects his son, Peter, but in less than an hour, despite having no lab and very little equipment, he’s able to isolate the virus and concoct an antidote out of horseradish from a refrigerator — horseradish! — that immediately works on everyone infected.

• In “Of Human Action,” the November 12th episode, a researcher is conducting an experiment that would allow pilots to control planes with their brains, and when his son takes the “enhancement” drugs, it gives him the ability to psychically control other people — because, you know, the human brain is just “another kind of computer.” Fortunately, Walter is able to prevent the mind-control by creating special headphones (!!!) for the FBI agents to wear.

• In “Unearthed,” the January 11th episode (an unaired episode from the first season), a dying girl is “possessed” by an evil man who just happens to be dying at the same time. His spiritual energy didn’t dissipate due to, um, previous “heavy radiation exposure” while in a Russian sub, and he “jumped ship” to the dying girl.

• Despite the fact that the structure of DNA wasn’t even identified until 1953, in “The Bishop Revival,” the January 28th episode, it turns out that the Nazis (and Walter Bishop’s father, working as a spy) had developed an air-born toxin that attacked specific genes and could immediately kill anyone who had them.

I could go on, but I think you get the picture.

It’s like their not even trying — not even bothering with the fig leaf of Star Trek’s techno-babble to cover the nakedness of their pseudo-science.

Basically, Gilligan’s Island took science more seriously when they had the Professor making a car out of bamboo and coconut shells!

Hey, whatever. So there’s no love or deep affection for science on Fringe. So they’re even cheapening it — cynically flashing science’s most attention-getting elements, like dancers flashing body parts in some bawdy burlesque show, acting without nuance or elegance. They’re not the first to do this, and they won’t be the last.

But Fringe is not Gilligan’s Island. It pretends to be serious speculative fiction.

Basically, they’re making it impossible for me to enjoy the show. My knowledge of science is limited at best — hey, I was a social sciences studies major! But increasingly, I find my eyes rolling out of my head by the stupid and sloppily-conceived premises of most of their episodes.

Thursday’s episode better be spectacular. Because if it isn’t, I am so outta here.

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Throughout its six seasons, Xena: Warrior Princess featured an enormous array of world mythologies, but my absolute favorite was the four-episode arc dealing with Gabrielle’s spiritual quest in India, which is why that particular storyline earns the most esteemed award we here at TheTorchOnline can bestow:

The India Storyline

Five Torches (Out of Five)

The first episode, called “Paradise Found,” takes place before they even arrive in India, but introduces the element that most affected me: Gabrielle begins to feel peace by focusing on her breathing and practicing Yoga. Sure, it sounds hippie-dippie and new age-y, but anyone who’s truly thrown themselves into the practice of Yoga understands its healing and soothing effects.

Unfortunately, Gabrielle is guided along the beginning of her path by a guru named Aiden, who is actually a demon who feeds off the goodness of the people who come to his island paradise. As his victims sink deeper into a meditative state, they turn into blue stone and he absorbs their essence.

So, that part’s not so great. But the Yoga? We’ll keep that.

When they finally arrive in India in “Devi,” they encounter a man who will be very important to them: the Christ-like Eli,who at first glance seems to be just a street magician. Gabrielle is possessed by the demon, Tataka (man, can’t Gabrielle ever catch a break?) until eventually being rescued by Eli.

The next episode, “Between the Lines,” showcases a theme that will continue on for the remainder of the series: Xena and Gabrielle are more than just best friends. They are soul mates, and this is evidenced by the fact that every time their souls are reincarnated, they always find each other. They learn about the concept of karma, and how everything you do in this life affects what happens in future lives.

In this episode, they are sent into the future where Xena is the “Mother of Peace,” and Gabrielle is a male warrior. They fight the sorceress Alti in the future, before being pulled back into the present for a grand finale smackdown. (In this tussle, Alti grabs onto Gabrielle’s hair, and Xena uses her chakram to free Gabrielle of her grip, thus giving Gabby the short haircut she would wear for the rest of the series. Unfortunately, this is also the haircut that Xena keeps seeing in an earlier Alti-inspired vision of her and Gabrielle’s deaths.)

Finally, in “The Way,” Xena and Gabrielle again meet up with Eli, who we discover is being hunted down by the demon Indrajit. Eli teaches Gabrielle about The Way, a philosophy that emphasizes love and non-violence over all else. Gabrielle soon learns that this is not an easy pursuit in a world torn asunder by violence. After all, how do you defend yourself if you can’t ever fight back?

When Gabrielle and Eli are captured by Indrajit, Xena must do something she’s never done before in order to rescue Gabrielle: pray.

Unlike the petty, all-too-human Olympian gods, when Xena encounters the Indian deity Krishna, she finds him to be noble and serene. He explains to her that the way to purify her karma and rescue Gabrielle is to be true to her own Way, which is the Way of the Warrior (in this life). He endows her with the spirit of Kali, the goddess of destruction, allowing her to defeat Indrajit and rescue Gabrielle and Eli.

Aesthetically, the show never looked better, incorporating the exotic beauty and majesty of Indian culture into the set and costume designs, and of all the “looks” that Gabrielle sported throughout the series, her sari costume was my favorite.

At this point the show was at a creative peak. As could only happen on Xena, the writers took the simple art of mehndi, the beautiful body art made with henna, and gave it into a supernatural element, thus showcasing a real element of Indian culture with a truly Xena-twist. Cliche images like flying carpets were incorporated into the story as props in action sequences. And though the number of gods in the Indian pantheon is literally in the hundreds, these episodes allowed us to glimpse a few, when so rarely are Indian gods even acknowledged in most fantasy stories.

Aside from being a fantastic yarn (and they make excellent repeat viewing), it was this batch of episodes that gave me two gifts. The first was the doorway into Indian mythology, which for a myth-geek like myself, weary of Greek and Norse legends, was a true prize. And the second was an introduction to Yoga, a practice that to this day remains a large part of my life.

Fortunately, I never had a teacher that tried to turn me into blue stone.

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I know a lot of people have busied themselves haterizing on Dollhouse, but I’m here to take a stand.

I really dug that show.

And with the news that it’s been canceled, I find myself disappointed, for once again the world has been deprived of what could have been.

I say could have, because I think we can all agree that Dollhouse never really rose to the apex of Joss Whedon’s talent for storytelling.

But the potential was definitely there. Dollhouse is the Jerry Maguire to my Renee Zellwegger — I love it for the show it wants to be and I love it for the show it almost is. And I even made my face all scrunchy and squinty when I said it!

But like Firefly before it, Dollhouse has been given the axe too soon. (Of course, the difference is that Firefly was instantly a clearly great show, but I digress.)

It seems that the two most common criticisms of the show were the following: Eliza Dushku wasn’t a good enough actress to pull off the part of Echo, and the show took far too long to establish the greater story arc, instead focusing on too many “one-shot” episodes. I’d like to take this time, before the corpse is even cold, to offer my rebuttal.

Sure, Eliza Dushku is no Meryl Streep, but few are, and I think people had made up their minds about her not having what it takes long before they saw a single episode. In fact, there were a few times she really impressed me. (And personally, I have a theory that indifference to this show stemmed from a lot of Buffy fans’ resentment of the fact that Dushku and Whedon were working together but NOT in a Buffyverse-related project. That, however, is a topic for a whole other article.)

Focusing on her also conveniently allows haters to overlook the solid talent of some of the other players, particularly Amy Acker, Fran Kranz, Olivia Williams, and the impressively chameleonic Enver Gjokaj, who in the part of Victor really did seem to be a different person with each new assignment.

As for the season-long story arc that we’ve come to expect from Whedon (a tactic he used on both Buffy and Angel), I believe he was trying something different. With Dollhouse there was no season-long storyline, but rather a series-long storyline. Each season didn’t contain a Big Bad — the corporation responsible for the Dollhouses was the nemesis, and the vanquishing of that foe meant the end of the series.

Therefore, Whedon allowed us a great deal of time to live in this world, to soak up every little detail of it, so that when the plot changed significantly there would be no confusion. But while crafting this sort of slow-drip exposition, he gave us fun little adventures each week, and with his true flair for storytelling, they bounced liberally between drama, comedy, action, and horror.

The individual episodes weren’t setting us up for the ride. They were the ride. But many Whedonites, too busy looking for the Big Bad and the overarching story, failed to see that, and grew frustrated.

Of course, this is all just my opinion. What one likes is entirely subjective, and I can understand how for many people, Dollhouse just wasn’t their cup of tea. But I enjoyed it. I genuinely liked the characters, and wanted them to eventually find their way out of the Dollhouse. But now, sadly, I’ll never see that happen.

Sorry it didn’t work out, Joss and Eliza. I was with you guys.

Um…if you’re looking for something else to do, though, there’s always that Faith show! Just throwin’ it out there…

An attractive, telegenic, charismatic leader shows up out of nowhere, promising change for the better and universal health care, and charms millions of Americans, while others refuse to jump on board the love train, and some even go so far as accusing the new leader of being a covert terrorist.

Sound familiar?

It should, because it it’s a fairly accurate (if overly-concise) account of President Obama’s campaign. It also happens to be the plot of the new show V, minus a little tidbit about reptilian aliens.

According to this article, the similarity is a little too perfect to be ignored. The author states his opinion that the show is a “barbed critique on Obamamania that will infuriate the president’s supporters and delight his detractors.” If that’s true, than we have a high-profile primetime series being used as an outlet for seething anger towards the president, not only taking aim at his supposedly specious ability to charm people, but also putting forward the belief that he is truly here to harm good, upstanding American citizens.

So, is it true?

Nope. The show obviously uses the political language of the day — a character directly, without coding, says that the aliens can offer “universal health care” — but that’s because television dialogue always reflects the language of the present culture. V doesn’t strike any eerie realistic chords with its political rhetoric anymore than The West Wing did.

Thanks to 24-hour news channels, which have made celebrities out of partisan political commentators like Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann, politics have infiltrated pop culture like never before, and have become completely infused with entertainment. Given this merge, is it any surprise that pure entertainment is based on political secrecy?

V’s source material — the 1980s mini-series and series — used similar references — and it was obviously created decades before anyone even knew Obama’s name.

Liberal or conservative, whatever your stance may be, feel free to enjoy V as a fun, if slightly silly, bit of escapist television, and leave the politicking to the professionals. Sometimes science fiction and fantasy can be used more effectively than any other genre to make social criticisms, because they allow us to step away from naming names and speak clearly, if through the lens of metaphor.

But sometimes it’s just for fun. And such is the case with V.

So here’s the thing. When I was a kid, I would go on and on about how there needed to be a movie version of Thundercats. I felt that the world as we know it would not be complete until Lion-O and the gang came to the screen in a full-blown, effects-laden mega-blockbuster, a la Jurassic Park or Independence Day.

(Yes, those references are dated. I was a kid.)

The point is, life wouldn’t have true meaning until we could see up there, in celluloid, the strength of Panthro, the speed of Cheetara, the disappearing act of Tigra, and the cunning of Wily-Kat and Wily-Kit … oh, and Lion-O’s stuff, too.

In my head it would have looked something like this:

Then one night, when I was in college, the RAs in my hall thought it would be fun to throw an anti-drinking party and show episodes of Thundercats for a fun night of nostalgia, sans underage booze-hounding. I goaded some friends of mine to attend, being desperate to bask once again in the glory of Thundercats. (We may have drank after.)

In the hours leading up to the showing, I reminisced about the deep, dense mythology surrounding the feline heroes: their expulsion from their native planet of Thundera; the death of their leader, Jaga; Lion-O’s tragedy of aging physically while being dormant, thus missing out on the formative years of his life.

It was like Hamlet with cat-people.

Then I watched a few episodes. Um, yeah. Not really that deep.

The reason why many people my age went gaga for the likes of Thundercats, G.I. Joe, He-Man, and, of course, Transformers, is one simple reason: children are easy to impress.

But in truth, the source material has all the depth of a bit of spittle drooled onto one’s shirt. These stories were meant to entertain kids, not adults, which is a strange thing, considering the demographic they’re trying to reach with the Transformers movie is men between 18 and 35.

Do kids younger than me really care about Transformers? By the time they were cognizant enough to watch cartoons, the world had moved on to Doug.

Terrifyingly, I’m now of the same age as the guys in charge of green-lighting what movies are made. (On the younger side of the scale, mind you. Like, REALLY younger side of the scale, okay? But still.)

And what’s happening is that those studio execs are banking on the same nostalgia that drove me to watch episodes of Thundercats and waste some perfectly good beer-time.

I first felt the sting of this grown-uppedness some years ago when I watched a commercial for 1-800-COLLECT. (Remember that?) The two characters featured in this particular ad were bastions of 80s cheese: Hulk Hogan and Alf. I realized that they were targeting my age bracket with a healthy dose of nostalgia.

Transformers has come upon us, and now we are faced with its inevitable sequel, because these days, a movie isn’t a success unless it’s part of a franchise.

It’s all about franchises.

And the first of what’s surely planned to be the G.I. Joe franchise will be hitting theaters before long. For anyone who’s seen the trailer, it looks like your standard lots-of-things-blowing-up and a-few-half-hearted-fistfights actioner.

A He-man film has been in the works for a while, although it seems stuck in development hell.  (IMDB, however, has a listing for a film called Grayskull, and even a year of release — 2011. This will apparently have no connection to the Dolph Lundgren He-man film.) Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson was, for a time, rumored to be playing the lead.

He-man is another show best left to the halls of your memory. He-man, is of course, the secret identity of Prince Adam of Eternia. How no one realizes they’re the same person is beyond me, seeing as how they look exactly the same, and no masks are involved. To become He-man, Adam just does some wonky spell with his sword to make all of his clothes disappear, which means he is now He-man.

That’s not a super-hero transformation. That’s just streaking.

And yes, a new Thundercats movie is coming, allegedly due out next year. Unlike the other cartoon-to-movies jump, however, it will be CG. No doubt some Gollum-esque motion capture will be employed. Not sure I like the sound of this, though. I mean, did you see Beowulf? Yikes.

It seems that only more 80s-cartoon properties will chug along to the big screen. What saddens me most is the lack of imagination involved in any of these projects.

On the other hand, I can’t wait for the big screen, epic adapatation of the Smurfs.

I won’t go so far as to say that the film versions of The Lord of the Rings changed the world, but I think it could be posited that they changed the world’s perceptions of fantasy. All of a sudden, those who never knew a dungeon from a dragon were discussing hobbits, wizards, dwarves, and elves. The films made fantasy fans out of those who knew nothing of fantasy.

Of course, there was a steadfast group of Tolkien devotees who knew of the story as a book before it was a film trilogy, many of whom took umbrage at the fact that their — THEIR — story was now filmic fodder for the unwashed masses. These Tolkienites appointed themselves watchdogs of the epic, challenging everything they read on the internet about the films’ progress during production. However, when the films debuted, they were, for the most part, satisfied at the immense achievement of the director Peter Jackson and the entire team who brought the films to life.

There was, however, one problem. And it got very ugly.

As discussed in a previous article, there was a brief scene in the first film, The Fellowship of the Ring, in which a minor character, Glorfindel, is replaced by another minor character, Arwen (played by Liv Tyler), in a roughly three-minute long rescue sequence. She comes on horseback, picks up the wounded hobbit Frodo, is pursued by evil wraiths, and calls upon the power of Rivendell to cause a river to wash away said wraiths.

A little later, as in the book, she has a quiet romantic moment with another hero, Aragorn. Then the titular fellowship leave Rivendell, and we don’t see her again. Her part is a cameo at most.

And when a certain subsection of fans saw this, they went ballistic.

But why? Having Arwen sub in for Glorfindel is far from the only change made to the story. There are others that are far more obvious: the absence of Tom Bombadil and the Barrow-Wight sequence, Frodo’s reduced age, the lack of music and poetry that make the books so charming, and the completely revised characters of Merry and Pippin.

So why zero in on Arwen in particular?

The answer is obvious to everyone except those who hated the changes to Arwen’s character. And that answer is simple, old-school sexism.

Tolkien didn’t put many women into his epic. Of the scores of characters in Lord of the Rings, only four of them are female, and one of those females is a giant spider. It’s a boys’ story, where men perform all of the major action, with the exception of Eowyn’s slaying of the Witch King. And it seemed like a lot of anemic nerds wanted it to stay that way.

In the extended version of The Two Towers, Merry and Pippin are about to be swallowed up by the wicked Old Man Willow when Treebeard, the Ent, arrives in the nick of time and saves them, saying to the beastly Willow, “Eat Earth…Dig Deep…Drink Water…Go to sleep.” This moment also occurred in the books, but rather than Treebeard, their savior was Tom Bombadil.

This is exactly the same as what happened in the first film with Arwen, yet not a peep was heard from the fans. Why? Because Arwen is a woman, and Treebeard is a…well, okay, he’s a walking tree, but he’s a walking tree that’s also a dude.

The elf Legolas, an extremely minor character in the book The Return of the King, had a ridiculously huge hero moment in the film version of Return, in which he toppled a Mumak (basically an elephant the size of a skyscraper). He climbed up the side of its body using the arrows that had pierced its hide, slew numerous enemies riding atop it, killed the beast, and then surfed down its trunk as it died, naturally landing on his feet. This is not a revised episode from the book, but rather invented wholly from scratch for the film. And what was the reaction of those same people who called for the beheading of Liv Tyler for sullying the pristine beauty of Tolkien’s work?

“Dude, Legolas is AWESOME!”

What amazes me is the number of excuses I’ve heard people make to allow the filmmakers their wiggle room, and yet Arwen consistently gets thrown to the wolves. When you step back and look at the films, you realize that the only plausible reason for people to single out that one, small alteration among many is because it cast a woman in a more proactive, heroic role, and that is clearly a mortal sin.

So I’m calling you out, nerds. It’s time to knock it off. If you ever want to actually get a girlfriend, you need to get with the times, and backing off of Arwen is a good place to start.

Incidentally, in the original script, Arwen was written into the battle at Helm’s Deep, arriving with Haldir’s troops. This allowed a brief reunion for her and Aragorn, before the film kicked into high gear with its awesome climax. I only wished they had kept this is in the film, because personally I would have loved to see Arwen and Aragorn fighting side by side, laying the smackdown on some Orcs. Alas, it was not meant to be, although they did film some of it. (Andif you have a keen eye and a few minutes to spare, you can catch a glimpse of footage of this in the bonus features on The Two Towers Extended Edition. You’re welcome.)

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