Hilarious live-action remake of one of my favourite cartoon from the 80s: Ulysess 31

Related Posts:

• Ulysses 31, 30th Anniversary
• Clash of the Titans, a missed opportunity? (a short movie review)
• The Night Watch books
• Will Lost Heroes RPG be yet another stock fantasy RPG?

This bank holiday morning, myself and my kids sat and watched some episodes of Ulysses 31, an 80s sci-fi series. Despite the weaker animation than modern cartoons, the kids still love it. My daughter and myself can quote the opening sequence where Zeus curses Ulysses:

“Mortals, you defy the Gods? I sentence you to travel among unknown stars. Until you find the Kingdom of Hades, your bodies will stay as lifeless as stone.”

I wasn’t a huge fan of it as a kid, though when it was on I watched it. But since becoming an adult, probably fuelled by nostalgia, I’ve become a big fan.  It was originally released in 1981 so this year, 2011, makes it is 30th anniversary. A French musician, a fan of the show, is re-mastering the soundtrack and has got permission to release a special edition (his website is in French but there are demos of the track there: www.parallax.fr).

I got the box set of the entire series just a few years ago, before I started Lost Heroes RPG. And it’s only in the last year I re-watched it with the kids. I’ve done a lot of reading of mythology including Greek myths for Lost Heroes and when I watched it with the kids recently, I had a new appreciation of the series. In fact I think subconsciously the genre mashup of far future fantasy plus Greek mythology probably did heavily influence the inception of Lost Heroes RPG (which could be described as a mashup of modern day fantasy plus ancient classic mythology).

Ulysses 31 is set in the 31st Century where a modern Ulysses is travelling on a large spaceship home where they encounter a planet that kidnaps his son Telemachus. Ulysses saves his son but kills the robotic Cyclops in his efforts and so the Olympian Gods curse Ulysses and his crew. It’s originally a French cartoon but done by a Japanese studio. (If you remember the Daft Punk music videos featuring blue humanoid aliens, then you’d have a good idea of the style of animation of Ulysses). Each of the episodes are inspired by Greek myths and stories.

I like the fact that the kids, Yumi and Telemachus act like kids in the show. Modern cartoons put the kids as the superheroes now (thinking Ben 10, Witch, etc.), giving them the power while a lot of the 80s cartoons, the kids are kids. They may be brave and smart and even the main protagonists but they don’t do the fighting or the heroics, that’s up to the adults.

While the main cast only features Yumi as a female character they do encounter a lot of strong female characters along the way from the Rebellion on Lemnos where the women revolt against the dominating men to The Magic Spells of Circe where a powerful sorceress is trying to defy the gods, but still it is quite atypical of the time, where the heroes are white males.

What is cool is their treatment of the classic myths. I love their take on Chronos in Chronos, Father of Time where he is exiled from Olympus so he captures Ulysses, hoping to use him to get back into Olympus. There these cool steampunk/clockwork like robots that serve Chronos and in the end Ulysses defeats Chronos by turning the clock of the Universe back! Or when Ulysses ventures to the centre of the universe in At the Heart of the Universe and is tricked into waking Atlas which causes the entire Universe to start to collapse.

I found many of the characters they met were more rounded out than the main cast, like the story of Sisyphus in The Eternal Punishment. They also managed to maintain the tragedy of Sisyphus in the episode, not something you’d find in many kids cartoons. In fact that is one of the qualities of the series, they really managed to keep the tragedy and sadness of many of the original myths, like the story of Orpheus in the final episode or the Minotaur  in Lost in the Labyrinth.

I managed to find a video of the intro on youtube, embedded for your viewing pleasure:

For pure fandom, apparently there was a pilot episode created. It followed the same plot as the original first episode but all the character designs are different and it was never translated to English. It was online at some point, but when I found out about it, all the links were dead.

Related Posts:

• Ulysess 31, live-action intro!
• Clash of the Titans, a missed opportunity? (a short movie review)
• The Night Watch books
• Will Lost Heroes RPG be yet another stock fantasy RPG?

I just finished “The Night Watch” series of books by Sergei Lukyanenko, a Russian urban fantasy that rocks socks (if you like urban magic action books that is).

They follow (mostly) the story of Anton, an “Other” or more specifically a Light Magician, as he works in the Night Watch. The Night Watch patrol the actions of Dark Others, Vampires, Werewolves, Dark Magicians, etc. (The Dark Others have their own watch called “The Day Watch”, hence the name of the second book). Sounds all black and white, but nicely isn’t. For a Light Other to do good, they have to let the Dark do something bad, for example the Night Watch give licenses to Vampires to hunt.

They also share several similar concepts with Lost Heroes, which is why I’m talking about them here. If I had read these a few years I’m pretty certain they would have been a big influence. But now instead I can point to them as being examples of what Lost Heroes is about.

In the world of Night Watch, there are humans and their are “Others”, those who are supernaturally different. And so too in Lost Heroes, though I haven’t differentiated between “Light” and “Dark” per say and the types of Others are different too.

There is also the “Twilight”, a realm that lies across mundane reality but only accessible to Others. In the movies (did I mention there are two movies based on the books?), this is translated from Russian as “the Gloom”. I like the word Gloom, it conjures up some great mental images of a sticky grim alternative world but Twilight makes more sense within the world of the books; a multi-layered spiritual planes of existence. In Lost Heroes there is the “Veil” and crossing the Veil you enter the Spirit World. In these books, there is a complex relationship between Others and this Twilight and similarly in Lost Heroes there is a power-play between Others and the Veil (which will affect how powers work too).

I’m amazed there isn’t a PnP RPG based on this world. It’s nearly crying out for it and I’d certainly pay for it. (I do believe there is a Computer Game RPG though).

Oh and by the way, there made two movies. I’ve seen the first one and thought it was good (but the book is infinitely better and more compelling). I haven’t seen the second one.

Related Posts:

• Ulysess 31, live-action intro!
• Ulysses 31, 30th Anniversary