Hercules: The Legendary Journeys Season 1
Hercules: The Legendary Journeys
Hercules: The Legendary Journeys Season 0
SPOILERS TOTAL. You've been warned.
101: The Wrong Path 1995 January 29
(First watched 2025-02-06) So I knew from looking into the series months ago that it started out with Hercules's family being killed, but boy Hera sure didn't mess around. Fireballs through the windows to totally destroy their bodies in front of his eyes in an instant.
Also an easy explanation for why Zeus was around so often in the movies but not in the series: dipshit was off boning somebody else while his wife was killing Hercules's family, so he's too ashamed to show himself and Hercules doesn't want anything to do with him.
So Iolaus... he's basically Krillin, yeah? Oh, and his Bruce Lee moves and sounds survived.
So at the end Hercules basically walks off in a random direction, figuring he can do some good. Well, I suppose he will run across problems... but it leaves other people in the lurch, doesn't it? People used to go running to Hercules's house for help, but now there's never any telling where he is.
Also... Hercules starts on a Hera revenge tour, but then is reminded that helping people is the better thing to do. But... why not both? As long as he's wandering aimlessly, why NOT set Hera's temples as targets to knock down along the way?
102: Eye of the Beholder 1995 February 5
(First watched 2025-02-07) As a rule I don't want to nitpick over special effects for every episode. I'm going in with the understanding that it's both low budget and 30 years old. That said, some things are worse than others. The cyclops in this episode, the prosthetic worn over the top of his head was not so great. Didn't really match the rest of his skin color. Kind of seemed like somebody got a poorly fitting Klingon forehead prosthetic that accidentally went over their eyes.
Robert Trebor... what is this, the twentieth person to return in a separate role so far? But he is fair decent as a comic relief sidekick.
On the subject of comic actors, Castor and "Ferret" weren't exactly going for big laughs, but were appropriately over the top as campy villains. That's the kind of fun that doesn't need budget.
103: The Road to Calydon 1995 February 12
(First watched 2025-02-10) Seems like a lot fewer people/places/things on Earth would be cursed if Zeus could keep his willy in his pants. Here we see an entire town that's been wiped out because Hera was jealous of one person.
Everyplace in Mythical Times was close together, yet again. Hercules tries to help a wandering group without a home, and it just so happens that a land free of curses and apparently willing to take in refugees, Calydon, is just a couple days' journey away!
The people sent to attack Hercules and the wanderers reminded me of some sort of Power Rangers peon. A little skull thrown onto the ground grows into a man-sized thing that isn't really a man... and being un-manny, Hercules has to basically break them into pieces to defeat them.
Considering curses weren't supposed to exist in Calydon, I was kind of expecting the ending to be that the woman Hera turned into a dog would be freed from her curse, buuuut nope. She just never goes to Calydon and instead travels with the blind future-seeing doom-seeker.
104: The Festival of Dionysus 1995 February 19
(First watched 2025-02-19) OK, so I expected to see the blind prophet again... but the very next episode? And he's already without the dog? Which wasn't even mentioned.
Some goofy god action in this one. Dionysus is supposed to inhabit the new wine and they point a telescope between the wine and the moon to facilitate this... but this is more than just metaphor, and instead Ares rides his way into the wine to control the people who drink it. Could he not have done that without the telescope contraption and all? And Dionysus didn't care about his festival being ruined? Truly the gods work in mysterious ways. I guess for a TV show it works that their precise objectives and capabilities are a bit vague.
105: Ares 1995 February 26
(First watched 2025-03-02) So for Hera they show eyes in the sky with a peacock sound. For Ares we get a skull superimposed on the moon with an evil chuckle. Do all the gods have show sky signatures like this?
I haven't directly brought it up yet, but this show really lays on the woman flesh thick. Maybe this is the sort of thing they figured they could supply without needing a big budget. It feels more out of place in the series than the movies, considering we're following a recently-widowed hero. If Hercules isn't being chased by 100 princesses who want his seed, he's being ogled in a village where all the men are off at war and the female blacksmith is walking around with her ass out.
106: As Darkness Falls 1995 March 5
(First watched 2025-03-03) Not bad. Poisoned Hercules has temporarily lost much of his vision, making him much less of a threat to anyone attacking him.
The centaur from one of the later movies is back. Or rather his brother, which is so far the best excuse they've had for reusing an actor. Speaking of reusing an actor, Lucy Lawless is in this episode, as a character who is neither the same one she played in the first movie, nor Xena who she will start to portray in merely three episodes. Did they cast her for that role so late that this couldn't have been avoided?
Nice to see Salmoneus again. I think he works because he is exactly what you DON'T think of when you hear "Hercules"--a weird entrepreneur comic relief sidekick.
107: Pride Comes Before a Brawl 1995 March 12
(First watched 2025-03-04) If Hercules is just wandering around helping people, how does he do things like make plans to travel to an event with Iolaus? For that matter how did he get invited to the wedding in the previous episode? Does he stop by his house every month to check the mail? Do people just whisper to the grapevine and hope Hercules eventually hears it?
Some stuff in this whole scenario seemed a bit weird. Like apparently Nemesis is someone Hercules knew when he was young, and so was Iolaus, but they don't know each other? And now Nemesis has a job with the gods, but... was it always that way? Like, was the reason his friends didn't know each other because she was at the demigod daycamp or whatever? And if that's not the case, do humans regularly get the chance to apply for a job with the gods where they mete out ironic punishments and turn invisible?
So if the gods think someone is getting too full of themselves (like themselves), they send her to arrange a death for them... but it really seems like more of a test. If they continue their failings, they end up dying. But I don't see that playing out in this episode? They say his big problem was too much pride, but over and over in this episode he's like "Do what I say if you want to live!" and... basically he's right each time, and it leads to their survival. Doesn't seem like much of a punishment against pride?
Still, fun to see Iolaus getting the chance to be the episode's big hero, even if it does seem a little early for such a reversal to be necessary. This is only what, something like his fourth appearance?
108: The March to Freedom 1995 March 19
(First watched 2025-03-10) Today's half naked woman: a young Lucy Liu.
It does seem a general problem for any sort of story set in the far enough past, that the heroic characters are just coexisting with slavery. Hercules just kind of gives it dirty looks and decides to buy one slave to release them as his good deed for the day, before getting caught up in more. Speaking of, the money he spent to buy her was half from Iolaus and half from the proceeds of selling his mother's grain... and he took the 200 dinars that was the very first amount anybody offered to him for the grain, even though his mother said to not let it go for anything less than 400. Hercules, you are a shitty salesman and will put your mother in the poorhouse.
So Hercules's solution for what to do with the bad guy... sell him as a slave to a horny old woman. That's... that's pretty fucked up, Hercules.
109: The Warrior Princess 1995 March 26
(First watched 2025-03-12) So Iolaus got married in the movies, his wife died, they mentioned him being a single father... but no mention of that stuff since. Did his kid get retconned out of existence? Did his wife get retconned out of existence?
So Xena is introduced, and is... basically a murderous warlord. I wonder how this gets played into her having her own series. Like, gotta be something better than "Oops, I now regret killing so many people. I will be good now and help."
It was a little too easy for her to cause a rift between Iolaus and Hercules, but maybe he was just too busy thinking with "little Iolaus".
110: Gladiator 1995 April 2
(First watched 2025-03-12) Good old Tony Todd! Another anti-slavery episode, this time Hercules lets himself (and Iolaus) be imprisoned so they can try to help someone from the inside and... it expands.
111: The Vanishing Dead 1995 May 7
(First watched Another fun guest star to see, Reb Brown! Playing dual roles sort of, both as a guy who is dead, and Ares impersonating that guy in the flesh to manipulate people into war. Stupid fun banter of the episode between Hercules and Ares, something like "Starting a war just to feed your dog? That's awful." "I guess you're not a pet lover.")
113: Unchained Heart 1995 May 21