Hercules: The Legendary Journeys Season 1

Hercules: The Legendary Journeys

Hercules: The Legendary Journeys Season 0

SPOILERS TOTAL. You've been warned.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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107: Pride Comes Before a Brawl 1995 March 12

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108: The March to Freedom 1995 March 19

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109: The Warrior Princess 1995 March 26

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110: Gladiator 1995 April 2

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111: The Vanishing Dead 1995 May 7

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112: The Gauntlet 1995 May 14

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113: Unchained Heart 1995 May 21

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Hercules: The Legendary Journeys Season 2