BEASTMASTER SEASON ONE (1999-2000)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *metaphysical, sociological*

Just as the 1982 BEASTMASTER film was based only loosely on a 1960s Andre Norton space opera, this teleseries was based very loosely on the first film. There were two DTV movies in the nineties, but neither was worth much, aside from their keeping the franchise alive, until this series germinated.

Just as XENA took advantage of the unspoiled lands of New Zealand, BEASTMASTER shot in both Australia and Canada in order to put across the sense of a primeval fantasy-world. Though XENA had a higher number of strong myth-episodes, its jumbled use of different historical periods compromised any sense of the "enchantment" that many fantasy-fans prefer. BEASTMASTER takes place in a fantasy-world with no connection to Earth, and overall the producers did a better job of evoking, through sight and sound, the appeal of a sword-and-sorcery world, for all that the hero fights evil not with a sword but a staff.

As in the 1982 movie, titular character Dar (Daniel Goddard) is the last of his tribe, who are slain by invading hostiles, this time named "Terrons" and led by a ruthless warlord, King Zad (Steven Grives). Because Dar possesses an innate rapport with the entire animal kingdom, he can speak to them and sometimes ask their assistance. Four nonhuman creatures regularly travel with Dar: tiger Ruh, eagle Sharak, and two ferrets, Kodo and Podo. Dar also befriends itinerant scholar Tao (Jackson Raine), who provides a certain amount of comedy as well as discoursing on abstract matters far from Dar's concern. As is the case with most sword-and-sorcery serials, most stories are episodic, concerning Dar and Tao wandering from place to place, either being menaced by assorted aggressors or coming to the aid of innocents. There are occasional opponents whose peril extends over more than one episode, but there are none of the big, ambitious story-arcs seen in the aforementioned XENA.      

Zad is the duo's most frequent enemy but he's less interesting than two support characters not resembling anything in the movies: two magicians, The Sorceress (Monika Schnarre) and her master/tutor The Ancient One (Grahame Bond). Most of the time they simply watch Dar's struggles, like some Howardian take on The Book of Job, occasionally intervening to help Dar or Zad. The Ancient One is impossibly old, and any humanity he may have had has been overlaid by a dry scorn toward mortals. The Sorceress is also much older than she looks, and in olden times she and another student conspired to overthrow their perceptor. For this attempt, the Sorceress was punished with a loss of memory, while the male student was transformed into Sharak the Eagle. The showrunners may have been going for a lovelorn "Ladyhawke" vibe by making Sharak-- originally just a regular bird-- the lost romantic interest of The Sorceress. This trope is sometimes slightly affecting but in Season One at least, it doesn't develop into anything, since the Ancient One has to remain in power to utter all of his gnomic witticisms.        

           

Of the various recurring characters who appear more irregularly, the best is Curupira (Emilie di Raven), a sort of forest-goddess who tasks Dar with doing a good job of protecting her animal subjects. The one-shot characters range from nugatory (a tribe of Amazons) to mythically resonant (a culture of island-dwellers, more fully explored in my only standalone review of a Season One episode). But even those magical entities who are not fully realized still have a touch on unpredictability about them.

Dar has one romantic arc of sorts, in that his lover Kyra is taken prisoner by the Terrons, but it will come to no one's surprise that she disappears during the middle episodes of the season and comes back near the end just to get eliminated from the narrative. Dar himself is something of a pacifist; he seeks to knock out his enemies rather than killing them, though he restrains himself less out of righteousness than out of a desire not to be like his ruthless opponents. As a series it's more often pleasant rather than compelling, but it does have its own unique charisma.