What is the best Arthurian show?

[Steve Newport]

Three versions of best:

1. Most fun to watch.
2. Best quality production.
3. Most "faithful" to sources.

Notes:
For me 1 is usually 2, but not always.
Obviously 3 is difficult has there is no single source, but some
things just seem to use the names and make this up from scratch,
others rely on a source or source...

**********************************
"March went out like a lion, a whippin' up the water in the bay..."--
Oscar Hammerstein II

[StormChaser]

For me it is still Camelot.

Excellent music and lyrics.

Relies on the singing skills of
the principal cast. Was written
in the days when projecting to the
balconies was a serious consideration
for casting.

Set changes are modest.
(it can be performed by eight graders
or in the family basement).

(no doubt, if revived today, it would feature
glowing swords and Merlin would shoot
laser blasts from his fingertips. This would
be justified by producers pointing
sharply in the direction of Spiderman: Turn
off the Dark).

[John W Kennedy]

"Camelot" has a damnably effective final curtain, but, to quote, with
minor revisions, from myself a few years ago:

Having read (mostly in translation), Geoffrey of Monmouth, Wace,
Layamon, Marie de France, Chrétien de Troyes, the Vulgate, the
Post-Vulgate, Sir Thomas Malory, Tennyson, and White (not to mention
Charles Williams), I can see the historical origin of the show's
inability to hold together philosophically, but the inability itself,
on the other hand, anyone can see.

There is another problem with "Camelot", of course. Aristotle pointed
it out long ago:
    The Unity of a Plot does not consist, as some suppose, in
    its having one man as its subject. An infinity of things
    befall that one man, some of which it is impossible to
    reduce to unity; and in like manner there are many actions
    of one man which cannot be made to form one action. One
    sees, therefore, the mistake of all the poets who have
    written a _Heracleid_, a _Theseid_, or similar poems; they
    suppose that, because Heracles was one man, the story also
    of Heracles must be one story.

But the key problem is that, from Robert de Boron on, the story of
Arthur has been tied to the Holy Grail. Chrétien had introduced it, but
in the form of an isolated story of Sir Percival. It might not even
have been connected with Arthur, but when Chrétien wrote, it was
fashionable for knightly heroes to be associated with Arthur's
marvelous court, and so Percival was seated at the Round Table. But
Robert first made the story of the Grail the central episode of an
entire Arthuriad, and the subsequent Vulgate nailed it down by the
brilliant device of tying together the Grail and Guenevere, by
supplanting Percival with the new character, Sir Galahad, Lancelot's
bastard son. This version of the story became the standard, followed
almost exactly by the Post-Vulgate, and, three centuries later, by Sir
Thomas Malory, whose "La Morte Darthur", in Caxton's version, has
remained the standard in English for another five.

But to the Protestant Tennyson, the Grail quest was a mistake, and to
the agnostic (at best) White, it was a disaster. Yet, for the Guenevere
war to be a tragedy, the loss of Camelot must be a tragedy, too. Thus
White's historically absurd suggestion that Arthur somehow invented the
idea of justice. (There is a truth inside the absurdity, however. It
was in the Arthurian tales that the notion of a Hero, as we understand
the word today, was born. Classic heroes became heroes because they
were incredibly lucky, or incredibly unlucky, or out of loyalty to a
nation or to a king, to which Judaism and Christianity added loyalty to
God. It is only in the middle ages that we first see the hero who
wanders in the world only for the sake of looking for evils to make
right.) Thus, too, I suppose, White's uprooting Arthur from his proper
setting in the twilight of Rome and replanting him in the imaginary
Norman-and-Saxon world that Scott invented for "Ivanhoe", which Scott
had modeled after the world of the Scottish border that he had already
successfully written of.

So here we are in "Camelot" with a bunch of characters with
20th-century personalities, but who are, according to the needs of the
plot, little better than savages, until Arthur suddenly intuits at
least half the values of the Enlightenment. It refuses to gel for any
adult audience, and is downright laughable to anyone who really knows
his way around the middle ages, because it's not just an anachronism,
but an anachronism that violently contradicts itself.

White's distaste for fantasy also means that the highly potent figure
of Morgan le Fay is reduced to a cardboard joke, while the demands of
musical comedy produce the merely childish "Seven deadly virtues" and
"Fie on goodness".

I confess, however, that analysis fails me on "Take me to the fair".
Why didn't at least one of the two creators realize that the parlando
section is cute once, but pays severely diminishing returns?

* * * * *

Sure, I tear up just like anyone whenever I see the ending. But I also
laugh at "The Court Jester" and "Roman Scandals", which I knew enough
to poke holes in by the time I entered high school. The difference is
that "Camelot" asks us to take it seriously.

--
John W Kennedy
"Only an idiot fights a war on two fronts. Only the heir to the throne
of the kingdom of idiots would fight a war on twelve fronts"
-- J. Michael Straczynski. "Babylon 5", "Ceremonies of Light and Dark"

[T987654321]

Movie: Excalibur

Series: Merlin (are there any others?)

[John W Kennedy]

On 2012-04-15 14:06:21 +0000, T987654321 said:

> Movie: Excalibur
>
> Series: Merlin (are there any others?)

"Sir Lancelot" from the 50s (starring Doctor Who's William Russell)

"Camelot" (very recent, on HBO in the US--only one season)

I am also aware of an unaired pilot from the 90s.


--
John W Kennedy
Read the remains of Shakespeare's lost play, now annotated!
http://www.SKenSoftware.com/Double%20Falshood