Posted on 07/29/2012 3:43:49 PM PDT by KevinDavis
Weekly Sci-Fi Thread (07/29/12)
Monday:
9/8 -- Warehouse 13 -- SyFy
10/9 -- Alphas -- SyFy
Wednesday:
10/9 -- Futurama -- Comedy Central
Yours?????
I always preferred Greek mythology. I was a classics major for around a year.
I always loved Norse mythology, largely because of the implications of Ragnarok. After Ragnarok things will be peaceful and awesome, but all the gods will be dead so they’re trying to delay it. I like a mythology where what the gods want is not for the best of humanity, shows the way random chance (acts of the gods) affected Nordic people compared to other cultures where their gods tend to be on their side.
I like Greek mythology too. I also detest when Hollywood makes a movie and completely screws the pooch on mythological facts.
Case in point: Clash of the Titans. Perseus was supposed to wind up with Andromeda. The Hollywood idiots ended the movie with Perseus and Io walking off hand in hand together. Io was Perseus’s grandmother. Eeeeewwww!!!!
As for SciFi. There isn’t any anymore.
Wrestling as a major attraction on the SciFi channel doesn’t cut it. And neither does horror. Vampires and werewolves are not SciFi.
And Athena had a robot owl.
> ... and from Anglo Mythology (well mostly stories about King Arthur).
Arthurian legends are great, but there’s a whole parallel set of legends set in the same time period. Ever read Orlando Furioso? It takes place in France and Italy during the reign of Arthur. In Orlando Furioso I found out that Morgana was the Lady of the Lake, and that Merlin had her make two Excalibers, because he knew one would be broken. When Arthur broke the sword and cast it into the still water of the lake, Morgana caught it, took it to the bottom of the lake and brought up the duplicate Excaliber.
Merlin features prominently in Orlando Furioso. You wouldn’t believe the number of holes in the Arthurian Legends that are filled in.
I agree but I have come to the point where I don’t even have any expectation of getting the story right in a movie.
I used to like Smallville before it got unwatchable. Someone among the writers must have had a basic understanding of Greek Mythology because they have lex and Lionel Luther regularly quoting it as well as Greek and Roman history. They always manage to get it partially wrong. You would think they would just get a book, say Edith Hamilton or Bullfinch and look it up before they write.
Same with the Bible. They have Lex telling the tale of King David then Lex tells him about David sending his best friend to die in battle so he can have bathsheba.
Well first of all Uriah was not even an acquaintance of King David but he was an honorable man. Then Clark Kent says “they never tell you about that do they.
Well they in fact do tell you about that and what King David suffers for the infidelity and the terrible results of his own children fighting each other and David and Bathsheba’s baby dying for David’d sin.
Totally different than what they say.
I know almost no Celtic mythology. I was watching the movie “Edge of the World” about the remote Scottish island where the government resettled them to the mainland as it was getting too difficult to survive there (despite the fact that the island had been settled for several thousand years.
Anyway they had the actress who was very pretty sing a song to her little baby. It was Dream Angus and a very pleasant song.
I looked it up and it was an old Scottish lullaby about Dream Angus, a beautiful young man who brought dreams to people. In the lullaby he brings fine dreams to sell to the Mother.
My favorite, as well. And it's one reason I really enjoyed Stargate SG-1 - the emphasis on Norse mythology in the creation of the "little grey men," the Asgard, with "Supreme Commander" Thor, Loki, Freyr, Heimdall, etc.
Bookmark.
On the other hand he gave away the family farm to the Saxons, and they had to move from there to Brittany which had recently been seriously depopulated by whatever it was caused the Dark Ages to begin.
Now, from that point on there end up being SEVERAL sources of Arthur stories. First, the Welsh version, then the Breton/Briton version ~ and the Brocelinda, then all the way across France to the headwaters of the Rhone there's a third source.
These things were possible at the time because there was hardly anyone around to care one way or the other. Merlin had to replant the grapes in Brittainy, Beaujolais and along the Rhone Valley for that matter, and that was a whopping big job, except there weren't many customers around so he and a couple of Saxon slaves could probably get the job done in short order.
Notice that no one ever buys or sells a horse ~ they just go out to the fields and get one. All the horses were wild for a while until people bred more riders! Wolf attack stories make their way back into all the European folk tales there in the 6th and 7th centuries (real wolves too)
One, or maybe two of the stranger things to happen in that period was the dispatch of Jain missionaries to the ends of the Earth by several Jain kings in India. A couple of these fellows made it all the way to England ~ right there at the time King Ad was giving away the family farm. They moved to Brittany as well.
They left behind sermons that heavily criticize the local petty kings and nobles for fighting wars. A Jain thing!
This is a bit short of an Ancient Astronauts scenario, but the missionaries were real, they came from India, and they probably seemed quite Spock-like to the locals. One of them saw buildings fall down when they were pulled into the sky ~ by something.
No doubt the Pope had a good laugh with these fellows ~ they got to Europe just in time to see it turn nasty.
I like Norse, Greek, and Roman.
As the battle of Roncesvalles was about 280 years after Badon Hill, I going to call shennagins on "the same time period". And as Orlando Furioso was published only 30 years after Le Morte d'Arthur, I'm not too surprised that a number of improvements were made to the plotting.
What Ludovico Ariosto did was write a crossover fanfic combining the universes of Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur and Matteo Maria Boiardo's Orlando Innamorato
And Wagner’s ‘Ring’ Cycle is one hell of a telling of the Ragnarok.
One things for sure, its a unique mythology.
I got to go with the Arthurian mythos, which is at its root Celtic, (although several other cultures have added to it significantly over the past 1500 years or so).
watching a rerun of The Big Bang Theory the other night.
Sheldon put Rupert Murdock on his ‘enemys list’....
why?
because he owns Fox, which cancelled ‘Firefly’.
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