Fox announces it’s new teen drama: Olympus

 <-Next season, we follow the mishaps of Herakles in the new Drama inspired by "The Hills," "Olympus"

During a press conference, FOX entertainment has announced it’s latest drama in the style of TV shows like “The OC” and “The Hills,” to be titled “Olympus.” Rather than taking place in a beach town, this television show will take place in the mountains of Greece, and will focus on the day to day troubles of the gods that live there.

Thankfully, the nice folks at Fox gave me a preview of the shows setting and characters. Although this show is really being filmed in the Saddleback mountain range in California, they manage to make it look a lot like it is actually being filmed in Mount Olympus in Greece. A great deal of time will be spent in the fictional school Olympus High, where several of the characters struggle through the everyday issues of being high school students, maintaining worshippers, maintaining their divine portfolio, and competition with other gods.

A Preview show of a place many of the main characters hang out, a coffee shop named "The Forum."

The show will be taking place in a variety of locales that actually exist on Mount Olympus, and an actual coffee shop based off of “the Forum,” a place frequented during the show, is being planned in order to promote the show. The first episode they showed me focused on Herakles, and showed his relationship with Zeus, with a brief glaring match between him and Hera. Later Orpheus was shown playing a song by whatever band those kiddies are listening to these days. Although the actor that plays Athena was quite hot, she got the role of the jealous jerk down perfectly. I took issue with the fact that Herakles seemed to have been portrayed as a bit more macho in mythology, but the people at Fox said they wanted a new twist on the character. They also pointed out that this is why Orpheus plays a guitar instead of a lyre, along with having Orpheus showcase music by the latest bands. Fortunately, the pilot episode showed us a lot of the characters, and the hot young actors who are going to be playing them:

   Here's a shot of Olympus high, which the show will be taking place at

Zeus: Zeus is the principal at Mount Olympus High school. Although he mainly appears as a guidance figure to the other gods, he will occasionally get his own moment in the spotlight. He is currently having marital issues with his wife Hera, which makes things difficult while trying to a proper father figure to his illegitimate son Herakles.  

Herakles: Zeus’s illegitimate son who is trying to fit in at Olympus high. He has trouble getting along with the other students, who make fun of him because he isn’t really a god. Furthermore, he feels estranged by his father, who never seems to have time for him, and his scheming wife Hera, who always seems to make things difficult for him. At the start of the series, he’s been attempting to complete twelve labors in hopes of getting strong enough to join the Mount Olympus High Football team.

Orpheus: A singer who plays the guitar every Saturday at “The Forum” the coffee shop that the students at Olympus high frequently attend. He’s best friends with Herakles, as he’s the only person who really understands what it’s like not being a god in this town. Sometimes can be found by the lake gazing off into the distance, mentioning something about a girl named Eurydice.

Poseidon: Poseidon is the local surfer dude, who always seems to use metaphors that allude to surfing. He’s also very popular with the ladies at Olympus High, despite being a bit of a delinquent. He is quite famous at the school for an incident where he lost a contest with Athena, and wound up flooding most of the school.

Athena: Leader of the student council at Olympus high, she’s the principal’s daughter, and everybody knows it.  Started a rumor a few years ago about Poseidon’s ex-girlfriend that she was never able to recover from. Strangely, there are some rumors floating around that she has a crush on Herakles, which would ruin her reputation entirely if they were to be confirmed, since Herakles is SUCH a dork.

Aphrodite: Another member of Athena’s band of cheerleaders, quite famous for her on and off relationship with Poseidon. Then again, who DOESN’T she have an on and off relationship with? Recently, she’s had her eye on Herakles, just to see how it would cause Athena to react…

Artemis: The local goth chick, she always seems to be late for class. She loves animals, and doesn’t get along with Athena and her gang of blonde cheerleaders. She can be seen hanging around with Herakles down at “the forum” sometimes, and likes listening to Orpheus’s work, especially after Eurydice died and he got into a darker type of music.

I’m actually exited to see how this show turns out, and if any of the actors will be able to launch their careers from this show. Furthermore, Fox said that if the show is successful, they will be launching a spin-off series named “Valhalla.” This show will be airing sometime next season on Fox!

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Mythology and its relation to Modern Anime Entertainment

 <-Did you know GAR and general manliness was invented in Greece

Kids, it’s time we discuss how little attention you pay during your history class, A great majority of the fantasy anime you watch is unsurprisingly unoriginal. Not unoriginal in that every anime takes elements from another anime, unoriginal in the sense that most things take elements that are about as old as dirt.

I’m not about to go about calling everybody unoriginal, today at least. Instead, I am going to discuss how knowledge of ancient mythological concepts will actually enhance your anime experience, making being an anime fan a much more enlightening. Your conversations with other fans will suddenly have more substance, as you will have a wide array of things to talk about and expand on your favorite series. This is fun for both the optimist and the pessimist, as the optimist can find deeper meanings in everything he does, while the pessimist can find further things to complain about.

This becomes apparent with some of the more mythology based series, such as Neon Genesis Evangellion. Knowledge of Christian mythos will help you realize that the concept presented as deep actually make no sense when applied to the mythos, and that cross shaped lasers are just dumb. Furthermore, while Shinji gets crucified in the end, casting him as a messiah figure just makes me facepalm. It would make more sense if Koworu was placed as a messiah figure, placing Koworu as the Christ figure, and Shinji as the Jewish leaders who killed him out of fear.

Now then, knowledge can be used for more than nitpicking. Granted, even doing the most basic research shows the mythological references in Fate/Stay Night (Great Demon Hercules…?) are wildly inaccurate, doing that research ensures that you can converse with others and tells you how little research your average writer does.

An underappreciated set of mythos belongs to the Greek pantheon, which basically ran a divine soap opera of betrayal, seduction, and just plain weirdness that inspires people to this very day. Alas, people insist on taking out the shades of gray and turning it into a bunch of black and white battles between good and evil, portraying Zeus as a good guy with Hades as a jerk, when both of them had about the same moral fiber (No, really, go read into them and get back to me.) The shades of gray nature is a section of mythology that largely goes unnoticed, despite Greek mythology being one of the most frequently used mythos in modern media. At the same time, it suffers the greatest amount of adaptation decay (Okay, I admit, I loved Disney’s Hercules, but nobody acted like they do in myth) At the very least, it allows you to perform intelligent sounding conversations comparing the mythos modern media bases things on, and how they interpret it.

The main reason I like to encourage researching mythologies of various cultures, is that it is just plain good fun. It’s like reading a comic book before comic books were invented. It’s not like the philosophers in ancient Greece, the Scandinavians, or the Celts had anything better to do besides survive and tell stories. I’ll admit, to really appreciate mythology you should probably look up a version with footnotes, but once you fully understand the concepts, it’s like doing research on a comic book universe. Anybody who enjoys watching high fantasy anime or manga would get a great deal of enjoyment out of researching the world’s mythologies that inspire fantasy anime and manga.

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Why not do some research?