Warrior… Princess… Vampire Slayer?
In comparison with many other genre television shows and films, Xena: Warrior Princess and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys have had relatively short life spans. No one had ever heard of the Warrior Princess back in 1994, and while Hercules may have been a legend of Greek mythology as far back as we can remember, we would have laughed at the prospect of a weekly television series about the demi-god 10 years ago. Yet Xena, and specifically the show's chief character, has crept into our culture more than most of us would probably realise, as Jim Smith reveals…
Official Xena Magazine: Issue 22
It's easy to tell when something has been absorbed into the cultural consciousness; it's when it becomes so famous that nobody has to explain what it is anymore. When that happens to something, be it a television show, a band or a soft drink, it becomes possible to refer to it, quote it and joke about it without worrying whether or not your audience are going to know what you're talking about.
The ultimate example of this is the work of Shakespeare. The writer’s work has permeated our culture to the point where he doesn’t need a first name anymore. Millions of people use the word ‘eyeball’ without realizing he invented it; people who’ve never read or seen anything by him know who he is.
Another example is The Beatles. Lazy newspaper headline writers repeatedly feed the public ‘Hard Day’s Nights’, ‘Days in the Life’ and things that can be done ‘With a little help from my friends’, all terms which entered the public consciousness as Beatles’ song titles. The Beatles are so famous that the idea of a Yellow Submarine has stopped being absurd. That is cultural penetration.
So has Xena: Warrior Princess achieved cultural absorption to this degree? Well, no. But then few things have. What is interesting about Xena is the extent to which it has been embraced by mainstream culture, especially considering that the title character has been around for just a handful of years.
There have been far too many mentions of, and references to, Xena in other media in recent years for me to mention them all, but these are a few of the most interesting examples, all of which indicate the level to which the adventures of the Warrior Princess have been absorbed into US and/or UK culture.
Perhaps the least unlikely first: Twentieth Century Fox’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a series which has a lot in common with Xena: Warrior Princess. Although the original Buffy movie predates Xena’s initial appearances in Hercules, the Buffy series came at a time when strong female-fronted shows like Xena were becoming more and more popular with television networks and audiences around the world.
In the superb Buffy episode Halloween, magician Ethan Rayne casts a spell over the whole of Buffy’s adopted town of Sunnydale. This spell affects people wearing Hallowe’en costumes, magically turning them into the people who they are dressed up as. Thus, Buffy’s friend Xander becomes a soldier because he’s dressed as one, whilst Buffy, dressed as an 18th Century blushing beauty becomes... well, a blushing beauty with no knowledge of how to slay vampires.
Of course, all hell soon breaks loose, as is usual on the series, and she’s no help at all. This leads Buffy’s best friend Willow to exclaim, ‘She couldn’t have dressed as Xena?’ What she means, of course, is that if Buffy had dressed as Xena, she could’ve made use of the Warrior Princess’ notorious fighting skills.
Miami 7, a popular kids comedy/music show featuring the members of UK pop band S Club 7, has also made reference to everyone’s favourite Warrior Princess. In the episode How Deep Is Your Love?, Paul tells the other members of the band that he’s fallen in love with a marine biologist called Janine. Quizzed by his best friend Jo about the depth of his attraction, he’s asked if he fancies Janine more than Jennifer Aniston. ‘Yes,’ he replies, to shocked looks all round. ‘More than Xena: Warrior Princess?’ asks a horrified Jo. ‘Yes,’ says Paul, in a voice that suggests that even he can’t believe it.
Turning from popular television to more literary realms, we come to the work of popular and innovative British science fiction novelist Dave Stone. Stone is something of a fan of Xena, so much so that he included a sly in-joke referring to Xena and Gabrielle in his novel Return to the Fractured Planet (Virgin Publishing 1999)
Some of the characters in Return To The Fractured Planet are ‘APES’ (an Artificial Personality Embodiment). Essentially, an APE is a super-soldier grown in a tank in a factory somewhere, and then implanted with artificial memories and a back story which explain to them who they are, how they’ve woken up somewhere strange and why they are now expected to go off and fight in some war or other. The suspiciously Xena-like Delbane eventually explains to an (unprogrammed) colleague that they are not who they think they are:
‘You know, I'm not sure whether to envy you or not,’ Delbane continued. ‘Every other APE is fitted with a back-story cobbled together out of old parts. I mean, I was this Warrior Princess wandering around Ancient Greece, with tits of death and this incredibly homy sidekick with a quarterstaff, till a daughter of hers who was actually the Spawn of Hell sent me into the Country of the Amazons and then into the future...’
Clearly, before she realized otherwise, Delbane thought she was Xena, lost in time and trapped in the future.
Speaking of a trapped Xena, one of the most high-profile Xena jokes in US television was when Lucy Lawless appeared in an episode of the hugely successful animated comedy series The Simpsons. Xena/Lucy (in full Warrior Princess garb) is captured by the bearded rotund comic shop owner and placed in a plastic mylar bag alongside Tom Baker’s Doctor Who and various other cult television characters. Once Bart and Lisa Simpson have freed Lucy/Xena from the bag and defeated Comic Book Guy, she offers to fly them home.
‘Xena can’t fly,’ objects Lisa. I know,’ says Lucy. ‘But I’m not Xena. I’m Lucy Lawless’. She then picks the Simpson children up, one under each arm, and lifts them into the air. So now you know - Lucy Lawless can fly, even if Xena can’t!
Last, but far from least, one of my personal favourite uses of Xena ever. Last autumn, The Street debuted on Fox, a series about stockbrokers which, despite sharp scripts and a good cast, was quickly axed by the network. Although The Street cannot itself be considered influential for this very reason, its treatment of a character's love of Xena: Warrior Princess was, to say the least, very interesting.
In the series’ pilot episode, we’re told that Evan (Adam Goldberg), one of the regular characters, is a big fan of both Lucy Lawless and Xena. Much later he is dragged, somewhat reluctantly, to a strip club by some of his colleagues. Here he’s transfixed by a stripper who’s initially (i.e. before she starts her act) dressed like Xena.
He’s bewitched by her performance, and when he later sees her sitting in the bar, decides to ask her out. Initially, he asks her name, which is Allison, and after a brief chat asks if she’d like to have dinner with him.
Allison refuses, but Evan argues that his attraction to her isn’t just some silly fetish. He really does like her, and, what’s more, he thinks he's got a good idea what she's really like.
He requests to ask her three questions about her life. If she answers ‘yes' to all three questions, she’s got to go on at least one date with him. Amused, she reluctantly agrees, and is obviously surprised when she willingly answers yes to the first two questions. The final one is, ‘Didn’t I see you at a Xena convention last week?’ Laughing, she agrees to date him just once. The romance between the two, although turbulent, was still going on as the series was cancelled.
What was significant about The Street and its use of Xena as a cultural reference was that nobody in the programme at any point felt the need to explain what the series was.
This is something that’s true of almost all mentions of Xena in popular culture; there’s no need to explain, because the identity of the Warrior Princess is simply something they expect the audience to already know.
Whether this cultural awareness will continue beyond the series' demise remains to be seen. Time will tell, but given how far ingrained the series already is in our culture, it’s more than likely that although it may be gone, Xena won’t quickly be forgotten.