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From the Editor-in-Chief:
Life...Goes On
From the Editor-in-Chief:
Life...Goes On
Seems like a couple of years ago that Xena: Warrior Princess ended. Well, it has been! And here we still all are. Pretty pathetic, eh? Anyways, at least some cast members of Xena: Warrior Princess have found life beyond the cult classic.
From June 23-30, 2003, Renee O'Connor was in Las Vegas shooting the indie film Diamonds and Guns. They shot on the Vegas strip at the Riviera, mainly at the garage, the pool, the rooftop, and the casino proper. The writer is Dawn Higginbotham who describes the film as a "Swingers with girls" and "Romeo and Juliet". It is about two friends (Renee O'Connor and Helena Beaven) who go to Las Vegas for one last fling and it turns into "a comedy of errors". She also said, "We wanted to stick to the classy-style, old-school Vegas look".
Lucy Lawless finished up a 6 week shoot in Ireland on June 15th filming the story of 16th Century pirate sea queen Grainne Mhaol for a Discovery Channel documentary on women broadcasting sometime next fall. After the Ireland gig, Lawless then flew to China to do the dubbing and some filming for another part of the series. Lawless will be not only appearing as one of the women, but will be narrating the entire series. Apparently she will also appear on camera during the China section of the docudrama series.
Hudson "Callisto" Leick has lent her voice acting skills to a new PlayStation2 game called "Primal". It released in June 2003, lists at $40, and has an "M" (mature) rating.
Or Does It?Looks like there is some blow-back from the unpopular conclusion of Xena: Warrior Princess. The season 1 DVDs of Xena: Warrior Princess released April 29, 2003, according to industry sources, has sold around 15,000 units. To put this in perspective, the season 2 DVDs of Babylon 5, released the very same day, has sold over 40,000 units. The kicker is that the season 4 DVDs of Buffy: Vampire Slayer, released June 10, 2003, less than three weeks ago, have sold over 80,000 units. Okay, that the Xena DVDs offer no commentary other than an extra disk with some interviews on it and that season one DVDs were available by another company previous to the Anchor Bay run may factor into it. But the numbers do not lie. Xena; Warrior Princess used to be a force. Heck, it was the show that kept Oxygen afloat for a while. Now, it is under performing shows that it should be over performing. Would this be different had the series ender been anything other than FRIEND IN NEED? I bet it would. All they would have to do was run WHEN FATES COLLIDE and they would have had a healthy franchise still ripe for the picking. Tapert disfranchised many when he promised the fans that Xena would not die at the end of the series and then killed her off anyways. Also, the series deserved a better ending than introducing a new character literally in the last two hours of the show with a story-line that went against the redemption theme carefully laid out over the previous 6 seasons. It was a weird choice and now we can see some consequences of it. It has become the primer on how not to end a successful cult series.
Kym Masera Taborn
Editor-in-Chief/Publisher
Executive Committee
Calabasas, CA
July 1, 2003
