King Arthurathon: "King Arthur, The Young Warlord" (1975)Not all King Arthur movies are created equal. Some are pretty dang good, some are so bad you wish you had one of those things from the Men in Black movies to take the memory of that movie out of your mind. And sometimes the good movies might even be missing something that I think is essential in a King Arthur story. Or vice versa.
Join me today as I embark on another adventure where I dissect a King Arthur movie and tell you what works and doesn’t work, from my perspective as a King Arthur fan. Today, I’ll be talking about a piece called King Arthur, the Young Warlord, which is on my DVD collection of 4 King Arthur movies that I mentioned the last time I talked about a King Arthur movie. The Internet Movie Database tells us that this came from 1975, but my further investigations tell me this isn’t true. This movie is actually cobbled together from a few episodes of a TV series called Arthur of the Britons, from 1972. You would have no way of knowing that if you just bought this DVD blind as I did, as it doesn’t mention the TV series anywhere on the DVD case. But as I continued to watch this movie, not even a full half hour in, I was realizing there wasn’t really a connective plot for this movie, but rather, several small plots that happen to involve the same characters. You know, like when you watch several episodes of a TV series back to back. So it’s going to be really hard to talk about this as a movie, which is how I watched it, and how it was presented on this DVD. Movies generally have character arcs for all of your principle characters to go through, and themes that connect all of your characters and bind scenes from beginning to end of the film. This doesn’t have any of that. This feels a lot like they took several unrelated scenes and stitched them together, and got Oliver Tobias to come in and record 5 minutes of narration to make it seem like one cohesive piece. Which is what they tried to do. And I guess there’s nothing wrong with watching episodes of a series back to back. I do it all the time. But I don’t pretend like I’m watching a movie when I do it. And that’s what this DVD is doing.
Anyway, getting past that lackluster part of the viewing experience, I should probably look at what this thing does and talk about it from the viewpoint of a King Arthur fan. So this series wanted to come at Arthur from a more “realistic” angle. Uh oh. So no magic or magical entities like Merlin, Morgan Le Fey, the Lady of the Lake, or magical swords (although you do get a sword UNDER a rock that accompanies a contest). Those are some of the things I’m most interested in when you do a King Arthur story. Why would you take those things out? Likewise, this does away with most of the characters we know were created for King Arthur stories. So characters like Lancelot and Guinevere are also done away with. In fact, the only characters or elements from other King Arthur stories I recognized were Mark of Cornwall and Arthur’s brother Cai, both of whom are pretty far removed from the elements from other stories that you would normally associate with them.
Now we do have examples of taking the magic out of a story with lots of magic and still making it work. The Brad Pitt Troy movie, for instance, and even the 2004 King Arthur movie. I liked both of those quite a bit. So why do they work, but this doesn’t? Part of it might be that I’m pretty easily bored by older movies with a slower pace and less of the action-boom-boom scenes. It’s not that I’m instantly bored if you take out the fast-paced action stuff. It’s just that you have to try a lot harder to grab my attention with the talking scenes, which this “movie” is largely comprised of. If the talking scenes aren’t interesting, then there’s precious little else to keep me invested. Compare this to the 2004 King Arthur movie, it had several talking scenes that kept your attention because you were invested with what is going on in the scene, even without the action stuff (although it had plenty of that, too). But this “movie” goes so far in stripping everything you recognize from the mythos away, that I found myself wondering why they even bothered making a King Arthur TV show. I’ve seen some people say they don’t like some of the additions that have been made to the King Arthur mythos over the centuries, and I can kinda see how some people can justify their displeasure at some of those things. But then some of the things this show decides to cast away, I feel are intrinsically part of the King Arthur story, and by casting those things away, you’re doing your story more of a disservice. It’s like trying to do a Superman series where he doesn’t fly and doesn’t even wear his costume (oh…they did that? And it lasted for 10 years? Huh.) By the time they got rid of everything that is cool about King Arthur stories, they might as well have called this guy Richard or Henry or John or any other British Monarch and called it a day. When all is said and done, this doesn’t feel much like a King Arthur story. So it’s kinda difficult for me to talk about it as if it was one. I have been kinda harsh on this one, so I want to talk about some things that I did like, or at least didn’t hate. This may seem like a cop-out, but I liked the costumes. A lot of King Arthur movies will have costumes that look like they belong in the late Middle Ages, which is around when Thomas Mallory’s Le Morte d'Arthur became a thing, instead of the early middle ages, which is when scholars tend to agree that Arthur lived, if he did exist. So this thing being limited to a small 1970s TV budget actually helped it, in my humble, in terms of props and costumes, because they weren’t trying to get the biggest brightest costumes and sets they could find. Compare this to the Sword of Lancelot that I talked about recently. While I overall enjoyed that more than this, I do appreciate the more subdued costumes this thing is going for. What else? Well, if you’re a fan of Brian Blessed, from films such as Star Wars: The Phantom Menace, then you can look forward to seeing him in this. He’s only in a couple of the episodes, but he’s one of the more entertaining actors here. He’s actually energetic, and feels like he’s enjoying himself here, which I don’t really feel for most of the other actors. 
Overall, I can’t say that I recommend watching this. Which is good, because I doubt most people are going to have my experience of buying this collection of movies on DVD and being tricked into thinking these episodes are a movie. But nonetheless, I don’t think this is worth anyone’s time, which isn’t fun for me to say, because I don’t want to hate something like this. But it is what it is. So those are my thoughts. I hope you guys will be with me the next time I drop by to talk about some other King Arthur thing. In the meantime, keep it trashy! 
|
|
|
Social Trash Mutant |
|
Friendly & associated sites
|
© 2012-2020 TRASH MUTANT. All rights reserved. Some materials used are © their respective copyright owners.
