Sword and Sandal, Neo-Mythology, and Percy Jackson, Part 1

English: The Jules Verne Festival launch in
Los Angeles, October 2006.
L-R: Ray Harryhausen, Harrison Ford,
 Malcolm McDowell, Jane Goodall,
James Cameron, George Lucas.
Front: Jules Verne Festival founders
Jean-Christophe Jeauffre and Frédéric
Dieudonné. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I've been thinking so much about my project that I completely forgot to post last week, but I should be making up for that in the next few days; in fact, I have to split my entry for today into two posts (it's just too long).  It all started with a talk I had with my dad.  He asked what I was working on, and for a minute, it was like I was back in the third grade -- what he really wanted to know was if I needed help with my homework.  And, just like back in the day, he came through for me.  He reminded me of when he took my sister Rebbie and me to see Jason and the Argonauts at some really weird theater when we were kids.  It was part of some film group's -- I don't know what to call it; not a festival, but like a special program or something.  Anyway, he said that Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (from now on, I'm gonna abbreviate that to PJI) made him think of Ray Harryhausen (and I'm not going to get into who he is/was, so if you don't know, follow the link), who is apparently a favorite of his, which is why he took us to see Jason and the Argonauts. 
What I remembered about the movie was the fight with the skeletons and the scene with the harpies-- and I think the harpies are what made Dad see a connection.  In PJI, there is a scene near the beginning where a fury attacks Percy in a museum, kind of like the harpies in JATA.  So, I asked him what genre he thought JATA was, and he said that he thinks it's called "sword and sandal."  Based on that, I started doing some web searching (mainly to get terms to use for searching later in scholarly databases), and that's where I'll leave it for now.   

Related articles

• Jason and the Argonauts: The five films it inspired (telegraph.co.uk)
• Percy Jackson Series Review (negaublog.wordpress.com)
• Percy Jackson was framed and the fandom was not pleased. (bookingawesome.wordpress.com)
• More episodes of @AdAbPodcast have been uploaded (onlythesangfroid.wordpress.com)

A Whole Bunch o' Heroes

Cover of Jason and the Argonauts

When I was reading the first page in the assignment packet about our research options, I got an idea from the very short explanation of myth criticism:  "Films and other works of art draw on patterns established in cultural myths."  I read down to the list of films we can use, and the one I was thinking of (The Fellowship of the Ring) was there.  My idea was that one of the myth patterns in this film is (and this is really hard to state clearly, so bear with me) a group of heroes goes on a quest together.  This came to me because when I read the statement about myth crit, I immediately thought of a few myths, one of which was the story of Jason and the Argonauts (I saw a movie of that when I was little, and it stuck with me because the army of skeletons gave me nightmares for a long time).  I also remember an episode of Hercules (the tv show), where he went to see Jason and the rest of the Argonauts.   

I want to talk to the prof about this some, just in case I'm totally on the wrong track, so I guess I'm getting up early tomorrow to make it to her office hours.