January 16, 1995: The "Hercules"/"Xena" Franchise Premieres

Left to right: Renee O'Connor, Lucy Lawless,

Kevin Sorbo and Michael Hurst

January 16, 1995: The Hercules/Xena media franchise is launched -- not that anyone yet knew that that was what it would become.

Hercules: The Legendary Journeys premiered on this date. At first, it was part of the syndicated Action Park franchise, launched by the television division of Universal Pictures. It included TV-movies based on the movies Smokey and the Bandit and Midnight Run, both of which flopped, mainly because the former didn't have Burt Reynolds, Sally Field and Jackie Gleason; while the latter didn't have Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin. The Midnight Run films were promoted with, "Christopher McDonald is the legendary Jack Walsh!" No, he wasn't. De Niro was.

They also included films based on the TekWar novels that William Shatner "wrote"; and Vanishing Son, about 2 brothers who escaped from China to America, after the Tiananmen Square protests, one going into the music business, the other into organized crime.

Hercules: The Legendary Journeys was the only one to make it. Kevin Sorbo played the titular hero, son of Zeus (played by several actors, before they settled on Charles Keating), the king of the Greek gods, and a mortal woman, Alcemene (Elizabeth Hawthorne). In this version, while his past, including his famed Twelve Labors and his tenure with Jason (Jeffrey Thomas) and the Argonauts, was alluded to, the story was basically that of The Fugitive, where he traveled the country (in this case, ancient Greece), doing what good he could, while pursued by "the law" (in this case, Meg Foster as Hera, Zeus' perennially cheated-on wife, who hated all of Zeus' illegitimate offspring).

He frequently had to deal with other Greek gods, usually his half-siblings, including Ares, god of war (played with considerable malice by Kevin Smith -- not the American film director); and Aphrodite, goddess of love (played as a flighty "Valley Girl" by Alexandra Tydings). And there were other occasional annoyances, like Atolycus (Bruce Campbell), who called himself "King of Thieves."

But he had some help, from the occasional other Greek god, or from girlfriends (present and former), and from his best friend, fellow Argonaut Iolaus (a character made up for the show, played by Michael Hurst).

To match the Greek landscape, but also to save on filming costs, filming was done in New Zealand, far from the U.S., and also far from Canada, where the production company, Alliance Atlantis, was headquartered (also so U.S. networks could save money). As a result, it was cheaper to hire New Zealand-based actors, rather than fly Americans in. These included Smith and Hurst.

They also included Lucy Lawless, who played a character created for the series: A female warlord named Xena, who turned back to good after a brief fling with Hercules. (They stayed friends afterward, but never fell back into bed.) This character proved so popular, she got a spinoff series: Xena: Warrior Princess premiered on September 4, 1995.

Given Xena's background, it seemed at first like it was supposed to be a darker series. The opening credits certainly had music and a spoken introduction that were darker in tone than HTLJ. But it quickly became every bit as jokey and campy as its base series, with Xena having her own "Iolaus," a teenage bard named Gabrielle (Renee O'Connor), and her own "Atolycus," Joxer (Ted Raimi, brother of film director Sam), a would-be warrior (and would-be-but-never-was boyfriend for Gabrielle) who turned out to be a coward, and frequently got in the way.

The producers were coy about the specific time period, saying, "Anything BC is fair game." As a result, Xena was there in Troy when the Trojan horse ended the Trojan War, which was said to be around 1190 BC; in Israel, when David slew Goliath, around 1000 BC; in China, encountering the great philosopher Lao Tzu, and discovering that his wisdom was actually written by his wife, Lao Ma, around 500 BC; and in Rome, encountering Julius Caesar, who was assassinated in 44 BC, and even meeting Caligula, who was assassinated in AD 37. (They even had a "Christmas episode," in which Xena and Gabrielle inadvertently invented Christmas traditions, but, being before the birth of Christ, it was in celebration of a holiday already celebrated at the time, the Winter Solstice.)

Hercules' adventures didn't clear this up, either: He met Cleopatra, ally and girlfriend of Caesar; and, thanks to a time-travel spell, King Arthur and Merlin, with on-screen graphics saying, "A Thousand Winters Before Camelot," right after saying Camelot was in "500 AD" (which is usually alleged to be its time period), making it 500 BC, which would place Herc's adventures right before the Greek-Persian wars. (The Battle of Marathon was in 490 BC, and those of Thermopylae and Salamis in 480 BC.)

Hercules' last episode was on November 22, 1999; Xena's, on June 18, 2001. One of Xena's last episodes was a farewell for the Hercules character, as he was finally freed from the influence of Zeus and Hera, as they died. But Xena ended up dying for a good cause -- in Japan, riddled with arrows while wearing samurai armor that exposed more skin than her usual armor did. Even Game of Thrones' last season ended up making more sense than hers.

Xena and Gabrielle acted as sisters, but there was always an undercurrent in the fandom that wanted to believe they were lesbian lovers. For the record, both characters were depicted as having only fooled around with men, and both actresses, as far as is publicly known, have always been completely straight.

Sorbo moved on from the distant past to a far future, playing a starship captain in Gene Roddenberry's Andromeda. Lawless, whose Xena also sometimes had to deal with Campbell's Atolycus, later teamed up with him again in the series Ash vs. Evil Dead. She did another ancient-times series, Spartacus; then, like Sorbo, did science fiction, playing a Cylon in the rebooted Battlestar Galactica.

Lawless stayed on the good side, and has done a considerable amount of work for environmental protection groups. Sadly, Sorbo, like that other 1990s TV strongman, former Superman Dean Cain, has turned dark, going full MAGA.

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January 16, 1995 was a Monday. Jonathan Allen, the Pro Bowl defensive tackle for the Washington Commanders, was born. This was also the day the United Paramount Network, UPN, was launched. I have a separate entry for that event.

Baseball was out of season. The NFL's Conference Championship Games had been played the day before, won by the San Francisco 49ers and the San Diego Chargers. And the NHL team owners' lockout of the players meant that the season wouldn't start for another 4 days.

There were 8 games played in the NBA:

* The New York Knicks beat the New Jersey Nets, 107-90 at Madison Square Garden. Patrick Ewing scored 35 points. Remember: The Nets, now in Brooklyn, consider the Knicks their arch-rivals, but the feeling is not mutual.

* The Detroit Pistons beat the Philadelphia 76ers, 116-110 at The Spectrum in Philadelphia. Joe Dumars scored 35 points.

* The Washington Bullets beat the Chicago Bulls, 109-101 at the USAir Arena (formerly the Capital Centre) in the Washington suburb of Landover, Maryland.

* The Atlanta Hawks beat the Miami Heat, 99-95 at The Omni in Atlanta.

* The Utah Jazz beat the Indiana Pacers, 99-98 at the Market Square Arena in Indianapolis. Karl Malone led all scorers on the day with 42 points.

* The Minnesota Timberwolves beat the Houston Rockets, 94-75 at the Target Center in Minneapolis.

* The Golden State Warriors beat the Denver Nuggets, 77-73 at the Oakland Coliseum Arena.

* And the Los Angeles Lakers beat the Los Angeles Clippers, 96-88 at The Forum outside Los Angeles in Inglewood, California. Remember: The Clippers consider the Lakers their arch-rivals, but the feeling is not mutual.