It’s “What have you been watching?”, your chance to recommend anything you’ve been watching this week
For once, I actually managed to watch and review all the TV I promised to watch and review last week. Well done me. True, Boxset Monday ended up as Boxset Tuesday, but that’s largely because Squinters turned out not to be Boxset Monday-worthy material.
Later in the week, I’ll be dealing with HBO’s Here and Now, as well as anything else that pops up despite the Winter Olympics. But today, there’s the latest episodes of the current roster of regulars: Baron Noir, Black Lightning, Corporate, Counterpart and The Magicians. Star Trek: Discovery‘s season finale has aired, too, but taking its place in the viewing queue is the returning DC’s Legends of Tomorrow. Lastly, it turned out that High Maintenance returned a few weeks ago without my noticing, so I’ve been playing catch-up with that.
In Australia: Available on ABC Me
In the UK: Netflix. No premiere date yet
Wu Cheng’en’s Journey to the West is a classic of Chinese literature – indeed, it’s one of the four great classic Chinese novels. The story of Buddhist monk Tripitaka’s quest for some sacred scrolls, aided by his magical disciples Monkey, Sandy and Pigsy, naturally enough it’s been adapted numerous times for TV. However, while the book is obviously well known in the East, in the West, people often watch these shows without realising that what they’re watching is an adaptation of anything at all, let alone Journey to the West.
Funky Monkey
If you’re American, the most recent adaptation of Journey to the West was Into the Badlands. You might not have realised this, but to be fair, that’s because it had almost nothing to do with the original story. Nevertheless, it was theoretically an adaptation.
However, if you’re British, Australian or a New Zealander and of a certain age, you’re almost 100% likely to know of at least one, far more faithful adaptation of Journey to the West: Monkey!
A huge hit, it was made by Nippon TV/NHK in Japan then dubbed into English by the BBC, but probably only 1% of the audience at most knew it was both a surprisingly faithful yet also free adaptation of Journey to the West.
New legends
Watching The New Legends of Monkey, I think we’ll have pretty much the same situation for a whole new generation of viewers. Aimed squarely at the same ‘children and young adults’ market as Monkey, it also acknowledges all the changes in storytelling that TV has undergone in the past 30+ years, moving us further away from the original Journey to the West to give us something that as its name suggests is a bit more Monkey meets Hercules: The Legendary Journeys
Ditching any Daoist or Buddhist influences completely, The New Legends of Monkey relocates the action from China, India and the Silk Road to a fantasy realm inhabited by humans, gods and demons. Most of the gods have been gone for 500 years, leaving demons to run the realm unhindered. A resistance movement exists, but they’re pinning their hopes on tracing the location of the ‘Monkey King’ (Chai Hansen), a god imprisoned in rock for centuries but whom they can revive if they place his crown on his head.
Trouble is, the demons want to stop them, so it’s left to serving girl Luciane Buchanan to first find and free Monkey, then locate the Sacred Scrolls that he hid before his imprisonment. Adopting the identity of monk Tripitaka, she soon recruits two other gods, Pigsy (Josh Thomson) and Sandy (Emilie Cocquerel), to help her and Monkey find the Sacred Scrolls, all while the demons try to stop them, prompting numerous martial arts fights. Of course, it would all go a lot quicker if Monkey could summon that cloud of his…
