PTSD

So, how can I get this?

Indulge me a bit once more, please, as I give a shout out to one of the best (okay, you had to have watched it) series on TV ever. They are making a new version of the show though I'm not sure about having a boy band-er as the hero.

I was thinking of Monkey during my train trip back to DC from last weekend's conference. I watched most of the original version of Monkey when younger and then later during undergrad in Northern Australia, where the series was highly popular among many students. During this past weekend's conference in Wisconsin, I realised that those of us who didn't grow up with US television shows (Star Trek, for example) don't have much to talk about and don't often get what the big deal about such shows were in terms of media history here in the US. Instead of folks on spacecrafts, we got people (well, a couple of them are monsters) going about on epic journeys. It would be interesting to compare how different national myths/imaginaries are evoked in the portrayal of the heroes and heroic acts in these two contexts (ooh! another extracurricular research interest! What's that you ask about finishing a PhD?).

Monkey (or Monkey Magic as it was sometimes called in Australia) seems a bit silly now--badly dubbed and with slow-moving action sequences--but the story was familiar (Tripitaka going from China to India to get Buddhist writings and encountering, as is usual in these cases, lots of obstacles along the way) and they wandered around in the Himalayas (not many shows do that, let me tell yous). Some other fun stuff: the voice of the Buddha was a woman and the story of Hsien-Tsang (Tripitaka) is mentioned in Nepalese history books.

I'm well pleased there's going to be a new version. So, again, how do I get it?

posted by Priya @ 12:48 PM