If I had to point out
the worst enemy of my productivity, that would be stress and, believe
me, in last few weeks I've been through enough drama material to make
a proper movie, but now spring is coming, toxic people are cut off, I
have roof above my head, not to mention a decent Wi-Fi signal. With
bright look into future, let me tell you about tv series so positive,
that the wind seems to howl cheerful tunes through the window.
Behold one of a kind -
Galavant!
Series follows the
journey of a knight errant and his companions cut into half-hour
episodes filled with motives from fairy tales and original musical
numbers. At beginning we're introduced with Galavant – a hero of
his times, he's handsome (square jaw and perfect hair! cojones out to
there*), strong, tough plus any other manly value, and madly in love
with beautiful Madalena, who turns out to be a material girl and
abducted by evil king, instead of eternal love chooses welfare and
power and becomes an actual black character of the story. Galavant
with broken heart loses his will to live, abandon hero life style and
rot in bed with a pitcher of vine, then on his doorstep appear a
princess in distress asking for help, trying to convince him that
Madalena still loves him and needs to be rescued, which is a part of
a trap for the hero prepared by the king. Nonetheless still being
naively in love Galavant take his squire and head out with the
princess for their adventure.
Timothy Osmond is faultless, his King Richard is absolutely brilliant - cruel, sissy and a comical master.
Honestly I haven't had
this much fun watching anything since a loooong time. It's hilarious,
it's brilliant, it's got musical numbers that aren't show stoppers,
but carry on the plot, it's laughing at fairy tales schemes, but
still is a fairy tale itself, although from time to time there are
mentioned real conditions of living in the Middle Ages, they are
presented in humorous, a bit Monty Python alike, way. The characters
are wonderful, so expressive and replete, that you suddenly find
yourself liking them. Well, it's helpful that they all have the
screen (and often a song or two) for themselves at least for few
minutes, so you get to know them and your heart is stolen not only by
the main trio, as well as the evil king, but also his mousy cook, the
heartless henchman and many more.
The songs are catchy
(at lease two days after every release, I'm wandering around room
humming the tunes), funny and really well sang. The huge plus of
production is that the main cast is composed from actors with musical
career, so apart from their good looks, they have very pleasant
voices. It has to be mentioned that in charge of composing the music
was Alan Menken, who is known for music from Beauty and The Beast,
The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Tangled, and words are
written by Glenn Sleter who's credit for lyrics to most of the songs
from Tangled - except here he could allow himself to make
jokes that wouldn't suit Disney movies, what only did good for the
Galavant.
Back to the casting,
although most of the leading roles are played by unknown faces
(unless you have better face recognition than me (gosh, I suck at
it!) and connected Sid or rather Luke Youngblood with Lee from Harry
Potter movies), as the story goes among the others we can spot Hugh
Bonneville, Ricky Gervais or Anthony Head. A bit like Easter egg
hunt. And there's also the king with his court who cannot be
overlooked – Timothy Omundson himself! Last time I saw him playing
Cain in Supernatural, quite change of air. On his side Vinnie Jones
(shame on me, but I mostly recall him as this face in the background
of every production) and Darren Evans (My Mad Fat Dairy).
Because of low tv
audience Galavant's season 2 fate is endangered (seems to have
more fans in the internet, maybe somebody will look in their
direction and kindly notice us). And the first one finishes with
cliffhanger, so feel warned!
*They got me. It's
catchy. And you won't hear lyrics like these in a ordinary Disney
movie.
No comments:
Post a Comment