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The Three Musketeers
YouTube decided to show me (presumably due to my having watched the entirety of the first one) a whole series of fan-vids on the BBC "Musketeers" -- which apparently I never actually wrote about here, despite having watched it diligently throughout its run[s], and in fact named one of my Raouls in tribute to a character whose arc I particularly enjoyed!
I had forgotten just how *intelligent* that show was; yes, the biker leather uniforms were trying far too hard to be 'contemporary', the gunplay was more Wild West than seventeenth-century and the plots were largely unrelated to the source material (they were writing an ongoing series using Dumas' setting and characters, rather than a multi-part adaptation of the original novel), but a lot of the episodes really raised questions about initial appearances or created a moral twist, without being all obnoxiously post-modernist about it. A lot of the antagonists were excellently drawn (and of course Peter Capaldi, pre-Doctor-Who, was an outstanding Richelieu who made the utmost out of a morally grey role!) What they did with the character of the weak and petulant Louis XIII was impressive; in the end we actually come to care about him. And some of the most flagrantly non-canonical plot choices (Porthos is a self-made black Musketeer who has dragged himself up by force of character from the worst of the slums; Aramis sleeps with Anne of Austria and accidentally manages to provide an heir to the throne where the King has failed to do so) are both convincing and effective in practice, however high they might raise purist eyebrows if presented as a bald suggestion.
I was, however, surprised to hear that the actor who was cast as Athos in this version was the same who later played the burly Cormoran Strike in the Rowling TV adaptations, though I can see the likeness now that it has been pointed out; I'm afraid that was the one part I would have changed. He really didn't fit my image of the character, being strongly reminiscent of Oliver Reed in the same role, whom I always felt to be miscast. (Someone suggested last year that her dream casting would have been Basil Rathbone as Athos, and that I would definitely have loved to see...)
The show as a whole manages to have its cake and eat it by being both morally complex and straightforwardly heroic; the characters may question on occasion whether they are actually doing the right thing and even come into conflict, but at heart they are devoted to one another and to their duty. It had a reasonably short run of three seasons that ended on a high, allowing it to develop the characters beyond their initial portrayal without outstaying its welcome or running out of ideas. And it was *fun* -- when it wasn't nail-bitingly tense, or occasionally heartrending.
Of course the fan-vids didn't go into any of that beyond the action sequences and the one-liners :-p
But YouTube proceeded in consequence to recommend me a 'review' of the various different screen versions of "The Three Musketeers" by someone who started off his upload with a scathing plot summary of the original story, saying how much he disliked the characters, accusing them of murder (for duelling) and rape and elitist behaviour, and generally demanding that a 19th-century novelist writing about the seventeenth century should adhere to the tenets of his 21st-century Internet-advocated ideology. The irony being that this is the same text that my vintage edition praises in the introduction for being "extraordinarily free from any real offence" despite featuring "hard-living soldiers and anything but prudish ladies", the moralising of the present day being directed in an entirely different direction!
(Perhaps unsurprisingly, the comments featured the fangirl trope popping up that 'Raoul in "The Phantom of the Opera" is a stalker and he is just as bad as the Phantom'....)
I think partly the problem was that he had gone into the story with the preconception that the protagonists were supposed to be ideal role-models, which of course they are not; when Dumas does attempt to write such a character (Hector in The Last Cavalier) he is a dead bore. But it is also the result of a complete wooden ear to the norms of any era but one's own; punishing your servants is Physical Abuse, challenging people to duels is Illegal Murder, and seducing a devout young man into actual unprovoked murder is simply justifiable resource and sagacity provided it is performed by an inherently oppressed female character.
My immediate reaction was a strong desire to reread the novel in the original French, of which I own a copy! But I ended up by remembering that I had once been halfway through the animated series which was recommended to me by![[fanfiction.net profile]](/img/userheads/ff-icon-192.png)
Violonaire as a childhood favourite, Sous Le Signe des Mousquetaires, a.k.a 'the one where Milady has green hair and Aramis is a girl' ;-)
The episodes are still on YouTube, ten years later, and I was able to drop more or less straight back in where I had left off, with d'Artagnan returning from England with the missing diamond studs (and, in this version, still riding his bizarre yellow horse): Episode 26. Being aimed at children, the episodes are reasonably short and with a convenient recap at the start of each - being made in an earlier era, they are also beautifully enunciated, and I can understand almost every word, as in the case of the TV adaptation of La Poupée Sanglante. Of course watching that many episodes would probably take longer than reading the entire novel, even an eight-hundred-page novel in French, but the individual chunks are shorter... and it passes for virtue, since it is undoubtedly good listening practice, which is something of which I get very little!
This one does purport, so far as I can see or am able to remember, to be a straight adaptation of the original story, albeit in a more child-friendly version -- so Constance is the mercer's young daughter and not his wife, the role of Planchet is taken by a little boy whom d'Artagnan befriends, and there are various animal side-kicks. Aramis being a female in disguise is actually pretty irrelevant, save for one episode where he/she is trying to have a bath in privacy for obvious reasons, where it is played for comedy -- most of the time the character is just treated by everyone as male and an equal, to the degree that I can't actually remember who does and doesn't know the truth, and if the original backstory behind the masquerade is ever explained then I can't remember it. Milady's green hair really isn't that obvious either ;-)
What does become obvious on rewatching it is the extremely low standard of the animation; characters often have only one 'talking' or 'riding' sequence of frames that will get repeated throughout the scene as many times as necessary! Rochefort looks oddly Japanese (I think it is the samurai-style moustaches), but otherwise the origins of the series aren't particularly obvious. It's a cartoon France, but it's clearly France, down to the peasant icon of the Virgin Mary.
For a children's show, surprisingly engrossing, and I can see why the Québécois would have retained fond memories of it. The actual 'three musketeers' are largely in the background in this one, though, with the focus seeming to be much more on d'Artagnan - possibly because it is after all a children's show, and he is definitely the youngest.
I had forgotten just how *intelligent* that show was; yes, the biker leather uniforms were trying far too hard to be 'contemporary', the gunplay was more Wild West than seventeenth-century and the plots were largely unrelated to the source material (they were writing an ongoing series using Dumas' setting and characters, rather than a multi-part adaptation of the original novel), but a lot of the episodes really raised questions about initial appearances or created a moral twist, without being all obnoxiously post-modernist about it. A lot of the antagonists were excellently drawn (and of course Peter Capaldi, pre-Doctor-Who, was an outstanding Richelieu who made the utmost out of a morally grey role!) What they did with the character of the weak and petulant Louis XIII was impressive; in the end we actually come to care about him. And some of the most flagrantly non-canonical plot choices (Porthos is a self-made black Musketeer who has dragged himself up by force of character from the worst of the slums; Aramis sleeps with Anne of Austria and accidentally manages to provide an heir to the throne where the King has failed to do so) are both convincing and effective in practice, however high they might raise purist eyebrows if presented as a bald suggestion.
I was, however, surprised to hear that the actor who was cast as Athos in this version was the same who later played the burly Cormoran Strike in the Rowling TV adaptations, though I can see the likeness now that it has been pointed out; I'm afraid that was the one part I would have changed. He really didn't fit my image of the character, being strongly reminiscent of Oliver Reed in the same role, whom I always felt to be miscast. (Someone suggested last year that her dream casting would have been Basil Rathbone as Athos, and that I would definitely have loved to see...)
The show as a whole manages to have its cake and eat it by being both morally complex and straightforwardly heroic; the characters may question on occasion whether they are actually doing the right thing and even come into conflict, but at heart they are devoted to one another and to their duty. It had a reasonably short run of three seasons that ended on a high, allowing it to develop the characters beyond their initial portrayal without outstaying its welcome or running out of ideas. And it was *fun* -- when it wasn't nail-bitingly tense, or occasionally heartrending.
Of course the fan-vids didn't go into any of that beyond the action sequences and the one-liners :-p
But YouTube proceeded in consequence to recommend me a 'review' of the various different screen versions of "The Three Musketeers" by someone who started off his upload with a scathing plot summary of the original story, saying how much he disliked the characters, accusing them of murder (for duelling) and rape and elitist behaviour, and generally demanding that a 19th-century novelist writing about the seventeenth century should adhere to the tenets of his 21st-century Internet-advocated ideology. The irony being that this is the same text that my vintage edition praises in the introduction for being "extraordinarily free from any real offence" despite featuring "hard-living soldiers and anything but prudish ladies", the moralising of the present day being directed in an entirely different direction!
(Perhaps unsurprisingly, the comments featured the fangirl trope popping up that 'Raoul in "The Phantom of the Opera" is a stalker and he is just as bad as the Phantom'....)
I think partly the problem was that he had gone into the story with the preconception that the protagonists were supposed to be ideal role-models, which of course they are not; when Dumas does attempt to write such a character (Hector in The Last Cavalier) he is a dead bore. But it is also the result of a complete wooden ear to the norms of any era but one's own; punishing your servants is Physical Abuse, challenging people to duels is Illegal Murder, and seducing a devout young man into actual unprovoked murder is simply justifiable resource and sagacity provided it is performed by an inherently oppressed female character.
My immediate reaction was a strong desire to reread the novel in the original French, of which I own a copy! But I ended up by remembering that I had once been halfway through the animated series which was recommended to me by
Violonaire as a childhood favourite, Sous Le Signe des Mousquetaires, a.k.a 'the one where Milady has green hair and Aramis is a girl' ;-)The episodes are still on YouTube, ten years later, and I was able to drop more or less straight back in where I had left off, with d'Artagnan returning from England with the missing diamond studs (and, in this version, still riding his bizarre yellow horse): Episode 26. Being aimed at children, the episodes are reasonably short and with a convenient recap at the start of each - being made in an earlier era, they are also beautifully enunciated, and I can understand almost every word, as in the case of the TV adaptation of La Poupée Sanglante. Of course watching that many episodes would probably take longer than reading the entire novel, even an eight-hundred-page novel in French, but the individual chunks are shorter... and it passes for virtue, since it is undoubtedly good listening practice, which is something of which I get very little!
This one does purport, so far as I can see or am able to remember, to be a straight adaptation of the original story, albeit in a more child-friendly version -- so Constance is the mercer's young daughter and not his wife, the role of Planchet is taken by a little boy whom d'Artagnan befriends, and there are various animal side-kicks. Aramis being a female in disguise is actually pretty irrelevant, save for one episode where he/she is trying to have a bath in privacy for obvious reasons, where it is played for comedy -- most of the time the character is just treated by everyone as male and an equal, to the degree that I can't actually remember who does and doesn't know the truth, and if the original backstory behind the masquerade is ever explained then I can't remember it. Milady's green hair really isn't that obvious either ;-)
What does become obvious on rewatching it is the extremely low standard of the animation; characters often have only one 'talking' or 'riding' sequence of frames that will get repeated throughout the scene as many times as necessary! Rochefort looks oddly Japanese (I think it is the samurai-style moustaches), but otherwise the origins of the series aren't particularly obvious. It's a cartoon France, but it's clearly France, down to the peasant icon of the Virgin Mary.
For a children's show, surprisingly engrossing, and I can see why the Québécois would have retained fond memories of it. The actual 'three musketeers' are largely in the background in this one, though, with the focus seeming to be much more on d'Artagnan - possibly because it is after all a children's show, and he is definitely the youngest.