A new trailer for an upcoming animated series based on Sega's classic arcade game, Golden Axe, came out today. It is… not good. And I am not surprised. Disappointed, yes. But not surprised.
For some reason, a lot of people making animated series seem to have fallen into the trap of thinking there is only one way you can possibly make this sort of thing: irony-poisoned "adult animation" with a complete lack of sincerity and earnestness. And it fucking sucks!
Now, I'm not someone who swears off the sort of genre-savvy, quasi-fourth wall-breaking meta-comedy style as an automatic and immediate matter of course. There is a time and place for that sort of thing; we call it parody. Right now, I have been casually playing Agents of Mayhem by Volition, which is a spinoff of the Saints Row series that focuses on a band of gun-toting superheroes. It is full of this sort of humour, and it works because the whole thing is set up to be a parody of a particular genre. You go in expecting that sort of thing, and it delivers. You have to be in the right mood for it, but it is not throwing any particular curveballs.
Hell, it doesn't even have to be parody. I still enjoy Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, even though series creator Joss Whedon apparently turned out to be a bit of a dildo, to say the least. People who complain about the dialogue in modern Marvel movies often accuse them of being full of "Whedonisms", and that may be a fair point, given his involvement in several of them — but in the context of Buffy and Angel, again, this sort of humour worked, because it was a bunch of kids saying it, and in turn that made it highly quotable in the playground.
Star Trek: Lower Decks is another great example. I thought I was going to hate this series after the first episode, which was pretty "wacky", but I kept watching out of curiosity and was pleasantly surprised to discover a series with a lot of genuine heart, soul and sincerity — plus an appreciation of and admiration for Trek canon. Sure, it had its silly moments — a lot more than in most of the live-action shows — but it struck a good balance, and at no point did it feel like it was designed primarily to mock its source material maliciously.
But, like, Golden Axe? This is a beloved arcade game that, in its original form, played things reasonably straight for the most part, at least until its ending sequence. Sure, it had its silly elements like the treasure goblins and the weird mount creatures, but it's clear what the intent was: make a game designed in the style of pulp fantasy, complete with loincloth-clad barbarians, bikini-clad female warriors and hairy dwarves.
When you adapt something like this in the obnoxiously referential, wise-cracking "adult animation" style popularised by shows like Family Guy, you just put across the feeling that you don't respect the source material at all; there seems to be an unspoken assumption that if the creators of this show took Golden Axe seriously, then no-one, in turn, would take this animated series seriously.
You could make the argument that Golden Axe, as a franchise, didn't really have much meat on the bones in terms of narrative in the first place, and you'd probably be right about that. But there's more than enough there to act as a basis for something more — and perhaps to build something genuinely interesting which uses the lore that does exist as a starting point. That could have been cool! There aren't that many good fantasy-themed shows out right now other than Game of Thrones and its spinoff, House of the Dragon, and those are very much an acquired taste (not to mention the poster children for "dark fantasy", which is distinct from more traditional approaches to fantasy) — and there's definitely scope for one in the animated space. Remember stuff like Xena: Warrior Princess? Golden Axe could have been a new Xena: Warrior Princess, but animated!
But no. Instead we get a show that just feels like everyone involved with it has complete and utter contempt for the fantasy genre, for the source material, and for the audience. And I don't really know why! It's not as if animated adaptations which take potentially rather silly source material seriously don't exist — look at Castlevania! That turned out great! It managed to tell a compelling, serious, earnest story with interesting characters and even incorporate some humour without it all feeling forced and filled with such a sense of not giving a shit.
I guess ultimately it's no real skin off my nose, because with Golden Axe being on Paramount+, I'm not going to watch it — and I'm certainly not going to make an effort to seek out some alternative means of watching it (be that official or "unofficial"), based on that trailer. It's just frustrating that this sort of thing is so very predictable; it makes it difficult to have any excitement for announcements of potentially interesting adaptations of video game properties into other forms of media, and very easy to be cynical.
I can't say I was particularly hungry for an animated adaptation of Golden Axe generally — and thus, honestly, I'd rather they hadn't bothered at all than come out with this predictable nonsense.
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