Tuesday, August 20, 2024

CROSSING GODS PT. 3

 Following directly upon my comment at the end of Part 2--

In formulating my definition of an "internal alignment" crossover, I'm again only concerned with the interrelationship between nominative and innominate icons in modern fiction, but I'm not discussing the interaction of different icon-cosmoses, but with substantive alterations of icon-arrangements in a single cosmos.

I've already touched on two examples of such alterations in the essay PHASED AND INTERFUSED PT. 4. In the 1952 movie THE QUEEN OF SHEBA, King Solomon is "deposed" from his Prime position in the Old Testament in favor of a romance between the titular queen and Solomon's handsome young son. In the 2004 NOAH, because the patriarch didn't have a "villain" to drive a film-narrative, the writers imported an icon from another section of the Old Testament, Tubal Cain, to serve in that capacity.



Two other interesting examples are both cinematic versions of CLASH OF THE TITANS. Both movies attempt to emulate a number of familiar tropes from the Perseus legend, but they import figures from other Greek narratives having nothing to do with Perseus. As I discussed in my review of the 1981 movie, that script edged out the character of Hera and built up the character of Thetis, Mother of Achiles. More memorably, since this was a Harryhausen production, Perseus does not fly with the aid of Hermes' magic shoes, but on the back of Pegasus, freely borrowed from the narrative of Bellerophon. 



The 2010 CLASH, reviewed here, arguably delves into even more "cosmic" waters, situating Perseus within a war of gods between Perseus' negligent father Zeus and the malefic Hades, God of the Dead. So both of these films mingle the alignments of differing innominate myth-tales within the widespread cosmos of Greek myth.

Parenthetically, both films used the name "Kraken" for the giant monster Cetus from the original Perseus narrative. But there's no attempt to make the creature homologous with the Norse beastie, so the use of that name does not constitute any sort of "cross-alignment."

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