Like many properties of yesteryear, Xena: Warrior Princess, the cult '90s, swords-and-sandals series starring a muscular, yodeling Lucy Lawless, was deemed revival-worthy not too long ago. The news was announced in late 2015 with Lost writer, Javier Grillo-Marxuach tapped by NBC to oversee the project in collaboration with Xena co-creator Rob Tapert. Even Sam Raimi was brought back on board as executive producer. The word "reboot" was purposefully absent from the conversation, branding it instead as a "revival," a shrug-worthy linguistic difference to the general public, but a clear statement of intent to those paying closer attention.

Two years later, NBC parted ways with Grillo-Marxuach due to "insurmountable creative differences," and the project was scrapped, but Xena's resurrection wasn't taken off the table entirely. "We looked at some material; we decided at that point it didn't warrant the reboot," NBC Entertainment President Jennifer Salke said at the time. "I'd never say never on that one because it's such a beloved title, but the current incarnation of it is dead."

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We got to see exactly what the "dead incarnation" was when a pilot script was made available by the Facebook fan group Xena Movie Campaign, with Grillo-Marxuach's permission. True to the early word, the revival would have been a significantly different take on the warrior princess' origin rather than a straightforward remake. It also made significant changes to Hercules, or at least, the Kevin Sorbo iteration of the ancient Greek demigod, who was a cut-and-dry hero. Xena, of course, was introduced on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys as a villainous warlord, and proved popular enough to warrant her own spinoff that has become far more culturally noteworthy. The planned Xena revival would have flipped this dynamic between the pair on its head.

XENA WARRIOR PRINCESS AND HERCULES

More importantly than a more mythologically accurate Hercules, however, was the revival's inclusion of a clear romantic relationship between Xena and her loyal, adventuring companion, Gabrielle. The subtextual queerness of the "gal pals" was never allowed to be anything other than subtextual in the original run. In fact, Universal Television was worried (read: lavender panicked) about this interpretation from the outset, as Tapert told Entertainment Weekly: "The studio was so concerned that it would be perceived as a lesbian show that they would not allow us to have Xena and Gabrielle in the same frame of the opening titles."

Xena and Gabrielle did finally get to share a kiss in the finale; less of a watershed moment and more like cowardly executives throwing the show's clamoring, queer fandom a bone right as the plug was pulled. At the moment, making the Xena/Gabrielle One True Pairing an official one is top of a laundry list of reasons why the not-quite-dead-for-good Xena revival project should be dug back up. As the founder of Xena Movie Project points out: "Young people today need a queer icon like Xena."

Young people were robbed of an explicitly queer icon like Xena in director Patty Jenkins' otherwise-excellent Wonder Woman. An island inhabited exclusively by women and a throwaway line about men not being necessary for "pleasure" was as close as the 2017 film got to fully outing Gal Gadot's Amazonian superheroine, a character who is canonically bisexual in the source material. Straightwashing aside, Wonder Woman was 2017's biggest superhero movie, and injected some much-needed percentage points into the sinking Rotten Tomatoes score of the so-called DC Extended Universe.

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On the flip side of this success is the recent box office and critical failure of other mythological- and folklore-rooted, fantasy properties like Robin Hood (both of the Russell Crowe and Taron Egerton varieties), Guy Ritchie's King Arthur, and the "meh" performance of Dwayne Johnson's 2014 film Hercules. Could it be that the endless, endless retellings of male-centric, swords-and-sorcery tales are finally wearing thin? The iconography of the man who stole from the rich to give to the poor, for instance, is so ingrained into our collective cultural reference pool that it's hard to justify the necessity of two, big-budget films about him in eight years.

robin hood

This space, whether on a film or television screen, could be far better filled by more female-oriented properties rooted in the same genre, which, as Wonder Woman proves, there certainly seems to be an appetite for. Naturally, some of this is owed to both the character's preexisting popularity and the popularity of superhero media in general, but elsewhere, women are conquering more and more ground in ye olde fantasy fare. It's hard to believe that Game of Thrones could have risen to its level of power without centralizing its female characters and drawing in a more diverse fanbase. In the world of animation, Netflix's She-Ra revival is outlasting 2002's He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, despite being introduced in the original series as a mere side character. As of 2018, women make up 40 percent of Dungeons & Dragons players.

With the right material, the time seems right to take another mighty, warrior's swing at bringing Xena back in some capacity. Although she's far from being on Diana Prince's footing, Dynamite Comics' current Xena series and the show's loyal, active fanbase of "Xenites" are proof the character has far from faded from memory. But even if she had, She-Ra's young demographic is keeping that series going with no nostalgic fealty to the original, '80s run.

Of course, as Disney's divisively received slew of remakes -- and every failed effort to play necromancer to long-buried properties from the past few decades -- teach us: It's not enough to bring something back for the sake of it. In this respect, it might be a good thing that NBC felt it didn't have something worth moving ahead with a few years ago. Xena ran for a respectable six seasons, but while no-one can argue it was short-lived, there's a strong argument to be made for updating the series' hokey set design and costumes and polishing some of the creakier storytelling, all without losing the slightly spoofy edge that first charmed viewers over twenty years ago.

Returning to our laundry list, the desire to reframe Xena as an unabashedly queer story -- opening credits and all -- is reason enough to get Lucy Lawless, or another actress, to pick up the chakram and sword again and go where the show's original incarnation couldn't. Considering how difficult it is to insert any kind of non-heterosexual representation into mainstream fantasy entertainment -- as Wonder Woman proves -- a fantasy television series or film with not only an openly queer heroine but an openly queer lead heroine would, shockingly in this day and age, still be triumphantly subversive. Or, we could just sit tight and wait for the next, inevitable Robin Hood movie that nobody will be interested in.

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