The Mahabharata is the longest (and therefore best) poem in the world, and the TV series they made of it in 1988 is so long that it took the BBC two whole years to show it - at 94 episodes, it is so long that you could have watched all of Blakes 7 instead, and then started watching it again and been as far along as Traitor.
The narrator is Time, who I think was the baddy in Sapphire & Steel. For that matter his bits, where he introduced each episode with a vague recap and some incomprehensible philosophising, are reminiscent of the opening titles of Sapphire & Steel.
And then there are the special effects within the series, which remind me very much of Monkey, especially when gods and demons appear, or when characters go to Heaven - it would be very easy to imagine the two series coexisting. There is also Monkey-style SFX used for battle scenes, of which there are a lot, when the main characters use their magic powers.
This bit made me do a lol, as it comes right at the climax of an episode, and is supposed to be very dramatic. I'd explain what is happening, but you need a lot of context when you're 85 parts in.
The plot is very complicated, but very basically it resembles the sort of thing that happens in a game of Crusader Kings 2 - the great king Bharat (the title character, but he only appears briefly in the first episode and then very occasionally in dream sequences thereafter) establishes the Indian Empire with the inheritance determined by the most worthy in each generation.
Many years later, his descendant is the foolish king Dhritrashtra, who wants to change the succession law to Primogeniture so that his evil son Duryodhan will inherit instead of his nephew, the worthy Yudhishthir.
Krishna (who is the main character) then leads a faction to restore the law of Bharat and make Yudhishthir the Crown Prince again, which in turn leads to a revolt by Yudhishthir, Krishna and their allies, culminating in the 18-day battle of Kurukshetra in which most of the characters get killed.
It is a tragic battle because many of the characters fighting on the side of evil Duryodhan are not themselves baddys, rather they are goodys trapped into aiding Duryodhan because of oaths or social obligations they have towards the king and his family.
Chief among these is Bhishma, who is the eldest member of the family to fight in the war, and the character present for longest in the series - it goes from his birth in episode 2 through to his death in the very last part. Bhishma is the son of the goddess Ganges and has been blessed with a form of immortality, so that he can only die if he chooses to - this makes him unbeatable at fighting until Yudhishthir's brother Arjun, the "ace archer," shoots him so full of arrows that Bhishma cannot move or even stand up, and he lies on a "bed of arrows" until the battle is over.
In Crusader Kings 2 terms, Bhishma is Dhritrashtra's Steward, who has clearly had some kind of immortality event trigger earlier on. The other council positions on the baddys side would be Sage Kripa as Court Chaplain, Sage Drona as Marshal (who taught all of the young princes the martial arts), Duryodhan's evil uncle Shakuni as Spymaster, and Dhritrashtra's illegitimate half-brother Vidur as Chancellor.
Of these only Vidur (the wisest of them) resigned his post in protest when the war began, and was presumably replaced at that point by Duryodhan himself, even though diplomacy was never Duryodhan's strongest attribute.
Meanwhile on Yudhishthir's side all of the council roles are filled by Krishna, as he acts as adviser to Yudhishthir and his brothers on all things because it turns out that he is the incarnation of their religion's best god - a fact which all of the main characters seem to be aware of, somehow, even though he only reveals his cosmic manifestation once, to Arjun.
The TV series would be a tough watch for a casual viewer - partly due to the huge cast of characters and the glacial pace (it thinks nothing of spending 10 episodes on Krishna's childhood, or of bringing back a minor character from dozens of episodes earlier and expecting you to remember who they are and what relationship they have to the main characters), but mainly due to the English subtitling. This is patchy at the best of times, but on occasion it seems as if the subtitler just simply couldn't be bothered, and whole scenes dense with dialogue are left mysterious. This is even worse if you're watching it on the internets, where two crucial episodes towards the end of the series (both of them featuring the deaths of major characters) do not appear to have subtitled versions available at all!
But there is a lot to enjoy if you're prepared to persevere and get past these difficulties - I found the Wikipedia entries on the Mahabharata story invaluable in following what was going on, and for comprehending some of the different cultural assumptions that make no sense to us cats. The story is one of the All Time Greats among mannys for a good reason (more than just being the longest, I mean, mew) and this is because many of the larger-than-life characters and clever plot twists stand up well even today.
May you live long.
Chief among these is Bhishma, who is the eldest member of the family to fight in the war, and the character present for longest in the series - it goes from his birth in episode 2 through to his death in the very last part. Bhishma is the son of the goddess Ganges and has been blessed with a form of immortality, so that he can only die if he chooses to - this makes him unbeatable at fighting until Yudhishthir's brother Arjun, the "ace archer," shoots him so full of arrows that Bhishma cannot move or even stand up, and he lies on a "bed of arrows" until the battle is over.
In Crusader Kings 2 terms, Bhishma is Dhritrashtra's Steward, who has clearly had some kind of immortality event trigger earlier on. The other council positions on the baddys side would be Sage Kripa as Court Chaplain, Sage Drona as Marshal (who taught all of the young princes the martial arts), Duryodhan's evil uncle Shakuni as Spymaster, and Dhritrashtra's illegitimate half-brother Vidur as Chancellor.
Of these only Vidur (the wisest of them) resigned his post in protest when the war began, and was presumably replaced at that point by Duryodhan himself, even though diplomacy was never Duryodhan's strongest attribute.
Meanwhile on Yudhishthir's side all of the council roles are filled by Krishna, as he acts as adviser to Yudhishthir and his brothers on all things because it turns out that he is the incarnation of their religion's best god - a fact which all of the main characters seem to be aware of, somehow, even though he only reveals his cosmic manifestation once, to Arjun.
The TV series would be a tough watch for a casual viewer - partly due to the huge cast of characters and the glacial pace (it thinks nothing of spending 10 episodes on Krishna's childhood, or of bringing back a minor character from dozens of episodes earlier and expecting you to remember who they are and what relationship they have to the main characters), but mainly due to the English subtitling. This is patchy at the best of times, but on occasion it seems as if the subtitler just simply couldn't be bothered, and whole scenes dense with dialogue are left mysterious. This is even worse if you're watching it on the internets, where two crucial episodes towards the end of the series (both of them featuring the deaths of major characters) do not appear to have subtitled versions available at all!
But there is a lot to enjoy if you're prepared to persevere and get past these difficulties - I found the Wikipedia entries on the Mahabharata story invaluable in following what was going on, and for comprehending some of the different cultural assumptions that make no sense to us cats. The story is one of the All Time Greats among mannys for a good reason (more than just being the longest, I mean, mew) and this is because many of the larger-than-life characters and clever plot twists stand up well even today.
May you live long.
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