Richard chamberlain

Every now and then I’m amazed at how pop culture doesn’t actually require you to have seen, read, heard or played something for you to have, or at least think you have, a fairly clear idea what it is. I’m sure I’ve seen snippets of versions of Alexandre Dumas’ Musketeers stories, but I don’t think I’d seen an entire Musketeers film – let alone watched a series or read any of the original novels – until a few weeks ago. (Not even Douglas Fairbanks’ silent-era original.) Nonetheless, I had quite a concrete image in my head: four friends in dashing 17^th century outfits, wielding swords (but not muskets – go figure) and getting into swashbuckling adventures, rescuing damsels and foiling the wicked plans of scheming authority figures.

What I didn’t expect: that the three Musketeers (feat. D’Artagnan) would basically turn out to be The Beatles from A Hard Day’s Night… in dashing 17^th century outfits, wielding swords (but not muskets – go figure) and getting into swashbuckling adventures, rescuing damsels and foiling the wicked plans of scheming authority figures.

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Thinking back to television when I was a kid – that is, the early 1980s in Switzerland -, I mainly remember these: German entertainment shows featuring all the beige in the world, the cheesy US series of the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, the likes of Simon & Simon and Knight Rider, and the Japanese anime adaptations of (mostly) European children’s literature, from Heidi to Pinocchio. Just as much as the daily and weekly fare, though, I remember the ‘prestige television’ of the time: the big miniseries that featured impressive casts and that by and large were concerned with more mature themes. I remember these being something of a family event that we’d gather in front of the TV to watch: Roots, Fatal Vision (starring Karl Malden, that big-nosed embodiment of integrity), the German Das Boot (which I’ll always think of as a miniseries, since I don’t think I ever saw the original cinema edit). To pre-teen me, these felt excitingly like grown-up television, and while I would probably not have put it like that at the time, they felt so much less generic and more ambitious than the ongoing series I was otherwise watching at the time.