Having created a rather goofy TV series about the mythical Hercules, Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert’s Renaissance Pictures discovered rather quickly that one “special guest� character on three successive episodes of that show - a warrior named Xena - was more immediately popular with viewers than their title character. Which isn’t, in hindsight, all that surprising - while the ‘90s TV-series version of the Hercules mythology had all the class and elegance of a night out at a posh restaurant with Herbie The Love Bug, New Zealand actor Lucy Lawless’s interpretation of Xena, with its intrinsic fire and energy, really clicked with viewers - especially young, self-aware women, who quickly adopted this fictional “warrior princess� as their idol and took to heart every inch of the increasingly tangled back-story that was developed around the character during the first season of Xena’s “own show�. A quick bit of renovation was in order, though, with Xena’s hair colour changed from Lawless’s natural blonde to jet-black, the spiffy gel-enhanced blow-wave converted to a quasi-tribal do without a hint of irony along the way.

While the show’s attentive cult following absorb every second of the over-the-top drama and pathos of Xena Warrior Princess, the hapless newcomer can’t help but wonder what all the fuss is about. While there’s rarely a dull moment in each 42 minute episode, the overwhelming impression is one of extreme cheesiness, Lawless and her cohorts desperately trying to outdo each other for each episode’s Worst Haircut Award and delivering lines that would be more at home in a ‘40s matinee serial - and when the show isn’t taking itself seriously, that actually works as wide-eyed, mindless brain-off entertainment, even if Xena’s constant car-alarm cat-call during action scenes leads you to root for the enemy, however evil they may be. But all to often the producers and writers make the mistake of trying to imbue their scripts with serious, “heartfelt� moments, and for the most part they just fall flat.

In fact, most of Xena is curiously old-fashioned - even the opening credit sequence, which recalls many bad ‘70s TV series with its “here are the characters, here is the plot� narration (it looks for all the world, actually, like a promo trailer for the series that’s been pressed into service as opening credits at the last minute).

There are three episodes on this first Xena DVD (though there’s plenty of room on the disc for a fourth) - and strangely, they’re the first three from the second season of the show, leaving anyone who’s not a long-time fan to figure it all out for themselves. There’s a great deal of “Xena faces her past� material throughout each episode, and while they do work as self-contained cheese-action-dramas, the back-story-driven moments here will confuse the hell out of all but the faithful. Those faithful, though, will revel in the chance to own their own piece of Xena, even if it is just a tiny fragment of a much larger story.

Supplied on a dual-layered RSDL disc in its original full-frame format with a straight stereo soundtrack, this Xena disc essentially just gives customers pristine copies of the TV master tapes - and there’s not much more you can ask for from a TV series disc than that. While there are no major compression problems throughout, the telecine transfers done for these early episodes are very mediocre, suffering from the all-too-familiar “electronic grain� that’s such a constant problem with many TV shows shot on film and transferred quickly (by necessity) to tape for editing. As a result of this “grain�, the compressed image isn’t always as stable as it should be; of the three, episode 2 (Remember Nothing, directed by Anson “Potsie From Happy Days� Williams!) looks the best on this disc (and is also the most dramatically satisfying episode). Though hardly close to modern telecine standards (in fact, there are quite a few scenes that are transferred with incorrect colour balance or too brightly) it’s the way these episodes were made, and you can’t ask for better than that. Regardless, they look better than they did on broadcast TV. The layer change is placed mid-way through the second episode (at the 24:19 mark), right in a fade-to-black where a commercial would have gone. It’s completely unobtrusive.

The audio is serviceable but not spectacular; in common with most TV productions, the soundtrack has been subjected to heavy dynamic range compression, and that really shows up when you’re listening through anything more advanced than the speakers in your TV. Despite the back cover’s statement to the contrary, the Italian language track here is in mono.

Extras are limited to episode summaries, a pair of short, hype-laden biographies for Lawless and co-star Renee O’Connor, and a photo gallery containing 17 images (including two of a blonde Xena, presumably from the Hercules series).