Percy Jackson and the Olympians: Nostalgia Propels Ace New Adaptation of Beloved Underdog Tale
By John Kirk
Rating: A-
Every generation of readers has a touchstone novel they fondly recollect. If you were in middle school in the last 20 years, there’s a good chance that Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief was that book for you.
Talk to any middle school student today about the new series that Disney+ is launching this month, and it’ll be pretty clear from their enthusiasm that it’s probably one of their favourite books as well.
Makes sense. Author Rick Riordan published the first of the series in 2005 and it was a resounding success. A teacher and a parent of a child who had both dyslexia and ADHD, he wanted to create a story his child could identify with.
In fact, an entire generation of students identified with it. It saw two semi-decent films in 2010 and 2013, and the book series still continues to enthrall students today. It’s deserving of a better media adaptation simply for that reason alone. And that’s what Disney+ is releasing this month.
If you’re not familiar with the series, Percy Jackson is a student who experiences persistent challenges at school, exacerbated by ADHD and dyslexia. After losing his mother, he discovers that he is a demigod, a child of the classical Greek myths and more specifically, Poseidon, the God of the Sea.
Charged to recover Zeus’s lost thunderbolt and bring balance back to the court of Olympus, Percy and his friends embark upon a quest that takes them across the continental United States, encountering all sorts of challenges that have a distinctly mythological twist to them.
A classic underdog story, the appeal of this book was so well-received by students who identified and who sought recognition for their own learning challenges that it struck a solid, sympathetic chord. It also encouraged a wave of reluctant readers to challenge themselves with the written word, which greatly pleased the book’s author.
The series, if somewhat rushed in terms of plot, is fairly true to the novel in terms of the sequence of the events. The cast of characters might be somewhat different from imagining but there has to be visual differences from the films of 2010 and 2013.
Still, the series manages to successfully capture the nature of the underdog Jackson, his sense of uniqueness and loneliness as the only child of Poseidon. Any loyal reader will know what to expect and the first season looks to be covering the first book in the series, The Lightning Thief.
Of course, today’s television production technology has the capacity to make a show that can deliver on the magical trappings needed to interpret the Greek myths in a modern North American setting. This show doesn’t disappoint in that respect. Presenting the gateway to Mount Olympus in an urban setting takes some elaborate setting and wait until you see the effects needed to present Camp Halfblood. In short, the expected promises a story like this requires are kept.
Walter Scobell gives the audience exactly the Percy Jackson the audience would expect. Short in stature, he’s the perfect target for school bullies, but Scobell also reminds us that Percy Jackson had a cunning and a quick wit that gave him his hero’s edge. Leah Jeffries (Annabeth) and Aryan Simhadri (Grover) as his companions have a lot of pressure riding on their shoulders as they are the ones Jackson bonds with and discovers what it’s like to rely on friends as he completes his quest.
There’s also the sub-theme of an abandoned kid’s resentment that plays out so strongly but not overdone in this series as Jackson puzzles why his father had not revealed himself. It’s an endearing theme that generates a great amount of good will to this character.
Dyslexic, orphaned, and thrown into a world that he doesn’t understand, Percy Jackson is a very strong character who drives the story and wins the audience instantly. It’s what underdogs do, right?
But there’s also the twinned force of nostalgia that also makes this series instantly likeable. Like I said, many audience members will be made up of former fans of the novel when it first came out or from when they read the story in middle school. It’s a modern feel-good fantasy that ranks up there with the likes of The Hobbit, A Wrinkle in Time and The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
It’s such a revered story that it’s important for it to be done right. Fans will, of course, be watching for any slightest inconsistency. However, aside from an accelerated pace, there’s very little that they’ll be able to complain about.
The additions of Lin-Manuel Miranda and the late Lance Reddick (which this will be his last televised appearance) to the cast will also earn instant approval with these fans. In short, this should be a series that will both entertain a new audience to the story and those die-hard fans at the same time.
It’s fair to say that this is a wonderful show for the family to enjoy together. It’s rare when multiple generations can agree on something to watch together, but when you have a story like this, that meant so much to so many at challenging points in their reading, nostalgia and the memory of being the underdog in school are difficult to resist. There’s a strong devotion to this book that will undoubtably be reflected by the viewing audience.
After all, underdogs rise to challenges in stories.
Percy Jackson and the Olympians. Created by Rick Riordan and Jonathan E. Steinberg. Starring Walter Scobell, Leah Jeffries, Aryan Simhadri, Charles Bushnell, Adam Copeland, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Timothy Omundson, Jason Mantzoukas, Lance Reddick, Glynn Turman, and Megan Mullally. Available on Disney+ starting December 20.