The Odyssey Is Back in the Air, and Our Shelf Is Ready
The Oldest Story Is New Again
Why a three-thousand-year-old poem keeps washing up on our counter
There is a particular kind of week when the same title keeps surfacing at the counter, and lately it has been the Odyssey. Somebody read that a big new version is on the way, and suddenly everyone wants to know what came before it. I love these weeks. They send people digging through shelves they normally walk straight past.
The funny thing about Homer is that the movies never really left him alone. Directors have been chasing that voyage since the silent era, and most of those attempts are sitting in our aisles right now, waiting for a curious renter. You do not need to wait for the new one to fall for the story.
If you want the grand old Hollywood swing at it, start with Ulysses from 1954, with Kirk Douglas squinting into the surf and wrestling a very rubbery Cyclops. It is earnest and a little silly and completely charming, the sort of film that reminds you what a tape used to feel like on a Friday night.
For something with more weight, we keep the 1997 television Odyssey close to the counter. Armand Assante carries it, the effects are hit and miss, and it still gets the shape of the journey right. It ran long, it aired over two nights, and it played endlessly on rental shelves back when this shop was young.
Building the Shelf Around the Voyage
The neighbours we would hand you on the way out
Once a customer bites on the Odyssey, my job gets fun, because the myth has cousins everywhere. The obvious first stop is Jason and the Argonauts, where Ray Harryhausen made skeletons fight with a patience no computer has matched since. Kids raised on smooth digital monsters are always startled by how alive those stop-motion creatures feel.
From there it is a short hop to Clash of the Titans, another Harryhausen showcase, and the whole shelf of sword-and-sandal pictures that filled Italian studios in the sixties. Steve Reeves as Hercules, oiled and unbothered, more or less built that genre, and the tapes still move whenever somebody stumbles onto them.
I also like to sneak in the odd film about the Odyssey rather than of it. Godard's Contempt is really a story about a doomed marriage on a film set, where the crew happens to be adapting Homer, and it is one of the most beautiful things we own. It rewards a patient evening and a decent television.
For the customer who wants the myth smuggled into something modern, there is O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which drops Odysseus into Depression-era Mississippi and never once talks down to its source. People come in asking for the soundtrack and leave with the whole tradition tucked under an arm.
And if someone is truly deep in it, I point them toward Theo Angelopoulos and Ulysses' Gaze, a slow, haunted film about a filmmaker crossing the Balkans. It is not a weekend crowd pleaser. It is the kind of thing you rent because a shop like ours told you it existed.
That is the whole point of a place like this. A poem gets people talking again, and we answer with a stack of tapes that tie the new thing to a century of old ones. Come in, say the word Odyssey, and watch how quickly the counter fills up. We have been ready for this voyage for a long time.
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