"The Magicians": Hogwarts Plus Narnia Plus Bisexual Menages-a-Trois

 

The Magicians has a 97% rating on Netflix, and it's already in Season 5, so here goes Season 1, Episode 1:

Scene 1: Elegant man and woman are arguing on a park bench. The woman: "You have to get them to Brakebills before HE finds them.  They're infants!  They know nothing!"  The man promises to try.  But...he's lost the boy.

Scene 2: Statue of Liberty pas out to the Midtown Mental Health Clinic.  Urm...the Statue of Liberty is nowhere near Midtown Manhattan.   A psychiatrist or social worker gets all sarcastic at a patient, a surly long-haired guy (Jason Ralph).  He admits that he's feeling better, no longer out-of-place, "the most useless person on the planet."

He's about to graduate from college (wow, he looks really old for 22!), and he has some interviews set up for grad school at Harvard, Yale, Princeton -- the standard Ivy Leagues.

Switch to a close-up of a gyrating girl butt.  Gross!  It's a gyrating party.  Surly Long-haired guy is sitting by himself.  Back to the girl butt.  She turns around to show us her boobs.  Gross again!. Surly tries not to look.

We intersplice the interview and the party scene. Surly impresses girls with a magic trick, discusses Danish cinema, and ignores Gyrating Butt's attempts to engage with him.  He goes to his room, which is full of books on stage magic, plus the Fillory and Feathers series of children's books.  He begins to read one.

Scene 3:  The story: The Chatwin Twins (Jane and Martin) and their older brother Rupert(who was wounded in the War) are staying in the country house of an elderly professor, where they discover that an old grandfather clock is a portal to Fillory (Narnia without the copyright issues).

Back in New York, Julia comes into Surly's room and asks why he didn't try to pick up Gyrating Butt.  "Not my type."  "But she was wearing a unicorn t-shirt.  She was clearly into all of that fantasy stuff you read.  But you wouldn't know because you never interact with anyone.  You're too busy with that Fillory crap."

She climbs onto the bed next to him.  James (Michael Cassidy) comes in and pretends to be upset: "My girlfriend and my friend together! Have you no decency?"  He piles on, yelling "Three way!"  

Scene 4: Julia is escorting Surly (we finally get his name -- Quentin) to his Yale interview.  Piece of cake -- Yale is so desperate for philosopy majors that they'll take anyone.   

The interview is being held in an elegant house in midtown Manhattan.  No one answers the door, so they go in.  In the drawing room, they see the Fillory and Feathers grandfather clock!  The admissions counselor must be a super fan.  Ahh -- he's lying on a chair, dead!

Scene 5:  The Admissions Counselor left a package for Quentin: the manuscript of Book 6 of the Fillory series.  But there were only five books.  This one was unpublished!  It will turn the fantasy world upside down! 

 "Nonsense!" Julia  snipes. "You said you were a super-fan on your application, so he thought he'd share his fan fiction."

"You used to be a fan."

"Yes, but then I grew up.  You should, too.  Start living life in the real world."

Scene 6: Quentin walking down the street at night, reading the unbound pages (not worried that they will blow away?)  Whoops, a page does blow away.  He chases it through a mysterious gate and into the woods.  Suddenly it's daytime, and he's on the lawn of an elegant old manor house.  Uh-oh, Quent is having a psychotic breakdown!

Meanwhile, Julia gets on an elevator, but instead of going up, it goes down -- way, way down, past P1, P2, and P3.  To a floor that is above the ground.  A corridor.  A sign reading "To exam."

Quent heads for the building -- Brakebridge Hall.  An Edwardian dandy with a nice basket eyes him.  "I'm Elliot.  You're late.  Follow me."  

Hey, his name is Elliot Waugh, a homage to Evelyn Waugh who wrote the queer classic Brideshead Revisited.  

I'm not going to watch anymore.  This sounds like the setup for yet another complex mythology featuring the Chosen One, and I don't have time for it.  But some research reveals that practically everyone on the show engages in same-sex activity at one point or another, although the main romances are heterosexual.

1. Elliot is more into guys than girls.  

2. Quentin is more into girls, but ends up with Elliot in Season 4. 

3. Penny (Arjun Gupta, left) is more into girls.

4. Rupert Chatwin (from the Fillory stories, which are real) is more into guys.

5. Josh Hoberman (Trevor Einhorn) is more into girls.

They Had Faces Then: TV Hunks Before Beefcake

During the 1950s, male tv stars rarely took their shirts off, even in Westerns and adventure series (Ty Hardin, top photos, was never displayed nude or semi nude on Bronco).  And when they did, there was usually little of interest underneath except chest hair. So gay kids of the first Boomer generation couldn't depend on pecs and abs.  They had to concentrate on the faces.

Take Richard Greene, who starred in The Adventures of Robin Hood (1955-59).  Which photo would you prefer to tape to your bedroom wall?

Or Eddie Fisher, popular crooner who hosted Coke Time with Eddie Fisher (1953-57), and along the way married Debbie Reynolds, Elizabeth Taylor, and Connie Stevens.  Which photo is dreamiest?

There's something to be said for leaving your clothes on (well, maybe not if you're Robert Goulet).  With the raw erotic energy of the naked body obscured, the star looks suave, sophisticated, ready for romance, leading you to fantasies about holding hands and kissing on the doorstep rather than what might happen in the bedroom.  And at age eight, who cares about what happens in the bedroom?

See also: Beefcake Dads of 1950s Sitcoms

Nanny and the Professor

There are two kinds of servants on tv.

1. The world-weary, laconic observer of the lunacy (Hazel, Beulah, Geoffrey on Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Florence on The Jeffersons, Benson on Soap).

2. The "breath of fresh air" whose joie de vivre revitalizes a failing family (Mr. Belvedere, Charles on Charles in Charge, Tony on Who's the Boss, Fran on The Nanny).

Nanny and the Professor (1970-71), which became a must-see when I was in fifth grade because it aired between The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family, was an early example of the "breath of fresh air" type.

Phoebe Figalilly (Juliet Mills), a proper British nanny, complete with deerstalker cap and Inverness cape,  sweeps in like Mary Poppins to take control of the household of stuffy English professor Everett (Richard Long of The Big Valley, top photo, shown working out with gay icon Rock Hudson).

His kids:

1.Intellectual teen Hal (David Doremus), seen here trying to meditate.

2. Athletic preteen Butch (Trent Lehman)

3. Baby of the family Prudence (Kim Richards).

Nanny draws from the "I've got a secret" genre by teasing at having magical powers, though nothing is ever stated openly.

For instance, in "Spring, Sweet Spring," Nanny thinks a family picnic would foster togetherness, but everyone has other plans.  Then a series of humorous accidents and coincidences push them, one by one, to the park, where the picnic is set out for them.

When Nanny and the Professor first aired, I was in fifth grade.  I was drawn to Nanny's independence, courage, and penchant for deflating masculine egos.  But there were several points of interest for gay boys.

1. The opening song sounded distinctly like the two boys were attracted to the Nanny ("soft and sweet, warm and wonderful...oohh, our magical mystical Nanny!").  But heterosexual desire was at a minimum: Hal liked a girl in one episode, and Butch, never.

 From the title, one expects a romance between Phoebe and Professor Everett, but that is never even hinted at.  In fact, the Professor fled from several girls anxious to snare him.  He could easily be read as gay.

2. Hal was a shy, intellectual, gay-vague outsider, like Peter on The Brady Bunch.

3. There was no beefcake, but my friends thought that Hal was cute, and there were several dreamy guest stars, including Van Williams and Vincent Van Patten.

4. Richard Long (1927-1974) was rumored to be gay or bi (married to women twice).

After Nanny, David Doremus continued acting until 1981, then retired to work in electronics.  He is married to a woman, and has four children.

Trent Lehman committed suicide in 1982, at the age of 20.  No info on whether he was gay.

Juliet Mills has been very active in movies and on tv, most recently playing Dottie on the gay sitcom From Here on OUT (2014).  Her husband, Maxwell Caulfield, was a gay icon of the 1980s.


See also: Maxwell Caulfield

The Crosby Kids

Bing Crosby (1903-1977), roommate of gay jazz legend Bix Beiderbecke, grew up to be the laid-back crooner that had 1940s teenyboppers swooning, starred in White Christmas, and had six sons. Growing up as celebrity kids took its toll on them, as did Bing's harsh, authoritarian parenting style, and his insistence that they follow in his footsteps.  None of them became famous, but they had some success in the early 1960s performing as the Crosby Boys, and some of them were familiar to the Boomer generation as actors.

1. Gary (1933-1995), left, starred in some lightweight romantic comedies, such as Mardi Gras (1958) and Two Tickets to Paris (1962), and guest starred on many tv series.  In middle age he played authority figures on Adam-12 and Emergency.

2. Davis (1934-1991) acted only occasionally, notably with his brothers and the Rat Pack gang in Sergeants Three (1962).

3. Philip (1934-2004), Davis's twin brother, had two buddy bonding roles, in Robin and the Seven Hoods (1964)  and None But the Brave (1965).  Coincidentally, he buddied with Rat Packer Frank Sinatra in both.

4. Lindsay (1938-1989) starred in several outlaw-biker movies, including The Glory Stompers (1967) and Bigfoot (1970).

5. Harry (born 1958), left, was best known to the Boomer Generation, playing Bill, the camp counselor who plays strip Monopoly and gets slashed in Friday the 13th (1980). He had small roles in several other movies. Today he is an investment banker.

6. Nathaniel (born 1961) (left, hugging Harry) stayed out of acting, and coincidentally the only one who has any gay rumors.  He's a professional golfer.

Steven Ford: from President's Son to Soap Hunk

Born in 1956, Steven Ford was the youngest son of Gerald Ford, President of the United States from 1974 to 1977.  By that time he was in college far from the White House, studying ranching at Utah State University.  But the acting bug bit, and he started making the rounds.

With or without the cachet of having a famous Dad, he got lots of two-fisted roles in Escape from New York, The Eleventh Commandment, and Body Count.  

But his blond hair, square jaw, and chiseled physique got Steve more attention as a heartthrob.  From 1981 to 1987, he starred on the soap The Young and the Restless as private detective Andy Richards (right), where he buddy-bonded with fellow p.i. Paul Williams (Doug Davidson, left).  The extremely girlish-looking bottom guy is Michael Damian, who played singer Danny Romalotti.

Afterwards Steve hosted the tv series Secret Service and continued to act, with roles opposite action heroes like Al Pacino in Heat, Richard Griego in Against the Law, and Casper Van Dien in Starship Troopers. Today he spends most of his time on his ranch and giving motivational speeches about alcoholism.

Steve has never married, so he's been the subject of lots of gay rumors.His Mom, former First Lady Betty Ford, was a proponent of gay marriage.

"Cougar Town": Can A Rich White Heterosexual Get Laid at Age 40?

Gay men in their 40s and 50s are twink magnets.  By the time you reach your 60s (which I did last month), you are at the pinnacle of hotness; you have to swat them away.  It's considered perfectly normal in gay communities for a couple to differ in age by 20 or even 30 years.  Apparently straight men in their 40s and 50s have sorority girls lining up to have sex with them.  But heterosexual women over 40 are perceived of as "gross."  If they manage to get a younger guy interested, they are ridiculed: "What's wrong with you?  You're not a sexual being!  Act your age!"

That's the premise of Cougar Town (2009-2015), which Bob and I just started watching on Amazon Prime.  Jules (Courtney Coxm who had just finished playing a young adult on Friends) is in her 40s and recently divorced , though I'm not sure why:  her ex-husband Bobby (Brian Van Holt, above) is her best friend, always stopping over to offer advice on the crisis du jour.  

She lives in a palatial McMansion on a cul-de-sac on South Florida with her teenage son Travis (Dan Byrd), who is embarrassed by everything she says or does. 

She has a great job as a high-power realtor, selling McMansions to noveau-riche Florida couples.  

Her best friend (Christa Miller), who lives next door with her husband (Ian Gomez) and new baby, is constantly inviting her over for "wine and Scrabble."  

Sounds like a perfect life.  So, if this were a musical, what would Jules' "I want" song be about?  Sex.

I want to get laid today, or next week, or sometime before May.

But I'm 40 -- yuck!  And gross!  And all the men my age are broken, married, or gay.

So, why not date guys in their 20s?  Because then everybody will make fun of her.  She makes fun of the "cougars," who date guys young enough to be their sons.  

But why the double standard?  Both Bobby and her cul-de-sac neighbor BJ (Chris Zylka, left) bring home a different young girl every night.  Plus she gets encouragement from her party-girl coworker (Busy Phillips), who is in her 30s, and man-hungry boss (Carolyn Hennesy), who is in her 60s; both of them bring home guys in their 20s every night.  

So Jules gets out there and scores a hookup with the hunky Matt (David Clayton Rogers).  

Complications ensue: ex-husband and son catch her giving Matt a blow job by the pool (ex: "Hey, you told me you didn't like that!")..  

So when they begin a relationship, Jules insists that they sneak around: Matt hides until after her son leaves for the night  with his friend Ryan (Lil J McDaniel), and has to leave himself at 5:00 am, before any of the neighbors wake up and see him.

In the second episode, Jules is upset because she has no "war stories" about her wild 20s: she got pregnant and married at age 22 (no wild college days)?  So she goes out for a wild night, only to find that she's too old to stay up until 3:00 am, she gets drunk on two beers, and trying an athletic sexual position throws her back out.  

So, is it ok for people in their 40s to play Scrabble, watch tv, and go to bed by 9:00 pm, or are you supposed to be hanging out at the bars into your 60s?  I don't understand what this show is getting at.

In a subplot, Jules accidentally used a sexy picture for her realtor signs, and a junior high kid (Tyler Steelman) keeps stealing them to masturbate to (why does he need a roomful?).  Jules finds this extremely embarrassing, and tracks him down to yell at him.  What's the problem?  She has no control over who finds her attractive.

Rich People:  These people are all so affluent that their problems seem trivial, but that may be the pandemic talking.

White People:  The map in the opening seems to be zeroing in on Fort Myers, Florida, where 34% of the population is white, but here, Hispanic people do not exist. Two minor characters are black: Travis's best friend and the bouncer at the club (Gregory Hinton), to whom Jules says "Wow, you are really black!"

Gay People:  No. Several cast members have played gay characters in other series, but here, everyone seems obsessed with heterosexual sex except Travis.  But his main job is to be embarrassed by his mother, so he didn't really have time in the two episodes I watched.

Beefcake: Tons.  There are two shots of Courtney Cox in bikini underwear, but other than that, it's all shirtless and underwear-clad men all the time.

My Grade: The problems of rich white heterosexuals in 2009, which seems like ages ago. I would have put up the lack of gay and ethnic minority representation back in the day, but not anymore.   Meh.

"Godless": A Godforsaken Reduplication of Jigsaw-Puzzle Plotlines About Men in a Town Without Men

Godless, on Netflix, is reputedly about an Old West town occupied entirely by women, with the two major characters a lesbian couple.  Wow, a tv series about a1960s radical lesbian separatist commune!  I shy away from it for several years because of the title -- "godless," keying into the myth that when you are gay, God abandons you.  Plus if it's all !00% women, there won't be any beefcake!  But Bob likes queer representatioon in all of its forms, and we're running out of things to watch, so...

Scene 1: Creede, Colorado 1884.  A stark, foggy landscape.  Howling wind. Ugly Moustache Guy and his posse ride into town.  All of the men have been killed -- some hanged, some shot, and some in a train wreck.  A woman kneels by a body, singing hymns.  

So the town wasn't built as a women-only lesbian feminist commune.  All of the men were killed.

Meanwhile, Young Guy (Jack O'Connell) rides up to an isolated ranch house.  He's been shot in the neck.  A woman and her preteen daughter take care of him.  

Meanwhile, Scary  Old Guy and his possee knock on the door of Elijah Graham, M.D. (Wait -- I thought there were no women in town...  So everyone was killed except the town doctor?).  He's been shot in the arm, and it will have to be amputated.  He introduces himself as Frank Griffin, and says "Don't worry, I won't die.  I've seen my death, and this isn't it."

I'm lost.  Who are these people?  And for a town with no men, there certainly are a lot of men.  

Scene 2: An elderly Paiute woman treats Young Guy by burning his wounds.  Gross!  But at least he has a shirtless shot.

Meanwhile, Yet Another Man in the Town Without Men awakens in an Indian village, with mud or something covering his eyes.  Grosser and grosser!  He walks out of the hut nude -- nice butt and flash of penis -- and complains that the cure isn't working.  

Meanwhile, Elijah has finished amputating the arm of Scary Old Guy (yes, we see the bloody arm).  

And at the Ranch, Young Guy wakes up and tries to dress.

Yet Another Man is wearing a sheriff's badge, so I'll call him Sheriff.  He sees well enough to pick flowers and put them on his wife's grave. 

He's about to die ("my twilight has come"), so he apologizes fro being a screw-up, and for disliking their daughter  Trudy ("but I can't forgive her for what she done to you").  Apparently wife died in childbirth.  

Pan out to the tombstone.  Sheriff's wife died  in 1882, two years before the town lost all its men.  Now we just need to meet Trudy to find out how much time has passed.

I'm actually cheating.  This is the second time I've gone through this episode.  The first time, I had no idea what was going on.  The second time, I'm stopping the streaming and taking notes, and paying attention to seemingly trivial details, and I think I've almost got it figured out.

Scene 3: Sheriff rides into town, where women are working as barbers and carpenters.  They don't seem to like him very much. 

Meanwhile, Young Guy goes outside and gets introduced: Alice Fletcher, her Paiute mother-in-law, and her son Truckee (sorry, they have long hair, so I thought they were a girl -- besides a town with only women)

Sheriff goes home, where Middle Aged Woman berates him for not greeting the Little Girl, who is deaf (I'll bet one of them is his daughter Trudy!) He berates her for wearing Albert's pants and hat -- a woman wearing men's clothes looks ridiculous.  Women do all of the masculine-coded jobs in town, and you're worried about costume?

The cure didn't work -- it just gave him an erection.

Aha!  The woman is Aunt Maggie, so the deaf girl must be Trudy, so it's been about five years since Wife died, or two years since the men were all killed.  

Scene 4: Scary Old Guy and his possee invade a church. (Hey, there are men in the congregation!  I thought....).

 He berates them for committing adultery, fornicating, and not Loving Thy Neighbor.  If they don't change their ways, Roy Goode will come and kill them all.  (I guess Roy Goode is like Krampus)

Scene 5: Night.  Alice from the Ranch is teaching Truckee to read.  Later she goes out to the barn and tells Young Guy that as soon as he's well, he's got to leave.  But he proves that he's good with horses, so she changes her mind.

Meanwhile, Ugly Moustache Guy from Scene 1 and his posse are scouring the hills, looking for Krampus, aka Roy Goode (probably Young Guy).

Back at the Ranch: a young woman shows up with her baby, which has scarlet fever, and there's no doctor in town (What about Elijah? Is the in a different town from the women-only town?).  Alice agrees to use Paiute medicine. 

Young Guy asks how Alice, the Paiute woman, and Truckee ended up on the ranch, and she  tells a long, convoluted story (good, the plot's not complicated enough yet!) about how she came to town to meet her fiancee, but on the way back to the ranch, they were caught in a tidal wave, and he was killed.  That doesn't really answer the question.  And Truckee is obviously from a second marriage, so there's another dead husband, no doubt with another complicated back story.

Scene 6: Ugly Moustache Guy rides into town and stops to flirt with the schoolmarm and stare at a cowboy's bulge.  He introduces himself as the Marshall.   

Next he visits Sheriff McNue (The Blind Sheriff from Scene 2!  If it was another sheriff, I'd be outta here!)

He's looking for Frank Griffin -- the Scary Old Guy who got his arm amputated.  He gives us a plot dump about what happened in Creede  (aha, a different town from the wonen-only town, just to make things confusing!): 

Scary Old Guy and his possee tried to rob a train, but Krampus, aka Roy Goode (aha!) arrived and stole the money.  He also shot Scary Old Guy in the arm (aha!).

Two members of his gang (apparently regulars, played by Matthew and Russel Dennis-Lewis) started to rape a young woman, so the townsfolk grabbed them and tried to lynch them.  Scary Old Guy didn't like this, so he and his posse killed everyone in town.

Ok, so we have three towns:

1. Creede, where everybody was murdered. They made it look like men only in Scene 1 in order to confuse us.

2. Unnamed town with Elijah and the church.

3. Unnamed town with no men except the Sheriff , the Undertaker who plays chess with him, and the unnamed cowboy with the bulge.  What happened to the men?  Maybe the tidal wave that killed Alice's fiancee?  

I went back and searched for the name of  Town #3.  If you freeze frame when Sheriff enters, you see the name on a building in the distance -- LaBelle. Or it could be the name of a store.

Scene 7:  At the taven, the Marshall discovers what happened to almost all of the men in Town #3 (LaBelle, probably) -- mining accident.  Nothing to do with the dead people in Scene 1 or the tidal wave in Alice's story.. Then why did I sit through all of those plotlines twice?

Scene 8: Sheriff rides up to the Ranch to ask about the stranger Alice has living with her. Krampus admits to being Roy Goode, who stole the train money from Scary Old Guy, so his posse would chase him and not kill everyone in the town.  A noble act, but Sheriff arrests him anyway.

If we have a sheriff, why do we need a marshall, too? They have the same job.  

Last scene: Marshall looks down on a town (I think LaBelle)  and says "God help you folks."

God help us for sitting through this twie, plus freeze framing, to figure out what's going on.  Why three towns, and the one you think it is, it isn'?  Why two tragedies -- or three, if Alice's tidal wave is something different.  A marshall and a sheriff/  Two bad guys, of whom one might not be bad? Why reduplicate the complexity?  Thisi isn't entertainment, it's homework.

And where are the lesbians?

Corentin and Kim

Like Alix and Enak, Jonny Quest and Hadji, and a dozen others, Corentin and Kim were a teenage European-Indian homoromantic pair. Belgian cartoonist Paul Cuvelier began painting the androgynous, muscular teenager in 1943.

Herge, creator of Tintin, saw them and suggested a comic strip, which appeared in  Tintin magazine beginning in 1946.














The comic story begins with Corentin at age 14, a Breton boy in the 18th century who runs away from his abusive uncle, stows away aboard a ship, and is shipwrecked on a desert island.  Soon he teams up with an Indian boy named Kim.  They also add a gorilla named Belzebuth and a tiger named Moloch to their entourage.

Corentin was aimed at somewhat younger children than Alix, so his adventures were less complex, but the backgrounds were just as spectacular, and there was nearly as much nudity (especially as the two boys aged into muscular late adolescence).









  








Seven comic albums appeared between 1950 and 1974, rather a paltry number compared to Alix, sending Corentin and Kim to India, China, Italy, Egypt, and back to Brittany (Corentin's grandson also appeared in the 1800's Wild West).  There were also novels, an animated cartoon series (1987),  and an original comic strip, translated into German, Spanish, and Dutch.

Nevertheless, Corentin was never as successful as Alix, and Paul Cuvelier less concerned with homoromance; eventually Corentin gets a girlfriend, and many of Cuvelier's other works featured female nudity.

Alix and Enak: Jonny and Hadji in Ancient Rome

If the gay kids of Britain had it good, then France must have been a Paradise of beefcake and bonding: bandes-dessinee (hard-bound comic books) overbrimmed with same-sex couples, including Tintin and Captain Haddock, Spirou and Fantasio, Corentin and Kim, and Alix and Enak.

 Alix, who premiered in 1948, was a Roman citizen from the province of Gaul (modern France) who travels through the ancient world,  through Gaul, Egypt, Persia, and eventually as far afield as India, China, and the Pacific, having death-defying adventures in historically accurate settings (give or take a few hundred years) with beautifully detailed backgrounds.






Alix is blond-hared, handsome, muscular, and frequently nude.

That's right, nude.

His creator, Jacques Martin, had no qualms about introducing rear and occasional frontal nudity into his strips.

But that's not all.  Alix is accompanied by his boyfriend Enak, a slightly younger Egyptian, dark skinned, equally handsome, muscular, and nude.

Sort of a Hadji to his Jonny Quest, or a Raji to his Terry.

In the early books, they have no interest in girls; they are devoted to each other, rescuing each other from deadly danger over and over again, saying things like "I won't leave without you!" and "If anything were to happen to you. . . ."

In the books published since the 1980s, they occasionally get girlfriends, but only as momentary dalliances; nothing can interfere with their devotion to each other.

Thirty volumes have appeared, along with some "straight' history of the ancient world illustrated by Alix comics. They have never been translated into English, but you don't need to read French to enjoy the beautifully detailed backgrounds -- or the beefcake.

The Top 10 Hunks of "Once Upon a Time in Wonderland"

Lewis Carroll never intended to create a coherent fantasy world, where people could actually live, with governments, economics, social structures, and logical rules.  Alice is dreaming.

So when later writers and filmmakers try to make a Tolkienesque alternate-world fantasy out of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, they rin into countless problems: incoherent geography, sudden time shifts, queens without countries, worlds without history.  They closer they stick to the source material, the worse the results are.

Once Upon a Time in Wonderland, a spin-off of Once Upon a Time, sticks too close.

Oh, there's a new plot, with new characters and the extensive back stories we expect from the original. But the convoluted interconnections make no sense.

The plot: An adult Alice returns to Wonderland to rescue her True Love, Cyrus (Peter Gadiot, left), who happens to be a genie.  She is assisted by the Knave of Hearts (Michael Socha, above) and the White Rabbit, and foiled by the Red Queen and Jafar from Aladdin.

Meanwhile, the Knave of Hearts turns out to be Will Scarlet from Robin Hood, who is searching for his lost True Love, Anastasia (not the heir to the Romanovs; the daughter of Rapunzel), who happens to be the Red Queen.

The White Rabbit and the Caterpillar are actual animals, but the Lizard is just a nickname.  You can't have it both ways.

There are woefully out of place puns ("Forget-Me-Knot") which destroy the versimilitude.

At least, like the original series, Wonderland is a hunk paradise.  Here are the top 10 hotties:

1. Michael Socha

2. Peter Gadiot





3. Matty Finochio as Tweedledee.  He and his Tweedledum counterpart are Anastasia's servants.

4. Lost alumnus Naveen Andrews as Jafar.

5. Raza Jaffrey as Taj, Cyrus's older brother and the heir to the throne of...um...genieland?

6. Dejan Loyola as Rafi, Cyrus's other brother, also a genie.

7.  Hugo Steele as Orang, one of Jafar's guards.

8. Steve Bacic as "The Grendel." In the original Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, it's just Grendel, his name, not his species.

9.  Darren Shahlavi as a genie hunter.

10.  Arkie Kandola as a bartender.  He's also a Vancouver-based Sikh comedian.














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How about another peek at Darren Shahlavi?