S01E21 — Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief

SPOILER ALERT: This episode and transcript below contains major spoilers for Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief.

Featuring hosts Timothy Haynes, Donna Haynes, Rebekah Edwards, and T. Josiah Haynes.

This is one of those episodes where we (poorly) contain our disdain for… Well, I guess you must listen to find out!

We chat about how we felt about Rick Riordan’s middle-grade book and the film and new Disney+ show inspired by it.

(If you loved hearing from our guest host, Christian, you should listen to our other episode featuring the golden grandson: The Polar Express.)

Final Verdicts

If you haven’t listened to the episode yet, we recommend waiting to read our verdicts. (But you’re probably grown, so do what you want!)

The Percy Jackson book captures a mischievous 12-year-old’s epic quest grounded in Greek mythology, while the 2010 movie ages everyone up and swaps charm for chaotic plot changes. The Disney+ show gets closer to the heart of the book, with a younger cast and more faithful character arcs.

Tim: The book was better

Donna: The book was better

Rebekah: The book was better

Josiah: The book was better

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Full Episode Transcript

Prefer reading? Check out the full episode transcript below. It’s AI-generated from our audio, and if we’re being honest… no one sat to read the entire thing for accuracy. (After all, we were there the whole time.) 😉 We’re sorry in advance for any typos or transcription errors.

[00:00:00] Rebekah: Hey, welcome to the book is better podcast. We are a family of four reviewing book to film adaptations. This is a clean podcast and we’re going to be talking about a book today that’s actually a young adult fiction novel and a lot of kids really like this one. So if you have kiddos who love Percy Jackson, this might be a fun episode to listen to together.

[00:00:20] Josiah: I would even say middle grade. 

[00:00:22] Rebekah: Okay. Yeah. Well instead of young adult, I think that was insulting me on purpose because you know how much I like this. No, and you want to make fun of the fact that I like really young age novels, but it’s fine. It’s not, middle grade is fine. It’s not what was for you promised.

[00:00:36] Tim: But when we were talking to some of the adults, um, that stopped by, um, lots of them love it, but seriously. 

[00:00:47] Rebekah: Just adults who stopped by an unnamed location, 

[00:00:50] Tim: a party. 

[00:00:53] Rebekah: Sorry, I think we just look for reasons to pick on you 

[00:00:55] Josiah : at this point. I love the agents who stop by to do a checkup on us. 

[00:01:00] Rebekah: Well, anyway, spoiler warning for today.

We’re going to be speaking with Spoiling Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief, the book by Rick Riordan, I believe is how you pronounce that last name. Uh, we’ll also be spoiling the 2010 film, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, the Lightning Thief. And we will be spoiling the first season of the new Disney Plus TV show, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, the first season of which covers You guessed it, the lightning thief.

So we like to start by introducing ourselves and giving a little fun fact. My name is Rebecca. I am the daughter slash sister of this lovely family. And our fun fact for today is, if you could be the ruler of any facet of human life, what would it be? Um, I’m This one is hard. I don’t know that I have, like, a fantastic answer, and so, um, I think that my answer is going to be, I want to be the ruler of everyone having fun.

Like, I wanna, I wanna be in charge of ways to make sure that everyone can have fun and that no one is ever left out. 

[00:02:03] Josiah: Is that Dionysius? 

[00:02:05] Rebekah: You know, he was an alcoholic, so I don’t really appreciate the implication again. 

[00:02:09] Josiah: Christian, is he the god of partying?

[00:02:11] Christian: The Greek god of Of partying? I just know that he’s the god of wine.

Wow. 

[00:02:15] Rebekah: I didn’t say partying. I said everyone having fun with no one being left out. 

[00:02:20] Josiah: Here, here’s what Wikipedia says. Oh no. The Dionysius was the Greek god of winemaking, orchards, fruit, vegetation, fertility, festivity. Insanity, Ritual Madness, uh, and Theater. 

[00:02:35] Rebekah: Okay. Ritual Madness, Theater, Fertility. I want to be Dionysius, but I would be nicer than him and not an alcoholic.

So, there. 

[00:02:44] Josiah: I think whenever we decide what we are, rulers, The domains over which we are rulers. I think we will all be nicer than the Greek gods of yore. 

[00:02:53] Rebekah: You know, I really hope so because they’re all big turds. 

[00:02:57] Josiah: Well, I’m Josiah. I’m the brother son of the group. 

[00:03:01] Donna: I’m gonna say that so far both of you have not included the fact that our special guest is in our family and it gives you another, it gives you another place in the family.

You’re a sister and a mom and a daughter and a mom 

[00:03:16] Josiah: Actually cut that what mom just said And redo and I will redo 

[00:03:21] Donna: it all because I think that’s cute, but that’s no go ahead for art say go for it and Go ahead I fart. Okay. Oh, my God. Yeah. Oh, my God. Okay, everybody. 

[00:03:36] Josiah: Okay, everybody. Go fart. 

[00:03:39] Rebekah: Go fart. That’s why I tell Christian, I don’t like it when he farts next to me. T shirt idea. Go fart. Mom is determined. Dad said before we started recording that Mom is determined to go with T shirt ideas that are things that she just thinks would be funny for herself.

to wear on a t shirt and wants to use the guise of them being merch for the podcast. To order them. Puss man fart. Go fart, puss man. 

[00:04:05] Tim: Welcome to the book is better in the loony bin podcast. 

[00:04:10] Rebekah: So, I’m Rebecca, I am the daughter slash sister of the family, but today we have a special guest with us, so I get to say that I’m the daughter slash sister slash mom of the family.

[00:04:21] Christian: I am, my name is Christian, I am the son slash nephew slash, uh, grandchild. 

[00:04:30] Rebekah: So if you could be the ruler of a facet of human life, what would you be the ruler of? If you don’t think the answer is video games, you’re losing your mind. The ruler 

[00:04:38] Christian: of, of pranks and. 

[00:04:40] Rebekah: Oh, actually that’s, 

[00:04:41] Josiah: that’s, that’s 

[00:04:43] Rebekah: also. Slash trolliness.

Wait, who is that in Greek mythology? Pan? Who’s the, the god of tricks? Who’s the Trixie one? Pan is of nature, I think. 

[00:04:54] Josiah: Okay. But obviously in Norse mythology, you have Loki is what he would be. But in Greek mythology, um, my search is coming up with Dolas. The, the Greek God of Deception. 

[00:05:09] Rebekah: Hmm. I’m going to go with Loki being the closest foil.

Oh, you said Trixie, that’s Peter Pan. Yeah. Are you, he’s Peter Pan. Who’s 

[00:05:18] Donna: not part of any sort of mythology other than a story for children. It connected cause it’s Trixie and he said pan, but actually it’s not Trixie. Her name’s Tinkerbell. 

[00:05:29] Rebekah: The God of being sketchy pants. 

[00:05:31] Josiah: I also looked up who was the Greek God of words.

And I believe that Hermes was a Greek god of eloquence. And so I would not mind the domain over which I would rule being eloquence. I don’t know if that sentence was grammatically correct, so maybe that hurts my point. But I’m Josiah, the brother, son, uncle of this group. And eloquence is my domain, hopefully, in this situation.

[00:06:04] Rebekah: Hermes also has a whole lot of kids. Yeah, just 

[00:06:07] Josiah: like 

[00:06:07] Rebekah: me. And like Hermes children, they don’t know who their father really is. Wow. We’re kidding. You said this is 

[00:06:19] Donna: plain and I’m his mom and I didn’t know he had any kids. Yeah. None of that is true. 

[00:06:23] Christian: Just baby listeners, 

[00:06:25] Rebekah: please know we’re 

[00:06:25] Christian: kidding. I don’t want you to think that’s real.

How do you say the wine god’s name again, is that Dionysus? Dionysus. Dionysus. So we talked about him, uh, being the god of insanity. 

Mm hmm. There are many stories in Greek mythology about how he inflicts people with insanity, making other people look like grapes, and so when they hack through the grapes, they’re hacking through people.

Oh my goodness. I was so 

[00:06:49] Rebekah: everything I said about this being safe for your children, I’m really sorry. 

[00:06:52] Josiah: I was gonna say this is a clean podcast, but we have to talk about Greek mythology on this episode, and it’s not very nice. That’s true. And since 

[00:07:01] Donna: we connected Christian to Dionysius, he does love to cast shade on people in games.

So I could see, I was thinking like Secret Hitler. It’s inaccurate. So I’m Donna, I’m the wife slash mom’s slash grandma. And what does Christian 

[00:07:21] Christian: call you? Moomaw. 

[00:07:22] Donna: I’m Moomaw and I’m very, very pleased to be. So my fun fact answer is I would rule, um, smart Alec children. And when they are smart Alec, my power would be, they would immediately recognize it.

And if they would correct themselves, then that would be good. They would be prosperous. And if they didn’t correct themselves, very bad things could ensue. 

[00:07:53] Christian: You just always let them know that they’re broad different. 

[00:07:57] Donna: Dude, they would be broad different. They would be broad different to the ground. No cap, baby.

That sounds like a very specific and deep 

[00:08:05] Rebekah: seated desire. It is not 

[00:08:07] Speaker 9: a secret to anybody 

[00:08:09] Donna: who knows me for very long that I don’t think it’s a bad thing for children to 

[00:08:15] Tim: be gay. Gotcha. My name’s Tim. I am the husband, dad,

And if, if I were in control of one facet of human life, it would be, uh, making sure that the connection between thinking I’m going to turn in a Would automatically cause my left hand to sling over and do the turn signal. 

[00:08:46] Donna: Yes. Yes. 

[00:08:47] Tim: So you couldn’t think about turning without automatically using your turn signal.

[00:08:53] Rebekah: Bring on that God right now. I think it’s really funny that Josiah and I and Christian all had things that reflected parts of our personality. Mom and dad were like, if I could control something, I would make people stop doing things that I hate. Well, as we get into this, Christian, would you like to read our plot summary of what Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief is all about?

[00:09:17] Christian: So Percy Jackson is a young half blood demigod, a son of Poseidon, who discovers his true identity during a quest to save his mother from the underworld and prevent impending war among the gods of Olympus. This modern day interpretation of where the figures of Greek mythology are today follows Percy.

His friend, Half Blood Annabeth, and his satyr protector, Grover, across the United States as they battle monsters and gods far bigger than themselves. 

[00:09:43] Rebekah: So as we get into some of the changes, uh, we’re actually comparing three works. The 2010 film to the original book, and the 2023 and 2024. TV show on Disney Plus that’s also based on that first book by Rick Riordan.

I thought we could start this time by talking about a lot of the changes in characterization. So there are two characters that change quite a bit between book, film, and TV show. And then there are several characters that have some similarities and some differences. So I’ll actually start out by talking about Percy himself.

Um, in the book, Percy is a 12 year old Caucasian male with jet black hair and sea green eyes. The book makes a big deal about the fact that he has ADHD and dyslexia, which have really inhibited his quality of life. It makes it really hard for him to do school and do things in the mortal world, which you find out later is actually because of his half blood line, um, that he has ADHD so that he can fight and battle better.

And he has dyslexia, not because he can’t read English, but because his brain is quote hardwired for ancient Greek. And so, uh, the Percy of the book is very mischievous. He likes to see chaos. He delights in it a bit. Um, he likes mayhem. Like he kind of grins at things. He reminds me a little bit of Christian in terms of like, You don’t want bad things to happen, but you kind of like chaos to happen.

You know what I mean? Like, you don’t like it when everything is just totally like puppies and rainbows. Um, he’s ultimately kind and a protective friend and son. He’s really protective of his mother. He really wants to protect people he feels like get picked on as well. So in 2023, Percy’s very similar to this.

He’s 12. He does have blonde hair and blue eyes. So they do change his physical appearance some. Um, he also is mentioned as having dyslexia and seems troubled by like teachers that he’s worked with in the past I don’t know if they make a big deal of or mention his adhd in the series But the adhd dyslexia things were really played up in the book and in the film in 2010.

Whereas the The TV show did not do that. Um, and he basically just seems like a kid who’s curious, but also pretty confused as to why life is so hard and he constantly feels like he has issues learning or whatever else. Um, he’s willing to like be a protector, but it takes a lot longer for him to want to dive into the hero role.

He just kind of wants to have friends and have his mom. He just doesn’t. Want to be sad. He wants to understand in the film. They change Percy the most. So the film Percy is 16 He actually does have dark hair. It’s brown. He’s a Caucasian male with light colored eyes They make a huge deal about the ADHD dyslexia stuff and all of those labels but In the film, he’s, it’s only four years, but 12 to 16 is a huge time jump.

Um, and he’s, he’s a teenager. I mean, he is a young man. He is not like a kid, which the book starts out, as does the TV show with Percy as a sixth grader. And he’s in high school. They make jokes. He and Grover do about like high school without the musical in the movie. Um, and Really, the movie kind of has him as more one note.

He’s a do gooder. He wants to protect the weak He doesn’t really seem to be mischievous at all or anything like that So what did you guys think about the way that they changed Percy from book to film to TV show 

[00:13:12] Josiah: the Christian? Have we talked about why you’re joining us today? Yeah, 

[00:13:16] Donna: we really haven’t brought it up a lot How did you come to read it and?

[00:13:23] Christian: So, growing up, I was originally introduced to the book Greek Heroes by the same author, which this book discussed the, typically the demigods and their tales, including Perseus and Theseus. those kinds of characters. And then I moved on to Greek gods, um, which explained the backstory of the different gods and whatnot.

And so I was, I was constantly learning a bunch about these different mythological, like, tales about these heroes and gods and whatnot. And then I moved on to the actual series. Percy Jackson, and the series is quite long, he, um, and I’m, I’m saying this specifically because of the book series that comes after that, but I grew up on the books and I liked it.

[00:14:08] Tim: So are there five books in the original series? I think so. There are two more? Yeah. There are 

[00:14:13] Donna: five that were written before 2010, like written in the early 2000s. And then in the 20s. He’s written two others that he considers books six and seven. So I mean, he does. There’s also another whole series 

[00:14:28] Rebekah: with five other books, the heroes of Olympus.

Yeah. 

[00:14:30] Christian: Okay. There, there is then a series that comes after Percy Jackson called heroes of Olympus, which have the same characters in them, but introduce a few more key characters. And it’s not from Percy’s point of view. It is from, from someone else’s, and so Percy is introduced as kind of like a side character that comes in and helps every once in a while.

[00:14:51] Josiah: So Christian, how did you feel about the change of, of Percy Jackson from the book to his adaptations? 

[00:14:59] Christian: Yeah, the Percy from the book is It’s different when it comes to combat. 

[00:15:07] Donna: True. Luke is teaching him and, and they’re trying to tell him, learn from Annabeth what she says and the inside and, and things like that.

And I know what you’re saying, if you’re, if this is where you’re going, it does seem like for a visual adaptation, you want that to come faster. You want him to be more immediately skilled. Is that kind of what you’re thinking? I felt like I could see that too where After a couple short lessons He’s fighting gods and that’s yeah, you know 

[00:15:38] Rebekah: the whole fight with aries threw me off.

So like how did you feel about? Percy in the tv show did it feel like the character from the books that you remember? Did it feel a lot different and then like how did you feel about them making him much older? And like a teenager in the in the movie You 

[00:15:57] Christian: Um, I, I think that making him older in the movie wasn’t, it, it, I feel like it was the correct choice if they weren’t going to make another movie.

[00:16:05] Rebekah: Yeah. 

[00:16:06] Christian: But if they were trying to pan out on the series, then it’s just unnecessary to make him older in the first movie because there’s no, not really any room for growth. I feel like it’s nice starting out from a perspective of seeing that he is like 12 years old and seeing how much he progresses, literally grows up in that amount of time.

[00:16:24] Rebekah: Very Harry Potter esque, like you get to grow up with him. 

[00:16:27] Tim: Yeah. Did it matter that, that his physical appearance was different and he wasn’t? Dark haired and green eyes. 

[00:16:36] Christian: It was very odd because the book also makes a lot of references on how he Has green eyes and like jet black hair and so seeing that in the you know Show that they made him blonde blue eyes very interesting.

That doesn’t really affect it that much 

[00:16:54] Tim: Yeah, I did notice in the TV series Um, that he has the same color eyes as Poseidon, um, when they, when they have the two actors together side by side, they have the same color eyes, although Percy’s aren’t green, neither are Poseidon’s. They’re both the same, same shade of a bluish, bluish green color, so.

[00:17:18] Christian: And they make a, they make a big deal in the books that Percy has his father’s eyes because Poseidon in, um, Greek mythology has sea green eyes. 

[00:17:27] Donna: So, if we move on to the, to really the first supporting character with Percy, um, is Annabeth Chase. In the book, Annabeth is 12 years old. She’s a Caucasian girl with curly blonde hair, gray eyes.

She’s battle smart. She’s slightly suspicious. eager for a chance to prove herself. And, and one thing I remember when I, as I was reading or listening to the book was there was a, a pretty quick description there for the people around her that she was wise and that you learn, you know, listen, learn. So they kind of made a, a, I almost felt like they made a, a little bit of a conflict with them, you know, not, maybe it wasn’t intentional.

But it sounded like they were just trying to push that and force him To to get close to her to gain from her 

[00:18:22] Tim: And all of the things are just just in the tv series. I 

[00:18:26] Donna: got that in the book. Okay, and it the tv series Well, we’ll get there. Um and She also has a crush on Luke at the beginning Yeah in the book.

Yeah, she’s got a she’s pining for him a little bit. Um in the film She’s 16 years old And I’ll throw out here, uh, I mentioned this, I noticed, noted this in trivia, but I’ll mention here in, uh, the film, Logan Lerman, his real age when they filmed was 17. She was 24 in the film, and I think she was 23, and I think she was the youngest.

I think the others, or she, the others were all up in their 20s. The others of the teenagers grover was 

[00:19:10] Rebekah: 25 uh, luke’s character was 22 and Logan was 17 So that’s 

[00:19:17] Tim: interesting because I felt like when I was watching the movie before I saw that statistic. I thought She looks and acts more mature Than percy like quite a lot in the film.

[00:19:29] Rebekah: Also. I know it’s 17 to 23 That’s six years. That’s a big six years. Like that’s that’s graduating high school and 

[00:19:37] Tim: college. Yeah, that’s this. That’s the six years between playing football in high school and working for a living and having an apartment, you know, on your own after college. I mean, that’s that’s significant.

[00:19:50] Donna: But the girl that that played Annabeth in the film. She was also in a lot of things at that time. She was, she had done a lot of teen films. She’s really beautiful. She’s a gorgeous, I’ve always thought this actress was a very, very pretty girl. Um, she’s Caucasian, straight brown hair, blue eyes, the very piercing blue contact eyes, you know, that there’s a blue that, I don’t imagine anybody has naturally as their eye color and I think it’s pretty but um, I I caught that about her right off.

She’s battle smart She’s sometimes vicious like she can come across as vicious 

[00:20:30] Rebekah: They make some of who clarice was in the book like the mean character from aries’s cabin I feel like they give you a little bit of that But in annabeth like as you’re just starting to get to know her. 

[00:20:41] Tim: Clarice is missing from the first book Film isn’t she’s 

[00:20:44] Rebekah: actually in the film, but she doesn’t have any speaking parts like that She’s she’s a build character and has it like an actor was billed as Clarice, but she didn’t talk I don’t think 

[00:20:55] Donna: she is romantically interested in percy from the beginning in the film.

There’s a Tension there that that comes up pretty quickly. They never put the luke attraction 

[00:21:06] Rebekah: in this 

[00:21:06] Donna: film Um in the tv series, uh, the annabeth is 12 years old But She’s a black girl with dark hair and eyes. She’s battle smart. She’s wise Assertive she wants to be in charge of the adventure and she has a crush on Luke So back to the TV series.

Yeah, and the book are gonna do mirror there I did remember the begin in the beginning of the series There was almost, um, there, I don’t wanna use the term animosity sounds too harsh, but there was a conflict with her and Percy there in the beginning of the series where Yeah. Which is book and TV show, I think.

[00:21:44] Rebekah: Yeah. Um, they did not immediately, like they, they didn’t warm up to each to up. Yeah. It took them longer to warm up. Yeah. And um, I also think it bothered me a lot in the film. That, like, while Annabeth, daughter of Athena, was, like, portrayed as so strong and battle smart and blah, blah, blah. It was, like, as soon as Percy wanted to be in charge of the adventure, she was, like, Oh, of course, I’ll defer to you.

You be in charge. But that’s not Annabeth’s character in the book or the TV show either. Like, she wants to be in charge. She knows more than him. She’s been doing this longer, and she might be the same age as he is, but she is not, um, at the same experience level. And she makes it clear that she wants, like, I think in the TV show, I don’t know if this was maybe a little much compared to her book character, but I think she says something like, the only way I’m doing is, is if you listen to everything that I say and do what I say.

Like, she was very assertive, like, but I felt like that’s more what Rick Riordan wrote Annabeth to be like, versus someone who’s like, Oh, okay, I’ll just be along for the ride. What do you need? Like, she’s not that person. Anyway, I think the 

[00:22:50] Tim: characterization in the, in the TV series was, was much, much closer to what it was in the book.

[00:22:56] Rebekah: Yeah. 

[00:22:57] Tim: But I had a, I had a little problem with the fact that. Annabeth in the series, they kept talking about she’s so wise. She’s been here the longest. That’s one of the things that Luke says in the series, she’s been here the longest and all of those kinds of things, but she’s like the smallest of any of the main characters that you see, including.

Secondary characters where they just show somebody or they’re just standing there. She’s like the smallest physical stature of any of them. 

[00:23:28] Rebekah: They don’t really give her a lot of opportunity to become, like, to, for you to see her battle smarts or her wisdom, like, Yeah. It feels like they didn’t really do a great job of, showing you like, hey, she’s small, but like, here’s all the ways that she’s like, 

[00:23:44] Tim: right 

[00:23:44] Rebekah: in the movie, even Annabeth got some scenes where she like, flipped Percy over.

You know what I mean? Like, I don’t think that that was as prevalent in the, in the TV show, 

[00:23:52] Christian: which it does mention in the show. Uh, I think it was Luke that mentioned that she was the most combat capable in the entire camp. 

[00:23:59] Donna: Yeah. 

[00:24:00] Christian: In the series? Yeah, and in The Lightning Thief, in the book, there are a few scenes where she fights, definitely more than it does, like, depicts in the show, but there really isn’t any opportunity at all for her to fight, in the first season at least.

[00:24:15] Donna: The one beef I had with this, and I didn’t hate the book, and I didn’t hate the other two mediums, the film and the series. But I couldn’t get away from them being Potter knockoffs, and I know I don’t I’m not saying Rick Riordan was doing that I don’t believe it looking at some of the stuff about his beginnings and stuff I don’t think that was his aspiration or anything like that.

I can’t get away from seeing That in what you just said about where she doesn’t get us a chance to show those battle smarts I In the tv series, I kept thinking She’s supposed to be physically capable and skilled in combat But every time they would get into something percy just jumped out in front of all of them and he’s going to save them Yeah, he’s gonna save them and and I think that made me think even more of harry Being so no everybody else has to live and i’m good And so they didn’t they didn’t develop like they could have I will say 

[00:25:19] Rebekah: this to Percy jackson is like in the book, he’s a dark haired kid who kind of likes chaos, can’t really fit in at school.

The girl that is in their group, like she’s very wise. She’s literally got curly hair, big curly hair in the book. And like, now, Grover is not a redhead in the book, you know, physically, but like, he’s a little bit sillier, like he wants to be helpful, but he’s more doofy like than the other two. He’s a little bit more like, yeah, he’s kind of awkward like Ron.

So I totally get where it feels like that ends up being a very similar trio. 

[00:26:00] Christian: Another thing that is different from the book and in the film is There is talk about there being romantic tension in the film, but there isn’t any sight of that in the book whatsoever. 

[00:26:13] Rebekah: Yeah, I think you said that Annabeth and Percy eventually have a romantic relationship, is that correct?

[00:26:19] Christian: Yes, but not in the lightning thief at all. It might be in the second one with the Cyclops. 

[00:26:24] Rebekah: Mm hmm. See you monsters Yes, 

[00:26:26] Christian: you I think that starts in sea of monsters, but in the lightning thief there aren’t there’s no 

[00:26:31] Rebekah: Which I really appreciated honestly, it’s it’s nice, especially because they aged down the characters I appreciated that they stuck with the book where it’s like hey, they’re 12 years old It’s cute that Annabeth kind of had a crush on Luke and like there was like this tiny little you know note of that but otherwise I It’s cool if this is not a romantically like driven story.

So I did appreciate that a lot and it was, it felt the, the 2010 film, it was rated PG, which I think is surprising, but the 2010 film felt very like sexually charged. Like it, the 

[00:27:06] Josiah: character of Grover, I mean, do you want to talk about Grover in the book and TV show are fairly similar, whereas movie Grover.

He is very flirtatious. He also does not eat trash in the movie. 

[00:27:23] Rebekah: Which I thought was a funny thing to change. 

[00:27:24] Josiah: He’s a black teenager in the movie. Um, the actor playing him, Brandon Jackson, was 25. So, he was the oldest of the teenage characters, actors. In the movie, he even stayed with Persephone in the underworld near the end of the movie and Persephone says something suggestive and he says something suggestive.

And it’s very consistent throughout the movie. I mean, if you’re gonna, if you’re gonna make a change, at least they, they made it consistent. Yeah, he was 

[00:27:56] Rebekah: that person throughout. 

[00:27:57] Josiah: It does bother me in several ways that this change happened. I Um, convinced that all of the characters were aged up in the movie so that they could do this with Grover because they thought it would be more commercially successful, 

[00:28:16] Rebekah: which is kind of sad because what?

Yeah, if you would, I mean, if you had done that movie with kids that were supposed to be 12 years old instead of 16, it would have been not be 

[00:28:24] Josiah: PG. 

[00:28:25] Rebekah: No, first of all, it would have been sketchy pans for sure. 

[00:28:28] Josiah: And this was already incredibly sketchy. I guess the only thing is satyrs. age slower. So even though he looks like a teenager, you know, with the lore of Percy Jackson, the Grover is probably in his twenties.

In reality, even if you look like a teenager. 

[00:28:44] Rebekah: Also, Grover, I didn’t write this down, but Grover in the film doesn’t have horns throughout. 

[00:28:50] Josiah: Yeah. He 

[00:28:51] Rebekah: gains his horns because there’s the film and I, the film basically cuts out his whole like wanting to become a searcher on the quest for Pan, um, that was like a part of his story in the book and in the TV show.

And so, In the movie, they basically replace it with like, he does a good job protecting Percy and therefore gets his horns at the very end. 

[00:29:13] Josiah: So that is an interesting change where I can almost see what they were going for. As for me, it reminds me of Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life. You know what I’m talking about?

He gets his wings and the bells. Ding, ding, ding. And it’s a wonderful life. And so, okay, that’s an interesting film literary reference. While the same time Grover protects Percy, uh, I feel like on multiple occasions before the end of the movie, when he gets his horns, does Grover do anything in the Minotaur fight to help Percy a little in the film, 

[00:29:53] Tim: in the film?

Not really. But in the, in the book, he’s hurt. And Percy’s trying to drag him to the place. I think that happens in the 

[00:30:03] Rebekah: film too. I think he gets injured during the fight so that’s why he can’t help. But I’m not 100 percent sure. Does 

[00:30:07] Josiah: he get injured protecting 

[00:30:08] Rebekah: Percy? Yeah, I think so. 

[00:30:10] Josiah: Mm hmm. Well, 

[00:30:10] Rebekah: and his mom.

[00:30:11] Josiah: In the car. Oh, but that’s not good enough for horns. Well, 

[00:30:13] Christian: yeah, in the book, Grover is knocked unconscious during the Minotaur fight. 

[00:30:20] Rebekah: It is. I do understand what you’re saying, though. It’s like, okay, well, why didn’t he get his horns then or any of the other times? 

[00:30:25] Josiah: Yeah. And I assume that that’s not part of Greek mythology.

Slayers getting their horns by protecting their ward, their protectorate. And I think we’re going to talk a little more, probably throughout this Riordan’s. beefs with the 2010 movie, but just to sprinkle in a little here, one of Rick’s complaints was that so many of the changes, which were bad for a lot of reasons, one of the reasons was there’s just no basis in Greek mythology.

[00:30:55] Rebekah: Yeah, it wasn’t like they changed something and used the myth. Yeah. 

[00:30:58] Christian: Another, another thing that I realized is in the, both the film and the show, There’s no, like, because in the, in the books, it is stated very clearly that Grover is constantly eating cans and metal. And in the film and show, they’re, they, I don’t think he.

Does 

[00:31:19] Rebekah: he not do that in the show either? I couldn’t remember for sure. In the 

[00:31:24] Tim: film he does. He, when they’re sitting, when they’re sitting in the hotel room and one time when he’s sitting, when they’re sitting, he’s sitting in the back of the car. 

[00:31:32] Rebekah: Okay. So I apologize. So Josiah, what you said is my fault.

Inaccurate, but he does. Oh no, I didn’t remember 

[00:31:39] Josiah: either. 

[00:31:39] Rebekah: Okay, yeah, so he does eat cans in the movie cuz 

[00:31:42] Josiah: and and in the movie he eats cushion of the backseat 

[00:31:45] Rebekah: Oh, that’s right. You pointed that out. I knew that 

[00:31:49] Christian: and in the book he is Constantly caught eating cans because of nervousness 

[00:31:55] Rebekah: yeah, I liked that the show made him more like Grover of the book where he was like kind of Twitchy, like, you know what I mean, like the Grover in the movie felt like he was just trying to hit on women.

Like he, there’s this whole thing with like, I don’t know, yeah, he was just skeevy in the movie. Whereas like the Grover in the book and the TV show is like when he meets up with Sally and her senior at the beginning, he’s like, okay, don’t panic. Nothing, nothing is wrong. Like, you don’t have to panic. And Sally goes, okay.

I’m not panicking. And he’s like, okay, don’t panic, you know, and he’s kind of the only one 

[00:32:25] Tim: panicking. 

[00:32:26] Rebekah: Yeah. Okay. So we’ve gotten through the two big characters. Let’s do a little lightning round of the rest of the characterization changes that we noted that seemed relevant. 

[00:32:34] Tim: All right. Um, we’ve got Medusa.

She is different in all three works. Um, in the book, she’s older and described as Middle Eastern. Um, She’s young and attractive in both the movie and TV show, although she’s not super young. She’s an, she’s definitely an adult. 

[00:32:54] Rebekah: She’s like young, meaning she’s like in her thirties, right. Versus she’s not an versus an elderly woman.

She’s 

[00:32:58] Tim: not an old woman. She’s, yeah. The TV show portrays her as more conflicted. Um, I really liked the portrayal in the TV show. Me too, because it was very subtle. She wasn’t trying to trick them overtly. She was being very subtle about it and all. But she’s not outright evil as she explains why she, you know, why she is the way she is.

It was because she was, you know, Uh, she was involved with someone else and the girlfriend of the someone else cursed her. Annabeth’s 

[00:33:38] Rebekah: mom. Instead of 

[00:33:39] Tim: him. Yeah. Yeah. So she also tries to warn Percy in the TV show that his friends are not going to be loyal to him. Although I think that was part of the subtlety of trying to trick him.

[00:33:54] Rebekah: I genuinely did not know if she was bad. Like I couldn’t figure it out and I hadn’t gotten to that part in the book yet when I watched that episode. 

[00:34:00] Tim: Yeah, I thought it, I thought it was subtle and I appreciated that it was a, it was a very good role for, for, uh, an actress to, to take on, I thought, and she did a really good job.

[00:34:11] Donna: I will say one topic we, we kind of touch on throughout our episodes is this suspension of disbelief and, and watching and watching something and wanting to take in the story and not get lost in, oh, that’s that actor or, oh, I see this. I was. I was stricken pretty quickly in the movie when I saw Uma Thurman because the, I just, she did all right.

I’m, I’m not, uh, didn’t have a problem with her acting, but it threw me out of the story part of it because I saw Kill Bill. Oh, I saw Raven Ivy from Batman. 

[00:34:50] Josiah: I saw those sunglasses and thought, okay, those are very silly for a 

[00:34:55] Tim: Medusa to be wearing. Yeah, both of those films were what I saw as well, the first moment that I saw her in them.

[00:35:02] Donna: And I don’t, I totally don’t mean that to disparage her because I thought she acted the part fine. She did a convincing thing of being this, I mean, she’s got snakes in her head. Only so many ways you can act through that. Um, but I, I just did see more so than some of the other actors, Pierce Brosnan. I didn’t really see 007.

I didn’t see Kiron, right. And so, um, she was probably the biggest, uh, distraction for me. on that, on that first view of her in her scene, so. 

[00:35:37] Rebekah: Another character that was, uh, very different, Ares, was not featured in the 2010 film at all. They skipped his part of the plot. In the book, he’s very, very close to how they showed him in the TV show.

Biker thing, biker jacket, he’s got really tough, he’s tall, he’s really muscular and kind of rough looking. But I did notice one thing in the book that I wish they would have tried, which is that his eyes were empty and filled with fire. He normally wore sunglasses and they glowed red behind them. And he takes off his sunglasses a couple of times and Percy sees his glowing eyes.

And I, I thought that was really cool in the book and they’re just doing the show with fire. 

[00:36:14] Josiah: Yeah. They cut him from the film when he is The primary antagonist, uh, not in the 

[00:36:20] Josiah: film, 

[00:36:21] Josiah: in the book and TV show, he’s a very, there are multiple antagonists, but he’s kind of the mastermind 

[00:36:29] Tim: antagonist, which leads to one of the other minor characters, smaller characters, uh, that are changed from book to film to TV show and that’s Hades.

In the book and the TV show, he’s conflicted, not entirely evil. Um, he’s caught up in this war between the three of them as brothers, Zeus and Poseidon and himself. Uh, and he doesn’t want any part of the war. However, in the 2010 movie, um, he. His motivations are very clearly that he wants to start a war between the two.

And so instead of it being Ares, instead of there being a question of whether Hades is behind it or not, it is very clear. Hades is the antagonist. He is the biggest, baddest guy. 

[00:37:20] Josiah: And who stops him in the 2010 film? Who stops Hades, the ultimate antagonist? 

[00:37:28] Rebekah: Persephone. 

[00:37:28] Josiah: Persephone? Yep. Who was just introduced in that sequence, and not any of the main characters who we’ve been following.

Interesting definition of satisfying conclusion. 

[00:37:41] Christian: Oh yeah, I was gonna say something before, which is, it’s just a little fun thing that the book had, but when, when Percy and Ares were fighting, the police actually shows up. And from their perspective, it looks like Ares has a shotgun. Yes, I liked that.

Because of the mist, is what they call it. And so Ares was also, like, shooting at the cops, apparently, while he was fighting, like, Percy. I forgot 

[00:38:06] Tim: about 

[00:38:07] Christian: that. 

[00:38:08] Tim: That was very interesting. Another one of the things that to me was a little humorous in the book, what they were seeing and what was actually happening, that were, that’s missing in most of the book.

Most of the adaptations, uh, another character was care on the ferryman of the underworld, another chance to do something a little, a little on the lighthearted side. In the book, he is a person who is in this really, really fancy suit, and he’s in a waiting room that’s full of people, and he’s kind of a comic, money hungry character.

Uh, but in the 2010 film, he is just the ferryman. He only shows up for a moment and he has very little to say, and they just hand him a bunch of, a bunch of, uh, drachmas. Yeah. And, you know, he tries to convince Percy in the book. Uh, not to go to Hades 

[00:39:07] Rebekah: and he’s in the book. He’s in the tv show But just as the freaky weird looking right guy that takes him across the river.

It was 

[00:39:15] Tim: it was a much Nicer and welcome kind of comic ish relief Yeah in the book and I was sad that they didn’t use it in the film or in the tv series 

[00:39:28] Josiah: I think that the mother of Percy Jackson is relatively intact. All three media, the film, TV show, and book honestly give her agency. Give her more agency in different ways.

Whereas the movie shows her as a part of the final battle scenes. The TV show sees her be more assertive towards Gabe. And also there’s that conversation with Poseidon. Is 

[00:39:55] Rebekah: that 

[00:39:55] Josiah: in flashbacks in the 

[00:39:56] Rebekah: TV show? 

[00:39:56] Josiah: That’s in the TV show. Is that flash? That’s a flashback. 

[00:39:58] Rebekah: It’s a flashback because Percy was in second grade.

It was with the younger actor. 

[00:40:01] Josiah: That’s right. That’s right. One of the things I didn’t like about the book, one of the few things. Is the, the Sally, the mom ends up murdering Gabe with Medusa’s head. Spoiler alert. No good guys do not murder. Even good guys don’t murder bad guys. Good guys bring bad guys to justice.

And so if they die, it’s their own fault because they won’t stop or they do something else. Yeah precise That’s a great way to put it bad guys are brought down by their own flaws so I didn’t love that it was in the book. And so I didn’t mind necessarily the changes in the film and TV show. I think that all of them were a little different.

They’re not really one that I like best out of the three, but other than different little things that give her more agency in these different ways, she’s relatively intact. 

[00:40:58] Tim: Um, in the TV series, they do utilize the actress more often. Then she’s, um, what did they call them? Christian, uh, the, the water creature that, that she portrays.

That’s actually his mother. 

[00:41:15] Christian: It starts with an N. The Nyad. Is that right? No, it’s not a Nyad either. Is Nyads are, um, Nyads are river spirits that have their life force connected to rivers. 

[00:41:27] Tim: That was, that was what it was in the book to start with when she first encounters him. It’s when he falls into the Mississippi River and, uh, she says something about the Nyads that helped get her to the river.

Because she’s not in the ocean. The other creature is an ocean creature. Yeah, 

[00:41:44] Christian: I don’t remember that. I don’t think that she is specifically a naiad. She is some other Though 

[00:41:49] Tim: I think they helped her but the actress. Yeah, the actress has those two roles. So he sees his mother Um, she has his The the character as his mother’s face and she’s trying to help him To get to Poseidon and he encounters her in the book after he falls from the arch into the Mississippi River, right?

And again, when he makes it to the Pacific Ocean, um, he sees her both of those times and she’s the one who gives him the pearls, 

[00:42:24] Rebekah: correct, 

[00:42:25] Tim: I believe in the book 

[00:42:26] Rebekah: and in the film and the TV show. 

[00:42:28] Tim: So that in the TV show that gives the mother a little larger role. Though it’s a subtle, it looks like his mother, uh, helping him out.

[00:42:39] Josiah: Also wanted to mention Gabe to round out our character section. Gabe is Sally’s boyfriend? Husband. Husband. Okay. Wow. They are actually married. Percy’s 

[00:42:50] Rebekah: stepdad. Yeah. 

[00:42:50] Josiah: Percy’s stepdad portrayed similarly in the book in 2010 film, just kind of a scumbag, probably abusive to Sally in multiple ways, but the 2023 TV show kind of dumbs him down.

He’s less abusive and more he’s still mean. But he isn’t in control of the household. Sally does not let him be in control of the household, but his attempts are still cruel and could be considered, you know, emotionally abusive. But Sally seems to have more control over him in the new 2023 TV show, which I think kind of changes the dynamic, but overall I think it’s a nice opportunity to give Percy and Sally both just a couple extra opportunities to one up him and make the audience go, yeah, you tell him.

[00:43:46] Christian: I do believe that a lot of things were nerfed from the book because it is Disney. 

[00:43:53] Rebekah: Yeah. That may very, that may very well be. Like, do you think that they were trying to make it softer for the audience? 

[00:43:59] Christian: I think that it was made softer, specifically because in the In the show, it was clearly an accident that Gabe even died.

[00:44:08] Rebekah: So, there were a few changes to settings, uh, as well that we wanted to go through. 

[00:44:14] Josiah: Yeah, in the 2010 film, the Yancy Academy is in New York City, and so Percy lives at home with his mother and Gabe throughout the year, whereas in the book and the TV show, Yancey is clearly a boarding school that is in a different location where he lives away from his mother during the school year.

[00:44:36] Rebekah: Um, the 2010 film, in addition to the Yancey Academy thing, which completely threw me off, 

[00:44:41] Speaker 9: um, 

[00:44:42] Rebekah: because he’s not supposed to live at home, um, Honestly, they take a huge plot detour that we’ll talk about in a minute. And so, in that film, they actually cut a ton of settings and add at least one other really important setting.

Significantly, they cut the train setting where they meet the Mother of Monsters, they cut the Gateway Arch in St. Louis, they cut Waterland Amusement Park, and they cut Krusty’s Waterbed Palace, And then they add the Parthenon replica in Nashville, Tennessee, 

[00:45:12] Josiah: Nashville rip. Woo. 

[00:45:13] Rebekah: Yes. I was living in Nashville when this movie came out and I think I saw it in theaters.

I don’t remember for sure, but I will say while it was not supposed to be in the film, in my opinion, it was like, I understood why they put it there. Um, yeah, I didn’t, I don’t like it now that I’ve like read the book, seen how the TV show did it better. But it was funny because living in Nashville, it was a little bit of a chatter of like, Oh, look, Nashville doesn’t actually show up in that many like TV series and movies and things.

And that was kind of cool. Because 

[00:45:39] Josiah: it’s so connected with country music. And so it’s relegated to only one genre. 

[00:45:44] Rebekah: As people who have lived there, it is not all about country music. There’s definitely a country music central to it. 

[00:45:50] Josiah: It’s bigger hipster than it is country music. 

[00:45:52] Rebekah: Oh my. Yes. It is kind of a cool experience.

It’s the full, only full size Parthenon in the world, as dad pointed out. 

[00:45:58] Tim: Because the original was destroyed in World War II. World War II, Greece was using it as a munitions storage warehouse and the Out the, uh, access powers blew it up, dropped a bomb and it set it all off. Dang. Tragic. 

[00:46:15] Donna: Tragic. But historically accurate.

I do. That’s what you’ll get here. Listeners, historical accuracy. I 

[00:46:23] Josiah: do think it was after world war two, maybe I’m thinking world war one, but I think it was after the world wars that historical preservation was actually grew in popularity. But Rebecca, you’ll love this, that before the world wars, people did not care about historically preserving these important sites, just like you probably still don’t care now.

[00:46:50] Rebekah: Just because I don’t like it. Like entertainment set in the past doesn’t mean I want to destroy the past. 

[00:46:58] Tim: Just let it all burn, Rebecca. That’s not your motto. My gosh. 

[00:47:02] Rebekah: Now on this podcast that is all about historical accuracy, mom, would you like to take us through the next change to the setting where they meet Poseidon?

Right. 

[00:47:12] Donna: Oh, that’s fun. But there is a beach cabin In the TV show, the series that is not in the book or the film. And I will say I like the beach. I liked what they did at the beach cabin. I mean, I thought that was a cool little 

[00:47:29] Rebekah: Easter egg there at the end. I do. And I do want to clarify, I wrote this down.

It is, there is a cabin in Montauk that she and Percy go to and Gulliver comes to meet them. So it does, it technically exists in the book, but in the TV series, they use it as like a repeated location where not only are they there at the beginning, he goes back there in a dream at one point and sees Cronos.

He sees, he meets the Fury there with Hades’s helm. Like it’s like a central setting in the show in multiple episodes. So don’t 

[00:48:03] Tim: forget in making these kinds of things. You are always concerned about budget. And if you’ve got one thing that works for 12 things. Then that’s easier than making 12 different scenes.

So true that well, um in the book The trio run into crusty’s waterbed palace Trying to escape trying to escape a band of teenagers. It is actually purely by accident. They end up in there um and crusty who is 

[00:48:31] Rebekah: Procrustes is the Yeah, 

[00:48:35] Tim: um He actually tries to kill them or stretch them to death Um That comes from the book, but it’s not in, uh, in the book or in the movie or the television show to that extent.

In one of them. There’s a tiny piece of that, 

[00:48:52] Rebekah: the TV show. They’re there, but they don’t, neither of the characters other than Percy that got like stretched in the book. Right. That doesn’t happen to them. That doesn’t, yeah. 

[00:49:00] Tim: It’s completely different kind of scene 

[00:49:03] Rebekah: as Christian says. They nerfed it. 

[00:49:04] Tim: Yeah. And, uh, DOA studios is a fake recording studio in LA that hides the entrance to the underworld.

Mm-Hmm. in the book. Uh, the TV show combines the locations and basically makes the Waterbed Palace the entrance to Hades. Uh, they eliminate the studios altogether. I love it. Um, 

[00:49:23] Rebekah: every time you say Waterbed Palace, mom’s just gonna laugh. 

[00:49:25] Tim: Well it’s, I think it’s supposed to be funny on purpose. Uh, there’s no mention in the TV show as to why Percy shows up at Krusty’s.

He just does. 

[00:49:34] Rebekah: Yeah, it’s, okay, so this confused the heck out of me because at the end of episode six they get out of the hotel. The Lotus Hotel, and then, like, they leave it, like, they escape the hotel, with Hermes’s car. 

[00:49:48] Tim: Right, which is a cab that they drive to the beach. 

[00:49:51] Rebekah: Episode 7, no explanation, no precursor, nobody said go there, he’s just standing in front of this place called Krusty’s Waterbed Palace.

And I was like, oh, for surely they’re going to show you how he got there or why. No, they don’t. There’s no explanation. 

[00:50:08] Donna: That’s true. But I didn’t laugh because of Waterbed Palace. I laughed because a crusty waterbed is disgusting. And I can’t imagine why people would go in there to buy. I bet. Crusty. And then once you get in and see Crusty and his loveliness, even more so, 

[00:50:24] Rebekah: you should turn around and run away.

Oh, but mom, the mist, the mist, you know, covers what he really looks like. Yeah. Oh, that’s right. Okay. He probably just looks more like Gabe. 

[00:50:33] Tim: Right. Like 

[00:50:34] Rebekah: to humans. 

[00:50:35] Tim: Ah, so we jump into plot timeline changes. The timeline in the movie. And television show, uh, begins quickly after we first encounter Percy at Yancy Academy.

Giving a deadline of between 10 and 14 days until the solstice to in order to complete their quest. Which means they’ve been at camp, or Percy’s been at camp about a week or so at half at Camp Half Blood. In the book, however, Percy kills Mrs. Dodds on a field trip, spends several more weeks in school before the school year ends, and the story picks up.

And moves into a different timeline, uh, so that it makes a little, it makes a good bit more sense in the book to me that Percy has a lot more time to train and all of those kinds of things. Well, 

[00:51:19] Rebekah: no, just to clarify, difference is he’s got more time at his regular school, like he kills Mrs. Dodds and then everyone forgets that she existed.

Right. Existed. For like months and in the TV show, he gets kicked out immediately. Exactly. Well, because Grover rats him out, quote unquote, but it’s all a ploy. So like the TV show and the movie both have a timeline of between basically two and three total weeks from start of the movie to finish. And in the book, technically he’s only at Camp Half Blood for still like about a week.

I think it’s literally seven days and then he has 10 days left. to 10 days to do his quest. So it’s still, like, that part of the timeline is the same. The quest is still 

[00:52:03] Tim: the same length. Yeah. Correct. For me, I thought, I thought they were, he was at Camp Half Blood longer training. 

[00:52:10] Rebekah: That’s feel a little bit disingenuous.

Yeah. Like that he’s trained for a week and, like, by the end of his quest, he’s fighting Ares, really. 

[00:52:18] Tim: Right. Because in the book, he talks a lot about Luke, Luke training him and teaching him this and teaching him that and this is how this went and this is how this went. Just seemed like it took longer. 

[00:52:27] Donna: Um, another set of changes that there were some, several canon changes, uh, in the movie, in 2010 movie, that break from Greek mythology rules, guidelines, you know, the story that we have out there, Percy and Annabeth video chatting with Luke, Annabeth endangering the lives of janitors that they assume to be human, and then being able to look at Medusa’s head or her dead head.

just because her eyes happen to be closed. So there are a few things there that they do that step out of the, the rules, the, you know, the rules of what should happen. 

[00:53:06] Rebekah: Whether it’s the mythology rules or just the rules of like, how these people should behave. Perhaps the books set up. Yeah, when Annabeth straight up, like she freaking darted people, janitors, one of those guys fell over.

And if that had been a real person, like I know again, it’s a movie, but like if that had been a real person, the way he fell over, he would have broken his neck. He would have died. She would have killed an innocent janitor working at the Parthenon for no reason, but that they didn’t want to take the extra time to sneak past them.

So something else that was different in the, um, 2010 film, I’m gonna preface this by saying it’s dumb, um, was that in the book and the TV show, they had They talked a lot about a rule where the big three, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades had vowed together not to sire half blood children anymore because their children were straight up cray cray and were the reason that World War II had basically like destroyed so many lives.

That was like the reasoning given in the book. And historical monuments. That’s right. And something about history. I don’t care. It’s history. Um, so in the 2010 movie, Suddenly, that rule doesn’t exist. The rule that they have now, honestly no one tells Percy until like almost the end of the movie when Annabeth finally tells him, is that the gods, all of them, not just the big three, but the gods have collectively agreed that they are not going to directly communicate with any of their children.

Oh, 

[00:54:37] Tim: Zeus made the rule. 

[00:54:39] Rebekah: Oh, Zeus made a rule. That they all had to follow, 

[00:54:41] Tim: that was it. 

[00:54:42] Rebekah: Oh, my gosh. And 

[00:54:43] Tim: that was the rule that they couldn’t communicate with their children. 

[00:54:46] Rebekah: And so they’re not allowed to directly communicate with their children. Yeah, it’s still stupid. So, but here’s my problem. Poseidon is allowed to speak to Percy in his mind, but he cannot directly communicate with him except that he can telepathically communicate directly with him.

It doesn’t make any sense and it’s stupid and I understand that they changed the plot in a lot of ways, but like if there wasn’t a rule that those big three weren’t supposed to sire children, why is he the only son of Poseidon around? Poseidon be out there making babies, you know what I mean? They all did beforehand.

I don’t know that again It just seemed like a really dumb and pointless like thing to change 

[00:55:28] Donna: and Percy wondering the whole time If his dad even cared about him if his even even once he found out it was Poseidon. Yeah, that didn’t change his Longing to know did his dad really care and deal with that?

And then at the end, to have that face to face meeting with him, and the dad could say, yes, I’ve always, you know, I’ve always had my eye on you. To confirm that, but for this reason I couldn’t, that was a much more touching resolution or you know, a little, ties a little bow on it that you feel, oh, that’s a good, that’s a good thing to happen or a good thing for him to discover.

I did like that. And so to be able to talk to him in his mind and. communicate with him. Why would Percy even listen to him? Yeah. Because he just thought he was, you know, horrible for, for not communicating. Leaving his mother and all 

[00:56:21] Josiah: that. Well, let’s talk about the nature of the quest in the TV show and film.

The big, big change. Big, big, big, the hugest change. 

[00:56:30] Donna: Definitely. 

[00:56:31] Josiah: In the book and in the TV show, Percy’s quest is essentially the same as given by 

[00:56:39] Josiah: You shall go west and face the god who has turned. You shall find what was stolen and see it safely returned. You shall be betrayed by one who calls you a friend.

And you shall fail to save what matters most in the end. That was what the Oracle said. 

[00:56:58] Josiah: The 2010 film West bears no resemblance to the book and TV show. There is no Oracle. There is no prophecy. There’s no sort of thing like that. Percy’s just going to save his mom. And they know that if they get to the underworld, they can’t get out.

So they have to find Persephone’s pearls. And Luke happens to have found. A map stolen a map from his dad, who he’s never met, but he broke into his house. Does Hermes have a house? Apparently, nothing else in this movie makes sense. And so Luke sends him with this map that’ll show him the locations of the pearls.

Much lower stakes, much less motivation. No one thinks to get a fourth pearl for Percy’s mom. It’s, it’s something they don’t think about until they’re in the underworld with the mom. And that. It all starts with Hades somehow appearing in a fire at the half blood camp saying, I sent that minotaur to steal your mother because then you’ll come and exchange your mother for the lightning 

[00:58:08] Donna: bolts or something.

Yeah, I mean, that’s how he lures him, tries to get him. 

[00:58:13] Josiah: Hades can appear in this fire in the middle of the half blood camp. If there’s so little protection over the camp, why doesn’t Hades just go there, just right there, say, give me the lightning bolt. 

[00:58:27] Tim: He’s there already. No, he commissions him to go and steal the lightning 

[00:58:31] Josiah: bolt and bring it to him.

So the entire conceit of the film makes absolutely no sense. There’s no motivation whatsoever because a good, what, hour, hour, 15 minutes of the film is Getting the stuff from Luke to go find the three pearls and then getting the three pearls. Whereas the quest in the book, and then subsequently the TV show, is actually a, a quest where it’s not, I’m finding three MacGuffins.

They’re actually doing different things. They’re interacting with different gods and different mythical figures. And so they end up going to some of the similar places as. Where they go in the film to get the pearls. I’ll stop going on and on about the quest. It literally makes no sense. It makes the 2010 film, uh, effectively, narratively worthless.

[00:59:22] Donna: So, my only comment, it’s a short comment. You have the Parthenon, the Lotus Hotel, they can tie those. To mythology, they can tie those things in. Auntie Em’s, it’s a pretzel shop. And I don’t understand. Well, Auntie Em’s is a pretzel shop. 

[00:59:39] Rebekah: Auntie Em’s is where Medusa came from. Certainly, they are slightly different.

My gosh. 

[00:59:44] Tim: They’re spelled differently. One of them is spelled Em, the other one is spelled E M. 

[00:59:48] Josiah: It’s

[01:00:08] Rebekah: My favorite part of this is that we saw the scene of the movie together before Josiah finished the book. And so he hadn’t gotten to this part yet. And, um, Hades turns up in the camp and you just go, No! Like, 

[01:00:23] Josiah: you were so distressed, 

[01:00:24] Rebekah: you’re like, why? This doesn’t happen? Like, you were very, like, viscerally, you had a visceral reaction.

[01:00:31] Josiah: Like, the mom couldn’t go into the camp. She couldn’t cross the threshold. So I feel like there should be some sort of protection around there. Yeah, and she’s 

[01:00:39] Donna: human. She’s human. What 

[01:00:41] Josiah: could 

[01:00:41] Donna: she 

[01:00:41] Josiah: do? I don’t know, but the Hades is able to get into The camp, are there no children of Hades? Yeah, but Hades be really old.

I guess 

[01:00:50] Rebekah: they’re not. Yeah, they’d be old. 

[01:00:52] Christian: But Hades is also a big three god. 

[01:00:54] Rebekah: Yeah, um, so stupid. 

[01:00:56] Donna: There’s also a romantic connection built. Between Percy and Annabeth in the tv show. They’ve got eight season. They’ve got eight episodes to get through And build that up and I thought they built it. All right, it started out.


[01:01:12] Josiah: don’t think they have any chemistry personally No, 

[01:01:14] Donna: I didn’t I didn’t say they had chemistry. I think I think that the script tried to build it slowly started with animosity And they became friends over the series And you’re at that point where a lot of 12 year olds do not want to have anything to do boyfriend girlfriend stuff made sense Which fit the book, 

[01:01:31] Rebekah: too.

[01:01:31] Donna: Yes, and then as they walked along together Not unlike Harry, Hermione, and Ron, and their quests, and the three headed dog. They grow together as they go through peril together. So it makes sense. I get that. The film, okay, you’ve got an hour and, what was it? Hour and a half, two hour movie, whatever. Um, they’re right away, you know, they’re, they’re connected somehow in this, in this thing.

Yeah, and, and so, um, I can appreciate the fact that you’re, you’re dealing with a compression issue, but still. But mom, she’ll squash him like a bug. But the other part of this is they 7, 16 years old in the film. So, yeah, I mean, I still didn’t, still didn’t 

[01:02:19] Tim: flow for me. Yeah. Another plot change was when the Gateway Arch scene happens in the book.

Annabeth and Grover were not aware of what Percy was doing until he’d already fallen into the river. The Mississippi River, uh, the TV show makes a big deal of the fact that Percy pushes Annabeth and Grover out to save them and sacrifice himself. I didn’t like the way that the movie completely did away with all of, with all of that.

Um, in the TV show, it was different than it was in the book. I thought the book was far more dramatic the way that that happened. And I did notice something in the TV show, when they were filming at the Gateway Arch, they never showed a picture that showed the Gateway Arch going across the Mississippi River, like one, one, foot on one side, one foot on the other of the arch, but that’s the indication in the book.

I’ve never, I’ve never been there. I’m not sure if it does or not. So either the author was wrong when he wrote it or the TV show didn’t show it appropriately. 

[01:03:30] Rebekah: No, the TV show showed it correctly. It’s along 

[01:03:33] Tim: the river. Along the river because Percy falls out Falls out of the top of the arch into into the water.

[01:03:41] Rebekah: Yeah 

[01:03:42] Tim: But if the water wasn’t under the arch that wouldn’t have happened because he couldn’t fly. He was just going to fall 

[01:03:50] Rebekah: Like I guess christian. I don’t know if you remember this or not, but in the show Did like, Poseidon send water up to keep him from falling to the ground? How did he get into the water?

Because he fell into the river. He didn’t fall in onto the ground. 

[01:04:02] Christian: In the book, he does just fall and there’s water there. Poseidon, Poseidon does not save him. But in the show, Poseidon, like, intervenes. Yeah, 

[01:04:11] Rebekah: that’s what I thought I remembered. Poseidon is 

[01:04:12] Josiah: portrayed more as a good guy in the show than in the book, isn’t he?

Yes. Yeah, 

[01:04:17] Rebekah: a little bit. I think in the book, he’s not he’s not bad, but he’s not great. And in the TV show, they made you feel for him. Yeah, like you’ve, you know, and 

[01:04:28] Christian: well, in the book, the first time that beside meets Percy, he does tell him that he’s sorry he was ever born. So, oh, wow. There’s also tries to say, I’m 

[01:04:37] Tim: sorry, because it’s it Yeah, cause a war, not because you’re bad, not 

[01:04:42] Rebekah: that I hate that you’re alive, but I 

[01:04:44] Christian: still wouldn’t want to hear that from my father, you know, I can imagine, 

[01:04:48] Rebekah: buddy, I’m glad you were born.

[01:04:50] Josiah: Oh, just briefly in the, in the 2010 film, Chiron takes him into the camp and says, yeah, it’s crazy that you’re a son of Poseidon and just like that. And I believe in the book. And I think it’s similar in the TV show is that when. Ares’s daughter, Clarice, she cuts Percy and Christian, can you describe the scene where Poseidon declares Percy his son?

[01:05:19] Christian: Percy is cut somehow And was it in the show? Uh, Annabeth shoves Percy in the water. 

[01:05:26] Speaker 9: Yes 

[01:05:27] Christian: He is shoved in the water and his wound was healed And through the declaration of this act it was then he had a symbol over his head and he was claimed Right. 

[01:05:37] Tim: And in the book, he didn’t see the symbol over his head.

Everybody just started staring at it. Being the show, obviously, it’s visual. So, uh, you see it in, above him, and he looks up and sees it as well. And so 

[01:05:50] Josiah: I guess part of the lore of Percy being Poseidon’s son is that Poseidon, Zeus, and Hades were not allowed to have sons after World War II, I guess? Children, yeah.

Children at all, and so in the film with Chiron knowing Percy is the son of Poseidon, seems very casual for someone to just know that this horrible rule has been broken that can lead to war. So in the book, they set up that lore and the TV show honors that lore, that it’s a big deal that’s unknown until the declaration.

[01:06:25] Donna: There’s a hotel scene. That actually is covered in book film and TV series the the Lotus Hotel and It’s integral to their their quest in the book the trio definitely gives into the casino attractions of their They’re so tired up to the point that they arrive there from all their, all their journeys and lack of sleep and, and they’ve just been on the run that they go in and they see the video games and all the things going on in there and they’re, they’re definitely ready for a break and that’s nor, that’s a normal, I like that, that’s a, that would be a normal human response.

A while, we get a break, we get a little vacation. They 

[01:07:11] Tim: arrive there because the taxi driver that brings them from wherever they were before that, uh, in Missouri. 

[01:07:18] Donna: Yes. 

[01:07:19] Tim: He says, I can only go as far as Las Vegas. And when they stop there at Las Vegas. 

[01:07:23] Donna: Yes. 

[01:07:24] Tim: The person from the hotel comes out and gives them passes and brings them in.

Right. And then they go through all that. 

[01:07:29] Donna: So they get in, they go, and thinking they were there, what seems to be a few hours, they find out they’ve actually spent five days there. 

[01:07:39] Speaker 9: And 

[01:07:39] Donna: so that’s all part of the deception for them and the trying, trying, trying to get them to miss the deadline and all that in the film, the major reason the group gets confused or a little high from, uh, a little high is from eating lotus flowers.

They build that into the story, and it causes them to just be disoriented enough that they’re not sure about, they don’t notice the passage of time, nor do they realize what they’re really doing. Um, they find themselves, they escape by stealing a car. displayed for getaway out for giveaway out front. 

[01:08:18] Josiah: I wanted to mention that in the film, one of the most egregious changes to Grover’s character is when he’s surrounded by all these women and he said, Oh yeah, we’re all going to get married.

And he’s so, so, and it’s a big moment for excitable teenager Grover. And I’m just imagining the sweet kid who I thought did an amazing job in the TV show as Grover. I, I thought I, I, I loved him. Yeah. And I’m just imagining that kid being at the Lotus Casino and , 

[01:08:50] Rebekah: which one of you did I propose to all this 

[01:08:55] Josiah: and just how little that would fit.

But mom, as you start to talk about the TV show, I thought that maybe one of the relatively few things that they added to the TV show being Grover and his little sub quest at the casino. Mm-Hmm. . I wonder if that was a way to. Extra honor Grover’s. Motivation from the book because it was so off base in the movie.

So they’re like overcorrected to say, let’s give Grover something really important to his character of the show. 

[01:09:28] Donna: In the TV show, there’s a whole subplot around this where Luke’s mom’s a seer and They go to, they go to the Lotus as one of their destinations that they have to find another piece of the quest and Grover runs into this satyr and it really showed the character they were building for Grover because one, he was excited to find another satyr there, his name was Augustus, but two, when he saw that Augustus seemed a little disoriented, and this was before Grover began to fall to that same prey of the lotus flowers.

you could tell he was concerned about him and, and not just put off by him or you can’t help me. There was a concern there. I love that about a little bit of character building there. But then Augustus continues to kind of stay on topic and off and on and off topic and Grover starts to pick up and then Grover, his disorientation really takes off.

But Augustus grabbed him right at the beginning by saying, I’m on a quest for Pan. 

[01:10:31] Rebekah: I’ve almost found him. 

[01:10:32] Donna: Yes, I’ve almost found him. And so he distracts them off into the casino. Then by the time Percy and Annabeth go through their, uh, their trope there, their, their story arc there with Hermes, um, they, we got to find Grover.

We’ve got to get out of here. Grover’s standing up playing a VR game, kind of off on his own, uh, over in this little area. And they get together. Anna Best steals Hermes car keys and they take off. 

[01:11:03] Tim: I’m fascinated by the fact that the Lotus Hotel is in all three versions. The book, the film, and the TV show.

Yeah. The motivation for getting there is different. Mm-Hmm. In every one. Everyone. Yeah. Yeah. In the book there they end up there because the cab driver that Aries got them. Mm-Hmm. to take them to the West coast. 

[01:11:21] Rebekah: Technically the truck Yeah. Stops the, 

[01:11:23] Tim: yeah. Stops there. And. And they’re lured into the hotel, and it’s a way for Ares to distract them.

In the film, they go there specifically to get one of the pearls. And they’re distracted there, which confuses the plot. It’s like, it’s part of the quest, and it’s where you’re going to get stuck. Okay, that was Because it 

[01:11:45] Donna: still throws off the timeline. Yeah. Yeah, but it’s almost like a little let’s put a little light something in here With a little fun games and the yeah, 

[01:11:54] Tim: some of it is that way and then in the tv show um They drop some of the other plot lines and they end up going to the hotel on purpose But to meet hermes or right hermes 

[01:12:07] Rebekah: because they need something from hermes That’s 

[01:12:10] Tim: why it matters that luke’s mom who is a Who Hermes is his dad, correct?

So she could she knew that he was He was Hermes or whatever and the fact that she was a seer whatever Then they go to the hotel To meet with Hermes and talk to him about how to get into the underworld 

[01:12:34] Rebekah: and you know what christian’s right He’s Hermes is the one that says Krusty’s Waterbed Palace. 

[01:12:42] Tim: And so the motivation for it’s like it was a beautiful location they knew they wanted to use it in all of them But they completely changed the motivation.

[01:12:50] Rebekah: This isn’t really a spoiler, but something that they left out in the tv show That i’ve read some people kind of complaining about is that when they go to the hotel In the book, they briefly meet two characters who come back up in the series who were trapped there since like the 70s or something. Like they meet two people that are like their age, like young preteen teenagers, and their two characters come, these people come back.

And so it’s interesting that the TV show doesn’t have you meet them. Oh wow. 

[01:13:24] Christian: Was that Nico and? Yes, 

[01:13:26] Rebekah: Nico and Bianca. Bianca is his sister. 

[01:13:29] Christian: Oh. Oh. 

[01:13:31] Rebekah: Another change that I thought was really interesting, and I think I like it better in the TV show was what they did with Waterland. So Waterland is the waterpark that Festus owns or runs or whatever and lives there with Aphrodite, I guess.

So Aries meets up with the trio in the TV show. They’re like walking along the side of the road, I think in the book. He like meets them along the streets of somewhere they’re walking. Anyway, he meets with them, takes ’em to a diner. And this is before, obviously, that you know that Ares is actually the traitor.

And he says, Hey, I will give you a ride. I know you’re trying to get to Los Angeles. I’ll give you a ride as far as Las Vegas. I’ll get you, like, transport. If you do me this one favor, I need you to go to Waterland and get my shield back. And so there’s this whole plot, you know, and it’s actually a pretty large episode in the show.

Like it’s a pretty large part of that episode. And basically they agree, you know, we’ll go do it anyway. They get to Waterland and in the book, and this is again, this is not in the 2010 film at all. In the book. Waterland has cameras set up around the entrance to the Thrill Ride O Love. And basically the whole point of this was, Hephaestus, who’s offended by Aphrodite being with other men, wants to film Aphrodite and Ares in their lover’s tryst, and livestream it to Olympus.

Which is like interesting, I guess, um, the trio gets through the traps at the thrill ride of love and they find the shield of Ares and they rescue or have Aphrodite’s scarf and you never see Hephaestus, so you don’t interact with him. And I thought the TV show did this very interesting thing. I wonder if they did it because Hephaestus maybe will come up in future seasons, but The Thrill Ride O Love is still there at the water park and Percy and Annabeth are going through, I think Grover had to stay back with Ares, so it might have just been the two of them, I want to say.

Um, anyway, Annabeth and Percy go through the ride, they have to kind of encounter several little traps or whatever, and then there’s this point at which they come across this room with a throne in it and it has a shield in front of it, um, and a, like, a sword or something. Anyway, Annabeth with her wisdom because she’s good at like engineering kind of things.

She looks at it and she’s like, Oh, this is such an, I don’t know if it was like a Greek mythology thrown like that Hephaestus actually had some kind of a 

[01:15:56] Tim: trap. 

[01:15:57] Rebekah: Yeah. Yeah. But she could tell it was a trap. And she said, I think the only way to get the shield back is for someone to sit here, but they’ll get trapped or whatever.

Basically she knows and tells Percy like, this is what’s going to happen. So they’re like, well, we don’t know what to do. And then Percy says, I will do it. Just promised me. That once you’ve returned Ares shield like that you guys try to come back and get me because for him He just wanted to further on I got a rescue my mom.

I got to like do the quest whatever and so Percy sits in the throne gets turned into metal. It looks like gold or bronze maybe and Annabeth basically, it’s like, okay. Well, I’m not leaving like the the Shield of Ares drops, so she picks it up, or she’s able to pick it up, but she doesn’t just take it and leave right away.

She starts looking at the thing that has a bunch of gears on it. She tries to look at this throne to see if she can figure out how to undo the trap, even though nobody’s been able to undo this trap before. So Hephaestus comes out into the room and you meet him in the show, which is different. 

[01:16:57] Speaker 9: He 

[01:16:58] Rebekah: comes out and he says, you can leave here.

And he like puts a ladder down so that she can climb out of the room and leave with the shield. And he talks about how her mom’s Athena. He knows that she’s recently let Athena down by being part of the group that sent Medusa’s head to Olympus. And he says, you’ll be a hero to your mom. You can make it all up.

All you have to do is, is walk away with this. And she makes a big, I rewatched the scene, uh, this morning, she makes a big deal about the fact that she doesn’t want to be like the gods. She doesn’t want to be hero to her mom because all of them are very selfish and self serving. She’s only going to leave if she can take her friend.

[01:17:34] Josiah: Did anyone else think when Hephaestus appeared, he looked like it was Hugh Grant? 

[01:17:39] Rebekah: Yes, 

[01:17:39] Josiah: okay. I 

[01:17:40] Rebekah: literally thought it was Hugh Grant. 

[01:17:41] Josiah: Thank you, so I thought I was crazy when I saw it was a completely different person No, okay. Thank you. 

[01:17:47] Christian: You’re welcome. They also like display him as not a bad looking guy either Or maybe 

[01:17:52] Rebekah: it’s supposed to be pretty icky.

[01:17:53] Christian: Well, I guess my thought is that gods have been able to take different forms. They’ve, it’s talked about that they like, when they cast their true form out, like people die when they see it. And so I’m guessing that he’s just taking on a different form and how he really looks like maybe a little icky. 

[01:18:11] Rebekah: So Annabeth tells him, you know, I’m not leaving unless I’m taking my friend.

And then Hephaestus kind of looks at her and then he lets Percy go. He decides and like you see Percy start to untransform from the gold or whatever metal. And Hephaestus looks at Annabeth and says, some of us don’t want it to be like that either. And then he asks Annabeth to put in a good word with Athena for him.

And I thought it was a really interesting change. Like I said, this is not in the book at all like that. And, um, I liked it because I think one thing that the books do try to drive home is that these gods of myth are actually not great. They’re jerks. Like, they’re really selfish. They’re not good people.

And I thought that this really, like, sought to drive that home. And then I read a tiny bit about the mythology of Hephaestus. Basically, he is a scorned man, and, like, he’s not a man, but you know what I mean. He’s scorned, and so I thought it was really interesting to, like, humanize a character on the immortal side to make it feel a little bit more like this is a person I can relate to who’s been, like, hurt and betrayed and deceived, and he realizes, like, I don’t, I don’t like that I belong to this world in some ways, like, I don’t like the way that we are.

And so I wonder how they’re going to kind of. Get more into that in subsequent seasons because I do think that that was a running theme through the whole show 

[01:19:34] Tim: It’s always been fascinating to me that in the greek and roman gods in the in that whole pantheon I think that’s the roman word but um there they are humans in every bad character flaw 

[01:19:51] Speaker 9: Mm.

[01:19:52] Tim: They are gods in that they have the power a normal human doesn’t have. Yeah. So it’s like they are the worst of humanity in, in all the ways. They’re jealous. They, they cheat and steal and all, all those kinds of things and they have greater power. Yeah. Which I always, I’ve always thought was, was an interesting way, um, to create gods that are as bad as you.

They just happen to be more powerful. Yeah. 

[01:20:19] Josiah: Yeah. I didn’t like in the final episode. Along what we’re talking about with gods being good, the Greek gods, uh, being nice or not, mostly not. I didn’t like when Percy said something, I think, to Luke about, because Luke has a point that the Greek gods are not great leaders and role models and stuff like that.

And Percy said something in their defense, which I didn’t really like. He says they’re trying their best. He says they’re trying their best, exactly. And I thought that was cringey. 

[01:20:53] Rebekah: There is also, um, this long scene that they add to the show that isn’t in the book, and obviously it’s definitely not in the movie in 2010, um, where Percy’s mom and Poseidon meet up.

And so it kind of starts, it’s a bunch of flashback stuff when Percy’s in second grade, and it starts off with. Percy getting kicked out of yet another school and his mom doesn’t realize it, but Percy hears the headmaster of the school he got kicked out of saying, Hey, maybe you should homeschool him.

Like maybe that would be a solution. And she’s like, that’s not an option. And he feels really hurt because he feels like my mom is rejecting me. My mom doesn’t want me. She doesn’t want me here. I don’t understand why she wouldn’t want to just keep me at home. And he’s in second grade. He’s like, obviously an angry, frustrated kid.

So then they go to get ice cream. And he, I don’t know, he confronts her in some way, he’s like, oh yeah, he won’t eat the ice cream, he’s obviously really hurt and mad, and she’s super frustrated. And honestly, to this point, again, I read, I read the book kind of as I was watching sections of the show, so. I don’t remember how far I was.

I might have already finished the book by the time we got to this episode, but it’s, I think it’s in episode seven of eight where they do this flashback and I’m sitting here thinking I’m like, look, you keep telling me that this amazing woman has captured the heart of beside and kind of like you said before, but she’s also.

Married to an abuser and a deadbeat guy and I kind of understand based on the books why that would be but I was like I just don’t like she seemed like just keep your kid at home like because honestly it’s not really clearly explained at any point if I’m being honest like I don’t think it’s clear why he couldn’t just stay at home like I know they use Gabe’s 

[01:22:34] Josiah: smell is supposed to mask it.

[01:22:36] Rebekah: Yeah and so and there was like they try to explain it with different things and whatever and I I understand that they couldn’t explain every single detail of it. 

[01:22:45] Christian: And I feel like if anything, sending him to a school where he’s kind of alone would be more dangerous than keeping him at home where he’s sent his mask.

[01:22:52] Tim: I agree. Logically, that makes sense. Okay, you’re with Gabe who’s sent masks. She will send you someplace else where he’s not. Yeah. 

[01:23:00] Rebekah: So I don’t think that that’s clear, but I will say the scene where they’re eating ice cream, Percy won’t eat it. So his mom walks off and goes to sit at the bar. And then, this is weird, this part I didn’t love, but she drops a match into a bowl of ice cream and that summons Poseidon, I guess.

Why? No one knows. It was the most random possible thing they could have done. That part was very odd. But she summons him and then she and Poseidon sit at the bar and talk. And I don’t remember all of the dialogue or anything like that. I will say what I came away with was. You could tell that Poseidon was incredibly pained by the fact that he couldn’t be there for Percy, so it humanized him quite a lot, and I remember getting to the end of the scene, and again, I don’t remember the dialogue, I don’t remember what exactly was said, but when I got to the end of the scene, I thought She’s a good mom.

Like she’s literally doing the best that she can think to do in the circumstance that they’re in to love her son the best way possible. And so I know it was a completely new scene, but I really, really liked it. 

[01:24:06] Tim: Um, so the underworld is different in the book, in the TV show, uh, the three kids encounter, uh, Karen, the ferryman, uh, Cerberus, the three headed dog and see the fields of Asphodel.

Which are supposed to be the place where people that didn’t really do anything with their life are supposed to go. So it’s just a place where they wait. Um, They go there before Grover’s nearly drawn into the pit of Tartarus by the flying shoes. That, uh, were gifted to Percy by Luke. Annabeth is left behind before Grover’s misfortune.

Uh, and she uses a pearl to escape. In the book, she stays with Cerberus to play or distract them. In the TV show, she gets trapped by a vine in the fields. Uh, and has to use the pearl to get away because she couldn’t escape or she would just be stuck there. 

[01:25:04] Rebekah: And the vine, specifically, I’ve read this in a couple of different places, they, people think that they use that difference because they’re trying to set up something where she has regret over something that I believe comes up in the second book.

So they don’t resolve that in the first season, but it’s in the fields of Asphodel where people who didn’t really do anything, who live with regret, are trapped forever. And so it was meant to be symbolic. 

[01:25:29] Tim: The book is clear about what that field is like, so that makes sense if they’re setting that up.

Grover and Percy end up encountering Hades. Um, uh, who tells them that he thought Percy stole his helm in order to steal the master bolt and Percy realizes Hades won’t release his mother until his helm is returned. He doesn’t realize it. He tells him that, uh, they escape via pearls to re retrieve the helm.

He said, you have, you have those two pearls 

[01:25:58] Rebekah: and he has to leave his mother behind, has to leave his mother behind. You 

[01:26:01] Tim: only have two, there’s three of you. You can’t. She’s going to be here until you bring me back the helm, and that is a time where we realized that it wasn’t Hades who was the orchestrator behind all of this issue.

Something was stolen from him and something was stolen from Zeus to make a conflict. 

[01:26:21] Josiah: Am I correct in remembering he did steal Percy’s mother, though? 

[01:26:25] Rebekah: Yes, he did get Percy’s mother, it was only because he thought Percy, he saved her from being killed. He saved 

[01:26:31] Tim: her from being killed by the Minotaur. And, you know, in the movie, however, Hades is the big bad guy.

In the book 

[01:26:42] Josiah: and TV show, the Minotaur capturing the mother was Not the express purpose. Correct. The Minotaur was trying to get the lightning bolt 

[01:26:52] Tim: from Percy. That the one thing that they, they do say about the underworld is that it is a mirror of Olympus that’s not consistent in the book. The book does different things.

Uh, the kids pay Karen or care on or chair on, or however we pronounce it, uh, in the movie to pass the river sticks. They they’re nearly attacked by the hell hounds before. Persephone steps in and delivers them to Hades. Oh, 

[01:27:18] Rebekah: Persephone, this big character. 

[01:27:21] Tim: That we’d not heard anything about. Suddenly she’s very important to the plot for five minutes.

Um, Percy tells Hades that he didn’t steal the master bolt, but then the shield given to him by Luke falls open and the bolt is seen inside. Mm-Hmm. . So it’s like, aha. You did 

[01:27:38] Rebekah: Also, I just realized there’s a shield in both, but they cut Aries. So it was just the shield Luke gave him at camp. 

[01:27:44] Tim: Yeah. There’s just a, instead of Aries giving shield that he had a 

[01:27:47] Rebekah: backpack with the bolt in it, he didn’t know it was there.

[01:27:49] Tim: Oh my. So in the movie, Hades grabs the bolt and attempts to attack Percy, but per seny. Knocks him out, becomes the hero, claiming that she needs to stop Hades from beginning a war. Uh, they only have three pearls, so Grover stays behind with Persephone, which works into the stuff Josiah was talking about earlier with, um, Grover being on the skeevy side.

And so Percy, Annabeth, and Sally, the mother, escape. So that’s all really strange and it rewrites a whole lot of that stuff. So that’s a little weird at times. 

[01:28:26] Rebekah: If you couldn’t tell, they changed a lot between all of these three mediums. I will say, we’ll do this during final verdicts, but I will say, everything we talked about with maybe one or two very small exceptions about what they changed in this show, I was like, okay, I see, like, I get where you’re going here.

Everything they changed in the movie was stupid. Like, every time I was writing down one of the, I was like, Why? No. Yeah. 

[01:28:52] Josiah: Yeah. We didn’t, we didn’t talk about, uh, Percy flying through the air with Hermes wing shoes, which in the book and TV show would be illegal because Zeus would take him out if he were in the sky.

Yeah. 

[01:29:07] Rebekah: Yeah. That whole, we didn’t even mention that. That’s true. But like there was this whole sky fight with him and Luke in New York city. It was, Oh my God. I just like, it was so dumb. 

[01:29:16] Donna: Let’s move into some numbers. So, book released in June, in June of 2005. The movie release, uh, was about five years later, and, um, TV release of the Disney Plus series was December 19th, 2023.

Rotten Tomatoes, 49%, definitely rotten. But the TV show ratings on Rotten Tomatoes 92 percent The budget and box office production cost 95 million Um this is 

[01:29:49] Josiah: for the film 

[01:29:49] Donna: for the film Opening weekend was 31 million. Wow Which is unfortunate, uh, the movie was filmed in several places. They went to vancouver Canada to, uh, Burnaby, British Columbia, Nashville, Tennessee.

They, they did film on the Las Vegas strip and in Brooklyn, New York. So they did a ton of on location. They did a ton of on location stuff. 

[01:30:13] Tim: That eats up a budget fast. So some trivia, um, we’ll start off with the, with the sad part. It’s an in memoriam, uh, about a year ago, March 17th of 23, Lance Reddick. Who plays Zeus in the Disney plus series died from heart disease.

Um, in a four Forbes article from January of this year, the co creator of the series, John Steinberg said that they will recast the part, but aren’t in a hurry at this time because Zeus is part in the second season, isn’t very large. I had 

[01:30:47] Josiah: just finished the wire where he is one of the most moral plays.

One of the most moral characters in a past of. Morally gray characters. So awesome. I just got connected with him in the past few months and You know to learn that he had just passed away and I want to say he was only in his 60s. 

[01:31:07] Tim: He was 60 He 

[01:31:09] Josiah: was 60. Yeah, 

[01:31:10] Tim: he’s one of those actors even the the small Screen time that he had in in the series.

He commands the screen when he’s there I can 

[01:31:20] Rebekah: see why they 

[01:31:21] Donna: cast him as zeus for sure He has crazy eyes 

[01:31:23] Josiah: like me 

[01:31:24] Donna: Actually, when, at the time of his death, they were in press tour for John Wick 4. Oh. And so, you know. You did great in that, man. Yeah, for 

[01:31:32] Rebekah: sure. One of the things that we’ve talked about several times, and that I thought was really interesting as we were getting prepared for this episode, is that, and actually it’s the reason that I picked this, because I saw the show coming out, which was very different.

Rick Riordan. was not involved in the making of the 2010 film, and he hated it. He’s been very vocal and very public about his feelings. Obviously he had sold the rights or however all of that process works, and so he was not involved in any way in the 2010 process. He hated the film script. He has never seen the film all the way through.

He publicly stated that he was thankful for the people who found the books because of the movies, and he did not refuse the pay the studios sent him for the movies. 

[01:32:15] Josiah: And Rick Riordan did make a point in the same breath to say, I do not have any animus. for the actors who got roped into this. I, he said he felt bad for them or something like that.

[01:32:26] Rebekah: Yeah. He, one of his quotes was that he said the film is his quote, life’s work going through a meat grinder, which is sad. Um, he wanted a books to be adapted again, which I mean, If you had written a wildly successful fiction series, I’m sure you would too. So Disney plus brought Riordan on. He is one of the primary writers for the teleplays.

Um, back to the movie, he had written two emails to the studio warning that, and this was a quote from his email, trying to make the story more attractive to a teenage audience by aging the characters and including some profanity in the script might move a significant portion of the book’s readers to leave the theater in disgust long before the movie ended.

End quote. He also hated that Persephone’s pearls were used as a plot device. He said it made no sense because they didn’t have a basis in mythology and they just distracted Percy from the goal, which was supposed to be to recover the stolen lightning. 

[01:33:18] Josiah: That’s insane that they have no basis in mythology.

The movie did a really good job of gaslighting me into thinking they were a part of 

[01:33:25] Rebekah: actual 

[01:33:26] Josiah: Greek mythology. 

[01:33:26] Rebekah: But yeah, I think after watching the movie and reading the books, like not only do I understand where Ryder was coming from, like. It did, I hate calling stuff this because it sounds so like such a throwaway comment at this point, but it felt very much like a cash grab.

It was just like, hey, there’s this cool series we can take some concepts from, we’ll probably make a lot of money if we make the characters kind of hot and into each other. In the quest, he like runs away from camp in the middle of the night without permission to go save his mom after Hades shows up like in the books like he is sent on a quest.

He’s a hero assigned a quest by an oracle that’s like this monumental thing in his life and in the movie it was just like somehow you managed to make him a disobedient rebellious teenager and like that was the point like it was so weird 

[01:34:16] Tim: yeah 

[01:34:17] Christian: so the story behind the the seat That Percy set in that is the Golden Sea.

Yes, there is a bit of a story to that So Zeus was a bit feisty in Greek mythology times And so Hera got tired of it and said, you know what? I’m gonna have a child all by myself 

[01:34:34] Speaker 9: Mmm, 

[01:34:34] Christian: and so her being the goddess of like, you know childbirth and marriage. She was able to do so but This child was Hephaestus, and he was really ugly because he was, you know, bored just by Hera.

And so what happened was she saw his ugliness and cast him down Olympus. 

[01:34:54] Rebekah: And 

[01:34:54] Christian: on his way down, he hit his leg, and that’s how he has his limp. He broke every bone in his body, and it was quite terrible. But, so afterwards, he grew up living a, you know, just a normal life. Kind of a normal life. Um, it was actually satyrs that took him in.

[01:35:10] Tim: Aww. Normal life having 

[01:35:12] Christian: goat 

[01:35:13] Tim: people 

[01:35:14] Christian: raise you. 

[01:35:15] Rebekah: Normal life raised by the goats. Raised by wolves. Better than raised by wolves. 

[01:35:20] Christian: He went back one day, kind of plotting a bit of revenge. And so he presented these gods all with new thrones. Because he was the god of blacksmithing and like, You know, craftsmanship like that, except the one that he made for Hera had a very special mechanic where when you sat in it, you would actually become like, there was, there were ropes that were tied around you.

I don’t know where the gold came from. I think that was modified, but, and so essentially there was no way she could get out of this throne. There was not a single God that could let her out. And so he left Olympus and Dionysius found him. And they start, they became friends and he was eventually convinced to let her out.

And then he took his place among the Olympians. 

[01:36:06] Tim: Wow. 

[01:36:06] Rebekah: Very cool. 

[01:36:07] Tim: That is interesting. 

[01:36:08] Rebekah: So before we get into our final verdicts, I wanted to share something I thought was just kind of nice, um, that related to something I, I was reading, uh, I think yesterday, but, uh, we kind of talked about this briefly, but every single episode that we do is not the hour to an hour and a half or so of what you’re listening to.

Um, collectively, uh, if you don’t count multiple watches and reads between the four or five of us, um, we put about, Probably 20 to 30 hours of just reading and watching into every episode. Also by each of us. Yeah multiplied by each of us. Um, it also takes us about three to four hours to record each one between setup and all of that.

Um, the editing process takes between eight and 20 hours per episode as well. Um, and we love doing this so much that all of that’s been Good. And we’re okay with it. We don’t make any money from this podcast. It’s just something we do to spend time together. Um, but this episode is technically, it’s actually a little bit beyond this cause we’ve done a couple of 0.

5 episodes as a bonus. But, uh, this episode is actually our 21st, uh, released episode. And so, like I said, for every one of those, you’re talking about, I don’t know, I didn’t even do the math 40 to 50 hours at least per episode for something that’s just a fun pet project. Um, but the statistic I read is that most podcasts never get this far.

Only 1 percent of all podcasts ever make it to their 21st episode. How much? 1%. And if somebody’s listening 

[01:37:42] Tim: to our 21st episode, we made it. So 

[01:37:44] Rebekah: congrats to all of you. Yeah. Also everybody in the room because that’s pretty cool. Congrats 

[01:37:49] Tim: everyone. And thank you to our editor. 

[01:37:52] Rebekah: Yeah. 

[01:37:52] Tim: Josh does most of that editing.

Yeah. Thank you. He’s not in here. 

[01:37:55] Donna: You never hear his voice. Um, but it is, it is a time commitment for him and, and we do appreciate that because honestly, some of the movies we’ve done, I’m sure he would not care one bit about, uh, and we all have, uh, goods and bads too, but I, I really appreciate the work he does.

He has a great ear for it and I’ve really appreciated the way he’s put things together, the way he’ll tie pieces up and like our intro music, which I still love. He, he found that and a lot of the fun outros and all those things are things that he does on his own. 

[01:38:33] Rebekah: Um, I’ll give my final verdict first. So I think that for Percy Jackson, I think the book was definitely better, um, than the other adaptations.

The 2010 movie was garbage. Uh, it was like, okay, that’s unfair. It was entertaining to watch one time, but I don’t. Like, the more I read the book series, the more I don’t want it to be connected anymore. Like, I understand where Riordan came from. It was an entertaining watch in 2010. I’ll say it that way. Uh, the 2023 series was fantastic, and I will definitely be watching future seasons.

But I was excited to keep turning my audiobook back on, whereas, like, with the show, it was okay if we didn’t stay up late and watch the next episode. Like, I wasn’t like, oh, I gotta binge this. And I feel that way with the book series. I actually have already gotten partway into the second book of the first series because I really enjoy it.

So that is my verdict. 

[01:39:27] Donna: I would say overall, I agree with you. Uh, I liked, I liked the book, best of the three and normally visual medium, I’m going to go with that. Um, I was struck very quickly in the book series and I don’t know at what point, I don’t know what sparked it, but I was very taken with the fact I just saw this as a Potter knockoff and I hate that I couldn’t get away from that because after reading the book, And as we looked at the series and looked at the movie and there were good and bad parts about both of those It it was a fun book to read they got through their thing.

The pacing was good They they didn’t linger on this quest or that quest they moved through it to get to an end point and so how I knocked myself a little bit of that for a little bit about that because Maybe I will go back and listen and try to get that part out of my mind You Uh, so I, I did like the book and I think it’ll be exciting to see.

What disney is able to do with the with the future endeavors. I hope they’re all as good as the first series was. 

[01:40:39] Rebekah: Yeah 

[01:40:40] Tim: the reality is There are tropes and different things that are successful for sure And so I went back and looked at some of uh, some of the kinds of book series that might have been popular um, and for probably none of the other people in the room except for uh, donna Uh, you may or may not know about the hardy boys Peace And Nancy Drew, um, definitely 

[01:41:07] Donna: were good parents, definitely the same kind of things, 

[01:41:10] Tim: but then I went back even farther into the 1800s and you have Tom Sawyer.

Um, and Huck Finn, Huckleberry Finn, they’re this, they carry the same kind of weight. There are stories about, uh, teenagers or young, young people and they run into adventures and there are things that they have to get through. And so it’s, it’s a very similar thing. So when we compare something to another book, it’s not like, oh, that’s the only other one that’s ever been written.

Uh, and I guess that’s that’s kind of my point. It’s characters that were created thousands of years ago. This story is a, just a play on what their original stories were and how they fought with each other and how they connived and this, that, and the other. So it’s just, it’s wonderful that, you know, everything old is new again, uh, and all of that.

And I hope that every generation has things that, that people come up with that are exciting to them and hopefully they’ll also realize. It’s not the first time that those kinds of things have caught the imagination of a generation or two. 

[01:42:20] Speaker 9: Yeah 

[01:42:20] Tim: Um, I enjoyed the book. I thought it was great I liked the series.

Um, there were a couple of episodes in the series that I wish they’d done differently Um, and so I disliked that part of it, but I am i’m still visual. I love to read I’ve always enjoyed reading But, um, I would have to say that the series and the TV series and the book kind of come in. In the same ballpark for me, uh, as, as far as that goes, because I like the book for all those detail.

I like the series because it’s visually appealing. Some things were changed and some things were strange in the book that they fixed. Yep. So I would say they’re kind of dead heat. 

[01:43:07] Josiah: You know, I think that Percy Jackson, whether it was Rick Riordan’s subconscious or the production company seizing on something that was similar, I think it is so heavily influenced by Harry Potter, the story that with you mentioning that, dad, actually, it made me think You know, Percy Jackson in 2023 and 2024, I feel like is a lot more unique and relevant now that we’re past the age of Harry Potter movies coming out.

And you know, Harry Potter is still a very lucrative property, of course, but new books and movies aren’t coming out. And so I think it’s, uh, Percy Jackson does not live under the same shadow as it would have in 2010, as it does in 2023. I think the movie was largely laughable. One of the only things that the movie might have done well was, in the TV show by comparison, the casting of the adult characters.

It was tough for me when I had just seen the dumb movie where Sean Bean was Zeus and Steve Coogan was Hades. And, um, and Pierce Brosnan is Pierce Brosnan was Chiron. Joe Pantoliano was Gabe. I, I liked the mother in the movie. I liked the mother in the TV show. They were different. The mother in the TV show, I thought had more moments to shine, but the actress.

Her face was not as as grab onto a bull by my eyes. I don’t know. The movie had a movie budget in quotes, although I do think the TV show as a whole spent a little more money than the movie did. But I love the TV shows visuals. I love the TV shows visuals. I love the pacing of it. I’m not the sort of guy who says you need to be faithful to the source material just For the sake of being faithful, like maybe Rebecca is, but I do think the faithfulness came from a place of honoring the material, honoring the mythology on which it was based.

Book has a special personality. I don’t know that we’ve talked a lot about in the, in the point of view where just from the first sentences. And throughout the entire book that I had to speed through, I kind of want to go back and go through it so I can retain more, maybe more slowly. But the character of the narrator, the voice of Percy in the book is so strong, you immediately connect with him in a way that kind of Ready Player One had, but a lot less cynical.

[01:45:59] Rebekah: I can totally see that. Yeah. 

[01:46:01] Josiah: Yeah. I would agree. And so I think although the TV show is an Excellent adaptation. And I think it’s a lot of fun to watch. I do think being in Percy’s head is something you can’t do in the TV show, and it was really great in the book. I might give this one to the book. Book was better.

[01:46:19] Rebekah: Wow. Nice. Christian, what’s your final verdict? 

[01:46:23] Christian: I think that definitely for me it would be the book, just because it’s, you know, it’s Like even though it was visually appealing, which I always do enjoy. I enjoy that there are movies like of books with it’s nice to just you know, see that on the screen. But I think that for me it would be the book just because I did grow up on the books and also it’s like Josiah said with being able to like be in Percy’s head.

It’s a very unique experience that the Show doesn’t really give you 

[01:46:52] Rebekah: well, if you’re still here, we really appreciate you listening. If you enjoyed our episode, please leave a five star rating or review. It helps us a ton. If you have feedback questions or ideas for future episodes, or, you know, a lower than five star review, maybe email us first to give us your feedback at bookisbetterpod at gmail.

com. You can also find us on social and most places that book is better pod. And, uh, until next time. Happy Krusty Water Bits.

[01:47:21] Josiah: And what movie are we talking about? Percy Jackson and the Lightning 

Thief.

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