Looking back at LEXX

Lexx was always a cult hit at best, and a decade on, the show's fanbase has scattered and its presence online is minimal. (Lexx doesn't even have an official website anymore, and www.lexx.com takes you to a very dodgy "analytic" site that I strongly suspect just loaded all kinds of spyware onto my PC.) But Lexx was a twisty delight, an unlikely crossbreed of Flash Gordon and Caligula that deserves to be rediscovered.

The premise: four luckless souls drift through space aboard a Manhattan-sized, talking spaceship that looks kind of like a wingless dragonfly and kind of like a flying phallus. The ship’s captain, Stanley Tweedle (the superb Brian Downey) is a wretch who is perfectly willing to let whole civilizations die to save his own skin. He’s madly in lust with the ass-kicking, drool-worthy Xev, but she has the major hots for the ice-cold Kai, a surprisingly talkative dead guy with a stylish bouffant. Last (and arguably least) we have 790, a caustic robot who has never let the fact that he’s a head without a body hinder his attempts to seduce Xev, or to bust Stanley’s nuts. Together our heroes face evil insects bent on eradicating humankind, armies of flying robot arms, cannibal women with forty-foot tongues, dangerously inbred space hillbillies, Rutger Hauer, and lots of really hot girls in rubber dresses.

At its best, Lexx was one of the most hilarious, sexy, scary, disgusting, perverse, wonderful things you will ever see. But the series was, to put it mildly, not always at its best. The show was just about as good as the original Star Trek, in the sense that one episode was dumb but fun, and the one after that was embarrassingly bad, and then the next episode was so great you couldn't believe it... And then the one after that was even better, except for the parts that were embarrassingly bad. (And most of the third season just bit.) But hey, Trek was also a wildly uneven, tiny cult hit that was canceled too soon, and look how that turned out. Here's hoping that 10 or 15 years from now we'll be watching Lexx: The Next Generation.

Youtube user BeataIzabelaMiller has uploaded a bunch of behind-the-scenes videos from the show's early days, and for fans this stuff is a big pile of fun. Shot on cruddy video, public access TV style, here is Lexx creator (and R. Crumb lookalike) Paul Donovan with co-writers (and sometime actors) Jeffrey Hirschfield and Lex Gigeroff, telling you how this wonderfully crazy show came to be.




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