Film and Television
Several tales of urban fantasy have appeared in live-action format. Additionally, some stories have debuted as films before finding further success as television shows. Well-known examples include the 1992 series Highlander, and the TV adaptation of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which is regarded as a seminal work of the genre.
Certain staples of urban fantasy novels are also present in TV series. The concept of peaceful coexistence with paranormal beings is explored in the 1996 series Kindred: The Embraced, which focuses on secret vampire clans throughout San Francisco. Conversely, works such as Witchblade present the more common matter of a protagonist attempting to protect citizens.
While urban fantasy novels are often centered around heroines, live-action works have regularly featured both genders in leading roles. Shows such as Beauty and the Beast, Forever Knight, Moonlight, and Grimm are based around male protagonists, while other tales, including Lost Girl, focus largely on women.
Read more about this topic: Urban Fantasy
Famous quotes containing the words film and television, film and/or television:
“The obvious parallels between Star Wars and The Wizard of Oz have frequently been noted: in both there is the orphan hero who is raised on a farm by an aunt and uncle and yearns to escape to adventure. Obi-wan Kenobi resembles the Wizard; the loyal, plucky little robot R2D2 is Toto; C3PO is the Tin Man; and Chewbacca is the Cowardly Lion. Darth Vader replaces the Wicked Witch: this is a patriarchy rather than a matriarchy.”
—Andrew Gordon, U.S. educator, critic. “The Inescapable Family in American Science Fiction and Fantasy Films,” Journal of Popular Film and Television (Summer 1992)
“All the old supports going, gone, this man reaches out a hand to steady himself on a ledge of rough brick that is warm in the sun: his hand feeds him messages of solidity, but his mind messages of destruction, for this breathing substance, made of earth, will be a dance of atoms, he knows it, his intelligence tells him so: there will soon be war, he is in the middle of war, where he stands will be a waste, mounds of rubble, and this solid earthy substance will be a film of dust on ruins.”
—Doris Lessing (b. 1919)
“The television screen, so unlike the movie screen, sharply reduced human beings, revealed them as small, trivial, flat, in two banal dimensions, drained of color. Wasn’t there something reassuring about it!—that human beings were in fact merely images of a kind registered in one another’s eyes and brains, phenomena composed of microscopic flickering dots like atoms. They were atoms—nothing more. A quick switch of the dial and they disappeared and who could lament the loss?”
—Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)