I’ve talked a lot about the PJO series on this blog and have pretty much beat it to hell by criticizing how woke and stupid it’s become. It’s generated a lot of great content for my blog and now it’s time to do yet another post about it, this time focusing on the Disney+ adaptation of the books. The first episode was released last Wednesday on Hulu and when I found this out, I had to watch it to see if it was as bad as we’ve all been saying it would be and from watching the first episode, I have to admit that it wasn’t as bad as I thought, but you can tell that the show was poisoned by Disney’s hate for the audience.
#1: The Characters
None of the characters look like how they were portrayed in the books. Percy doesn’t look like Percy, Annabeth doesn’t look like Annabeth, Grover doesn’t look like Grover, etc. Except for Percy, Sally and a few others, everyone has been race-swapped, which I’ve talked about in pervious blog posts. If you thought that the aging up in the original movie adaptations of Percy Jackson were bad, at least those actors sort of resembled their respective characters. In those versions, Percy looked like Percy, Annabeth looked like Annabeth (at least in The Sea of Monsters), Chiron looked like Chiron, etc.
This time, however, it looks and feels like the directors and producers of the show (including Rick Riordan himself) didn’t even try to stick to how the characters were described in the books and it feels spiteful. There were ways they could’ve made the actors look like their roles, such as incorporating contacts, hair dyes, wigs, etc. into their costumes, but instead they got lazy. Their vitriol towards anyone who criticizes that fact is sickening, which leads me to my next point.
#2: The Acting
The acting in the show wasn’t Disney Channel bad, however it wasn’t the best acting I’ve ever seen. It was good and the actors actually acted like the characters in the books. While I didn’t see Leah Jeffries acting since only the first episode is on Hulu, the other performances got the message across that, “Yes, that’s Percy,” or “Yes, that’s Grover,” which makes the show that much sadder for me to watch because you know that these kids weren’t chosen on talent; they were chosen by skin color. I say this because there’s plenty of proof that this is the case. Today’s Disney is known for race-swapping everyone and choosing actors for their victimization/minority status and Rick and Becky Riordan’s reaction to the backlash only confirms this even more. If they hadn’t been hiring based off of race, they wouldn’t have threw such a tatrum to try to defend their casting decisions. The kids chosen to play the characters deserved better.
#3: The CGI
The CGI in this show is terrible and Disney tries to hide it constantly. While bad CGI can be made up for by the quality of the characters, pacing, plot, and buildup, the show doesn’t really have that. For example, when Percy fights Mrs. Dodds in the first episode, we have no buildup to explain who she is, why she’s important, etc. She just kinda appears for no other reason than she needs to. At least in the movie from 2010, we were told who Mrs. Dodds was and given a good reason to fear her. In the show, however, she appears and her Fury form wasn’t intimidating at all. She just looked like an angry fem-Nazi on a day that ends in “Y”. When she dies, I swear they stole to dust effects from Avengers: Infinity War and there’s no time to think about what just happened and what effect it had on Percy as we quickly move on to the next thing.
Another example of the terrible CGI is the scene where Percy fights the minotaur. Throughout that scene everything is very dark and shrouded with rain, which, while accurate to the books, doesn’t translate very well to screen. The only times where we ever get to see the minotaur are during close up shots when Percy is close to it or during a fight scene where things are moving quickly, but those scenes only last a few seconds at best. The rest of the time, the Minotaur is just a big, bull-shaped shilohuette moving through the rain. When it kills Percy’s mother, it’s once again shrouded in darkness, which I felt took a lot away from the emotional impact of the scene. Once again, in the original movie, while the CGI was not great, we at least got to see what Percy was fighting and there was more of an impact when Sally Jackson was killed. We also got a better sense of how powerful the minotaur was when he chucks a car several yards in front of Percy and co.
#4: The Pacing
The pacing in the books was pretty fast, which while that worked for the books, especially since it was from Percy’s POV, it doesn’t work well for the show. In the first episode, there was so much being crammed into a limited time span that you felt like you were being hit in the face constantly with exposition. Once you hit one beat, you’re onto the next and you have no time to take in the information just given to you. I feel like they could’ve split the first episode in half so the audience could’ve had more time to get a feel for Percy and his life before moving onto the really crazy stuff that happens later in the episode.
Until next time,
M.J.
The Tanuki Corner 
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