It’s not known whether “Ulysses 31” was on Christopher Nolan’s radar in his teenage years, but it’s intriguing to think it could have influenced the director’s decision to take on Homer’s “The Odyssey”.
This animated space opera, a French/Japanese co-production, delivered a crash course in Greek mythology to a generation of kids who grew up in the ’80s. And, although it looks more like “Star Wars” than Homer’s original tale, it had a decent stab at transferring the Classics to the 31st century (the clue really was in the title), years before the Coen brothers took “The Odyssey” to the Deep South in “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”
The cartoon’s core premise would be familiar to any Greek scholar, even though purists would surely bristle at the hero going under his Roman pseudonym, Ulysses, rather than the original Greek Odysseus.
At heart, it’s that old story of a ship’s captain racing to get home from Troy (in this case, a starbase) before his wife, Penelope, marries another man. That voyage is soon waylaid, however, when Ulysses’ son, Telemachus, is abducted to become a sacrifice to a giant robot Cyclops.
Ulysses quickly lives up to the promise of his famous theme song — “Always fighting all the evil forces, bringing peace and justice to all” — by vanquishing the one-eyed menace and rescuing Telemachus along with Yumi and Numinor (a pair of blue alien Zotrians who, as far as we can tell, do not feature in the original Homer).
Unfortunately for Ulysses and his crew, he messed with the wrong giant robot Cyclops, because this one happened to belong to the Greek sea god Poseidon, who’s now taken up residence in outer space. The deity is so annoyed at the puny mortal’s impudence that he gets his brother, Zeus (aka the head honcho in Olympus), to inflict divine retribution.
Ulysses is subsequently sentenced to “travel among unknown stars” (his ship, the Odyssey, has its navigational databanks purged) while his crewmates — referred to, in what now sounds like contemporary corporate jargon, as “companions” — are put into a perpetual slumber. If he’s going to make it home to Penelope, he’ll need to find the Kingdom of Hades before his 26-episode run comes to an end.
It’s less an update of Homer than a riff on his greatest hits, with several other notable classics of the Classical period thrown in for good measure. In addition to slaying the Cyclops, Ulysses follows in OG Odysseus’s footsteps when he meets the Sirens and Lotus Eaters.
But he also ventures beyond the confines of Homer’s narrative when he encounters Sisyphus (fated to devote his entire life to a repetitive, pointless task), Orpheus (en route to Hades to rescue Eurydice, the love of his life), and three-headed dog Cerberus, reinvented as an interceptor satellite with, yes, three heads.
Many of the character names are also familiar. Priam, the commander of the Troy starbase, shares his name with Troy’s last king in antiquity, while Nestor, Ulysses’ second in command, is an advisor in the original story. Shirka, the computer on Ulysses’ ship, takes her name from Circe, a sorceress.
But the show also adopts a pretty liberal approach to the source material. Homer’s version of Telemachus spends much of the story separated from his dad, whereas “Ulysses 31″‘s is a constant presence. While Odysseus’s shipmates mostly wound up dead, here they’re plunged into a state of literal suspended animation, lifelessly floating in the ship’s hold.
And Ulysses is already aware of the Greek gods before he makes first contact — in one episode, he even travels back thousands of years in time to meet his famous namesake.
If this sounds like writers sanitising the story for younger audiences, well, it didn’t feel that way if you watched the show as a kid. At times, “Ulysses 31” is genuinely freaky, from those levitating lifeless bodies to some truly grotesque monsters. The gods themselves are also an unnerving presence, omnipresent beings of colossal power who see humans as their playthings and view Ulysses’ toils as some twisted spectator sport.
Besides, unlike “Masters of the Universe” and many of the other biggest sci-fi cartoons of the ’80s, the good guys weren’t always guaranteed to win. Being Ulysses — a single dad guiding his son and adopted daughter Yumi through the cosmos — wasn’t easy.
Now 45 years old (though it didn’t find its way onto British and American TV screens until the mid-’80s), “Ulysses 31” is showing its age. The animation is often rudimentary, particularly in outer-space scenes that are effectively a cut-out of a starship being dragged across a stellar background. The dialogue, meanwhile, is played hilariously straight — good luck finding a laugh among these uncharted stars — and often consists of someone shouting another character’s name. “Telemachus!” “Father!” “My son!” “Yumi!” etc. Telemachus’s small red robot pal, Nono, is up there with the most irritating “cute” sidekicks of the era — quite the achievement in an extremely competitive field.
But there’s also plenty to like. As static as they sometimes look, the spaceship designs have the feel of a classic space opera book cover, particularly Ulysses’ eye-shaped craft, the aptly named Odyssey. The series also borrows heavily from a more modern piece of mythology, namely the “Star Wars” saga. Ulysses may not be a Jedi (as far as we know), but his gun/laser sword weapon looks a lot like a lightsaber. Some of the incidental music even apes John Williams’ score from a galaxy far, far away.
Which brings us on to the soundtrack, the main reason this show lives on in the collective consciousness of a generation.
The work of Denny Crockett, Ike Egan, and, on selected tracks, Shuki Levy and Haim Saban (the latter duo also composed for “Masters of the Universe”, “Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors,” and many more cartoon classics), the music is a cut above. “The Curse of the Gods” refrain is loaded with menace, totally living up to its portentous title, and then there’s that theme song.
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Seriously, to people of a certain age — even those who remember nothing else about the show — hearing the name “Ulysses” is enough to get them singing “Ulysee-ee-ee-ee-ees” ad infinitum, an earworm truly worthy of the gods of Olympus.
Homer’s tales may still be remembered thousands of years after he wrote them, but you can guarantee he didn’t have a tune quite like that.
“Ulysses 31” isn’t on any major streaming service, but there are fan uploads on YouTube if you want to experience the show for yourself.
