This is a weird one, but weird is kind of awesome. It appears that French graphic novel Barbarella, which was turned into a 1968 film by Roger Vadim starring Jane Fonda (I wrote about it last year; give that a read for all the sex-infused zaniness) is being turned into a television series from Gaumont International Television and will see the light of day on Amazon, this according to Deadline. For those who don’t know, Barbarella was a swinging space chick who had a lot of sex and met different alien creatures and the like.
It’s got a pretty decent pedigree involved thus far, with a pilot script written by former 007 scribes Neal Purves and Robert Wade, and Nicolas Winding Refn and Martha De Laurentiis, wife of the feature film’s late producer Dino, will serve as executive producers. Nobody’s set to show-run yet, but Gaumont has a good track record at the moment, having developed NBC’s Hannibal and Netflix’s Hemlock Grove.
What do you all think of this? Would you watch a Barbarella television program? What other obscure European comics from the ’60s do you think would make a good television series? Talk about it down yonder, would ya?
From what I understand, this is basically Nicholas WInding-Refn’s project…which could be really weird and amazing (and probably look gorgeous). Reading some interviews with him around the time of his last movie Only God Forgives (which is pretty weird and amazing in it’s own right), he spoke a couple times about really working to get his Barbarella tv show launched. Good to hear that it’s getting closer.
Would like to see this work out although i’m not sure this has the financial support that the character really deserves.Intriguing that Winding-Refn is attached as a producer considering Barbarella is fairly averse to violence.Producing a modern version is pretty challenging since the whole concept is quite counter culture and hippyish,i would think.