Hacker Cinema
Vikings
2013 · TV series · 6 seasons
Created by Michael Hirst
The adventures of Ragnar Lothbrok, the greatest hero of his age. The series tells the sagas of Ragnar's band of Viking brothers and his family, as he rises to become King of the Viking tribes. As well as being a fearless warrior, Ragnar embodies the Norse traditions of devotion to the gods. Legend has it that he was a direct descendant of Odin, the god of war and warriors.
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32 comments on Hacker News
In the TV series Vikings they reach the Muslim kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula
I believe Leadenhall carried on being used as a market. I’m not sure about the 400s to 900s when the Anglo-Saxons clambered over Roman ruins.
The Vikings set up shop around The Strand and Covent Garden, then Alfred reinstated London.
I think, I am not historian, and maybe attributing much to recent TV shows. But I’ve worked through Queenhythe enough times to read the placards.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Queenhithe
The article is from 2011.
Æthelstan is a central character in the TV show "Vikings" that came later, so perhaps his name is more recognized now
The first few episodes of "Vikings" owed a lot to Ahmad ibn Fadlan, but I think the use of source material went steadily downhill from there. "Roma Sub Rosa" correlated well with my classes for the first few books, but I don't know how they've held up in light of any more recent scholarship.
Chirologia/Chironomia are more oriented to hand gestures rather than whole body, but they might have some clues. Roman orators had a set of stock poses (the memes of the day?), so maybe Cicero actually said something about shoulder shrugging in the "delivery" part of De Inventione? It's certainly a gesture that would have read well in the back rows, had they used it.
EDIT: maybe also somewhere in Quintilian? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institutio_Oratoria
After watching the 1st 2 episodes I consider it in the realm of Vikings and Black sails idd. Worth watching!
Reminds me of a scene from the Vikings TV show where Rollo tries to learn French.
https://youtu.be/i5ZdBsbj8K0
I was a savage but now I am a man of great wealth and civility
I've literally never heard of any of these shows and I watch a lot of TV shows. I only know of Vikings in the top 50
I suddenly realize the American show Vikings took this to the next level where English is spoken by POV characters and characters who speak their language and everyone else speaks their foreign language. Kinda cool hearing Brits attempt Old English on television show.
Mhm. The Scandinavian countries has produced made many movies and tv-shows about the vikings. Almost all of it has been utter garbage. Then one American comes along and creates a show for Netflix. And it's amazingly good. Go figure.
I have always wondered if it was really a thing that actually happened after seeing it depicted in the episode Blood Eagle (S2E7) of Vikings.
Although fictional, the 5th season of the TV show Vikings covers these characters in some depth.
I mean, it's not like it's bad to daydream the "what if", then work backwards to see if it's even possible in the real world... but what irks me is how anyone imagines any form of gov, society, or industry just needs a Thanos snap to fix them. Like Jesus Christ, watch an overview video that explains the difficulty of grocery store logistics. That's a sliver of the difficulty to run a city, state, province, country or the goddamn planet. To imagine a writer or two, with zero political, business or logistics background "figured it out"... I won't use the r word only because that insults the mentally handicapped with how stupid this line of thinking is. We're talking about the same people who get basic physics and electronics wrong on their show all the time. "Its okay, we figured out how to create the perfect society in our fictional tv show." And people take it seriously... these same folks should watch Vikings and vote for that society to be implemented. I'd enjoy that.
Absolutely. Hell, how many people self taught themselves the real life influences of Game of Thrones, Vikings, the Last Kingdom, Master and Commander, etc? Sure, not everyone, but I bet theres a bigger history enthusiast demographic because of certain shows, movies and books. I dont think a bigger demographic of history enthusiasts is bad for a society.
Yes, this makes sense, but you can convey what you want to an audience without compromising historicity so thoroughly I believe.
Taking the Vikings tv show example - Ragnar Lothbroke would have been in richly and boldly colorful, probably embroidered, clothing of wool and linen and maybe even silk or cotton from trade.
He would have been covered in gold and silver jewelry, and his armor and weapons would have been gilt or inlaid with silver, gold, and copper-alloy and intricately engraved.
Instead we get an extra from Sons of Anarchy complete with tats and edgy haircut.
Edit, also 3/4s of those impressions the modern audience does have is from decades of movies and tv shows. I think a project that respects its audience could do its part to start projecting more accurate impressions of past aesthetics and fashion sensibilities.
The depiction of medieval folks wearing drab and dirty and torn clothes in black, browns, and and grays is THE biggest peeve I have with costume design in ‘historical’ movies and tv shows. The absolute worst offenders in recent memory being Vikings and The Last Kingdom, but there are a plethora of others. Not to mention the biker-gear-leather-fetish as armor look they all seem to go for.
Between the TV shows Vikings and The Last Kingdom this period has had some welcome screen time in recent years. It's a fascinating era in British history and it's great to see it getting more popular attention.
I'm in the middle of Vikings season 5 so I naturally clicked.
If you don't reference great sources like AC Origins, Valhalla, the Vikings TV series, etc. you will be disliked among HNers.
I was expecting to hate this show but I ended up enjoying it. Even more than what I my highest possible expectations gave me.
There's an episode in the Last Kingdom and in Vikings when we see the great pyres lit to communicate a raid was occurring. There's quite a few on the coast of North Eastern England where I grew up still present to this day.
Admittedly I some what doubt they're original .
At American Film Market last year, everyone was abuzz about Quibi before it launched. They appeared to have checked all the boxes. When they launched, my wife (who also attended AFM and is also in the film space) became a user, and I experienced it vicariously. A few thoughts on why this failed, and then simply shut down instead of being acquired.
1) Their hypothesis that short form content was desirable was deeply flawed, and I think based on an assumption that online attention spans are short. This is not true with film and TV where the trend has gone over to binge watching very long form content e.g. Vikings, House of Cards, etc.
2) There was no way to watch their content on a big screen. So that introduced another assumption - that no large market segment would want to consume their content on a bigger screen. We actually tried to watch it on Amazon Fire and the hack is horrible.
3) They decided they wanted to attract a number of A list directors and other talent and blew not only a lot of budget on that, but they also wrote their terms so that after two years they lose exclusivity and after 7 years the content reverts back to the creator. This is insane, if you consider the investment and long term value around the films and series that Prime, Netflix and Disney create. The direct effect of this was that there was no business to sell when they decided to shop the company.
4) Quibi suspended releasing new content during the recent protests, while continuing to burn investment cash. They should have adapted to the times. Even post 9/11 certain films were put on hold, but those were films insensitive to current events. I can't imagine all their content fell into that category.
They still have $850 million in cash and have decided to call it. Sounds like Whitman and Katzenberg actually have a good shot at recouping some of their $10.5 and $5.5MM investment respectively. Which leads me to wonder whether they had that money to burn in the first place. Doesn't exactly feel like a "failure isn't an option" approach - and with that cash still in the bank they could take all their learnings from the initial launch and do a hard pivot. Although the business model may be so fundamentally flawed, for the reasons I've described above, that a pivot isn't even feasible.
Sure. It's true that some Vikings settled, including in Normandy (in exchange for guarding the Seine against other Vikings, just like in the TV show). And yeah, they also settled pretty large swaths of England, beginning with York, and founded Dublin, among other cities. The whole of England very nearly became run by the Norse but for a single battle at the end of a very long war of attrition.
The TV show was actually extremely historically accurate in terms of specific events (like jumping out of the coffin and murdering the priest). It was just also extremely inaccurate in terms of the characters, time periods, and geographic locations in which those events occurred.
In some ways more, but in other ways they were less complicated than most think. I'm reminded of an interview with one of the historians attached to the Vikings TV series: "...but historically they would all have been blonde, ALL of them, and that would look strange on TV today."
The vikings are my favourite example for these kinds of interjections. We think we know a lot about the vikings, there is so much literature on Norse mythology, there is even a very nice Gabriel book turned TV show on Amazon prime.
Yet our only written sources on the subject were written by Christian monks.
You brought up Julius Ceacar as an example in another post, and he’s actually another great point. Because we don’t actually know that much about him, or his life. Most people think he was the first emperor of Rome, but that was actually Augustus.
I think the article doesn't tackle it from the correct perspective.
There aren't _many_ choices at all, because we don't hire the service for the service itself, instead, for the content, and content here is exclusive.
For instance, you have competition on the PC market: you can buy Dell, you can buy Lenovo, and while the outside may differ, inside, you have the same thing. You also have choices of Burger joints, because although we may prefer one to the other, whenever we want a burger, we can choose from anyplace.
This kind of content, TV shows and movies, however, is different. There's more uniqueness to each piece than a burger or a PC have. You can't interchange Game Of Thrones with Vikings and be really satisfied, worse, you'll probably want both.
So, right now, what we have is little choice - recent shows and movies are on a single platform, and just a few are on two or three different ones. So to have all content you want, you might need to subscribe to many different platforms.
I sometimes wonder if this isn't a fairly common practice in numerous industries. For instance some time back I was watching a show on US cable television. Vikings on the History Channel, in particular. Aside from the completely obnoxious icons and labeling everywhere, about 5 minutes into the show advertisement pops up literally in the middle of the screen consuming about 25% of the screen space. And that was enough for me to immediately move onto other things, as that's worth less than the $0 price of admission. Incidentally the web version is amazing, has more content, is better quality, has no ads, and something I would generally highly recommend - underrated series.
While cable TV, and cable news in particular, has been rightfully demonized, it makes me wonder if they're really just happy to target themselves down to a demographic that is willing to tolerate this nonsense. And perhaps this demographic might also respond more favorably to advertising, influencing, and other corporate ends.
The same thing has also happened in the movie industry as well. If you think the vast majority of modern movies suck, it would not necessarily just be because of nostalgia or other effects. The modern movie viewer demographic has changed radically and thus movies are being made for these people. Even more interesting is that movie ticket sales are down hard, but they're somehow convincing the new demographic to pay even more which actually means that gross receipts have been stable and even increasing at times.
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Of course there's also a chicken and egg question. In the movie industry for instance, did movies change because the demographic changed, or did the demographic change because movies changed?
The TV show Vikings shows one Viking family around 1100? traveling to Arab lands and picking up an East Asian female along the way and being the first ones to attack England, heavily fictionalized.
There's a TV series called "Vikings" that shows how Rollo (brother of Ragnar Lodbrok, another famous Viking) got there.
Can't say much about the historical accuracy but it's certainly a good show for the first few seasons.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2306299/
In the tv show "Vikings", Season 4, Episode 8, Ragnar (Travis Fimmel) came up with an ingenious plan to safely reach Paris: Lift their boats up the cliff, carry them across the mountains and slide them back into the river.
Good, means we can get a season five of "Vikings"
Though fiction and overly dramatic I can recommend the show Manhattan (as mentioned in the caption). http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3231564/
Most of all it reminds of Vikings. Not entirely accurate, but accurate enough that you get a feeling of the circumstances.
Vikings, the TV series, has nothing to do with Iceland.
So it has not boosted our national pride. The thing is that the 'Ásatrúarfélagið' has always been quite visible over here. I've always seen it as a "rebel"-religion over here.
EDIT: after writing this I realize your comment was probably sarcastic :)
Vikings enjoy a huge popularity amongst lay historians and the general populace. We've got a "Vikings" TV series, not a "early Danish kingdoms" series. There's "Viking metal", not "Calmar union metal". Every friggin' fantasy setting has Viking expies, even if the rest is positively Renaissance. When people think of Scandinavian history, it's primarily bearded raiders, not Gustavus Adolphus.
I'd say the only historic stereotype that is more popular are knights, and they share a lot of the same "bad history" characteristics.
So, "bum rap"?