"Xena: Warrior Princess" fans already know that "Xena" was a spinoff from "Hercules: The Legendary Journeys", a vehicle for actress Lucy Lawless to return after having previously played a different character on the show. But what most people didn't realize at the time was that there was one strange Season 5 episode of "Xena" that was actually the bits and pieces left over from a failed spinoff prequel series, to be called "Amazon High". Even though the episode was filmed and the cast was set, "Amazon High" never saw a second episode. With so many successful shows in that genre at the time, why didn't it make it? Here's the real reason this Xena spinoff never happened.
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00:00It might be easy to forget that Xena Warrior Princess was a spinoff. Originally appearing
00:05as a secondary character in Hercules' Legendary Journeys, Xena launched her own show and blew
00:10past Hercules in popularity, eventually becoming a wild ratings success.
00:15"...starring Kevin Sorbo, Michael Hurst, and for the first time ever, Lucy Lawless as Xena
00:22Warrior Princess."
00:24In fact, Xena Warrior Princess was so popular, the spinoff series actually almost spawned
00:28its own spinoff series, called Amazon High. Sadly, though, it never aired. Why?
00:34The clues can be found in Season 5 of Xena Warrior Princess, which featured one very
00:38unusual episode. And that's saying something, considering that Xena Season 5 mostly focused
00:44on an evil baby and Xena's slaughter of all the Olympian gods. But Lifeblood, Episode
00:4916, stands out because it includes a time-traveling Selma Blair.
00:54This is recycled footage from the two-hour unaired pilot of Amazon High, starring Blair,
00:59which would have been a spinoff from Xena. Blair played Cyan, a modern girl of 1998 who,
01:04by way of a magic dagger, is transported into caveman times, centuries before even the story
01:09of Xena takes place.
01:11In Amazon High, Cyan is considered the Chosen One in a tribe of female warriors. Cyan butts
01:16heads with Samsara, played by Xena regular Danielle Cormack, and becomes friends with
01:21a girl who can communicate with animals. She's then captured by a tribe of cannibals led
01:25by Kor, played by another Xena regular, future film star Karl Urban. Cyan later befriends
01:31Kor, domesticates horses, and names her new tribe of warrior women Amazons.
01:36So why didn't Amazon High work out? The show's main writer, Rob Tappert, had a pretty impressive
01:41hit rate. Tappert created Xena, then moved on to other syndicated shows like Cleopatra
01:472525 and Young Hercules. Amazon High seemed like a sure thing, right? Well, it should
01:53have been. Syndicated shows were big business in the early 90s. Baywatch proved that such
01:58shows could be financially profitable, and according to the LA Times, Xena and its predecessor,
02:03Hercules, actually outperformed Baywatch at one point.
02:06It would make sense to try and get another show out of the Swords and Sandals franchise.
02:10The problem for Tappert was that the success of Xena and Hercules spawned a lot of imitators.
02:16Tappert told the website Book of the Dead that he decided to axe Amazon High at the
02:20very moment they signed a deal to make the show, saying,
02:23"...everybody was pleased with what they bought. And I was standing at a monitor watching the
02:27Lost World promo and I said, you know what, we've been ripped off so many times we have
02:31to do something fresh."
02:33Around this time, there were similar shows on the air about Tarzan, Sinbad, and Conan
02:37the Barbarian. Tappert told the LA Times,
02:40"...the Baywatch people are doing Sinbad, and of course there are a bunch of other rip-offs
02:44on the way. I mean, what are we going to do? Young Moses? Freedom Fighter?"
02:48So Tappert took the basic 90s woman time travels back to a more savage time plot and flipped
02:54it, creating Cleopatra 2525, a show about a modern exotic dancer traveling forward in
03:00time and fighting the robots that have taken over the Earth. It was an early breakout role
03:04for Firefly star Gina Torres.
03:07While we'll never know how things would have turned out for Amazon High, Tappert may have
03:10had the right idea about needless imitators flooding the market with copycat shows, but
03:16at least we got Xena.
03:17"...from this moment on, we are the Amazons!"
03:18"...Amazons!"