Ah LEXX, those classic movies and episodes – Back to the Cluster, the Return of His Shadow, Brunnen H, Dorkakia, My Bonnie, The Salesman, The Clizzards of Woz, the Last Days of the Brunnen G, Prison Planet, Flytrap...
Wait? Never heard of them?
That’s because these are the stories that got lost along the way – that were abandoned, or didn’t get made, or got pushed out of the way by better ideas.
A lot changed on the way to LEXX.
For instance, there were only going to be three movies the first season, and the middle movie was going to be Love Grows. But a very different version of Love Grows, with a live kai and mutating monsters instead of sex changes.
And the last movie was going to be Back to the Cluster, which was completely different from what got made.
Even when Gigashadow was being made, Robert Sigl, the Director turned in a completely different cut and vision of his movie.
LEXX’s creators had big plans for the second season. They were working on it and writing episodes before season one had even finished production. In June 2016, literally 18 months in advance, they released a bible for twenty episodes. Of those twenty, maybe six were made. The rest were lost or radically mutated.
In mid 2017, another ‘bible’ was released for a season of only thirteen episodes.
And then in December 1997, yet another bible was released with another set of twenty episodes, with some missing from the previous bibles, and with some new episodes.
Only a third of those originally planned episodes actually got made.
A few others morphed so dramatically they were almost unrecognisable, the Clizzards of Woz became Woz. The Salesman became Patches in the Sky.
His Shadow was going to come back as a continuing villain. Wist from Eating Pattern was going to come back in a late season episode called Hi Wist, which became Lyekka.
Pa Golene from White Trash, he was originally going to appear in four episodes.
Kai was going to meet a race of Amazon cousins called the Brunnen H.
The musical episode was going to be Lexxtasy, about a watery planet of music where everyone sang.
Heaven and Hell? Those were going to be two episodes in the middle of the second season.
The stories of these lost episodes is fascinating, as are the stories of how the episodes that got made changed and evolved.
But there’s more to it – by examining these lost episodes, and by examining the transformations and earlier forms of existing episodes, we can actually see where the ideas and stories come from, how the whole show changed and evolved, how ideas were picked up and moved around, who some elements came to the front and changed the shape of the show, and how the writers and producers mat various challenges.
The first two series of LEXX especially, were a time of massive flux and change. It’s a fascinating story.
And it’s chronicled in the upcoming volume of LEXX Unauthorized.
Coming March 31.
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