One of the great certainties of the early years of the streaming era was that no matter what happened to licensed movies, the likes of Netflix, Disney Plus and HBO Max (sorry, just Max now) would keep their own shows forever. Sure, someone might be revealed to be a sexual predator and have their shows scrubbed, but in the main, the assumption was that original shows and movies owned by the streamers weren't going anywhere.
Then HBO realized that A) no one was watching Westworld anymore, and B) they had to cut loads of costs ahead of the Discovery merger. There was a lot of talk about the Batgirl movie that got canned, and about the various weird animated shows that also got culled. And about Westworld, which was once one of HBO's marquee titles but which hemorrhaged viewers season to season until it got cancelled. For my part, I'd been put off by the second season, which was both more violent than Game of Thrones and more confusing than the first season; I'd kind of entertained the thought of watching the third and fourth seasons, but the announcement came just a couple of days before they yanked it, so I didn't bother.
More recently Disney said it was going to do the same thing with a few of its own shows, including the Willow reboot and Hulu's adaptation of Y: The Last Man. With those I had a week of notice, so I calculated how much I had to watch (the Willow movie, 8 episodes of the show, and 10 episodes of Y: The Last Man), then decided to watch Willow because it had a better Rotten Tomatoes score and was shorter.
I'm old enough to remember when Willow came out in theaters, and I remembered that I'd watched it on VHS in elementary school once, for some reason. I also remembered that there was a pretty good-looking arcade game based on it, which I've seen in various retro arcade/bar establishments since then. As it turned out when I watched the movie again, those points were literally all I remembered.
The movie, seen 35 years later, is so clearly George Lucas's attempt at a fantasy version of Star Wars. It plays with certain of the same well-established tropes, and has similar characters. Val Kilmer's performance as Madmartigan is obviously indebted to Harrison Ford as Han Solo, right down to the bemused facial expressions and the romance subplot with a princess. A lot of the dialogue is also pretty excruciating, though in fairness, his dialogue has always been pretty cringe. Watching it felt like unearthing some lost cult object from the 80s, but not necessarily something that needed to become a big franchise, though maybe if Lucas had waited a decade he could have ridden the same wave that lifted Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter.
As for the show, there are good points and bad points. It doesn't feel essential, but in the end it is quite well-done, at least in points. Beyond Warwick Davis, it's nice to see Kevin Pollak and Joanne Whalley reprising their roles, while the various new cast members inhabit different fantasy character archetypes, from Tony Revolori as the aspiring sorcerer and Erin Kellyman as the first young woman to be selected as. a knight for her kingdom. Amar Chadha-Patel is also a lot of fun as the roguish Thraxus Boorman, who kind of takes on the Madmartigan role here and provides a link back to Val Kilmer's character.
The show's tone changes repeatedly, which is less of a good point. At points it's epic, but at other points Tony Revolori delivers his lines like he's still in Grand Budapest Hotel mode, which is a little off-putting when in the midst of an epic battle of good versus evil. Other modern flourishes, like the rock songs at the end of almost every episode, were also jarring, though I don't know if the cover versions of classics like Metallica's Enter Sandman were more or less appropriate than the original version of Dire Straits's Money for Nothing. I love the song, but it doesn't really feel like something I'd tack onto a high fantasy show...
I didn't watch the show when it came out on Disney Plus a few months ago, but I'd planned on catching it when I finished the Marvel shows that came over from Netflix (Daredevil, Jessica Jones, et al). The news that I had only a week to watch it made me prioritize it, and while I'm glad I did (overall), I do also feel bad for the creators. They clearly put a lot of effort into the show so it's a shame that not only did it get stealth-cancelled, it's disappearing to who-knows-where.
Everybody's talking about free, ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) as the resting place for these unloved shows, and maybe that's where everything's going to end up. But I haven't heard of any specific place, like Tubi or Pluto TV, that's going to be the new home of Willow. There's a very real possibility that it's not going to any of those places, which means it'll basically just disappear entirely.
That's one of the bad things about the digital age we're living in. I got laughed at on social media and at the office because I still get DVDs from Netflix (at least, until September, when they kill that too), but the advantage of DVDs and VHS tapes before them is that, being physical objects, there's always the possibility of finding one lying around. Among my most prized possessions are DVD versions of the original Star Wars Trilogy, Episodes 4-6, that include the non-special editions as bonus discs. They're prized possessions because I don't think those versions exist anywhere in streaming form.
It happens with podcasts, too. I remember when the Nerdist Comic Panel's dozens (hundreds?) of episodes were just deleted when the hosts pivoted that show to something else. Books and DVDs and comics in physical form can go out of print, but the copies still exist in some form, whereas streaming media can just disappear if someone decides to move it away from the servers it's hosted on.
Maybe very few people are going to lament the loss of the Willow TV show, but think of it this way: the original movie was able to inspire the show's creator, Jonathan Kasdan, to develop a sequel, more than 30 years later. If the show isn't on DVD and isn't available to stream anywhere, it won't be able to inspire anyone else to pick up the story, which is a shame. You might scoff at the endless rebooting, but I like the idea of being able to remain in conversation with these older shows and movies across the decades.
As I write this, on 25 May, the show is supposed to disappear from Disney Plus tomorrow, so I won't say to go out and watch it. But as I say, it's too easy for content to just disappear now that everything's hosted on a server somewhere. The fact that streamers are getting more cost-conscious about how much they're hosting means that nothing, really, is safe: so if you have something you've been meaning to get to, maybe look at watching it ASAP, because who knows where it's going next week?
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