Every now and then, one of your favorite book series gets turned into a movie or a series and the writers and directors actually do a decent job!  “Harry Potter” and “The Lord of the Rings” are good examples of amazing book series being brought to life and doing a good job in portraying characters that you love.  Although most true fans will always prefer the actual novels to the movies or series (let’s face it, the author always tells it best!), there is still something magical about stories being brought to life on screen WHEN they do a good job. Our family are huge fans of Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson series.  Actually even bigger fans of his Heroes of Olympus series.  But the one time they tried to make a couple of movies, the movies were just not done well.  Despite some decent actors–I actually liked Logan Lerman as Percy and Pierce Brosnan was wonderful as Chiron–but the movies were simply not written well and didn’t stay true to the story.

It’s now been about 13 yrs since the first movie came out and recently Riordan partnered with Disney plus to make his first book, “The Lightning Thief”, into a series.  While I wasn’t thrilled with the actor choices at first, particularly for Percy, Annabeth and Chiron, our family ended up loving the first season.  Our biggest reasons for not loving the actor choices are because most authors go out of their way to describe their main protagonists appearance in great detail.  Percy is supposed to have dark hair and green eyes.  He is vividly portrayed this way in all of the novel’s art and the fan art.  Annabeth also always has long blonde hair–as a daughter of the Goddess Athena, this is one of her trademark characteristics.

So choosing a blonde haired boy and a dark haired girl to play the two main leads, in total contrast to how they are described, always kind of bothers me. But we decided to put our images aside and focus on the acting and the story-telling.  The main characters in the series do play the leads in a slightly different manner than they are written in the book, but about halfway through the series you will see that it works!  They actually become pretty endearing.  And Aryan Simhadri, who plays Grover, totally hits it out of the park!  He does an excellent job!  Walker Scobell is not who I would have picked for Percy, but I feel like he will really grow into the role.  And the chemistry he has with his mom, played by Virginia Kull, is really wonderful.  She does an excellent job as Sally. And of course Lin-Manuel Miranda as Hermes was a great choice! I also really appreciated how the series is taking its time and recreating iconic scenes from the book that help it stay true to the original story.  However, there are still some bad casting choices, for example the actor who plays Zeus is a horrible choice.  He does not play the role well at all!  But the other good actors help to make up for this and thankfully we see very little of Zeus in the series.

So far this is yet another series that is exciting, has action and good plot AND is still appropriate for the whole family. We are truly hoping that it will get a season 2 and not be cancelled in the same way that the latest Willow series (which was awesome and shouldn’t have been cancelled) was.  Oftentimes these spin off series can be amazing, but if they only appeal to the true fans and not the masses then they are cancelled and we never get to see what happens.  Let’s hope the fans show up enough for Percy that we get to see what happens to him next in Season 2!