The successful book series “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” recently announced a highly-anticipated T.V. show coming to Disney+ on December 20, 2023. It was created in response to the backlash to the previous movies, “Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief” and “Percy Jackson and the Sea of Monsters.”
The T.V. show is about Percy Jackson, a 12-year-old-boy, played by Walker Scobell. In the books, Jackson has always felt like an outsider, and during one fateful vacation he finds out that he is a demigod.
Demigods are the children of a mortal and an immortal. Jackson finds out his dad is Poseidon, the god of the sea from ancient Greek mythology, and that he is accused of having stolen Zeus’s master bolt. Also from Greek mythology, Zeus is the god of the sky, thunder, and the king of all the other gods. In the series, Jackson embarks on a journey along with Annabeth Chase and Grover Underwood to find the master bolt and to clear his name before a war among the gods begins.
Riley Fuerte, a student at UC Riverside, read the books in middle school and recently, reread the series during quarantine.
“I thought that the trailers were really good. They give the gist of the show without giving spoilers of how things end. There’s a lot of stuff from the books included too, which I’m really happy about,” said Fuerte.
The Percy Jackson social media team released the cast for each character. Chase is being played by Leah Jeffries and Underwood is being played by Aryan Simhadri. Other characters such as Luke Castellan are played by Charles Bushnell and Mr. Brunner/Chiron is played by Glynn Turman. Another popular actor in the TV show playing Hermes is Lin Manuel Miranda; he has also starred as Hamiltion in the Broadway musical “Hamilton.”
“I think it’s good that they’re doing age accurate casting because when adapting books to like movies or tv they don’t typically do that. I think Walker Scobell is funny as heck, so I’m excited to see like his version of Percy. I wish they brought back Logan Lerman for some aspect though I thought that would’ve been cool, and Lin Manuel Miranda is there for some reason [laughs],” said Fuerte.
The show, premiering on Disney+ will release two episodes on Dec. 20 and then from then on, an episode will be released weekly. In total eight episodes have been made for Season 1.
