Thanks to Hannah for ponting out this article.
“Something about these people marks them out from the rest of their world, there is something unique and special about them, and somehow that is tied to their origin,” he says. The big-budget adventure TV series Merlin, which Murphy has co-produced with Johnny Capps, is the origin story of the future King Arthur and the wizard Merlin, a sort of Malory-meets-Smallville pitched at a family audience.
The story of King Arthur is constructed from a number of works, but particularly Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Latin work Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of Britain), written around 1138, and Thomas Malory’s Le Morte d’Arthur, published in 1485. Most of the Arthurian adaptations for film and television – from 1915’s The Quest of the Holy Grail to Excalibur (1981), First Knight (1995), Merlin (1998) and The Mists of Avalon (2001) – are predominantly derivative of both, but particularly the latter.
