The 10 Most Ridiculous Adaptations of Arthurian Legend

Well, here’s the first problem: it’s all a lie. Arthur Roman-name-icus and his brave, filthy band of warriors may look more realistic than the shiny heroes of Excalibur, and there were indeed wars involving twilight-era Rome and native Celtic tribes, but the whole thing’s really one huge what-if instead of a grounded historical approach to the origins of King Arthur.

Here’s the second problem: it’s just a dreary, clich?d movie. Capitalizing on the mud-and-blood battles from Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings, the 2004 King Arthur flick finds the ruler-to-be (Clive Owen) facing ugly political squabbles in a realistically wet and filthy Britain. Everything leads to equally ugly battles, with Guinevere recast as an amazon archer (Keira Knightley) in a medieval sports bra (filled out via Photoshop for the movie’s posters). The whole thing plops down in some unconvincing no-man’s-land of adaptations; too bowdlerized to teach easily bored middle-school kids anything, too bland and gray to be an unintended comedy.

6) Knightriders

In contrast to the 2004 King Arthur flick, most of the laughs in Knightriders were clearly intentional. An awesome specimen of late-1970s camp that leaked over into the next decade, George Romero’s film takes on the most dangerous of Ren Faire pursuits: knights who joust on motorcycles. It’s only loosely based on King Arthur, but there’s still a cycle-jouster leader, played by Ed Harris in top form, who’s trying to keep his troupe together despite a usurper’s challenge and a disintegrating relationship with his queen. There’s also a Stephen King cameo, a scene where Harris hurls pizza at a weasel-like talent agent, and movie-opening nudity that’s hard to forget.

Somewhere in there, you’ll see a depressing story of a man failing at something he loves, but we prefer to focus on the armored motorcycle jousting.

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5) Princess Gwenevere and the Jewel Riders

Some novels explore Arthurian myth from Guinevere’s perspective, but in most adaptations of the story, she’s a tragically unfaithful queen whose affair with Lancelot starts Arthur’s kingdom a-crumblin’. Because, y’know, dames ruin everything. Compared to that, it’s almost nicer to turn Guinevere into a She-Ra superheroine who rides a unicorn and shoots rainbows and throws horrible computer-rendered jewelry around.



There’s no Arthur or Lancelot to be found in Princess Gwenevere and the Jewel Riders, but like most perfunctory Arthurian take-offs, it’s got Merlin as a kindly mentor and Morgana as an evildoer. They’re not as marketable as a cast of animal friends with names like Wintermane and Sunstar, so Gwenevere gets plenty of those during her hideously animated battles against various non-threatening creatures. Shows like Princess Gwenevere were clearly made to take advantage of a small, low-aiming school of girl-oriented action cartoons, but it ultimately lost out to a slightly more tolerable Japanese import. In 1995, girls could watch this, Sky Dancers, or Sailor Moon. History and the frightening world of anime fandom show us which way most of them went.

4) A Kid in King Arthur’s Court

Few film genres are more insufferable than the one in which a plucky kid launches into some fanciful adventure, outwits numerous able adults, and survives life-threatening dangers. These movies all share one other trait: they become unwatchable the moment you turn 14. But those younger viewers might have endured A Kid in King Arthur’s Court. Fresh from the equally annoying Rookie of the Year and with the bright future of American Pie ahead of him, Thomas Ian Nicholas plays a SoCal baseball brat who’s sent via earthquake warp (seriously) to the sixth century, where he wins the respect of an aged King Arthur and explores a Camelot in decline. And then the whole thing writes itself, or rather fills itself with everything preadolescents in 1995 might superficially enjoy, including jokes about rollerblades, CD players, hamburgers, cutesy preteen love, and King Arthur learning how to say “chill out.”

The best part of A Kid in King Arthur’s Court? Appearances by Kate Winslet and Daniel Craig at a time before either could turn down movies like this. The worst part of A Kid in King Arthur’s Court? Most of it, really, but special disdain must be reserved for the soundtrack, which seems constantly on the verge of breaking into the Robocop theme but never actually does so. That’s some sort of crime.

3) Sword of the Valiant

So it’s 1983, and everyone’s making fantasy and science fiction movies. It would be the perfect time for a King Arthur adaptation, but Excalibur already did that two years ago. So what’s a B-list film company to do? Adapt Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, one of the few Arthurian fables that Excalibur didn’t grab for itself. The original is a short tale about chivalrous piety and supernatural pranks, but you don’t need those as long as you’ve got Miles O’Keeffe, star of those classic Ator barbarian movies, in a wig.


The premise stays true to the original poem at first, as Sean Connery rides into King Arthur’s court, challenges the entire Round Table, gets decapitated by the foppishly haired Gawain, and then picks up his head and leaves. This sets off a quest full of vaguely Arthurian knights, ladies, and magicians, most of whom weren’t part of the original story. Then again, the original story was largely about Gawain avoiding sex with a noblewoman and her husband, so the writers had to fudge details somewhere. The results are hilarious: Keefe’s bouncing and behaving hair outacting him, Connery popping in to bookend the movie with greenish make-up, and Peter Cushing realizing that he’s appearing in a much stupider film than Star Wars.

2) Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders

Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders was hardly the first movie to put the wizard in a modern setting, but it does so in such creaky, inept style that it stands out. The film starts with Ernest Borgnine telling his grandson about an unsold Merlin-based TV series, in which a long-haired Merlin and his toad-like wife set up shop in a middle-American suburbia. The first customer foolish enough to doubt Merlin’s powers is a jerkass newspaper columnist who decides to borrow Merlin’s spellbook. Thanks to Merlin, the columnist makes a deal with the devil, scorches a cat to cinders, and eventually turns into the baby his barren wife wants.

After this unsettling turn of events, director Kenneth J. Burton runs out of money/time/patience and pads the rest of Merlin’s Shop of Mystical Wonders with clips from an older movie he made about an evil toy monkey. Only this time it’s a monkey stolen from Merlin’s shop. This leads Merlin to wander around in search of his lost demonic toy while a clueless family, clearly hailing from a decade before all of Merlin’s scenes were filmed, narrowly evades death via cymbal-banging monkey toy. In his largely bloodless killing spree, the monkey offs some fish and a dog, but not the “ROCK AND ROLL MARTIAN” kid or any other humans. Burton’s shamelessly stitched-together film was later immortalized as an episode of MST3K, which summed up Merlin’s odd moral as “Remember to believe in magic…OR I’LL KILL YOU.”

1) King Arthur and the Knights of Justice

The quickest route to a mediocre King Arthur adaptation is to urinate on poor Mark Twain’s grave by sending an annoying hero back into a murky age of Arthurian wizardry. Well, King Arthur and the Knights of Justice goes beyond that by transporting an entire team of gratingly stereotyped football players back through the centuries. The cartoon begins with the real Arthur and his knights already captured off-camera by Morgana, so Merlin decides to recruit new defenders of the realm by reaching across time. Instead of gathering up soldiers or mercenaries or motorcycle jousters, this particularly ineffective version of Merlin gets the Knights, a high-school football squad led by quarterback Arthur King.

Yes, Arthur King. That sets the entire tone of the show right there. One of the co-creators of King Arthur and the Knights of Justice once made a pretty awesome cartoon by putting the myth of Ulysses in sci-fi trappings, but this attempt at taking on King Arthur is an agonizing parade of terrible ideas that somehow survived two seasons. Arthur and his teammates are both bland and completely repellent, while the villains consist of a cackling Morgana and a leftover G.I. Joe toy named Lord Viper. How lazy is the show? So lazy that it’s badly animated even in its opening credits, accompanied by what sounds like a sped-up version of Bananarama’s ’80s hit “Cruel Summer.”

Of course, every part of King Arthur and the Knights of Justice was designed with toys in mind, and it got plenty of them. More surprising was the creation of a 1995 Super NES game published by Enix, which had apparently figured the show for a lasting pop-culture staple. A boring and awkward Legend of Zelda swipe, the game is perhaps even worse than the cartoon. That’s quite the accomplishment.