Produced by Renaissance Pictures and Universal Pictures for television, and premiered on April the 30th 1994, Hercules and the Amazon Women it meant the first intent of the producers Sam Raimi and Robert Tapert in recreating a Heroic Fantasy with gods, sorcerers, magic and adventures; continued with Hercules and the Lost Kingdom (May 7th 1994), their success produced the filming of three more movies, Hercules and the Circle of Fire (November 5th 1994), Hercules in the Underworld (November 12th 1994) and Hercules in the Maze of the Minotaur (November 19th 1994), prelude of a long series of five seasons (Hercules: The Legendary Journeys ) that has passed frontiers thanks to its spectacular mixture of action, humor, adventures and visual effects. To put music and structures to this mixture, Raimi called his inseparable collaborator Joseph LoDuca, with whom he had worked from his beginnings in the cinema with the horror banquet that turned out to be The Evil Dead (1982); LoDuca, a solid composer that had demonstrated his ability already from the beginning, created an appropriate work that wisely mixes the orchestral excesses and corals with the most rancid adventurous tradition in the subgenre, incorporating oriental rhythms and harmonies, and obtaining excellent results; the mettle and happiness of their very attractive Main Title (better version the one that opened the second CD of the collection), as well as the surprisingly worked themes included from different episodes of the series (orderly as long suites in the first two CDs, and in several of similar content in the third), transform this collection into a special pleasure.
In a tangential way, and directly issued in videotape, is the long feature Young Hercules (1998) that goes to the youngest sectors in the audience as much for its content as for its development; LoDuca's score for this film doesn't have an apparent thematic or stylistic likeness with the music of the series, except for the logical parallelisms, and although deeply symphonic (see, for example, the cue It's to Twister) also search its vicinity to juvenile audiences.

VARESE SARABANDE VSD-5660 / 64'

VARESE SARABANDE VSD-5884 / 68'

VARESE SARABANDE VSD-6032 / 68'

VARESE SARABANDE VSD-5983 / 44'

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The success of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys offered the filming of a spin-off on Xena, a warring introduced, for the first time, in the Episode 1.9 (The Warrior Princess); the new series Xena: Warrior Princess, premiered on September 4th 1995, reached an even bigger success that the one dedicated to Hercules, becoming a true phenomenon of masses. Raimi and Tapert, again in production facets, continued trusting in LoDuca, which offers an radically different style to that of Hercules, with a much more primitive and wilder sound, accentuating the use of feminine voices, Celtic harmonies and oriental touches, evident from the stupendous Main Title. The first two disks pick up diverse material of the first two seasons, ordered in form of long and well structured suites, while the fourth opts to divide it in several suites of similar orientation. The most pleasant surprise comes from the third, the entirety of the music of the Episode 3.12 that it is none other that a surprising musical where we can listen the voices of Michelle Nicastro or Susan Wood, but also those of the main star Lucy Lawless (that doesn't do it anything bad at all), as well as that of Ted Raimi, the actor brother of the producer/director Sam Raimi. The best thing is to discover the enormous musical variety that contain each one of them and, the same as those of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys , the pleasure that takes place on repeated listenings.

VARESE SARABANDE VSD-5750 / 64'

VARESE SARABANDE VSD-5883 / 67'

VARESE SARABANDE VSD-5918 / 43'

VARESE SARABANDE VSD-6031 / 71'

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