As a last gift before Lent, my parents bought Beauty and the Beast, The Complete First Season. For those of you who, like me, were born after 1985, no, Disney did not make an inane half-hour animated series of it like they did to, well, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Tarzan, Lion King...wow, long list. Anyhoo, the series I'm referring to is the 1987 one starring Linda Hamilton (also known as *cue Ahnold voice* "SARAH CONNAH!") and Ron Perlman (he of the many DC voice acting gigs, oh yeah, and HELLBOY and the much-anticipated Hellboy 2).
Perlman plays the leonine Vincent (in spectacular feline make-up) who rescues corporate lawyer Catherine (Hamilton) after she's mistaken for someone else and brutally assaulted. He takes her down to the secret city of tunnels that lie just beneath New York, nurses her back to health, and their romance blossoms accordingly - in particular for Vincent, who acquires the ability to feel whatever she's feeling.
This comes in handy when she transfers to the District Attorney's office to do some actual good, because whenever she gets in trouble (which is often - quite a lot of nasty folks in NY), the show'll cut to a scene of Vincent peacefully reading or studying a map or having a bubblebath only to jerk up when he senses her fear, yank on his cloak, and run through the tunnels to save her with a lot of fang-baring and roaring and clawing.
It is fabulous. Vincent is like Fabio crossed with Simba. I love it. There is a general formula to the episodes (Catherine takes on a case, Catherine gets assaulted by criminals, Vincent hitches a ride on a subway to save her), but they intersperse it with enough Vincent-gets-in-trouble episodes to spice it up a bit. Oh, but I love it.
What I don't love, is that after rapturously finishing a bunch of Beauty and the Beast episodes, I discovered the family's copy of Hellboy went missing, and with my Lenten promise not to rent movies or buy them, I'm not going to see it for forty days! Argh!
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