ner as a tank, for example. If the original text has a reasonably specific historical setting, then I don't see why producers can't stick to it. Obviously, being a work of "myth", the Ring doesn't really have a specific historical date attached, although the presence of Attila the Hun in the Nibelungenlied presumably places the action around the mid-5th century AD. I'd be wary of updating that setting too much in case the thing looked even more ridiculous than it already is in many ways. (The 1957 Warner Bros cartoon What's Opera Doc? showed just how easy it is to take the piss out of Wagner's pretensions, with Bugs Bunny in Brunnhilde drag and Elmer Fudd singing "Kill the WAB-bit!" to the tune of the Ride of the Valkyries. The best joke, though, is that the Pilgrims' Chorus from Tannhuser actually provides most of the musical material for the cartoon.) This isn't to say we can't interpret the RingI'm not so literal-minded as to seriously think we can't take the cycle on anything other than face valuejust that I have reservations about how some people seem to interpret it. And I don't think we need to burrow too deeply to find meaning in this story of gods, giants, dwarfs, magical treasures and the occasional human being. The story gives us the passing of the gods and the rise of mankind, who are raised up by the power of those same gods they cast aside. One system is vanquished by another system with help from the first. If we accept the 5th century setting (which is admittedly extremely tenuous), we could further read it as the victory of Christianity over the pagan belief systems of whichever lands it filtered into. Politically speaking this could be seen as revolutionary (i.e. the replacement of the old with the new is inevitable) or reactionary (i.e. there are ruling classes and lower classes, and good reasons why the former shouldn't let the latter get above their station), so whether you choose to see this victory as wonderful or...
