Over several months, I rewatched The Mysterious Cities of Gold (1982) with my kids. It was my favourite show when I was nine; it is even stranger than I remember. In a quest for the seven cities of gold, two orphans with matching pendants – one of them apparently an Incan – lead a group of treasure hunters across South America in the sixteenth century. A joint French-Japanese production, it is a 39-episode serial, repetitious and veering between the predictable and the bizarre. In many episodes, the children solve an ancient puzzle or discover an artefact or a clue, only for the temple or other structure to collapse around them. Everything is designed for self-destruction in the path of the Spaniards. They find a solar-powered ship made of gold then, after it burns up, a flying condor made of gold, both of them the creations of an ancient vanished civilisation. But then it grows even stranger two-thirds through the season as they encounter alien humanoids with futuristic technology who are also in the hunt for the cities of gold.

It didn’t make complete sense to me as a child. I thought it was a deficiency in my comprehension. The truth is, like many shows for children, there is much gobbledygook in the mechanics that doesn’t bear scrutiny. More than that, rewatching it I was struck by the mythology that the world is intricately designed as a puzzle we can decode. There is a solipsism to the idea that everything exists for the questers’ benefit – peoples long ago spending all their time and effort to make shifting stone blocks and set-ups in order that someone in the future could come and solve the mystery. It’s an appealing fantasy.

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I didn’t realise The Cities of Gold was an adaptation of a novel, Scott O’Dell’s The King’s Fifth (1966). I ordered a copy and began reading it to my kids. It turns out it is one of the loosest and strangest adaptations ever made, worthy of Charlie Kaufman. O’Dell’s novel is deeply researched, realist historical fiction. The motif of the greed for gold is there and the destruction wrought on the Indigenous people. Three characters have the same name, too – Mendoza, Zia and Estaban. But in this work, Estaban is a 17 year-old map-maker writing his story from prison for withholding the king’s share of the gold. It’s supposedly a children’s novel, but has a marine and historical vocabulary which frequently stumped me and an elegant, difficult prose style. It is a dark and brutal story, reminding me of Cormac McCarthy far more than the Cities of Gold; I stopped reading it to the kids and finished it myself.

Incredibly, three more seasons of The Cities of Gold were produced three decades after the original. We have watched seasons 2 and 3 on SBS as well and they do an excellent job of carrying on the spirit of the first season with a contemporary sensibility. Alas, the final season has not been dubbed into English yet.