WarpGirl wrote:Well Robin Hood is one of the most incredible stories because it HAS evolved over many centuries. The very first incarnation Robin Hood was a selfish trickster, conman, highwayman, and all around sleeze. Maid Marian first appears in the tales as a whore! Every incarnation is an evolution based of the values of the times. The 1938 Errol Flynn version drew heavily on the Victorian era, but influences of a determined powerful Marian were developing. The BBC series was WONDERFUL until they killed Marian. I know someone was high on something when that idea was implimented, it's the only explanation.
By the BBC one you mean the latest one? Yeah, I hated it. They were obviously going for some kind of gray-scale ambivalence and mild foe-yay with Robin and the guy who killed Marian, etcetera, and...it just didn't work. Methinks one of the lead writers watched Torchwood and got all the wrong ideas from it.
There was a late 90's one, too, where everyone had even worse accents than in the Costner one, that was more like some weird cross between Xena and that Merlin miniseries (the Sam Neill one) without being as good as either.
For Robin Hood TV-shows, there's been three that I kinda liked. Maid Marian & her Merry Men was a lot of fun, the few episodes I got to see. Then there's a Danish one that played with the whole concept, using a local medieval folk hero to poke fun at all medieval folk heroes, especially Robin Hood (the recurring gag with grapnels *always* falling back down to hit someone on the head was brilliance and way before the Simpsons and Family Guy turned repeating a joke to unfunny and back to funny again into their Thing), but I can't remember the name of the show. Early to mid-80s, IIRC.
But my absolute fave is Robin of Sherwood, an old fairly low-budget show from the 80's. It's fairly blatant fantasy, but it's heavily steeped in actual medieval myths and lore, where gods are usually very eerie and frightening things...and they used the whole "more than one Robin Hood"-idea by having it be a *title*, not a name. The Costner movie stole the idea of a foreign Muslim member from it (a Saracen, actually, Moors being dominant a bit later in history), by the way.
