Thomas R. Sherwood

Transcription

{\rtf1\ansi\ansicpg1252\deff0\deflang1033{\fonttbl{\f0\froman\fcharset0 Times New Roman;}{\f1\fswiss\fcharset0 Arial;}} {\*\generator Msftedit 5.41.15.1515;}\viewkind4\uc1\pard\sb100\sa100\f0\fs24 Who owns Robin Hood? Clearly we think of him and have thought of him throughout the 19\super th\nosupersub century as either a local hero or a national hero- but an English hero. Beginning however in the late 19\super th\nosupersub century, I think Americans hijacked Robin Hood. The first move in this direction is Howard Pyle\rquote s the Merry Adventures of Robin Hood in 1883 which provides us with a sort of novelization, which is a complete history of Robin Hood; child friendly, equipped with beautiful pictures that have actually established the men in tights kind of image that Robin Hood holds and the book has been in print continuously for the past 125 years and has gone through something like 300 editions and a wide variety of languages. So Pyle establishes a sort of narrative basis for the stories that we all have learned to love. In the 1890s, from the gay 90\rquote s right through world war two, the most popular public entertainment in the United States was the Operetta by Reginald De Koven called \i Robin Hood\i0 . This was not only performed in every city in the United States that had an Opera hall, but took advantage of the new technologies- piano rolls, phonograph recordings and ultimately radio broadcasts to reach unprecedented audiences in terms of the story of Robin Hood. And is was a love story of course, a kind of operetta romance, but the final and most decisive appropriation, hijacking, is the Douglas Fairbanks film of \i Robin Hood\i0 in 1922. With that production, Hollywood and its mass media turned into an American, not only an American hero but an international icon of popular culture. When the New York Times recently reported that the president of Ingushetia was actually calling his opponent a false \lquote Robin Hood\rquote , somebody who portrayed himself as a Robin Hood, we can only actually see this as the legacy of that Fairbanks film, which propelled a whole series of sequels in Hollywood, including the Errol Flyn, the Kevin Costner and so on, right down to 2010. The kind of power of Hollywood to take Robin Hood over and not make him an American popular icon but an international popular culture icon seems to me to be so great that it can\rquote t be overestimated. The buzz surrounding the 2010 Russell Crowe, Ridley Scott Robin Hood suggests that there were a number of hiccups that this film experienced, some of them having to do with how to make it new. That is, how to have a plot that audiences will actually come see. Clearly, the initial take on this was to recast the hero, the star rather, as the Sheriff of Nottingham which would be an unprecedented way of setting things up. It seems early on that Ridley Scott decided this was a losing preposition, that the star has to be playing Robin Hood because of his irresistible appeal that the outlaw hero has to be in the center and the star power has to go in that direction. On the other hand, the previews that have been circulated suggests that the Robin Hood we see will be a kind of prequel, according to some reports. That is the Robin Hood who learns to be a social activist, who learns how to be politically engaged rather than someone who presides over the forrest and his band of merry men. In addition, the thing that seems unusual about this is the fact that he's on horseback. Robin Hood of course, in the tradition, has never been a cavalier, he's never been chivalric; that is, he's never's ridden a horse. And, he's always been the yeoman who lives in the forest, or at best, a lord who we get to see in a castle, but not a knight. And so therefore, the Scott movie is, seems to me, is offering a Robin Hood with a slightly different twist in terms of a sense that he may be not simply an upscale lord, but somebody who actually fights on horseback, and therefore seems more knightly than any Robin Hood we\rquote re seen before.\par \pard\f1\fs20\par }