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© Companions of the Longbow
What Was Wrong With Robin Hood Then? A review by Mark Tustian.
Strange Casting ...
While happily casting vaguely Middle Eastern looking actors in the role of the Muslims, the other roles are open to anyone of any ethnicity. This again can throw the viewer slightly as you ponder when the interesting back story to why there's an African Abbess in 12th century Nottingham. Of course you're never told. Just like some of the weird costume decisions the viewer has to accept things and move on. I think the show would’ve benefited from more black actors rather than the couple they had, simply because when they did appear with no comment from any of the other characters, you weren’t sure if twelfth century multicultural England was the norm or if there was going to be some sort of explanation or twist.
Script & Stories
Every retelling of the Robin Hood legend is added to by the people who tell it. The character of Robin himself is frequently rewritten and made to fit whatever values are pushed on to him, but some elements of the legend have always remained consistent. Given the high proportion of film re-makes that are around today you’d be right to wonder if producers worry about boring their audiences by trudging over old familiar ground. Each re-make tends towards trying to put in a twist, or something new to the story to “bring it up to date”. I certainly think that’s what happened in this version, but there’s a fine balance between remaking something familiar and destroying what made the original story appealing. Unfortunately with Robin Hood I think they’ve gone so far that they’ve lost what the core of the legend was about.
In 1984 Robin of Sherwood introduced the Muslim character of Nasir to the legend. This was entirely due to the fact that the character was originally only supposed to be in one episode, but the show’s makers liked the look of the Mark Ryan who played him. A few years later the makers of the Hollywood film Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves looked at the Robin of Sherwood show and for a time actually believed the character of Nasir was part of the original legends. As a consequence their Muslim character’s name (who was to be played by Morgan Freeman) had to be changed from Nasir to Azeem to avoid copyright infringement.
Robin Hood (BBC) has continued this trend by also introducing a main Muslim character and, just to be a bit different, this character is a young woman who is pretending to be a boy. So in only twenty odd years a Muslim character seems to have become a staple part of the Robin Hood story. Nothing wrong with that perhaps. After all, who would’ve begrudged Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer becoming part of Santa Claus’ established reindeer pack when he was created by Robert L. May in 1939? (But maybe somewhere there’s a Santa Claus fan site where they are still raging about the injustice of perverting the original legend?)
But anyway, the Crusades, which for the previous 800 odd years has only ever been an excuse for why the king should be out of the country for so long, has in this version become not just a back drop but a major driving force behind the story line. Again, what’s wrong with that? Well, again on the face of it nothing much. Except the focus of some stories shift away from ideas of social justice towards to the wider political musing on the wrongs and consequences of a nation invading another. This has also introduced many additional Muslim characters which have created religious problems for the writers which I’ll go into later. Basically because the focus of the legend has changed so much, it’s to easy to see why some of the other original iconic elements that made the Robin Hood story have been reduced in importance or dropped altogether.
Little John and Robin Hood meeting and having a fight with staves over a river was always pretty iconic, but in this version that meeting has been dropped in favour of a more mundane meeting. In this version the archery contest for the golden arrow, which even the Disney version with talking animals managed to include, becomes a minor sub-plot to an episode involving the trafficking of Muslim slaves. The character of Alan A Dale is no longer a minstrel as he’s just another cheeky chappie member of the gang, Marian isn’t a maid anymore (does her father know?) and the character of Much has been disinherited as he’s no longer A Miller’s Son. And have I mention Robin doesn’t use a longbow?