Robin Hood

On the data. The useful thing to know is that there is no original. Robin Hood has no single source text. He appears in medieval ballads from the fourteenth century onward, in fragments, with different companions and different enemies, and none of those ballads agrees with the others. Maid Marian arrives later, from French pastoral plays. The connection to Richard the Lionheart and the Crusades is a much later addition. Robin being a dispossessed nobleman rather than a yeoman is largely Walter Scott's doing in Ivanhoe in 1819. So every version invents its own. There is no continuity to track, no correct order, and no adaptation that is more faithful than another, because there is nothing to be faithful to. A few versions have nonetheless been influential enough that later ones copy them. The 1938 Errol Flynn film set the look. Robin of Sherwood in the 1980s invented a pagan mythology that has turned up repeatedly since. The 1991 Costner film put Alan Rickman in it, and his performance is the reason anyone remembers a film that is otherwise not very good. Disney's 1973 animated version with the animals is on its own track and is a great many people's first encounter with the story. Disney's 1973 cartoon is on this page because for a large part of the audience it is the Robin Hood they met first. It was made in the cheapest period in the studio's history and it shows: several dance and crowd scenes are traced directly from The Jungle Book, The Aristocats and Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, reused frame for frame with new characters drawn over them. It is nobody's idea of a faithful telling, and it has outlasted most of the faithful ones.

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