Robin Hood
My Tivo has decided that I really ought to be watching the BBC’s series, Robin Hood. There were a bunch of episodes lined up on the Now Playing list, so I decided to give the show a try. It’s reminiscent of a KNIGHT’S TALE that movie with Heath Ledger, but no where near as good. I was hanging in there until I watched an episode that just had me in hysterics.
I understand in 2008 women don’t want to watch a show where members of our gender get rescued, or sew a tapestry, but when it turned out that Maid Marian is actually a mysterious figure called the Night Watchmen, and she not only knows kung fu, but she’s also trained in gymnastics, _and_ she dresses as a man (I guess nobody told the writers that the church burned women for wearing male attire) I just lost it. I giggled my way through the rest of the episode, and I still haven’t recovered.
This is also one of these shows where the evil (and boy is he Snidley Whiplash evil) sheriff of Nottingham wants to silence some children who have seen his new secret weapon. But this is a family hour show so they can’t kill a bunch of sweet faced urchins so they tie themselves in knots to explain why the boys haven’t been killed until Robin can rescue them.
Oh, and I forgot to mention that the sheriff had a sister who dressed in black leather pants and boots and travelled everywhere with a box filled with poisonous snakes. Of course she falls into the pit instead of Robin Hood and her “babies” bite her and she dies. And they have a Mission Impossible moment where she pulls off the putty nose and wig to reveal Cruella De Ville rather than the simple woman who has been chained in the town square for pilfering food.
If anachronisms won’t drive you crazy, and you and you need a giggle this is the show to watch. Apparently it’s a really big hit. Which is just terrifying.
June 26th, 2008 at 12:47 am
I remember being very eager to watch this when the first word came out that the BBC was doing a Robin Hood series — twenty-some years ago the U.K. had the terrific Robin of Sherwood series (it made Michael Praed a star, at least for awhile), and if they were updating that, wonderful!
But … not so much, for all the reasons you note. Ugh. It is, if anything, worse than “The New Adventures of Robin Hood” from the late 90’s — a cheap, Hercules/Xena thing filmed in Lithuania. At least that one didn’t have the glossy veneer that the current show does.
The BBC is producing a Merlin tv series, a family drama that caused a bit of a stir when NBC bought the show. Hopefully that’ll be better, but I’ve the feeling it may end up rather twee.
June 26th, 2008 at 8:14 am
That sounds truly awful. Maybe even worse than the animated Disney version.
June 26th, 2008 at 2:38 pm
I had heard that new(ish) Robin Hood show was supposedly good. Like
Elio, I had been hoping for an updated Robin of Sherwood series– I caught
that back in the 80s when they ran it on Showtime.
And to think, I was this close to putting the new Robin Hood on my
Netflix queue…
June 26th, 2008 at 3:30 pm
The show was supposed to go into the Doctor Who timeslot and tide over the youngsters whilst Who was off the air. Whilst it got okay ratings, it wasn’t the big hit the BBC were after, sometimes only getting half of Who’s ratings. That’s still quite a lot though.
The second season, which was better than the first, ended on a rather unexpectedly dark note that seemed more in keeping with the excellent 1980s show. Hopefully this will lead to a more interesting third season, but it’s rumoured that there won’t be a fourth.
June 26th, 2008 at 3:38 pm
Okay, if there’s going to be a “dark” ending, I will push on through the remaining episodes stored on the Tivo. Hmmm, wonder what that says about me?
I just found Maid Marian kung fu fighting to be hysterical.
June 27th, 2008 at 9:43 am
We watched it regularly when it first showed on BBC America, but I finally couldn’t take the anachronisms any longer. I too laughed, but, lets face it, when we all played Robin Hood as kids (either the Errol Flynn version or the Richard Greene version), Maid Marion wasn’t waiting around to be rescued. She (I) went out with a sword as well.
June 27th, 2008 at 10:11 am
It was the kung fu that defeated me. I was okay with the modern idioms. I’m sure their idioms were modern to them.
And I usually played Robin. Boys just always got to do more cool stuff.
An aside — when I got involved in RPG’s with the Vic, Walter, etc. I started out playing women. But I discovered I got “protected” a lot. When I switched to playing men I got to do a lot more in the games. And trust me, these are really liberated guys. I don’t know to what to attribute that, but that was my experience.
June 27th, 2008 at 2:15 pm
Alas, Braveheart was a big hit, too. The Scottish still haven’t recovered from that one.
At least, that Robin Hood version sounds so over the top that those who think it’s history are beyond cure anyway. Like that lady from Texas (very pink dress, very pink lipstick, hair too blonde, lots of money inherited from a dead husband) who asked me if I had ever met Hitler. She was actually a sweet person without any I’m Rich attitude, but her grasp on history was more than feeble. It made me wonder what they teach at the schools in Texas.
I’m sure she will enjoy Robin Hood; she liked the old castles and people dressing up Mediaeval.
June 27th, 2008 at 2:46 pm
You’re a beautiful, young woman, Gabriele! Did she think WWII was like, _last week_???!! Sometimes I despair of the human race.
June 28th, 2008 at 5:33 am
Regarding the male RPGers protecting you when you were female, I’ve heard that the main reason the Israeli army phased women out of combat roles was because the guys were doing the same thing there, to the detriment of the mission.
June 28th, 2008 at 10:59 am
I read that too. I guess the solution is Amazon brigades.
The no women in combat rule is actually a huge disadvantage to women who want to make a career in the military. It’s really hard to become a general if you haven’t seen combat or led into combat.
Of course in that Iraq debacle there is no “front line”, so women are in combat all the time. Wonder if they get awarded purple hearts and bronze and silver stars? But if you did you’d be acknowledging that they are in combat.
June 28th, 2008 at 7:10 pm
I think many women have been decorated in Iraq for combat. My guess is the army doesn’t distinguish between planned and accidental. But it is hard to work your way up the promotional system without ever getting into the regular fighting.
June 29th, 2008 at 9:45 pm
I haven’t seen much in the way of protection of female characters in the RPGs I run, not even the ones in (quasi-) historical settings. I’m not sure if my women players are significantly younger than you are—they range from just past 30 to mid-40s. It may just be a statistical fluctuation rather than a generational difference.
At this exact instant, my collection of players is 60% female, though that’s partly because one of the guys who’s signed up for a planned campaign hasn’t finished designing his character, and I’m not sure he’ll make it—we’ve already postponed the first session by a month on his account, and if he holds us up again he’s out. But they’re oddly sorted out: three men and a woman in the present-day superhero campaign, five women and a man in the high fantasy campaign about privateers sailing under Atlantean letters of marque in the seas of myth (but three of the five women are playing cross-gender—on the other hand, so is the laggard man in the superhero campaign). I suppose there is some tendency for women to play cross-gender, but some of my most combat-enthusiastic women have never done so, not even in campaigns in historical settings. Of course, a campaign about the vampire slayer in 1817 Alta California had an excuse for taking liberties with history and authentic cultural attitudes. . . .