Cartoons
The very first American cartoon with a Robin Hood theme appeared the year after the Errol Flynn film in 1939. Robin Hood Makes Good, one of the ‘Merrie Melodies’ produced by Warner Brothers, is a wincingly twee tale of three young squirrels who play Robin Hood games until two of them are caught by a fox masquerading as Maid Marian. The third, and cutest, of the junior squirrels is left to rescue his brothers in an act of Hood-like heroism. This was followed by other cartoons that appropriated material from the stories. Rabbit Hood (1949), featuring Bugs Bunny, nods only perfunctorily in the direction of the legend and is really no more than yet another variant on the familiar storyline of the bumptious Bugs getting the better of a dim-witted opponent, in this case one who happens to be called the Sheriff of Nottingham. At the very end, the briefest of shots from the 1938 Errol Flynn film is inserted into the animation to bring matters to a conclusion. By contrast, Robin Hood Daffy, a Warner Brothers cartoon made nine years later, assumes a greater knowledge of the stories and even echoes a motif that dates back to the old ballads in its opening confrontation between Robin, in the shape of Daffy Duck, and Friar Tuck/Porky Pig. Most of the rest of the action follows the increasingly desperate attempts of Robin/Daffy to prove to the friar that he is who he claims to be by robbing a rich man. All his efforts rebound on him and he decides finally that life as ‘Friar Duck’ will be better than that of an outlaw.
Other classic cartoon characters have been given the chance to appear in Robin Hood stories over the years. In Robin Hoodwinked (1958), the outlaw is imprisoned in the Sheriff of Nottingham’s castle, guarded only by Tom the cat. The mouse Jerry and his diaper-clad nephew Nibbles attempt to get the key from the cat and release the outlaw. Tom swallows the key and Jerry is obliged to lower Nibbles into the cat’s interior to get it. Tom downs a large draught of ale and Nibbles emerges from his mouth in an intoxicated state. The mice now have the key, however, and Robin Hood, only ever seen in silhouette, escapes. Unfortunately, the cat and mouse games of Tom and Jerry never seemed so funny in an historical setting and this example is no exception to the rule. Plus Nibbles speaks with a supposed cockney accent that is very nearly as inauthentic and as irritating as Dick Van Dyke’s in Mary Poppins. On TV the following year, Yogi Bear became Robin Hood Yogi, aiming to rob the rich tourists of Jellystone Park and give to the poor, ‘namely ourselves’, as he tells his sidekick Boo-Boo. Indeed, there was a period in the late fifties and early sixties when Hanna-Barbera, the creators of Yogi Bear and other familiar characters, seemed almost obsessed with the Robin Hood story. Drawling Huckleberry Hound was Robin Huck in a 1959 cartoon named ‘Nottingham and Yeggs’; Loopy de Loop, a wolf with an extravagant French accent, enters Sherwood in search of Robin in ‘Not in Nottingham’ from 1962 and finds him in the shape of a squat bowman with an even more extravagant New York accent.
The Robin Hood story was flexible enough to accommodate all kinds of adaptations and transformations. In the late 1960s the Canadian company Krantz Films Inc. produced Rocket Robin Hood, a series of children’s cartoons in which the outlaw and his band are operating in the future. In the thirtieth century, Robin is a square-jawed spaceman battling against Prince John, would-be ruler of the universe, and his henchman the Sheriff of NOTT (National Outer-space Terrestrial Territories). One intriguing contributor to the series (as uncredited writer and director) was Ralph Bakshi, the American animator who was soon to surprise fans of traditional cartoons with the X-rated Fritz the Cat. Young Robin Hood, in which the usual band of outlaws were all portrayed as teenagers, was a bland and uninspired TV cartoon made by Hanna-Barbera which ran for two series in the early nineties. At about the same time, Japanese animators turned their attention to the stories and produced Robin Hood No Daiboken (‘Robin Hood’s Great Adventure’), an anime in 52 episodes. Here too the heroes of Sherwood were largely teens and pre-teens, the kind of unnaturally wide-eyed moppets who populate so many anime. For anyone unfamiliar with the conventions of the genre, this Japanese cartoon version of the story can seem downright weird but it does include most of the characters established in the Robin Hood stories over the centuries and even some of the basic themes and motifs. The hero is Robert of Huntington, dispossessed by a wicked Nottinghamshire Norman, here identified as ‘Lord Alwine’. There is a Maid Marian, a Little John and a Much. There is a Friar Tuck although, as a bear-like figure with an Irish brogue in the English translation, he looks and sounds like no other Friar Tuck ever seen on screen. Perhaps the oddest of all cartoon incarnations of Robin is one that dates from 2001. In the hugely successful, computer-animated Shrek, he has been transformed, for no very obvious reason, into a Frenchman, a debonair Robin des Bois complete with Gallic accent courtesy of Vincent Cassel, who attempts to rescue Princess Fiona from the eponymous ogre but discovers that she doesn’t much want to be rescued.
The only full length cartoon film based on the Robin Hood stories was made by Disney in 1973. The animators created a medieval bestiary of creatures – some native to Britain, some very definitely not – to take on the roles. Robin and Marian are foxes, Little John a bear, Friar Tuck a badger, King John a lion and the Sheriff of Nottingham a wolf. At its best, Disney might have made a very good cartoon version of the stories but, by and large, the early seventies didn’t see Disney at its best and this sentimental and uninventive film rarely gives the impression that those involved in it have much affection for, or knowledge of, the Robin Hood legend. By far the most irritating of its faults is the voice characterisation which was shaped by a determination to play to the US market. Robin and Marian are played by English actors and a couple of the minor characters have been equipped with grating Cockney accents but most of the leading figures speak with American voices. Alan-a-Dale, played as a rooster who is also a not particularly good country singer, is voiced by the not particularly good country singer Roger Miller. The Sheriff and Little John both have Southern drawls. Friar Tuck is played by fat cowboy actor Andy Devine and sounds as if he’s just ridden in from the range. Only Peter Ustinov, as a Prince John given to tantrums and thumb-sucking, and Terry-Thomas, as his fawning snake courtier Sir Hiss, give voice performances that are both skilful and also sound right for a Robin Hood film.
Illustrated Robin
Most people have their own image of Robin Hood but there are certain elements which are common to nearly all the pictures of the iconic outlaw that individuals carry in their heads. He is a handsome, athletic figure dressed in Lincoln green or, occasionally, in red. He wears a green peaked hat, usually with a feather in it, and he carries a longbow and a quiver full of arrows on his shoulder. He is usually bearded or has a moustache. This is an image that has survived many deliberate attempts to reinvent it in recent film and TV presentations of the character and it is tempting to assume that it dates back hundreds of years. In fact, it is a relatively recent creation, an amalgam of late nineteenth-century illustrations and the images on screen in the Fairbanks and Flynn films. Throughout most of his career, nobody knew what the famous outlaw looked like nor, it seems, did they much care.
For many centuries, visual representation of Robin is either very difficult to find or so blandly generic that it lacks any real interest. It was only in the late eighteenth century that the first artist of any merit turned his attention to the outlaw and it was only in the middle decades of the following century that a tradition of depicting him was first established. Perhaps the first surviving image intended to represent Robin Hood can be found in St. Mary’s Church in Beverley in the East Riding of Yorkshire. A wooden carving on a misericord which dates from c. 1450 shows two figures which scholars believe are meant to be Robin and the king standing amongst some trees. (In the other great medieval church in the town, Beverley Minster, a small stone sculpture from the previous century depicts a man with a longbow who might just conceivably be Robin but seems much more likely to be an unspecific archer.) Move forward a hundred years and a stained glass window now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, whi
ch probably dates to the middle of the sixteenth century, shows figures from the May Games. Maid Marian and Friar Tuck are clearly recognisable and some people have claimed one of the others as Robin but the identification seems, at the very least, debatable.
In the ballads, broadsides and chapbooks that proliferated over the next two centuries, Robin was often illustrated but the woodcuts that were used were common images. They were not intended to be accurate portraits of him and his associates and they were often recycled from other texts. Indeed, many of them made no gesture at all towards medievalism. In the same way that Romans on the stage in Shakespeare’s day dressed like ordinary Elizabethans, Robin and his merry men were most often depicted in clothes that were contemporary with the period in which the woodcuts were printed. Ruffs, long gowns and shovel hats were in evidence rather than medieval costume. Or medieval hoods.
Visual representation of Robin began to change and become more specific in the second half of the eighteenth century. Joseph Ritson’s 1795 collection of the extant ballads remains one of the most significant works on the outlaw leader ever published. Its chief importance lies, of course, in the texts that Ritson so painstakingly gathered but the illustrations to the first edition have great value in their own right. The little woodcuts which act as headpieces for some of the ballads and which are also scattered through the pages of Ritson’s two volumes are by John and Thomas Bewick. Although he was one of the first men ever to earn his living almost entirely as a book illustrator, John Bewick, who died in the same year that Ritson’s book was published at the age of only 35, is largely forgotten today save for his family connections. His brother Thomas, however, is still considered one of the greatest of all wood engravers, famous particularly for his images of birds and for his vignettes of the English countryside. Robin’s world, as depicted by the Bewicks, continues to owe a lot to the life they saw around them. His opponent in a quarterstaff fight in the little engraving illustrating the ballad of ‘Robin Hood and the Tanner’, for example, looks suspiciously like a sturdy young farmer of the day. However, the Bewicks did make some attempts to situate their Robin in the past. In the same engraving the hero himself is dressed in their idea of a medieval forester’s garb. On his head he has the kind of feathered hat that has since become a familiar part of the outlaw’s everyday outfit. This is Robin taking his first steps on the way to becoming the immediately recognisable icon he is today.
It was the Victorian era that continued the process. Daniel Maclise’s painting of ‘Robin Hood Entertaining Richard the Lionheart in Sherwood Forest’ was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1839. The Irish-born Maclise was a friend of Charles Dickens and became famous for his energetic and dramatic pictures of scenes from history and literature. His Robin Hood painting was one of his first great successes. It shows Robin, the focus of the picture, toasting the king, dressed in the armour of a crusader, who sits at the foot of a tree. Other figures from the legend such as Little John and Friar Tuck are easily recognisable in the foreground. In the background a forest clearing is filled with the more anonymous members of the outlaw band. A contemporary critic, singing the painting’s praises, wrote of ‘how admirable are the minor details, how finely all has been imagined, how skillfully all has been executed.’ In the exhibition catalogue the painting was accompanied by a quotation from a pastiche Robin Hood ballad which was printed in full in one of the magazines of the day but, looking at the painting today, the literary influence that is most apparent is Sir Walter Scott’s. It was only twenty years after the publication of Ivanhoe. Maclise’s Robin, resplendent in scarlet, may not be much like Scott’s description of Locksley but the image of the merry men, surrounded by their booty and the riches of the forest as they pledge themselves to the king, carries plenty of echoes of the novel. And the whole sense of a fondly imagined medieval world of good cheer and rowdy sociability (in implicit contrast to the alienation of contemporary industrial society) owes much to Scott’s fiction.
In truth, Scott’s vision of the past was the major influence on historical painting for much of the nineteenth century and other Robin Hood images of the Victorian era reflect it. However, Locksley the Saxon hero was not the only way in which Robin could be portrayed. The Victorians also liked the idea of Robin as courtly lover of the greenwood, even more devoted to his Maid Marian than to his Sherwood pastimes. A prime example of this alternative nineteenth-century Robin emerged unexpectedly in 2009 when a painting by Thomas Frank Heaphy of the outlaw leader and Maid Marian was found in a broom cupboard in a Sussex working men’s club. Dated to the 1860s, Heaphy’s image depicts the Sherwood lovers holding hands in a forest glade. A barefooted Marian has a smile playing about her face; Robin, bearded and clad in red coat and brown leggings, gazes intently into her eyes. His hunting hounds prowl around his feet and a chest full of treasures, presumably plundered from the rich and destined for the poor, lies open on the ground. Showing the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites in his attention to painterly detail, Heaphy, a minor artist of the day, gives us a picture of Robin and Marian as the Victorians liked to imagine them.
Historical paintings, of course, reached only a relatively small audience. For Robin’s iconic status to grow and develop, he had to be portrayed in other media. The period between 1880 and 1920 was a Golden Age for book illustration on both sides of the Atlantic. The success in 1883 of Howard Pyle’s The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood in America, described earlier, was a consequence of his gifts as an artist as much as his skill as a writer. It is in Pyle’s black-and-white illustrations that the outlines of the classic image of Robin Hood begin to emerge. Here is the hero in his forest attire and feathered cap. Here is the lithe and handsome athlete that later appears in the Fairbanks and Flynn films. Reproduced time and again, often with additional colouring, Pyle’s illustrations embedded a particular vision of Robin in the American popular imagination. As we have seen, other illustrators in the US, many of them pupils of Pyle, produced their own versions of the outlaw in the decades that followed but they all owed at least something to the pioneering work in The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood. The image created at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century by Pyle, Louis Rhead, NC Wyeth and others has been a long-lasting one.
During the same period in Britain, some of the most talented and well-known illustrators of the day were also turning their attention to Robin. Arguably the most influential of all of them was Walter Crane who produced a sequence of images late on in his life for Henry Gilbert’s 1912 book Robin Hood and the Men of the Greenwood. In many ways, Crane must have seemed the ideal artist to work on stories of an outlaw renowned for taking from the rich and giving to the poor. Early in his career, he was associated both politically and artistically with William Morris. Like Morris, he was a convinced socialist with an idealised view of the Middle Ages. In the 1890s he had published The Claims of Decorative Art, a polemical but successful work which attempted to show that true art could only flourish in a society where wealth was more equitably distributed. His sympathies must have been with Robin and his Merry Men but the illustrations he created for Gilbert’s book are curiously subdued, even stilted, and are certainly not amongst his best work. Only the tapestry-like images of the outlaws kneeling before Richard the Lionheart and of the king joining the hands of Robin and Marian carry much conviction. The line drawings by HM Brock, a much lesser artist than Crane, which were also used to illustrate Robin Hood and the Men of Greenwood, actually have more vigour than the older man’s work.
Crane and Brock produced their work in the last years when book and magazine illustration could be said to be as important as the cinema in shaping people’s visual imaginations. Once Robin had appeared in the movies, the most popular cultural medium of the first half of the twentieth century, his image there rapidly began to dominate his image in print. However, the influence worked both ways. Robin as imagined by the illustrators of the Golden Age of Illustration affected his cinematic incarnations in the 19
22 and 1938 films. The portrayals by Fairbanks and Flynn then began to feed back into the representations of Robin in books and, increasingly, comics. The first American Robin Hood comics appeared in the 1930s. The character has since made dozens of appearances in comics ranging from movie tie-ins to recreations of the legend set in post-apocalyptic futures. Superheroes and superheroines from Batman and Superman to Wonder Woman have time-travelled back to the twelfth century to meet him. One superhero, the Green Arrow, first created in 1941 and still going strong, seems to have pinched his outfit and many of his attributes from Robin Hood.
The same year that saw the debut of the Green Arrow also saw the first publication of Classics Illustrated, the well-known series of comic book adaptations of famous works of literature which initially appeared under the title of Classic Comics. The Robin Hood stories were ideal material for the new series and a Classics Illustrated version, based in part on Howard Pyle’s perennially popular book, appeared as Issue No. 7 in December 1942. Errol Flynn’s performance as Robin was still fresh in people’s minds and the original, somewhat crude illustrations obviously owed a lot to the image of the outlaw leader created by the 1938 film. The influence was even clearer when a reprint of the Classics Illustrated comic was published in the 1950s with new art work by Jack Sparling, an illustrator who went on to work for both of the giants of the American comic book industry, Marvel and DC. Sparling’s Robin was easily recognisable as a close cousin of Flynn’s. The concept of great literature in comic book form pioneered by Classics Illustrated has been frequently copied and very nearly every lookalike of the series that has sprung up in the last seventy years has included an issue telling the Robin Hood stories.
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