The Hooded Man

Normally when I blog my blog entries almost write themselves. And so blogging about boys is easy, considering how much I think about them all the time.

At the same time, of course, it has to be said, I do start a lot of blogs which then peter out because my interest in a subject gets "blogged out". Once I've got my thoughts on a subject I'm interested in out onto the Internet I sort of "get it out of my system". And then I think of a neat title for a new blog, a new web-ID to go with it, and I'm off.

This evening I took a small trip back to my own childhood, watching the DVDs I got for Xmas (actually my own present to myself - Heh, heh, heh!) of Richard Carpenter's superb TV-version of Robin Hood from the 1980s. At this point, I am of course assuming that Americans have a vague idea who Robin Hood was, or at least what and who he was supposed to have been. (I.e. a Saxon outlaw living in the forest with a band of "merry men", robbing from the rich, e.g. especially the Norman invaders, and giving to the poor, e.g. other Saxons.) What he is, to this day, is of course the great hero and mystery figure that every boy has been at some point before he reached adolescence. He's part of our culture, he's part of our mystical and legendary inheritance, and he's part our childhood.

Carpenter, in his version, called Robin of Sherwood, did various interesting things with the legend. To my knowledge, indeed, these have all impacted to greater or lesser extent on how other filmmakers have approached the character and his story. It's now de rigueur, for example, to have an "ethnic" character in Robin Hood's band - although whereas nowadays this is in order to fulfil various politically correct ethnic quotas, in Robin of Sherwood it was actually quite unpremeditated and in fact at the time quite natural and logical (as is explained by in the commentaries on my DVDs).

Of the two most important "innovations" on Carpenter's part though, one was the element of magic. Almost as if using up various leftover MacGuffins from the King Arthur legends (including magic swords and magic arrows, with Herne the Hunter standing in for Merlin the Magician, and indeed, in a later episode, the Round Table itself), the sword and sorcery stuff gives the 1980s Robin a mystical kick that very few others can have had.

The other, conversely, is a deliberately gritty realism. No doubt this was partly a function of early budget restrictions, and partly indeed a function of fashionable modernist naturalism. But what it did, more importantly, was it grounded the magical elements of the story in what was credible and recognisable (always essential in fantasy!). At the same time it also the show a sense of historical authenticity (e.g. with a lot of filming taking place in authentic medieval buildings, not to mention, er, authentic English forests) and of contemporary relevance (e.g. especially Ray Winstone's portrayal of Will Scarlett as a sort of medieval football hooligan).

For me, most importantly of all, it wired directly into my preteen heart and soul, and in an extraordinary way it never really left. Every few years I still find the old Sherwood Forest whimsy comes upon me - and then it's off to the thirteenth century, Nottingham, the greenwood... and the Hooded Man!