oldshrewsburyian: So, pursuant to this discussion with @stripedroseandsketchpads… yes, I thi
oldshrewsburyian: So, pursuant to this discussion with @stripedroseandsketchpads… yes, I think Disney’s Robin Hood is a Vietnam War movie. I apologize in advance for ruining childhoods, possibly. To be clear, I also think the 1973 Robin Hood is a delightful romp. Here goes.Our narrator is Alan-a-Dale, who says that we’ve heard a lot of “legends and tall tales” about Robin Hood, and that he is going to tell us “how it is, or was, or whatever,” hinting at a collapsing of temporality which is a hallmark of medievalism. He also tells us that he is a minstrel, “a kind of early-day folk singer.” So… 12th-century Pete Seeger, basically.And he gets imprisoned, as do a lot of other people, for political resistance, which is… not really a medieval thing in the way it’s depicted here. The same thing goes for the mechanism of the state. While the Normans opposed by Robin Hood in 1938 are Nazi-coded, these bad guys are just… bureaucrats, who care far more about the endurance of political structures than the welfare of the people living within them. HMM does this remind us of anything?Perhaps most interestingly to me, Good King Richard™ is represented as having departed for his expensive foreign war on the other side of the world only after having been hypnotized. If he’s going to maintain his reputation as a virtuous ruler, in other words, this can’t have been his choice. Again, a much stronger condemnation than ‘38, which has Richard indignantly ask “You’d condemn Holy Crusade?”; Robin’s cheerful response is, of course, that he’ll condemn anything that leaves him in charge of safeguarding English justice. I love him. Anyway, in this Robin Hood, Robin and his men are much less explicitly political. They just want people to thrive. Moreover, they go back to nature: making their own food, doing their own laundry, creating something recognizably like a commune in the middle of Sherwood Forest. It matters too, I think, that the quest of Robin et al. for a better system is linked so prominently to children, who need the opportunity to grow up in a world without Cold War brinkmanship Norman exploitation. We also have politically dissident clergy and a political protest song as a high point. A pox on the phony king of England, and I rest my case. -- source link