I guess I haven’t mentioned it much here, but I’m quite fascinated with Robin Hood. Not fascinated because he’s complex or there’s a lot to think about with him, but fascinated in a very childish way.
I have a confession.
Deep down I'd love to be Robin Hood - or at least one of the Merry Men. I’m sure this was initially sparked by the late [sic] great Kevin Costner. I was full on obsessed with Prince of Thieves when I was growing up. But I was also obsessed with a lot of Robin Hood media, which seems, looking back, to have been quite prolific in the 1990's. We had not only Costner but also Cary Elwes in Men in Tights, Maid Marian and Her Merry Men (which I watched religiously - Kate Lonergan, an early crush) and the release of Disney's version on VHS. Additionally, in terms of videogames, I was pretty obsessed with Conquest of the Longbow on DOS early on in life (and it remains a fantastic adventure game to revisit to this day!) and while we didn't own the game, I remember pouring over screenshots of a Robin Hood themed version of Commandos (The Legend of Sherwood) in PC ZONE.
Outside of consumer products, I could be found as a child, around the age of six or seven, running like a maniac around the Mendip Hills pretending to be Robin or Little John (or, now I'm remembering, any number of characters from Brian Jacques' Redwall series of books - my other great childhood obsession!). My dad would take us out for walks pretty much every weekend and it was my opportunity to entirely envelop the hills into my imaginative world; populating the empty fields with archers, galloping brigands or the sheriff's evil entourage.
Which is all to say I adore Robin's swashbuckling adventures in pretty much any form it takes (though I've not yet watched the newer, grittier film versions of the story). A bit like the romantic notion of pirates, there's a kind of roughness or ambiguity to a character who engages in theft and exists outside the law, which definitely appealed to me as a child. My one blind spot I guess, in terms of Robin media, are books. I recently bought a copy of one of the Ladybird books for my son - who (at the age of 3) is sadly not that interested. I've also read Henry Gillbert's early romantic version, but it was ...turgid, to say the least.
But I think my version of Robin Hood will always be some mixture of Costner and Lonergan. Noble but also down and dirty - with a healthy dose of silliness for good measure. I guess I'd like to see more of Robin in videogames but my hunch is that, in terms of contemporary games, we'd get some kind of humongous open-world (not unlike Shadow of Mordor or something like that), which is much too much like work for our man of the woods. Really I'm happy to keep Robin in the games of children, running around shooting invisible bows and arrows.
