Robin Hood

I finally watched Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves—the one with Kevin Costner and a very confusing relationship between the Sheriff of Nottingham and a shrieking witch. That only leaves a half million more versions of Robin Hood to go!

Actually, I had seen this movie once before, but I didn’t remember anything after the first ten minutes because I was too busy being emotionally devastated. But we’ll get back to that in a minute.

Like the rest of my generation, I was a Disney junkie as a child. My parents say that I wasn’t very interested in the princesses, though. Instead, after I saw The Little Mermaid at about age four, I liked to stomp around the house wearing my mom’s snow parka and cackling like Ursula. Later I switched to Sleeping Beauty’s evil fairy godmother, Maleficent. She was cooler because she had green skin and no tentacles and a better name. And she could turn into a dragon.

But my favorite Disney movie of all time ever was Robin Hood. All the characters are animals, including a singing rooster voiced by Roger Miller, and Robin himself is a dashingly handsome red fox. I’m pretty sure that canine outlaw was my first true love.

Anyway, my mom knew how obsessed I was with the movie, even if she didn’t fully grasp my feelings for the hero, so she rented a copy of Prince of Thieves for me to see. “It’s a different version of Robin Hood,” she explained. “You’ll like it!” I was sure she was right.


I was seven or eight, and this was my first experience with multiple adaptations of the same story. I did already understand about the same actors playing different characters, though, thanks to concurrent viewing of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Reading Rainbow.

(TANGENT: I asked my mom one day why LeVar Burton had an earring on Reading Rainbow. She didn’t know how to explain this phenomenon to a first-grader, so she told me that he wanted to be sure we could tell the difference between LeVar and Geordi La Forge.)

So I curled up in a big chair and waited, overwhelmingly excited to see a whole new movie about my very favorite characters.

Imagine my disappointment when, instead of my furry beloved, I was faced with THIS guy and his radical 1991 costume epic pseudo-mullet.


I hadn’t known until that moment that the Robin Hood story was about humans. I assumed that any “different version” would have a different fox and a different bear, just like how the live-action version of 101 Dalmatians still has dogs.

This revelation ranks as one of the major traumas of my childhood, right up there with losing my second-favorite My Little Pony or almost getting swept out to sea.

I don’t remember watching past Robin’s return to England in the second scene. My mom probably turned it off, either because my innocent childhood illusions were shattering violently or because she noticed how many maimings, blindings, skewerings, and attempted rapes were going on.

Though I never gave up on Robin entirely, I eventually transferred most of my energies to practicing running on all fours and writing dozens of first-person stories about wolves, in case I was able to fulfill my career goal of becoming one. Of course, most of the process repeated itself a couple of years later when I got to see Balto.

The My Little Pony Path to Fame and Fortune

I spent the last ten days at the Kerrville Folk Festival, camping on a ranch in Texas with thousands of aging hippies and an internet connection just slightly slower than hair growth. After the seventeenth round of “The connection has timed out—Google is taking too long to respond,” I stopped trying. This distressing lack of perseverance is why I deserted you for two weeks without posting anything.

Kerrville is a music festival that focuses on singer-songwriters, so most of the people there don’t just listen to the music, they write and perform their own. I, on the other hand, do not, so I pretty much just lurk in corners saying “Anybody wanna hear ‘Leaving on a Jet Plane’ again?”

This is not to say I’ve never written any songs.

My first composition, entitled “Magic Enchanted Kingdom Flying Unicorn Pony Horses,” was serialized over two or three years of my elementary education and delivered from my favorite swing on the school playground. It chronicled the exploits of an adventurous and sparkly band of My Little Ponies, including the Unicorn, Pegasus, Earth Pony, and Flutter Pony varieties (not Sea Ponies; they were annoying in the TV show). I used to sing my song from a swing with my eyes closed and imagine that everyone on the playground would spontaneously gather around, drawn by my glorious voice and enthralling lyrics. I was super popular in elementary school.

This song was destined to be a million-seller for sure. Tragically, I was never signed to a major label, so I don’t have a recording of it. What I do have is a cassette tape of me telling stories about the same cast of characters.

I cannot have been older than six when this tape was made. Since I wasn’t big enough to set up the tape recorder myself, it starts with, “Well, I was going to tell a story if my Mama would leave.” Then, with the kind of intensity my adult self reserves for ideological debate or super chicken nachos, I tell about the unicorn flying enchanted kingdom magic horse ponies and their expedition to the big cave to defeat the giants and save Ponyland. Apparently, every one of the adjectives was completely necessary at all times. All of the sentences sound like this: “Then Starlight the sparkly white magic unicorn pony enchanted magic kingdom horse said—flying horse—said ‘Come on!’ and her friend Lemon the yellow flying magic horse enchanted kingdom pony unicorn came, and they flew to the scary enchanted magic cave of giants of Ponyland.”

The magic unicorn flying ponies also went on three successive picnics. You can tell they were enchanted picnics because they included all the delicacies I wasn’t allowed to eat in first grade. “Then Sparkle River and Lickety Split packed Fruit Roll-Ups and Doritos and real corn dogs and purple grape juice!” Flying magic enchanted unicorn sparkle kingdom horse ponies have the best parties. They totally would have listened to my song.