This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Red Shoe: Does the Moorish character have any basis in the traditional mythos? He seems like a pretty blatant example of inserting a Token Minority to make the story more ethnically balanced.
Looney Toons: Oh, definitely. He's a relatively recent — like, the last 20 or 30 yars — addition. That's why he's not always there and there's no one "standard" Moor character. Let him hang around in the mythos for another century or two — or let a really influential writer come up with a memorable version of him — and he'll become as standardized as the others.
Paul A: It's like this: The pilot of Robin Of Sherwood included Nasir as a one-off character, but the production team liked how he turned out so much that they rewrote the end of the pilot to have him join the Merry Men and become a regular character.
Then the writer of the Prince of Thieves movie watched Robin Of Sherwood instead of doing proper research, and included a Moorish Merry Man because he thought it was traditional.
And Men in Tights did it because it was a parody of Prince of Thieves, and Maid Marian and Her Merry Men did it because it was a parody (of either or both, I'm not sure).
Looney Toons: And here we see an accelerated example of how all the other characters ended up in the Robin Hood mythos. <grin>
Silent Hunter: The new UK version of Robin Hood has a Saracen character (Djaq, played by relative newcomer Anjali Jay) turn up after six episodes. Probable example of this trope, even though she's not a Moor.
Looney Toons: Same basic idea, though — a Muslim in the Merry Men. Hey, it's a new character for the cycle — it'll take a century or two for it to coalesce into a single coherent form (and maybe not even then — both Robin and Will Scarlet have two distinct versions, after all).
Looney Toons; Ununnilium, why did you unWikify When Things Were Rotten? However briefly it lasted, it was in fact a genuine TV show.
Ununnilium: Oh, sorry, thought it was a movie.
Silent Hunter: Anyone up for doing a separate entry on the 2006 BBC series? Plus possible spoiler page.
Looney Toons: In re:
- About the same time as Kevin Costner's Prince of Thieves movie came out, Steve Jackson Games published GURPS Robin Hood, which not only laid out the original stories for use in roleplaying, but recreated them several times more in different genres, including the Old West and Cyberpunk.
Just as a point of historical interest, my wife and I cold-proposed GURPS Robin Hood as a follow-up to our earlier GURPS Camelot specifically because the Costner movie was going to come out a year or so hence, and we thought there was a good chance we could catch a wave of renewed interest with the book.
Tannhaeuser: Goldfritha, I really like the Wyeth picture. I do have to wonder why you suppressed the mention of Langland as the author of Piers Ploughman. Does it seem like Natter to you? At any rate, I do think that “poem” is a far more accurate description than “manuscript” — Piers exists in over 50 manuscripts.
