YMMV / Zorro

• Adaptation Displacement: Let's face it, most of you have seen the movies and/or the 1950s TV series, not the original stories. In a more direct example, in the first book, Zorro wore a sombrero and full-face mask. But McCulley liked the flat Andalusian hat and half-mask Douglas Fairbanks wore in the movie so much that he wrote that costume into all the later stories.
• Awesome Music: The opening themes for the 1950s and 1990s live-action shows come to mind.
• Complete Monster: See here.
• Fridge Brilliance: Works where Diego was formerly known as brave have the characters don't really wonder about his foppish behaviour once he's back from Spain... Because he just escaped the Peninsular War and he comes with a pre-made excuse of having fought in a ferocious war and just having enough of combat.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: For obvious reasons, due to the historical setting, the franchise is very popular in Mexico and Latin America, to the grade there's a couple of Zorro films done in Mexico.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • In the original novel, The Curse of Capistrano (later reprinted as The Mark of Zorro), Zorro forms a posse with his fellow caballeros to take on the governor and his men. They decide to call themselves "The Avengers".
  • In the second novel, The Further Adventures of Zorro, Zorro is repeatedly referred to as being a "land pirate".
• Newer Than They Think: Due to the iconic nature and well told storyline, Zorro is often thought to be an old folk tale from the settler days of California, and not a story made whole-cloth in 1919.
• Older Than They Think: The Legend of Zorro received a pretty big backlash from fans for two big reasons. First, there was the fact that Elena had divorced him and then proceeded to treat him horribly throughout the first half of the film. Second, Don Alejandro had a son who acted as his sidekick but many fans saw him as being an annoying Scrappy. In actuality, this wasn't the first time a Zorro story had these two elements. The 1996 anime Kaiketsu Zorro featured a Zorro who had both a love interest, Lolita, who treated him badly for almost the entire series and a boy sidekick, Bernardo/Little Zorro, who accompanied and helped him in almost every episode. In the case of the Lolita/Elena comparison, it should be noted that Lolita treated Zorro in his Don Diego civilian persona far worse than Elena did with Don Alejandro in Legend of Zorro, constantly belittling and making fun of Diego for allegedly being lazy and cowardly and at one point giving Diego a black eye for supposedly not coming to her rescue (even though he DID as Zorro). It wasn't until the very end of the series that Lolita finally warmed up to Diego and began treating him as a real romantic prospect, whereas Elena only divorced Alejandro because she had been blackmailed by Pinkerton agents into doing so (as opposed to Lolita who treated Diego badly of her own free will), otherwise they would have released Zorro's identity and put her family's lives in jeopardy. While Kaiketsu Zorro is far more obscure and less well known than The Legend of Zorro, it's pretty safe to say that the anime gets nowhere near the amount of hatred that the live action Banderas-verse sequel does, despite sharing what was fundamentally a very similar storyline premise.
• Once Original, Now Common: In the original novel, Diego's Secret Identity is patently obvious to anyone familiar with basically any superhero comic book at all, including by Popcultural Osmosis, even if they're not familiar with Zorro as a franchise. Except many of those comics, most notably Batman, were inspired by Zorro in the first place.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: Unsuprisingly, McCulley's original stories are much bloodier than most adaptations, especially the Disney version.

---