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| New Adventures of Robin Hood |
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| TV,
Jeremy Carpenter,
20 January 1999 |
Rating: F1
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Amongst otherwise Tits ‘n’ Complete Arse merchants Channel 5’s rare skills are it’s buying in of job lots of the American shows that other channels never know what to do with (witness ITV’s handling of ‘Millenium’ ) and showing them prime time. Xena and Hercules would get rescheduled in favour of cricket every month if BBC 2 had them, and no doubt ‘Stargate SG-1’ would end up in one of those themed dead-end slots if Channel four had it. My faith in the Fivesters ability to know good genre drama when they see it is stretched awful however by their latest acquisition ‘The New Adventures of Robin Hood’.
This is apparently one of many show creatively cashing in on the success of the Sam Raimi produced Xena and Hercules, along side new hip re-readings of the myths of Sinbad and Tarzan. This show however misses the point completely, where the dialogue in Raimi’s shows is unashamedly a bit ‘rich’ the writing in Robin consists of people talking as if just to fill in the blanks between the turgidly slow action scenes. Even the extras in Xena display more charisma than the blank-faced nobodies playing Robin, Marian, Little John et al. You probably though the cheapo CGI in Hercules was a bit a the rough but functional side, but you won’t be prepared for background effects composition that looks like something from the young film-makers competition on ‘Screentest’.
Those who fondly remember the Micheal Praed ITV ‘Robin Hood’ ,will know how well the supernatural element (totally absent from the original stories) was handled. Whereas the plots with the evil Wood spirits, and Rula Lenska’s witch cult were actually really scary, in ‘New Adventures’ they’re just mundane. A ridiculous deep voiced ‘Dark’ Lord ’s out to marry Maid Marian just to piss off Robin, and only by finding a magic fibre-glass horn can Robin defeat him. It all comes across like a TV version of British 80’s disco fantasy‘Hawk the Slayer’ but whereas that occupies a ‘so-bad-it-was-great’ nostalgic niche in my mind, this sits fresh in my cortex like a stool. Avoid.
Channel 5 Sundays 6.10pm
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