Take a guess. Do you think I’m, possibly, just a little excited about this upcoming movie (thanks to Steve Schaper for sharing the trailer with me)?

Sure, I have quibbles. The ship is centuries before its time. There’s a helmet that belongs in a different period, too. But all in all it looks good, and although I’d never pictured Russell Crowe as Bold Robin, he makes a rattling good warrior. All the talk of “the law” is good. I might mention that Robin is traditionally placed in Nottinghamshire, which is part of the old English Danelaw. There was a legacy of Norse republicanism in those parts.

Last weekend, when the Vikings and I lent our considerable glamor to the preview of How to Train Your Dragon, we went out to eat afterward, and the discussion turned to the old 1950s Robin Hood TV series with Richard Green, which we older Vikings remembered with great fondness. Some of the younger Vikings knew it too.

Then we swerved off to another, contemporaneous English show, called Sir Lancelot. I mentioned how much I’d loved that series. Robin Hood was on longer, and I saw it for years in re-runs, but I clearly recall how much I enjoyed Sir Lancelot, and how I missed it when it was gone (in those days, children, when a show went off the TV schedule, it was lost, lost, as if an uncle had died).

By coincidence, I ran across the complete set of Sir Lancelot episodes in a store shortly afterward, and I bought them and started viewing them.

You’ve probably had the same experience I have. If you get a chance to view a beloved television series from your childhood as an adult, it generally doesn’t live up to your memories.

I expected a rather silly show, and was not disappointed. For one thing, the hero (William Russell, who would later go on to be one of the first companions to the original Dr. Who) resembles Conan O’Brien in an unsettling way. He’s not as wimpy as Conan, but he’s no imposing physical presence.

The production values about match those of Robin Hood, which is to say they’re pretty low. Especially at the beginning, their casting budget appears to have been passing small, so that you have the spectacle of castles being beseiged with armies of four or five.

Also as in Robin Hood, they cheat on mail armor (as they also did in the Kirk Douglas The Vikings movie, and many other films in those days) by substituting a kind of knitted cloth, called nalebinding, spray-painted silver, for actual mail. This passes in a sort of superficial way, but anyone familiar with real mail can immediately see the difference in the way it hangs. Real mail is heavy, and hangs down. Nalebinding tends to curl up at the edges.

I was intrigued, though, by what I saw at first as a difference in attitude from Robin Hood. It’s well known that a number of American writers who’d been blacklisted in Hollywood went to England and got jobs writing for Robin Hood under assumed names. You can (I think) detect their collectivist attitudes in some of the episodes of that program. What better vehicle could there be for Marxism than the guy who stole from the rich and gave to the poor?

One Sir Lancelot episode, on the other hand, featured a plot where a rival king makes a great show of having all his weapons blunted in preparation for a tournament. But Lancelot manages to discover that he has a secret arsenal of sharp weapons hidden, ready to make a stealthy attack. That would seem to be a commentary on the Cold War disarmament movement, a reminder (as Reagan would later say) to “trust but verify.” So it occurred to me that Sir Lancelot may have been an intentional counterbalance to Robin Hood‘s leftism.

Alas, according to Wikipedia, the same bunch of Reds who wrote for Robin, wrote for Lance too. How the sharp sword script got in, I have no idea.

But I do recall my fondness for Sir Lancelot as a kid, and I’m enjoying it, taken on its own terms. The things that made me love it are the same things that persuade me, as an overweight, middle-aged man, to drag on heavy mail and go into single combat, again and again, with a guy who generally cleans my clock

We never really grow up.

Can’t wait for the Robin Hood movie.