There are two ways to look at this set. The first is to fully appreciate how good of a show Robin of Sherwood truly is. Led by the mullet sporting Michael Praed as Robin of Loxley, the show had a healthy mixture of authenticity of the original character, while providing a magical taste to keep the show more than just men in tights hanging out in the woods. Having that mixture was incredibly important, especially as the series grew older and older. For example, if you are coming into the series for the very first time (like yours truly) you will see a bit of hokey-ness residing in certain that cast doubt on the entertainment value of the show. When I watched the first episode and saw the very rough fighting sequences and the cheesy 80s moments when it came to the ‘love’ scenes, I have to admit I was a bit concerned. As the series progress and the actors grew into their roles, and their surroundings became more familiar to the cast everything started to fall into place. The acting started to get more convincing, the actors started trusting each other more and the fighting sequences became more natural and less clunky. About the fifth or sixth episode everything started to fire perfectly on all cylinders.
I could see why this show was rated so highly by critics and fans alike.
To help out all of this you get some great cast members. Praed plays a very stout and strong Robin of Loxley. While it’s very difficult to look past the God awful mullet (sorry, we’re out of Kentucky, it’s tough to love that hair style), once you do you’ll find a very focused and passionate actor that took one of the most valuable characters in British history and made a helluva effort to bring that character perfectly to life. Again, at the beginning of the series I was a bit shaky on how well he was going to work out, but you can see as the first series goes on how absolutely sold he becomes with who this character is. Of course, it takes more than just one man to bring Robin of Loxley to life, as the brilliant Ray Winstone’s Will Scarlet, the burly Clive Mantle’s Little John and the beautiful Judi Trott’s Lady Marion helps quite a bit.
While the acting is certainly strong it was made stronger by the location of the shoot. Shot in the English hillside in actual castles and forests, it’s easy to see how the actors got in character with such a good atmosphere surrounding them. Again, it’s so much nicer seeing ‘on location’ type of environments than ugly, dreary sound stages for a show like this. It would have been much easier to just build half a castle in an artificially lit sound stage and go from there. Fighting the elements, the show did its best to get the actors and audience in the mood for Robin of Sherwood. It’s really too bad more shows don’t do it like this.
So are there any flaws to the show? Well, like I stated above the show really does have a rough start. It takes about five episodes before everyone reaches their comfort level. Once it takes off it never looks back, which makes it fun. Getting over the initial hump of the start will take patience, so stick with it.
As for the real reason you want to read this review (because most of you already know how great this show is), how did it do on the HD side of things? Well, it didn’t translate entirely well. I’m not sure if the age of the film hurt, or if the film was kept up poorly, but there is a lot of artifacts and noise in the shots to make you cringe a bit. While admittedly the HD does get cleaner and cleaner as the shows progress, there isn’t a lift-off point for the HD visuals. There are moments where you can see how much was cleaned up, but they are far and few between. There is an especially pretty moment when Little John and Robin are fighting their famous battle on the river, which looks really good. On the flipside to that coin, when you get to darker, foggier moments in some scenes it just simply looks like a DVD quality production. While that certainly is better than a VHS production, it still isn’t quite up to the snuff of a strong Blu-ray transfer. There just aren’t enough of those moments to say, “Wow, what a great Blu-ray.” This is surprising, as Acorn Media has always done a really good job with their Blu-ray transfers. I honestly, have to write this one up as just not being able to make poor film quality into great HD; sometimes that happens. The audio is still impressive, though as you get stereo instead of mono (that’s a welcomed upgrade).
With all this said, you do get two beautiful series in one set. You also get some fantastic bonus features, which include solid commentary, a great set of behind the scenes documentary (I love seeing this stuff), some new featurettes (though in SD) and some great outtakes. Acorn Media put together some very solid stuff for this Blu-ray release of one of the highly rated shows that the BBC brought to life. Here’s a complete list of what you can expect:
Blu-ray
– Five episode commentaries
– Behind-the-scenes documentary
– Photo galleries containing nearly 500 images (wowsers)
– Music-only tracks for four episodes
DVD
– Two documentaries about the making of Series 1 and Series 2
– New featurettes for three episodes
– Outtakes
– Textless and foreign credit sequences
– PDF material including PR, Richard Carpenter’s original story treatment, and several scripts
That’s a lot of stuff for a release like this and it makes it worth the price of admission.