oh look I am alive

[splendidissima]

...just busy. I'm teaching a five-week summer course on Robin Hood, which is wonderful fun. There is Douglas Fairbanks. And Jonas Armstrong.

I have also written another book review for Science Fiction Studies that should be out in November, and am attempting a new project, which is a co-written article for a book about medievalism and video games.

Comments

[splendidissima]

Clearly I need to sit with the cool kids next time! I have been missing out.

That is an awesome YouTube clip. I am almost tempted to show it to the Little Freshmen tomorrow, but then I might get some very strange final papers on Monday. Also, Cambridge, Cardiff--totally the same, right?

I need to watch more Robin of Sherwood. I've only seen random bits. (And now I have seen random bits of Robin himself.) I do think, from Richard's reactions there, that they are trying to imply something. It's subtle enough that an audience who doesn't know much about Richard might not read it as sexual, exactly, but...

I totally picked those two ballads based on a)usefulness for my dissertation and b)how odd and interesting they are. My Little Freshmen are at the mercy of my research interests.

I like Wolverine, and there is a lot of story to tell, and (ideally) a lot of character depth, but I wish he'd stop showing up everywhere. For someone who ought to be a loner, he really likes to be on super-teams. I find Cyclops much more interesting when he's *not* with Jean Grey and actually gets to be cool on his own. I suspect that that was one of the reasons I liked Whedon's run--Scott is actually pretty awesome, eventually.

[puckrobin]

The clips were from the 1975 BBC series The Legend of Robin Hood. In Robin of Sherwood, extra-geek points were gained by having John Rhys-Davies as Richard. I don't think they ever implied anything about that Richard other than all he cared about was war.

In my biggest X-Men period, Jean was still dead .. the first time. Cyclops was apart from the team and trying to find himself.

[puckrobin]

Actually, thinking about it more, I'd say that like Joss Whedon, the X-Men I really, really liked was Kitty Pryde. It probably helped that she joined the team in the first issue I ever read. (Not her first appearance. But it was Jean Grey's funeral and mainly an info dump by Cyclops which is as helpful a first issue as you could find. While the X-Men are at the funeral, Kitty's dropped off at the mansion on the last page and waits for them.

The bizarre thing about Kitty is when I started reading the character was young, but still a few years older than me. Both a mixture of identification and the cool older woman. Now as I've aged a lot faster than her, she's jailbait.

Robin of Sherwood - it's really hard for me to be unbiased on that one. I know there are some clunky things and some very dated things, but I still find it enjoyable and remarkable. I'm still working on an article about it. It ties with the Errol Flynn film for being my absolute favourite film/TV version of the legend.

[splendidissima]

Heh, yeah, I find I have kind of a similar problem when (re)reading young adult fantasy novels, sometimes--hard to identify with the main characters. (Sadly, I feel this way about early seasons of Buffy: I find myself thinking, "oh, just grow up already! especially about anything having to do with the opposite sex!")

By the way, I have friended you under my other lj account, in case you were wondering who the random person is. It's the account where all the fannish stuff will be moving, soon, and where I'll probably put that Gerald of Wales thing, once I get around to it. :-)

[puckrobin]

Thanks for the friending. I see some tales I'll have to read.

The Xavier/Magneto former friendship really blossomed during the time I was reading the X-Men. Stories of his travels with Xavier, and hell the whole Holocaust motivation was added then, along with Magneto's struggles with reformation. (Although he was Magnus back in the day. I think the Erik name first came from a later period where they temporarily retconned him into being a Gypsy because the idea of Jewish supervillain made someone uncomfortable.) John Byrne hated Claremont's changes and wanted to keep Magneto as the unredeemably evil cackling maniac. I think the popularity of Magneto in the films shows Claremont was on the right track.

I think Kitty was a bit smarter than the Buffy characters. (Also, she was far more mature than her older sometimes-boyfriend Colossus.) But then hey, don't you want to say "oh, just grow up already! especially about anything having to do with the opposite sex!" to all the characters of Star Trek: The Next Generation? And they're adults. (I don't think there would be any point in saying that to the characters of Smallville -- they were hopeless.)