Indy Week!

With the release of Indiana Jones, we thought it’d be fun to take a look at some swashbuckling, danger-brimming, adrenaline-coursing, good old-fashioned adventures!

Tyler Clark
June 26, 2023

Good morning Consumers. This is please consume, the film newsletter that will never pay full price for Peacock.

The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)

With the release of Indiana Jones, we thought it’d be fun to take a look at some swashbuckling, danger-brimming, adrenaline-coursing, good old-fashioned adventures!

Let’s commence the week with one of the greatest rascals in all of cinema: Robin Hood.

The Adventures of Robin Hood is about as classic of a tale as you can get, faithful to a fault even, but it’s also thrilling, and rapturous, and is the forefather of numerous action and adventure films to follow in the next decades.

Inspiration

It’s not hard to see what Spielberg could have taken away while watching this film; it holds many of the hallmarks of a classic Indy adventure. So let’s go through some of them together!

The Star of the Show

While Robin Hood might not have donated his findings to the museum, Errol Flynn certainly feels like a roadmap to how Harrison Ford would come to embody the iconic, Dr. Jones. He’s charming within the scene in the way that his charm jumps off the screen and into the audience, not quite winking at the crowd, but certainly intentional in a “I’m a handsome devil, aren’t I?” sort of way.

Characterization

The way that Robin and Indy are written feels very in line with each. They're rebellious against the bad guys in the name of the good guys and also, regrettably, both love to neg women.

The only real difference you can see in these two characters is that with Robin Hood you know he will always get his man and win the day.

Indiana Jones, well, he’s always coming up short-handed.

This really is an interesting commentary of the times and what audiences are looking for at different points in time. See, when Robin Hood came out in 1938, film was still a fairly new medium.

We were looking at our movie stars as larger than life by the time we got around to the 80s. But we had seen the same hero cycled through so many times we were interested to see one who was vulnerable. We wanted a little realistic failure mixed in with our hero!

The Score

As you watch today’s clip, take a second to just listen to that score. The sound is vibrant and fantastic.

It sounds so reminiscent of the type of work John Williams will become iconic for. It is used in a way that emphasizes the shock and awe of the moment without overstaying its welcome. It then allows the scene to play out.

Miles Davis very famously said, “It's not the notes you play, it's the notes you don't play."

Williams is a musician that knows the value of that. And you hear the echoes of what’s to come in this original score by Erich Wolfgang Korngold.