Trailer
Plot summary
In a medieval England of talking animals, Robin Hood, a fox, and Little John, a bear, hide out in Sherwood Forest and rob the wealthy to give the money to the poor. King Richard has gone to the Crusades, so his brother Prince John rules in his place, taxing Nottingham heavily and sending the Sheriff of Nottingham after the outlaw. On the road to Nottingham, Prince John's coach is held up by two fortune-tellers who are really Robin and Little John, and the embarrassed prince offers a large reward for Robin's capture. The townspeople, among them a young rabbit called Skippy who admires Robin, suffer under the taxes. Friar Tuck brings word to the hideout that Prince John will hold an archery contest whose prize is a kiss from Maid Marian, King Richard's niece and Robin's childhood sweetheart.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Robin Hood (1973)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Production fell behind because of time spent developing several settings and auditioning voice actors for the title role, so to meet the deadline the animators recycled dance sequences from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, The Jungle Book and The Aristocats in the "Phony King of England" scene.
- Tommy Steele was chosen to voice Robin Hood after The Happiest Millionaire, while Peter Ustinov was cast because Walt Disney had enjoyed him in Blackbeard's Ghost. Steele could not make his character sound heroic, so the part went to Brian Bedford over Bernard Fox after a May 1971 test.
- Robin Allan wrote in Walt Disney and Europe that Ken Anderson wept when he saw how his character concepts had been processed into stereotypes for the animation. Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston said another casualty was making the Sheriff of Nottingham a goat instead of Reitherman's preferred villainous wolf.
- Louis Prima was so angered at not being considered for a role that he personally paid the recording expenses for the album Let's "Hear" it For Robin Hood and sold it to Disneyland Records.
- Ken Anderson pitched a Robin Hood feature in 1968 that used anthropomorphic animals rather than humans, taking ideas from Reynard the Fox; it became the first completely "post-Walt" Disney animated feature and the first with an entirely non-human cast.
- The song "Whistle-Stop" was sped up for the Hampster Dance, one of the earliest internet memes, and later played at normal speed in the Super Bowl XLVIII commercial for T-Mobile.
- The film's song "The Phony King of England" closely resembles "The Bastard King of England", a much older and bawdier English folk song.
