Robin In Da Hood

Look, folks. I am here before you today to try to set the historical record straight, once and for all.

Forget the popular imaginings embodied in the form of a grimy Russell Crowe, or a blow-dried Kevin Costner traipsing about the Middle Age forests of Nottinghamshire. Trash your movie poster of Patrick Bergen romancing Uma, and stop giggling at the snug green tights on Cary Elwes.

For that matter, you can also let go of all that lofty Medieval Robin-of-Loxley lore, and even the cute little saw-toothed jerkin Fairbanks silently frolicked across the black-and-white cinema screen in. Allow me to give you the true and actual skinny on myself: Robin In Da Hood.

I was hatched as — what else? — a robin, so a Robin I am. And I am definitely In Da Hood, the neighborhood of Sherwood, to be exact. (That’s just about the only piece of this whole Robin legend thing that anyone’s been able to get right all these years!) Being a forest, Sherwood is quite green most of the year, so, naturally, I wear green most of the year, as do all my avian relatives. If you happened to be a Robin that didn’t particularly look fondly on the idea of being consumed as an appetizer by some famished bear or badger or bobcat or puma, you’d be wearing your best camouflage gear, too.

Contrary to all the stories, my sidekick is not Friar Tuck, but Fryer Cluck, a balding field rooster that hangs with me. (Yes, he does go about in drab monk-ish brown, but that’s simply because his favorite hideout when danger nears is inside the nearest rotting oaken stump.) And forget all those silly, rowdy, beer-swilling ‘Merry Men’, too. My posse is mostly made up of a bunch of wannabe chicks and fledglings from the nearby nests, lookin’ to get their jollies jumping the occasional bad guy in the brush.

We don’t go in for the swords and shields and staffs and torches that screenwriters always seem to put in the hands of our little band. For one thing, at a total individual weight of just a tad over 2-1/2 ounces, there’s no way any of us can lift any of those honking heavy things. For another, a light bow and a quiver of arrows serve us best, because in the heat of the fight we’ve always got a ready supply of replacement fletching feathers in our back pockets (so to speak).

We will occasionally steal from the rich, but we’ll just about as often steal from the poor, too. You can blame that on the fact that there aren’t too many jobs out here in the woods, especially for your average birdbrain with limited education.

Oh, and one more thing. You guys have got that Sheriff of Nottingham villain all messed up, too. The guy we really fear is the Chef of Nottingham. Seems he’s developed a tasty little variant on squab pie that substitutes the common robin as a key ingredient.