Simon Mattacks
speaker
2,981 appearances
17 recordings
3 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 13 Sep
Simon Mattacks’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 14 in all, peaking in Aug 2026 with 3.
Appearances
The kids of the 1980s and 90s could never forget the movie Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves, which cast Kevin Costner in the title role and featured a supporting cast full of big names in Hollywood, such as Morgan Freeman, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, Alan Rickman, and Christian Slater.
Critics weren't all fans of the movie, but it turned out to be the second highest-grossing film of 1991.
Further, Alan Rickman won a BAFTA award for his portrayal of the evil sheriff.
Giving the film additional reach and staying power, Bryan Adams won a Grammy Award for the title song, Everything I Do, I Do It For You.
Sean Connery made a cameo appearance as King Richard, which was an entertaining nod to his role of decades earlier in Robin and Marion.
But the prior movie successes were not safe from a little lighthearted ribbing.
In 1993, Mel Brooks released a parody called Robin Hood, Men in Tights.
Starring actors and comedians such as Cary Elwes, Richard Lewis, and Dave Chappelle, it poked fun at the previous, more serious retellings of Robin Hood.
Although its reviews were mixed, it was another box office success and has a cult following to this day.
And still, the legend endured.
Director Ridley Scott tried his hand at it in his 2010 movie, which got another mixed reception.
In his New York Magazine review of the Scott film, critic Anthony Lane said of its star, Russell Crowe, that, like the movie around him, he looked distinctly underjoyed.
His robin seemed pathologically glum.
In an era when so many movies were gritty and full of violent action, it appears that people still wanted some of the jaunty adventure and the romance and color that the Robin Hood legend had collected over the years.
Lane further clarifies that opinion by saying, although we got a few flashbacks to Robin's traumatized childhood, nobody is less in need of a backstory.
He is the creature of a perpetual now.
That last phrase, the creature of a perpetual now, says so much about the resiliency of the Robin Hood legend.
We will almost certainly never know for sure whether our favorite English outlaw was a real person.
And to sticklers for detail, it may be unsettling that his era in history is fluid, or that his personal characteristics have changed with the times.
But that flexibility, that quality of plasticity, is one of the defining characteristics of most classic stories that survive the ages.
Showing 1741–1760 of 2,981 · page 88 of 150
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