A couple of weekends ago, I rewatched the Disney animated Robin Hood. I may have seen this one first-run at the theater, but I would have been young enough that I don’t have specific memories of doing so. I had the “story and songs” record and listened to it over and over (how we “watched” Disney movies in the days before home video), to the point I still have the key scenes memorized and can even hear the voices in my head.

Given Disney’s trend of doing “live action” remakes of animated films, I’m a little worried that they’ll try to do this one and just give us CGI photo-realistic animal characters, like they did with The Lion King. I don’t see how that would work because the character voices are a big part of the appeal, and just changing the animation while keeping the soundtrack would be pointless. I like the hand-drawn animation. There’s a warmth and charm to it, and they managed to get a lot of nuance into the facial expressions.

But I did catch myself pondering how they could do a live-action Robin Hood that isn’t strictly a remake of the animated version, much like they did Cinderella, which was more a new telling of the same story that just included a few nods to the animated version. With all the gloomy Robin Hood tellings they’ve done in the past 30 or so years, we could use one that has some of the fun spirit of the animated version. Really, the best Robin Hood since this one was Men in Tights, and that was a spoof full of meta jokes. I’d love to see something with the cheek and charm of the animated version, but without the cartoony elements. No fight that looks like a football game or the guards running with a tent around them so that it acts like a steam train, or any stuff that would look weird in live action. Maybe not a musical, since you probably aren’t going to find a former big band leader to play one of the roles. Though it might be fun to see if they could do some “bardcore” covers of the songs used in the movie that are actually sung by the characters without being like they’re in a musical. Alan A’Dale is a bard, after all, and it’s part of the story that everyone’s going around singing “The Phony King of England.” Could they find a way to perform that song that sounds more appropriate to the time period so it’s not a jazzy swing number?

The characters would have to be human, but could you find human actors who could portray their characters in ways that somewhat suggest the animal versions? Right now, I can’t think of an actor who could pull off a Robin that cheeky, charming, and maybe a bit sexy but then could also show those hints of vulnerability that the animators managed to give the cartoon fox version. Cary Elwes came really close in Men in Tights, but he’s aged out of the role. Maybe Henry Cavill could pull it off. He was playing a somewhat similar character in The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare.

The archery contest seems to be at the core of most Robin Hood stories, so they’d have to use that, and there are plenty of other incidents in various bits of Robin Hood lore to use to flesh out the story a bit.

I guess I’m just starving for a fun adventure movie. Some swashbuckling, some humor, a touch of romance. Something in the same category as The Princess Bride and Stardust.