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Mediaeval Zone
Feb. 9th, 2011 09:25 amAfter yesterday, I felt I should restore balance by posting one of the best things ever instead. Maid Marian and her Merry Men was one of my favourite programmes growing up (as I'm sure it was to many people who read this, owing a lot to the legacy of Blackadder), and someone's posted a clip from it that I had never seen before, where as the Sheriff of Nottingham and the castle guards try to rescue King John's idiot nephew Guy, it suddenly turns into The Crystal Maze.
Nowadays, this is a perfect tribute to the 90s - even besides the wonderful Richard O'Brien impression (harmonica and all), the whole style suddenly changes to the trademark shaky two-camera viewpoint, and they have a great only-just-lawyer-deterrent substitute for the famous theme music. It seems to have something of a Fun House flavour to it as well with strawberry jam flying everywhere, which The Crystal Maze never had (almost uniquely, for a programme at that point in the 90s) - I can't help but notice that Tony Robinson scripted this happening to just about everyone except himself.
I've downloaded some more of it now, and even though I'm a bit out of its target audience these days, I kept on finding things that I never noticed at that age, such as the rest of the episode being a satire of the Channel Tunnel, and the residents' resistance to the snail-eating foreigners stealing their jobs if an underground passage were to be built to Scunthorpe. And I laughed so much at the two-minute mark in this clip - this was a point where you could really tell that one of his main motivations in writing this was to have a turn at being the Blackadder instead of the Baldrick.
It says something that even in a world where the Sheriff is meant to be surrounded by idiots, they don't really appear any more stupid than anybody who appeared on the real programme.
Nowadays, this is a perfect tribute to the 90s - even besides the wonderful Richard O'Brien impression (harmonica and all), the whole style suddenly changes to the trademark shaky two-camera viewpoint, and they have a great only-just-lawyer-deterrent substitute for the famous theme music. It seems to have something of a Fun House flavour to it as well with strawberry jam flying everywhere, which The Crystal Maze never had (almost uniquely, for a programme at that point in the 90s) - I can't help but notice that Tony Robinson scripted this happening to just about everyone except himself.
I've downloaded some more of it now, and even though I'm a bit out of its target audience these days, I kept on finding things that I never noticed at that age, such as the rest of the episode being a satire of the Channel Tunnel, and the residents' resistance to the snail-eating foreigners stealing their jobs if an underground passage were to be built to Scunthorpe. And I laughed so much at the two-minute mark in this clip - this was a point where you could really tell that one of his main motivations in writing this was to have a turn at being the Blackadder instead of the Baldrick.
It says something that even in a world where the Sheriff is meant to be surrounded by idiots, they don't really appear any more stupid than anybody who appeared on the real programme.
