With Fiery Blasts Our Roaring Rockets Rise

Since it’s Canada Day today, let us pay a humble tribute to the glorious pinnacle of exported Canadian entertainment, a legendary television show that shines brighter than even the brilliant SCTV.



Yes, Rocket Robin Hood, “The Trouble With Tracy” of Canadian animation. Appropriate it is that a show about outer space should be animated and voiced in the Centre of the Universe™, Toronto.

Perhaps we should avoid the temptation to call this an “animated cartoon” because, isn’t it far greater than an animated series like, say, “The Robotic Harlem Globetrotters” (or whatever it was called)? Well, that and it isn’t very animated. Oh, it is in the opening. In fact, we get to see the same animation of Robin heroically raising his sinewy arms twice. But some of the time drawings of characters simply remain rigid frame-after-frame while only the lips move. Unless it’s a medium-long shot where nothing is animated while the soundtrack crackles with dialogue. Hey, non-lip movement worked for the Fleischers, didn’t it? Shamus Culhane worked there. Obviously the close-mouthed mumblings of Popeye were an inspiration when the demure Mr. Culhane produced this programme. And Robin’s better than Popeye because he doesn’t need a crutch like spinach.

Gape with awe at some of the background drawings from the show opening.



How great is this show? There’s one episode where Little John suddenly has a different voice about half-way through the cartoon. It’s like the first actor got drunk at lunch and was so out of it, someone else had to do his lines when the session picked up in the afternoon. (To be serious, the show featured the voices of Bernard Cowan, Paul Kligman and under-used Carl Banas, so it wasn’t all bad). And, unlike Buck Rogers, who we know is in the 25th Century, Robin and his posse are in “the fabulous years to come,” as if the writers couldn’t make up their minds when to set the show.

With all the reboots on TV and in theatres these days why, oh, why, hasn’t an artistic soul come forward to freshen this series for modern times, turning the Merry Men of N.O.T.T. into futuristic, lute-playing hip-hoppers starring Lil RR Hoody? Isn’t it time? Shame on Shamus that he’s not around any more to launch a Kickstarter campaign to raise the money to update one of his masterpieces. But perhaps you, dear reader, can assemble a band of brothers, marching together, heads held high in all kinds of weather, to bring back Canada’s gift to the world— Front Page Challenge Rocket Robin Hood—and return him to a rightful position of prominence and esteem on television once again.