MOVIE: Robin Hood – A Little Too Much
“Robin Hood” is one my absolute favorite Disney animated films. Portrayed as a wily fox, Robin Hood is at his coolest, pulling off impossible shots with his bow and arrow that could only happen in a cartoon. But it’s still fun to watch.
I’m so glad that my three-year old daughter loves it, too. She often asks to watch it, so I’ve seen it a few times over the past year.
Whatever theme might have been intended for this children’s film, one theme comes across to me clearly: greed destroys an individual and the community under their care, but courage and compassion can restore it.
In “Robin Hood”, Prince John (Peter Ustinov) temporarily assumes the throne of his kindhearted brother, King Richard, and begins taxing the heart and soul out of his subjects. His goal, of course, is to line his own pockets, filling the royal treasury with gold coins while the entire kingdom struggles in utter poverty.
To challenge this injustice, Robin Hood (Brian Bedford) begins robbing all representatives of his majesty Prince John, and secretly returns the money to the poor people from whom it was first taken. He’s a thief who’s stealing back the money that was stolen “legally” through trumped-up taxes, which only benefit Prince John himself.
Robin Hood is exactly the sort of person that people would love to have in today’s economy. When big corporations receive government handouts and spend it on frivolous cruises, Robin Hood would somehow sneak aboard deck, empty out their cash boxes, and secretly distribute the wealth among all the innocent taxpayers who had to fund this extravagance.
Of course, it might get a little more complicated than that.
We can’t expect a Robin Hood to come racing to our financial rescue. But we can avoid the fate that Prince John suffered: a life devoted to greed.
A familiar story about billionaire John D. Rockefeller tells of him being asked, “How much money is enough?” He replied, “A little bit more.”
This philosophy is the very heart of greed.
Overtaxing his people once was not enough for Prince John. He had to keep finding new ways to tax them, to pile up more gold coins in his castle vault. The Sherriff of Nottingham wanders through village after village to do the prince’s dirty work. He shamefully snatches away a little boy’s birthday present, a blind man’s last few coins, and even robs the church collection box for the poor. All so that Prince John can have “a little bit more”.
Unfortunately, whenever the prince overtaxes everyone, Robin Hood finds some way to slip the money back to the masses. Prince John ultimately arrests nearly every citizen of Nottingham for refusing to pay their taxes. Which they can’t, since they have no money left to line his pockets.
When he learns that Friar Tuck is among the prisoners, the prince threatens to hang him in order to spring a trap for Robin Hood. Robin and Little John sneak in during the wee hours of the morning to spring Friar Tuck and the rest of the villagers, while also emptying out the prince’s royal treasury.
But Robin gets a little greedy.
Having passed out nearly every bag of gold coins from within Prince John’s own bedroom, he spies two more bags. One beneath the pillow the prince is sleeping on. Another being cradled tightly in the prince’s arms, like a comforting teddy bear. Robin’s already looted out nearly every bag of gold that the prince stole, and dawn is approaching. They still need to escape the castle with all of the villagers before Prince John and his other guards wake up.
Just a little bit more …
Robin successfully slides the bag from beneath John’s pillow. But when he extracts the last bag from John’s arms, the prince is unsettled, and his assistant, Sir Hiss, wakes up to see Robin fleeing through the window with all of the gold. He attempts to stop Robin, waking Prince John in the process and alerting the guards to the presence of the fugitives. Little John barely escapes with the people in tow, and Robin must scramble up the castle walls to narrowly avoid the axes and arrows of Prince John’s guards. Robin is off-balance, escaping from the guards only to come face-to-face with the Sherriff of Nottingham, who battles him with a sword and a torch. Robin crawls outside to the top of a castle spire, which the Sherriff has accidentally set ablaze. Robin makes a daring leap from the tower, plummeting into the moat below. He swims desperately for shore, beneath a hailstorm of deadly arrows.
Until only his hat floats to the surface, an arrow through its center …
“A little bit more” isn’t always worth it.
Greed can cause you to do some risky and stupid things. As a leader, it can cause you to find ways to spoil yourself rotten, ignoring the needs of people who serve beneath you. And it can make you forget that those people can find ways to fight against you, if they must.
Greed can also make you spend a lot of time and effort on foolish ventures. Imagining that you can turn a quick profit and make millions at some new job, because the employer or the TV promoter promised that it will work. Or you can gamble away your paycheck … and a little bit more … on a night at the casinos, because you “feel lucky” or you “have a strategy”. Or you can lie about your job qualifications to get a high-paying job, figuring that no one will ever find out. A friend once told me that her parents keep buying lottery tickets and then spending an entire evening planning out how to spend their winnings.
Greed, in short, can turn you downright stupid. Don’t waste a lot of time and effort on a fortune that only exists in your imagination. And don’t shortchange your regular job duties or the people under your care in order to pursue unfair, personal gains. Greed is a form of selfishness that values the money to be made over everything else: including people, communities, and personal integrity.
Sometimes “a little bit more” is too much.
Don’t fall into the trap of Prince John’s lifestyle, or Robin Hood’s temptation.
Robin survived, by the way. Just barely. In spite of the greedy choices he made in his final adventure, the one that nearly got him killed. He made it to shore, but it wasn’t because he was smart. It was because he was lucky.
Very lucky.
Learn to be satisfied with what you have, and you just might keep it.
Find more reviews of “Robin Hood” Most Wanted Edition DVDat amazon.com!
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