When Things Were Rotten | |
---|---|
Robin Hood and his Merry Men | |
Genre | Parody Sitcom Adventure |
Created by | Mel Brooks Norman Stiles John Boni |
Starring | Dick Gautier Dick Van Patten Bernie Kopell Richard Dimitri Henry Polic II Misty Rowe David Sabin Ron Rifkin |
Composer | Artie Butler |
Country of origin | United States |
Original language | English |
No. of seasons | 1 |
No. of episodes | 13 |
Production | |
Producers | Mel Brooks Stanley Jacob Norman Steinberg |
Running time | 30 minutes |
Production companies | Crossbow Productions Paramount Television |
Original release | |
Network | ABC |
Release | September 10 – December 3, 1975 |
When Things Were Rotten is an American sitcom television series created in 1975 by Mel Brooks and set in 1197 as a parody of the Robin Hood legend. [1] It aired for half a season on the ABC network. [2] The series starred Dick Gautier as the handsome and heroic Robin Hood.
The series received mostly critical acclaim, [3] though John Leonard wrote that watching it was "like being locked inside a package of bubblegum where the only card is Alvin Dark." [4] It failed to find an audience and was cancelled after 13 episodes. The Bionic Woman was its midseason replacement, and became a great success. [5] Eighteen years later, Brooks produced another Robin Hood parody, the feature film Robin Hood: Men in Tights .
The complete series was released on DVD in 2013 as a manufactured-on-demand item exclusively available on Amazon.com's CreateSpace. [6]
No. | Title | Directed by | Written by | Original air date |
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | "The Capture of Robin Hood" | Jerry Paris | Mel Brooks, John Boni & Norman Stiles | September 10, 1975 |
2 | "The French Dis-connection" | Coby Ruskin | S : Gene Wood and Jay Burton T : Bo Kaprall and Pat Profit | September 17, 1975 |
3 | "The House Band" | Joshua Shelley | Barry E. Blitzer & Jack Kaplan | September 24, 1975 |
4 | "Those Wedding Bell Blues" | Marty Feldman | Jim Mulligan | October 1, 1975 |
5 | "A Ransom for Richard" | Peter H. Hunt | William Raynor & Myles Wilder | October 8, 1975 |
6 | "The Ultimate Weapon" | Peter Bonerz | Steve Zacharias | October 15, 1975 |
7 | "Ding Dong, the Bell is Dead" | Bruce Bilson | Les Roberts | October 22, 1975 |
8 | "There Goes the Neighborhood" | Cory Ruskin | Tony Geiss and Thomas Meehan | October 29, 1975 |
9 | "Quarantine" | Norman Abbott | John Reiger & Garry Markowitz | November 12, 1975 |
10 | "Birthday Blues" | Peter H. Hunt | Harry Lee Scott and Robert Sand | November 19, 1975 |
11 | "The Spy: Parts 1 and 2" | Peter H. Hunt | Lawrence H. Siegel | November 26, 1975 |
12 | ||||
13 | "This Lance for Hire" | Joshua Shelley | Jack Amob & Bruce Selitz | December 3, 1975 |
Melvin James Brooks is an American actor, comedian, and filmmaker. With a career spanning over seven decades, he is known as a writer and director of a variety of successful broad farces and parodies. A recipient of numerous accolades, he is one of 21 entertainers to win the EGOT, which includes an Emmy Award, a Grammy Award, an Academy Award, and a Tony Award. He received a Kennedy Center Honor in 2009, a Hollywood Walk of Fame star in 2010, the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2013, a British Film Institute Fellowship in 2015, a National Medal of Arts in 2016, a BAFTA Fellowship in 2017, and the Honorary Academy Award in 2024.
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The Adventures of Robin Hood is a 1938 American epic swashbuckler film from Warner Bros. Pictures. It was produced by Hal B. Wallis and Henry Blanke, directed by Michael Curtiz and William Keighley, and written by Norman Reilly Raine and Seton I. Miller.
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Maid Marian and her Merry Men is a British children's television series created and written by Tony Robinson and directed by David Bell. It began in 1989 on BBC1 and ran for four series, with the last episode shown in 1994. The show was a partially musical comedy retelling of the legend of Robin Hood, placing Maid Marian in the role of leader of the Merry Men, and reducing Robin to an 'incompetent' ex-tailor.
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The Adventures of Robin Hood is a British television series comprising 143 half-hour, black and white episodes broadcast weekly between 1955 and 1959 on ITV. It starred Richard Greene as the outlaw Robin Hood, and Alan Wheatley as his nemesis, the Sheriff of Nottingham. The show followed the legendary character Robin Hood and his band of merry men in Sherwood Forest and the surrounding vicinity. While some episodes dramatised the traditional Robin Hood tales, most were original dramas created by the show's writers and producers.
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Richard Gautier (Go-DEE-eh) was an American actor. He was known for his television roles as Hymie the Robot in the television series Get Smart, and Robin Hood in the TV comedy series When Things Were Rotten, as well as for originating the role of Conrad Birdie in the Broadway musical Bye Bye Birdie.
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