The Adventures of Robin Hood

American producer Hannah Weinstein pitched the series to Lew Grade in 1954, proposing 39 half-hour episodes at £10,000 each; Grade agreed immediately, hoping to profit from selling the show to the lucrative American market.

Hannah Weinstein, who held left-wing political views, created the series specifically to enable blacklisted American writers such as Ring Lardner Jr., Waldo Salt, Robert Lees, and Adrian Scott to keep working, crediting them under pseudonyms to avoid detection by studio executives.

After the blacklist ended, Ring Lardner Jr. said the series' format let him comment on Eisenhower-era America, and many early episodes featured the theme of Robin's band being betrayed by friends or loved ones, echoing the real-life betrayals faced by blacklisted writers.

Actor Archie Duncan, who played Little John, was seriously injured during location filming of the episode 'Checkmate' on 20 April 1955 when he grabbed the bridle of a bolting horse to protect watching children, causing a fractured kneecap; he received the Queen's Commendation for Bravery and was temporarily replaced by Rufus Cruikshank for ten episodes.

Ian Hunter, who played Sir Richard of the Lea in the series, had earlier portrayed King Richard the Lionheart in the 1938 Hollywood film The Adventures of Robin Hood starring Errol Flynn.

The series featured many actors early in their careers who later became well-known, including Donald Pleasence, Leo McKern, Sid James, Desmond Llewelyn, Billie Whitelaw, and future film director John Schlesinger, who appeared as a singing minstrel in two episodes.

Interiors were filmed at Nettlefold Studios while location shooting took place at Wisley Common and the adjoining Foxwarren Park estate owned by Hannah Weinstein, which also stabled the horses and had a projection room for viewing daily rushes.

A replica castle exterior with a drawbridge was built at Foxwarren Park in 1956 for the spin-off series The Adventures of Sir Lancelot and was subsequently reused for castle scenes in series 3 and 4 of Robin Hood.

Art director Peter Proud, a wartime camouflage expert, designed many props on wheels to allow rapid set changes since each 26-minute episode had to be shot in just four and a half days.

Some of the 100 soldiers seen manning the battlements of Nottingham Castle in the show were actually miniature toy soldiers rather than actors.

The closing theme song was written by Carl Sigman and sung by Dick James; its 1956 single reached number 14 in the UK charts, while a rival version by Gary Miller reached number 10.

The arrow-striking-tree sound effect that opens the theme tune was created by record producer Joe Meek, who also served as recording engineer on the Gary Miller version of the song.

The theme song was later parodied in Monty Python's Flying Circus 'Dennis Moore' sketch and in the 1958 Hancock's Half Hour episode 'Ericson the Viking'.

The series was an immediate transatlantic hit, drawing an audience of 32 million viewers per week, which led Lew Grade to commission Sapphire Films to produce further historical adventure series like The Adventures of Sir Lancelot and The Buccaneers.

In the early 1990s, following the success of Kevin Costner's Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, three feature-length compilation films were created from the series using edited and computer-colourised footage from the original episodes.