McCulley, though, had other sources to draw on, most notably The Scarlet Pimpernel, Baroness Orczy's fantasy of a foppish aristocrat with a double life, which had first appeared in 1905. McCulley moved the action back from the Gold Rush to the time of Mexican independence from Spain, in 1821. After he was captured and killed in an ambush laid by members of a new law enforcement agency called the California Rangers, his head, along with the hand of one of his companions, was pickled in brandy and displayed all over California.Elements of all this were cleverly woven into the 1998 Zorro movie. There is scant historical evidence Murrieta was anything other than an opportunist and a criminal, but as early as 1854 he had been turned into a romantic figure and a champion of the people in a best-selling book.Murrieta quickly became a symbol of Mexican resistance to the influx of Anglo-Americans into California, and equally his apprehension became a priority and a point of pride for the leadership of the young state. Like all pulp writers, McCulley was driven by the need to make money, more than anything, and borrowed heavily from a number of sources to put some rapid flesh on the bones of his basic idea.The Zorro character was inspired most obviously by a real-life 19th-century outlaw called Joaquin Murrieta, whose gang was responsible for endless cattle-rustling, robberies, kidnappings and murders during the California Gold Rush of the early 1850s. Since his creation 86 years ago, Zorro has always been a bit of a bad-faith hero - a Mexican Robin Hood originally offered up for the entertainment of white Californians who were busy repressing the very Mexicans Zorro defended.Such hasty rearrangement of the historical furniture remains a feature of the Zorro phenomenon even today. In the latest movie, Zorro and California's Mexican population are seen cheering the advent of Californian statehood in 1850, even though the arrangement worked entirely to the Anglo population's advantage and cut them out of the political power structure for 150 years.
But, hey, when we have plenty of swordplay and the spectacle of Zeta-Jones in skimpy lace underwear to contemplate, who's complaining?Zorro was first dreamed up by a long-forgotten pulp writer by the name of Johnston McCulley, who had his story serialised in a magazine called All-Story Weekly in 1919. In the United States - and, to a lesser extent, the rest of the western world - the political class is regarded as unusually corrupted and incompetent, and unequal to the daunting challenges imposed by our distinctly dangerous times. In an age of killer hurricanes and nuclear proliferation and suicide bombings and endless conflict in Iraq, what could be more reassuring than a quietly dignified, seemingly passive nobleman who in fact leads a double life, dons a hero's mask to defend the people whenever necessary and makes a habit of triumphing over his enemies by gouging his trademark Z into their quivering flesh?If the fantasy is imbued with a certain amount of Hollywood-style bad faith, that in itself may be no less telling a sign of the times. Hollywood, after all, has not exactly distinguished itself by the originality of its ideas in recent years, and Zorro seems as good a property as any to turn back to after the multiple flops of ancient Macedonia (Alexander), the Crusades (Kingdom of Heaven), Depression-era boxing (Cinderella Man) and the rest of what has turned out to be a miserably unprofitable year for the big studios.Certainly, advance reviews of the new Zorro movie suggest it is a money-making enterprise first and foremost - it is louder, more expensive, more action-spectacular than the original, and nowhere near as deft in its tongue-in-cheek explorations of the history of banditry and social upheaval in 19th-century California, which is where the story is set.It is also tempting to think, though, that Zorro might just be a hero whose time has come, or come back. Several Zorro comics and at least one graphic novel are in the works.
A Zorro Television Companion was published last month, for aficionados of both the Disney serial from the 1950s, starring Guy Williams, and a more recent small-screen incarnation starring Duncan Regehr, which first aired in the late 1980s.And, topping them all, is the sequel to the 1998 movie, The Legend of Zorro, which opens worldwide this Friday and once again pairs Zeta-Jones with her co-star from seven years ago, the effortlessly charming Spanish heart-throb Antonio Banderas.A cynic might see all this as no more than evidence of the power of cross-marketing by the media conglomerates who run our entertainment industry. The film industry has a notoriously short attention span, and in short order Hollywood was busy reinventing all sorts of other neglected genres, from the swords-and-sandals epic (Gladiator) to the comic book action-adventure (X-Men, Spider-Man and so on) to the retro appeal - distinctly limited, as it turned out - of 1970s television shows (Bewitched, Scooby Doo).Suddenly, though, Zorro seems to be everywhere again. Isabel Allende, of all people, published a novel about the masked social crusader over the summer. The Gipsy Kings are writing a Zorro musical, set to debut in the West End sometime next year. Back in 1998 -- a year that seems, in retrospect, blessed with an almost preternatural innocence, when the stock market was booming and an American president lying about sex seemed like a big deal - Hollywood went through one of its periodic self-examinations and decided to revive that most quaintly innocent of film genres, the swashbucking adventure story. The result was The Mask of Zorro, a throwback to the swordsmanship and gallantry of Douglas Fairbanks Sr and Tyrone Power, which turned out to be a highly entertaining romp of a movie, made scads of money at the box-office and turned a certain young Welsh actress called Catherine Zeta-Jones into a major international star. And that, it seemed, was that. In a report issued here, Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman and his colleagues on the Senate Subcommittee for Investigations claim to have evidence showing that Mr Galloway's political organisation and his wife received vouchers worth almost $600,000 (£338,000) from the then Iraqi government..
