Geekscape’s How Did We Forget: Zorro

ZORRO: The complete Series or Mexican Batman 1.0

When Geekscape asked me to do a review of the new DVD set of 1990 Zorro series, I was confused; I had no idea such a show even existed! It’s because as a youth, most of my television watching time was spent on Saturday morning cartoons and if not then on Nickelodeon, where more cartoons happily resided. I never watched The Family Channel when it was actually known by that name, before it was consumed by Fox, and later, ABC.

I was excited, since I had seen The Mask of Zorro in theaters in the late nineties, and had fairly fond memories of a black masked swordsman who fought injustice and tyranny with style and panache. Plus, I was promised a sweet case of cerveza for my time. This is pretty much the quickest way to get me to do anything

Well, I’m going to need that cerveza now, if only to drink until I gain some sort of short-term amnesia (which is pretty much what happens every time I drink but ‘m digressing), as if there’s one thing this series is; it’s terrible.

Let me state this again, so I’m being clear. The Zorro television show, starring Duncan Regher, is the most mind-bogglingly stupid show ever produced! It has plots so poorly conceived, characters so pitifully portrayed, and such racist overtones running through out it, that I’m pretty sure it could be used as a form of torture in Mexico. It has quite possibly ruined the name of Zorro in my mind, and if anything I was pro-Zorro before this experience. If you want to see the intellectual equivalent of a mule’s retarded offspring between it and an inebriated television writer, this is it folks!

Well, mostly anyway. It does have a couple of good points. Uh, let’s see; well there’s the show’s awesomely cheesy opening theme song which must have called in a favor from the great theme songwriters of the eighties, cause man, they just don’t make them like this anymore. Also, there is some decent swordplay once every few episodes, so I’ll grant them that, but except for that, this thing can only serve as an object lesson on how not to plot an adventure show.

I mean, I’m not even sure where to begin describing this monstrosity. You know what, how about this? How about I share some of this with you? Yeah, screw it, we’re going to delve into the madness that is Zorro, by breaking down the first episode of the series,”Dead Men Tell No Tales”. My only suggestion is to do what I’m about to, pour yourself some tequila, and drink along as you read.

It eases the pain.

I apologize now to you all.

Written by Phillip John Taylor and directed by Ron Satlof; we open our action-adventure yarn (which again, was how they introduced this series) with . . . a guy looking at the moon through a telescope – in a cave? Um OK. He’s also in the company of a young, overly excited boy, who the mustachioed man addresses as Felipe. Other than that, we have no idea who this is, or any other introduction, but I’m going to assume this is our hero? OK, wait, maybe it’s the villain, I mean after all, who else would spend their alone time at night with young boys?

Notice how happy he is to teach this boy who to properly hold a long, hard, cylindrical object.

So the creepy pedophile guy, who does turn out to be Zorro by the way, starts talking about visiting the moon, and the mute kid Felipe (played thanklessly by Juan Diego Botto) just gives him weird looks, until the amateur astronomer spots something in the distance: a rider at night! We see the rider through the scope, then cut to . . . an interior location that’s fairly non descript, and a woman answering a door to the same mysterious rider. She gives him a shocked look and  . . . fade to commercial break.

I’m very surprised to see actual guests at my hotel! Let’s milk this non-suspense a little more shall we?

Really? I mean, so far, if you had been watching at home you would have seen the show’s credits sequence which has all sorts of fighting and adventuring stuff going on, then this? I mean, come on! It’s about a swordfighter folks! Sure he can be a nerd too, I mean a lot of vigilantes are, look at Spider-Man, but you probably shouldn’t make the big dramatic break of your first act some broad opening a door with absolutely zero context.

Anyways, turns out the lady, whose name ends up being Victoria (played by Patrice Camhi Martinez), is running a tavern/hotel, and the rider, is looking for a place to stay the night. How compelling. I mean he’s kind of a dick about it, but other than that, it’s really nothing out of the ordinary. Until the next morning, when she opens the door with his breakfast (not at dawn as he requested by the way) and discovers him murdered, a bloody dagger on the floor. She screams and like an idiot, picks up the bloody dagger, and so we cut to the town’s constable who rushes in to her aid after hearing her yelp of terror. The constable, one Sergeant Mendoza, despite seeing the shocked look on her face and as we later find out, knowing Victoria for years, doesn’t begin an investigation, but immediately assumes she killed this man, and locks her up in jail without a moment’s hesitation. Naturally.

Sherlock Holmes Mendoza ain’t. Also, he really must not trust his friends very much.

Let’s take a moment to look at Mendoza and Victoria shall we? They’re easily the two most “ethnic” actors on the show, and both end up turning out to be horrible sketches of bad Mexican stereotypes. Mendoza (played by James Victor) is kind of pudgy (which in TV Land means he’s horribly fat), lazy, always hungry or napping and never really wants to do his job very well because it gets in the way of his sleeping and eating. Oh and he’s the “comic relief” of the show. While there are the occasional funny moments throughout Zorro, I’m pretty sure absolutely none of them ever have anything to do with Victor’s hammy attempts at being the series’ Bucktooth stand in.

Victoria on the other hand, is the actress we get to be Zorro’s love interest. She’s noble and hardworking, and pious, often saying that she’s praying for the other characters when they’re about to do something dangerous. She’s also a complete idiot, perhaps greater even than Mendoza, since at some point pretty much every episode she encounters Zorro. He’ll talk to her from about a foot away, and then she encounters his alter ego Don Diego de la Vega, about ten minutes later and she can never put two and two together. EVER.

While we’re on it, let’s discuss this problem and Zorro’s actor Duncan Regehr. You see, Zorro, like many masked vigilantes that came later (and he predates both Batman and The Shadow, so pretty much all of them) has the classic dramatic trope that comes with the territory: having a secret identity. The problem in this show though, is that it would be fucking impossible not to know that Diego is Zorro after at most, two appearances. Partly because in the time period of the show, Los Angeles where it takes place, is a really small town with most likely only a thousand residents, and the other problem is the casting.

Regehr is just two damn heroic looking not to notice! He’s a foot taller than everyone else in the cast and in his civilian garb is always wearing form-fitting outfits that pretty much outline his athletic physique. He has a distinct voice and diction, which he doesn’t change between identities and his mask doesn’t hide his eyes, nor his impressive jaw line at all. The excuse that the other characters are supposed to buy is that, like with Bruce Wayne, Don Diego’s personality is supposedly so unlike Zorro’s that people would think it impossible. But Regehr can really only play one character or must have had a nobility clause in his contract or something, so Diego ends up talking and acting heroically all the damn time, and the contrived reasons that the writers have him spouting to justify his absences when Zorro’s around are just miserable excuses . . . of excuses.

Look at the guy, he’s just too dreamy not to be Zorro.

Back to the episode, Diego hears of Victoria’s arrest from his father Alejandro (Efrem Zimbalist, Jr.) after leaving the hidden door to his homosex- I mean secret life- I mean vigilante lifestyle cave wide open in his piano room where they discuss this turn of events. His father doesn’t notice this hidden door, nor remark on it, and yet again, we’re supposed to buy that Diego’s pops doesn’t know his son is Zorro.

Hurried mistake, or is Diego trying to leave “subtle” hints about his alternative lifestyle?

So Diego tries to play up his ineffectualness and bring a basket of food to Victoria rather than plead her cause. It might work, other than that he drugs the one item of food he psychically predicts Sgt. Mendoza will steal and eat upon the gate inspection, so that the captain of the city guard gets the runs, all so he can have a few more minutes questioning Victoria. Subtle move there hotshot.

Because when you don’t know what else to do- go with toilet humor!

Diego only learns that the dead man’s belongings are with the Alcade (which is sort of like a mayor/judge), which again, is knowledge didn’t need to poison someone to glean. So he waits till the cover of dark and as Zorro, sneaks into the Alcade’s office but it’s all in vain, since it’s a trap. The Alcade has Zorro dead to rights with two pistols(!) but of course, Zorro defeats him handily and leaves his infamous “Z” on his desk before escaping in an action sequence that can at best be described as uninspired, but I’d call a raging pile of horse manure choreographed by a cerebral palsy victim anyway.

The Alcade is the show’s heavy by the way, and as the episodes go on, proves to be the main reason to watch this at all. Played by Michael Tylo, giving his best Walter Peck (from Ghostbusters) impression for the first two seasons, he’s eventually replaced after a hilarious death sequence where he actually screams “I should have known betteeerrr!”, and most of the show’s bemusement withers into trepidation afterwards. He’s also ludicrously evil and ineffectual in any given episode, in manners that are so far beyond sensible given the scale of the series that it boggles the mind. In a later episode, he steals the town’s water supply and charges the residents for it! Again, these are the people he already rules and taxes unjustly, yet this kind of dick behavior is of an apparently acceptable tolerance level for the residents of Los Angeles aside from the de la Vegas.

The Alcade’s pretty inhuman, but apparently the show’s staff thinks Mexicans are too lazy to do anything for themselves aside from praying that Zorro will stop him some how.

So Zorro gets his evidence, a torn piece of the dead man’s shirt, and puts it in some sort of . . . stuff that turns green, and Felipe poisons Mendoza needlessly yet again while bringing Victoria more food. The Alcade kicks the mute boy out of the room to tell Victoria that he’s hanging her in the morning on the already flimsy evidence, to which she just sort of shrugs like he told her that they were out of cornstarch, before it’s revealed (bum bum buuum) that the deceased traveler isn’t dead at all! In fact, the Alcade has lunch with the guy!

Like a boss.

Mendoza walks into the room, sees the guy he thought was dead, and then makes this face before fainting:

The man who played dead turns out to be an actor from Mexico City, and old friends with the Alcade, which I refuse to believe on the count of the Alcade being nothing but a boil of hate in the form of a man. I mean, if you shared a cab ride with this dude, he’d mug tell the driver to head to a shitty part of town, mug you, then shoot the driver before running off, just to mess with you. It turns out that all of this was an elaborate plot to ensnare Zorro, since the Alcade knows he’ll show up at Victoria’s execution, and Mendoza, upon hearing this, seems completely fine with the fact that a good friend of his (as we’ll see as the series goes on) could end up hanged completely unjustly as a part of all this.

OK. Hold the phone and let me get this straight. First off, Mendoza sure as shit wasn’t doing his job very well. I mean before you haul someone in for murder, you might want to you know, actually check to see if the victim’s actually dead. Secondly, the Alcade already runs the damn town, and Mendoza and his men always prove to be immensely loyal to him (for some reason that’s never explained) and his attempts at capturing Zorro. All he would have really needed to do here would be to trump up a charge on Victoria to put her in a cell; the whole dead guy/actor thing is completely unnecessary seeing as Victoria still knows she didn’t ice the dude regardless, and all the deception does is provide a clear out for her innocence if say, I don’t know, a known vigilante who has it in for him decides to investigate the matter, which he already knows he will!

Zorro shrugs at your logic!

So of course, Zorro/Diego does figure it out (something to do with the green shirt I guess) and captures the actor as he tries to flee the city. The capture’s a little awkward, as it seems a lot like Zorro’s coming on to the dude, and then we cut to the execution. Here, somehow Zorro sneaks both himself and the actor (who is unbound and could have run away at anytime) onto a rooftop to announce their presence to the townsfolk gathered below. They all act surprised when he appears despite this event occurring in the middle of the day, and the fact that Zorro’s wearing all black, which against both the skyline and the white of all of the town’s buildings, would make him stick out like a sore thumb.

So the writers seem to think Mexicans suffer from sort of brain hemorrhage that doesn’t allow them to see perfectly silhouetted figures. Or that Zorro can teleport between camera cuts or something.

How the hell did they miss him?!

So Zorro reveals the plot, the Alcade’s men make almost no attempt to stop him despite several moments where they have a clear line of fire and wouldn’t risk hurting a civilian (so there’s no real “action” sequence), and the both the townsfolk and Victoria seem fine with everything despite the fact that their leader has just committed a criminal conspiracy and tried to kill an upstanding citizen in the name of the law. Zorro also just leaves his telescope at the public square carelessly (he used it to distract Mendoza before he murdered Victoria), yet somehow Felipe recovered it and brought it back home. Why? So he can play a prank on the ol’ Diego by etching a Z into the lens so it seems he’s carved up the moon! Ha ha!

Telescopes aren’t cheap even in our time, and this mute kid just ruined one in the 1800’s. I’d be pissed.

That’s the opening episode of the series, and it serves as a perfect example of the kind of show this is. Every episode, every season. It keeps going on and on, never really improving. Sure there are a few standouts here or there, and the sword fighting occasionally has its moments, but for the most part, it’s a show made by idiots for people assuming the audience is full of like-minded individuals.

What’s especially depressing is the fact that the box set, though it doesn’t have features like commentary or a documentary, does have the show’s unaired pilot, and the original 1919 film starring Douglas Fairbanks, The Mark of Zorro. Watching this fairly long (for a silent film) little flick, you learn all of the 1990 recreation’s mistakes, and it’s sadly accurate moments.

Now Mark isn’t exactly the smartest film or anything, considering it seems like the world’s first crack at the “masked vigilante” genre, but it does a few things way more right than the show. Firstly, Fairbanks’ portrayal of Diego in his civilian life is far different than how he acts as Zorro, going very far in his own deception as a shiftless, drunken boor that most folks just can’t stand to be around unless he’s the one buying at the cantina. He even has the little mustache that Zorro wears be a fake mustache so that no one could identify him as Zorro due to his facial follicles, which makes WAY more sense! Zorro’s assistant is a manservant which is less creepy and he’s also way more of a badass: the actual “mark” of Zorro (that “Z”) isn’t just something he carves into people’s clothes- he carves it into people’s faces!

If you’re saying “Pics or it didn’t happen”, then there. It happened.

He also, and this is very unlike pretty much all later vigilantes, has an endgame. Zorro, especially since his original story is set when Mexico and California were under Spanish rule, is really a figure meant to inspire the populace to revolt, and lead them to this war. He’s got high ideals for sure, since he’s trying to do this bloodlessly (mostly), but his intentions are clear on this. Plus, by the end of the picture, he even ditches the Zorro identity and fights his enemies as Diego, in order to both win the heart of a lady, and to give the men under his command a face they can trust rather than just an shady masked man. You know, like a hero unafraid of standing by his convictions publicly. Besides, since Zorro does this to inspire, and not out of some disturbed psychological reason, he doesn’t seem like he reverts to the illusion completely, like one Mr. Wayne.

This is the key difference. Zorro was never meant to be a long standing vigilante, just a symbol to rally behind in order to throw off the yoke of oppression, and when that’s accomplished, discarded. This setup just doesn’t work in a “serialized at length” format like television. The villainy drafted in the original film is meant to be a breaking point, so when it becomes repetitious it’s ridiculous, and if the identity’s doesn’t last, then it’s easier to buy that people haven’t figured it out. Of course, this means the story has to end, and there’s less money in that, so now we have to deal with a new interpretation once a decade, to very mixed results.

Later vigilantes, especially Batman, would follow the Zorro mold and perfect it. They keep the rich playboy who secretly fights crime, as well as a love interest who can’t figure out the identity, and in Batman’s case, even the young boy he lives with. They usually ditch the whole “still living with his dad” thing though, which is probably for the best, but since they do, they always give the hero some daddy issues so he’s a bit crazy. This helps justify the longevity a bit more, since we can look at the tragedy as distinct cause of why they dress up in flamboyant clothing.

So in the end, I guess I actually learned something.

Thanks Geekscape for teaching me way more than I ever wanted to know about Zorro. I do mean ever, because I want the last week of my damn life back.

Or at least some more beer.

-Adam Thomas, signing out-