Zorro: Still sexy 50 years later

I don't make a secret of how much I love Zorro. He's exactly like Batman except Spanish and, y'know, first. Zorro is a fictional character so cool that Bruce Wayne, an even cooler fictional character, decided to base his whole life on him.

So I was pretty excited that Disney has released the complete series (two seasons, 78 episodes) of the black and white Zorro television show that ran in the late 1950s. The DVDs are part of Disney's stylish Disney Treasures series. The Zorro DVDs, divided into two sets: season 1 and season 2, come in fancy black metal boxes and include fancy collectors pins and postcards. They also include a long-winded introduction by Leonard Maltin, but fortunately my remote control includes a skip button.

The Zorro series is like the 1950s Superman series starring George Reeves, except it isn't boring and the action scenes are awesome. The opening sequence also features a bit of animation, which is pretty neat given the era. The song is awesome too. I like that it ends by repeating the word 'Zorro' to the point where the word loses all meaning. 

If you are unfamilar with the character for some reason (which means you HAVEN'T been reading the fantastic Dynamite comic series written by Matt Wagner and drawn by Francesco Francavilla despite my frequent suggestions to do so), Zorro (Guy Williams, aka Professor John Robinson from Lost in Space) is actually Don Diego de la Vega, a wealthy young man who has just returned home to California after studying abroad in Spain. A large part of his studies involved sword fighting (spoiler alert: this will come in handy later). When he returns he sees that the people of California are being ruled with an iron fist by the evil Captain Monastario. He decides that it would be a good idea to pretend to be a useless fop during the day, and transform himself into the dashing Zorro at night to fight the injustice he sees around him. This works out pretty well.

Both Zorro and Monastario are played by attractive actors, which adds to my enjoyment when they are fighting each other. In the third episode of the first season they get into a big whip fight and just start whipping the shit out of each other. You can see it around 5:45 of this colourized clip: 

Because this show holds up really well, is beautifully restored in black and white, and these are probably the only DVD box sets that Batman would own, I highly recommend.