Who Is Zorro?
Zorro is a fictional adventure character created by Johnston McCulley in the novel "The Curse of Capistrano," which was serialized in the pulp publication All Story Weekly and followed a year later by the popular Douglas Fairbanks Sr. film "The Mark of Zorro." In the decades following, Zorro has appeared in countless stories in a variety of mediums produced all over the world.
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Background
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Zorro's alias is Don Diego de la Vega, and he typically operates in the 19th-century pueblo of Los Angeles to battle corrupt officials such as the mayor Luis Quintero and Captain Juan Roman in "The Curse of Capistrano." Zorro's defining features are his mask, his cape, and his sword, which he uses to slice his signature Z-shape onto the clothing of his enemies.
Prose Versions
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Johnston McCulley wrote the serialized prose adventures of Zorro until his death in 1958. Since then, many Zorro stories have been published, including the 2005 work "Zorro, a Novel," by Isabel Allende, most famous for her novel "House of the Spirits." Allende's novel has spawned its own children's novel, "Young Zorro: The Iron Brand," which follows the adventures of Don Diego de la Vega as a boy. In 2008, Moonstone Books published "Tales of Zorro," featuring new short stories by prolific authors like Peter David, Greg Cox and Max Allan Collins.
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On Film
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Numerous Zorro adaptations have been since "The Mark of Zorro" in 1920, starting with a sequel to "The Mark of Zorro, Don Q. Son of Zorro," which also starred Douglas Fairbanks, Sr. A year after Robert Livingstone starred in 1936's "The Bold Caballero" came a series of Republic Pictures serials, each one featuring a different actor as Zorro. In the following decades there were numerous international productions of Zorro from Mexico, Italy and Spain, the most famous of which is 1974 "Zorro," starring Alain Delon. That same year the United States produced a 1974 remake of "The Mark of Zorro" with Frank Langella, followed by the 1980 spoof "Zorro, the Gay Blade" starring George Hamilton. Most recent adaptations, as of 2009, have been 1998's "The Mask of Zorro" and its 2005 sequel, "The Legend of Zorro," both of which starred Antonio Banderas.
On Television
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The year 1957 brought the first Zorro television series, produced by Walt Disney Studios, which ran for 78 episodes over two years. Disney attempted another production of "Zorro" in 1983, a short-lived spoof called "Zorro & Son." In 1989, New World Television and the Family Channel produced a new Zorro TV series starring Duncan Regehr, which lasted 88 episodes over five years. In 2007 came "Zorro: la Espada y la Rosa" ("The Sword and the Rose"), a Spanish-language telenovela starring Christian Meier as Zorro, which aired on Telemundo in the United States for 122 episodes.
Filmation produced the first Zorro animated series in 1981, which ran for 13 episodes. More than a decade later in 1992, the Italian Mondo TV produced a 52-episode animated called "The Legend of Zorro," followed five years later by the European co-production "Zorro, the Animated Series," with 26 episodes, and an animated television film in 2002. A new, futuristic Zorro animated series, "Zorro: Generation Z," began to air internationally in 2008, and is set to air in the U.S. in Fall 2009.
In Comics
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Many of the major Zorro comic book series were published as tie-ins to the television shows. The first Disney television series spawned a comic book series drawn by Alex Toth while Marvel Comics published their own Zorro comic as a tie-in to the 1989 live action series. The Italian animated series "The Legend of Zorro" also led to a series of comic book stories published in Il Giornolino.
Topps Comics began publishing Zorro comic books in the late 1990s, most of which were written by Don McCregor and illustrated by Mike Mayhew. This series is notable for the creation of a new character, Lady Rawhide, who proved popular enough to justify the creation of a series devoted to her. There was also a contemporaneous newspaper comic strip that ran for two years. This was also written by Don McGregor, but drawn by Thomas Yeates rather than Mayhew. McGregor also wrote a series of Zorro comic books for the publisher Papercutz. In 2008, Dynamic Forces began publishing a Zorro series based on Isabelle Allende's novel.
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