Zorro

• 1. Introduction

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  Zorro first rode into print in 1919, and the novel that introduced him eventually sold more than 50 million copies. That figure places The Curse of Capistrano among the best-selling books of all time. Its author, the American pulp writer Johnston McCulley, meant it as a stand-alone tale. The hero's name is Spanish for fox. He is a masked vigilante who defends commoners and Indigenous peoples against corrupt, tyrannical officials in the Pueblo de Los Ángeles in Alta California. Since then he has appeared in over 40 films and ten television series, plus radio dramas, comic books, stage shows and video games. Who hides behind the mask, and why does he play the coward? How did one story stretch into four decades of sequels that contradict each other? Where did McCulley find his hero? And who owns Zorro today?

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• 2. The Double Life

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  The Curse of Capistrano describes Don Diego Vega as "a fair youth of excellent blood and twenty-four years" with a "small interest in the really important things of life." Those who knew him best declared that "he yawned ten score times a day". He seldom wore his sword except as a matter of style, and he paid court to no woman. Lolita Pulido, an impoverished noblewoman, finds him dull. She is drawn instead to the dashing Zorro, who is, of course, the same man.

  At the close of the book, Diego tells the men around him that he began planning the game at fifteen. He recalls tales of persecution and says, "I saw soldiers beat an old native who was my friend." So he pretended to have little interest in life, to keep anyone from linking his name to the highwayman he meant to become. In secret he practiced horsemanship and swordsmanship. "By the saints, he did," Sergeant Gonzales growls. Diego describes the change this way: "The moment I donned cloak and mask, the Don Diego part of me fell away." His "voice grew strong and firm" in costume, and without it he was "the languid Don Diego again".

  Don Alejandro, Diego's father, is the wealthiest landowner in California, and Diego's mother is dead. McCulley's later stories changed the family name from Vega to de la Vega. In most versions the two live in a vast hacienda, riddled with secret passages and tunnels that lead to a hidden cave. That cave serves as Zorro's headquarters. The backstory itself shifted on screen. In the 1920 film The Mark of Zorro, Diego has just come home from Spain, where Zorro says he learned swordsmanship. The 1925 sequel Don Q, Son of Zorro adds that the eldest son of each generation of de la Vegas returns to Spain for travel and study. The 1940 film The Mark of Zorro adds the final piece. Diego's father summons him home unexpectedly because California has fallen to an oppressive dictator. Most retellings keep both ideas.

  Disney's Zorro of 1957-1959 bends the formula. After using the fop act early on, its Diego becomes a passionate and compassionate crusader for justice who masquerades as "the most inept swordsman in all of California". Everyone knows he would love to do what Zorro does, but they think he lacks the skill. The Family Channel's Zorro of 1990-1993 pushes further. Its Diego fakes clumsiness with a blade while exaggerating his real passions for art, poetry, literature and science. In that version the hidden cave even holds a well-equipped laboratory. Isabel Allende's novel Zorro makes the deepest change. Her Diego is a mestizo, the son of a Spanish aristocrat and a Shoshone warrior woman, caught from childhood between the divine right of nobility and the ways of his Native mother, grandmother and ancestors.

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• 3. Costume and Craft

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  In his very first appearance, Zorro wears a purple cloak. His hat is only called a wide sombrero, and a black cloth veil with slits for the eyes covers his whole face. The look that followed came largely from the 1920 film. The black costume Douglas Fairbanks wore there was likely adapted from The Masked Rider, a character in a 1919 Arrow serial. That character was the first Mexican black-clad masked rider on a black horse to reach the screen. Fairbanks's costume differed only slightly in the mask and hat.

  The standard outfit has a black flowing Spanish cloak, a black flat-brimmed hat called a sombrero cordobés, and a black sackcloth mask over the top half of the head. The mask comes in versions. The 1920 film and the 1957-1959 television series use a two-piece design: a blindfold-style cloth with eye slits, plus a bandana so the head stays covered even without the hat. The one-piece mask arrived with the 1940 film and appears in many modern versions. Occasionally Zorro wears a rounded domino mask with no bandana.

  A Z cut in three quick strokes is the mark he leaves with his rapier on defeated foes and on other objects. He also uses a bullwhip and a pistol. On screen, Fairbanks, Tyrone Power and Guy Williams carried an epee dueling blade with a saber hilt, while Antonio Banderas used a transitional rapier. Zorro has a high bounty on his head, but the bumbling authorities cannot catch him, and he enjoys humiliating them in public. The townspeople began calling him El Zorro for his fox-like cunning and charm. Yet the fox is never shown as his emblem. It survives only as a metaphor, as in the Disney theme lyric "Zorro, 'the Fox', so cunning and free".

  Zorro is an acrobat who swings on his bullwhip across gaps between rooftops and lands safely from great heights. He has used his cape as a blind, a trip-mat and a disarming tool. His boots and hat are sometimes weighted, and he has thrown the hat Frisbee-style as a warning. In some versions a medium-sized dagger rides in his left boot. He is also a tactician who uses mockery to goad enemies into traps or into fighting badly. His skills include infiltration, espionage, improvised explosive devices, escape and camouflage. He can even decipher many spoken and written languages, which helps him talk with locals of any background.

  His jet-black horse had no name in The Curse of Capistrano. Disney's television series named it Tornado, and many later adaptations kept the name. In most versions Tornado hides in the secret cave, linked to the hacienda by tunnels. Zorro's heroic pose is rearing on that horse while saluting or raising his sword high. The logo of Zorro Productions, Inc. is built on exactly that image.

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• 4. The Pulp Years

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  Between the 9th of August and the 6th of September 1919, the pulp magazine All-Story Weekly serialized The Curse of Capistrano in five parts. McCulley intended it as a self-contained tale. Then Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, on their honeymoon, chose the story as the first picture for their new studio, United Artists. Fairbanks produced, co-wrote and starred in the resulting 1920 film. It was a commercial success, and in 1924 the publisher Grosset & Dunlap reprinted the novel under the film's title. The book has since appeared under both names.

  Public demand pushed McCulley to write more, beginning in 1922 with The Further Adventures of Zorro, serialized in Argosy All-Story Weekly. Fairbanks bought the film rights to that sequel the same year. His own follow-up, Don Q, Son of Zorro, released in 1925, drew more on the 1919 novel Don Q's Love Story. That book was by the mother and son team of Kate Prichard and Hesketh Hesketh-Prichard. McCulley therefore received no credit on the film.

  New stories arrived irregularly at first. Zorro Rides Again, the third novel, appeared in 1931, nine years after the second. Between 1932 and 1941 McCulley wrote four short stories and two serialized novels. Then came a burst. From 1944 to 1951 he published 52 Zorro short stories in West Magazine. "Zorro Rides the Trail!", printed in Max Brand's Western Magazine in 1954, was the last story to appear in his lifetime. McCulley died in 1958, just as the Disney series carried Zorro to the height of his popularity. One more story, "The Mask of Zorro", ran posthumously in Short Stories for Men in 1959.

  McCulley kept little track of his own continuity. His first magazine serial ends with the villain dead and Diego publicly exposed as Zorro. In the sequel the villain is alive again, and the next entry has the double identity secret once more. The later stories ignore the unmasking altogether. The tales are set in Spanish California, which lasted from 1769 to 1821, though exact years stay vague. The Pueblo of Los Angeles was founded in 1781, so nothing can happen earlier. Some adaptations move Zorro to Mexican California, which lasted from 1821 to 1848.

  Most of McCulley's other Zorro stories stayed out of print until the 21st century. Bold Venture Press finally gathered them all in Zorro: The Complete Pulp Adventures, six volumes issued in 2016 and 2017.

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• 5. Roots of the Mask

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  The historical figure most often linked to Zorro is Joaquin Murrieta, whose life John Rollin Ridge fictionalized in an 1854 novel, The Life and Adventures of Joaquín Murieta. Zorro's closest literary ancestor, though, is Sir Percy Blakeney, hero of Emma Orczy's Scarlet Pimpernel stories. Like Zorro, Sir Percy keeps a secret identity and taunts his enemies by signing his deeds. Like Don Diego, he deflects suspicion by playing an effete dandy who wears lace, writes poetry and shuns violence.

  Comparisons also reach back to Robin Hood, Reynard the Fox, Salomón Pico, Manuel Rodríguez Erdoíza and Tiburcio Vásquez. William Lamport, an Irish soldier who lived in Mexico in the 17th century, is another candidate. Vicente Riva Palacio wrote a fictive book about his life, and a recent biography is titled The Irish Zorro (2004). A different possible model is Estanislao, a Yokuts man who led a revolt against Mission San Jose in 1827.

  Spring-heeled Jack is a subtler suspect. Penny dreadfuls of the 1860s, 1880s and 1900s portrayed him as a nobleman who built a flamboyant masked alter ego to fight injustice. He showed exceptional athletic and fighting skill and kept a hidden lair. He also carved the letter S into walls with his rapier as a calling card. Those stories may have inspired some aspects of Zorro's heroic persona.

  In 1860 the Hungarian writer Mór Jókai published the novel Szegény Gazdagok, or Poor Richmen. Its Baron Lénárd Hátszegi supposedly leads a double life as Fatia Negra, an outlaw with a blackened face who robs local people by night and lives as an aristocrat by day. Jókai drew the character from a real Hungarian baron, László Nopcsa, who lived from 1794 to 1884. According to local legends, Nopcsa had a similar alter ego.

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• 6. Zorro Everywhere

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  Disney's Zorro, broadcast from 1957 to 1959, ran for 78 episodes with Guy Williams in the title role and remains the most famous television version. Portions of its first 13 episodes were edited into a feature film, The Sign of Zorro, released overseas in 1958. Four one-hour follow-ups aired on the Disney anthology series in the 1960-1961 season. The series also changed the hero's helpers. In McCulley's stories Bernardo is a deaf-mute servant. In Disney's version he can hear, but pretends otherwise, working as Zorro's secret agent and sometimes wearing the mask to prop up his master's charade. The Family Channel series replaced him with a teenager named Felipe, played by Juan Diego Botto, who has a similar pretended disability.

  In Isabel Allende's novel, Bernardo is the son of the de la Vega family's Native housemaid, Ana. She nurses both babies, which makes the two boys milk brothers. After pirates attack the hacienda and Bernardo's mother is murdered before his eyes, he stops speaking. Diego's grandmother, White Owl, reads his silence as a form of mourning. Bernardo later marries a Native girl named Light-in-the-Night.

  Tyrone Power starred in the 1940 version of The Mark of Zorro, directed by Rouben Mamoulian. In the 1960s, Spanish and Italian studios produced a stream of Zorro pictures. Frank Latimore headlined two in 1962, Zorro the Avenger and The Shadow of Zorro. Alain Delon starred in a 1975 Italian-French Zorro. Turkey and India made their own, and Mexico produced a run of Westerns, several starring Luis Aguilar. The tone could turn comic. Zorro, The Gay Blade (1981) stars George Hamilton as Diego Jr. and his twin brother Ramon. Many continuations hand the mask to a descendant. In 1949's Ghost of Zorro, the hero is Zorro's grandson. In the 1983 sitcom Zorro and Son, an aged Don Diego, played by Henry Darrow, trains his son Carlos.

  The 1998 film The Mask of Zorro, directed by Martin Campbell, stars Anthony Hopkins as an aged Don Diego de la Vega. Antonio Banderas plays Alejandro Murrieta, a misfit outlaw trained to become the next Zorro. Alejandro eventually marries Diego's daughter Elena, played by Catherine Zeta-Jones. A sequel, The Legend of Zorro, followed in 2005. On television, Duncan Regehr played Zorro for 88 episodes on The Family Channel from 1990 to 1993. A 2007 Spanish-language telenovela with Christian Meier ran for 112 episodes. A Philippine series ran for 98 episodes, and a Japanese anime, Kaiketsu Zorro, ran for 52. In December 2021 a new series starring Wilmer Valderrama was announced for Disney+.

  The comic books started early. In 1939, Zorro was adapted into comics in France, in the magazine Jumbo. Dell Comics published him in Four Color Comics from 1949, and after the Disney series launched, Alex Toth drew the first stories. Marvel Comics revived the character in 1990. Dynamite Entertainment's Django/Zorro, which ran seven issues from 2014 to 2015, was co-written by Quentin Tarantino and Matt Wagner. Toys followed the Disney craze. In 1958 The Topps Company produced an 88-card set, and the Louis Marx company released hats, swords, toy pistols and a playset.

  About 65 separate Zorro live productions have been staged, from melodramas to ballets. Ken Hill's musical opened at the East Stratford Theater in London on the 14th of February 1995, and Hill died just days before the opening. In 1998 Robert W. Cabell released his Z - The Masked Musical as a CD, with Debbie Gibson singing Carlotta. Cabell would later become the character's most persistent legal opponent.

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• 7. Who Owns Zorro

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  Zorro Productions, Inc. states that it "controls the worldwide trademarks and copyrights in the name, visual likeness and the character of Zorro." It also warns that unauthorized, unlicensed use of the name, character or likeness is an infringement. Its claim traces to 1949, when McCulley assigned his Zorro rights to Mitchell Gertz. Gertz died in 1961, and his children created the company. The company's critics point to the clock. At least five works are in the public domain in the United States because 95 years have passed since their release. They are the 1919 novel, the 1920 film The Mark of Zorro, the 1922 novel The Further Adventures of Zorro, the 1925 film Don Q, Son of Zorro, and the 1926 film In the Way of Zorro. Many later stories remain under copyright.

  In 1999, TriStar Pictures, a division of Sony Pictures, sued Del Taco, Inc. over a fast-food ad campaign that allegedly infringed Zorro Productions' trademark claims. Sony and TriStar had paid licensing fees for the 1998 film The Mask of Zorro. In an order that August, the court declined to invalidate the trademarks. The defendant had argued that some copyrights were in the public domain or held by third parties.

  On the 24th of January 2001, Sony Pictures, TriStar and Zorro Productions sued Fireworks Entertainment, Paramount Pictures and Mercury Entertainment. Their target was the series Queen of Swords, set in early 19th-century Spanish California. It featured a hero in a black costume with a red sash who used sword fighting, a whip, bolas and horse-riding skills. Fireworks answered that the original rights had passed to Douglas Fairbanks Sr. in 1920, a transfer legally affirmed in 1929. It also questioned whether the copyright was still valid. Judge Collins wrote that "since the copyrights in The Curse of Capistrano and The Mark of Zorro lapsed in 1995 or before, the character Zorro has been in the public domain." She called the trademark argument "specious". She later vacated the ruling after an unopposed motion from Sony, TriStar and Zorro Productions.

  In 2010, Zorro Productions sued Mars Inc., the maker of M&M's, and the ad agency BBDO Worldwide over a commercial with a Zorro-like costume. The case settled on the 13th of August 2010, each side bearing its own costs. In March 2013, Cabell, the author of the musical, filed suit asserting that Zorro is in the public domain and that the company's trademark registrations were therefore fraudulent. A judge dismissed the case in October 2014 for lack of jurisdiction in Washington, then reversed course and transferred it to California. In May 2017, U.S. District Judge Davila dismissed Cabell's claim to cancel the federal trademarks, and Cabell did not appeal.

  Europe produced a similar fight. In June 2015, the European Union's trade mark office declared the Community Trade Mark for Zorro invalid for goods in classes 16 and 41. That followed a ruling in a case over the character Winnetou, which held that famous character names cannot be protected as trademarks in those classes. Zorro Productions appealed. On the 19th of December 2017, the Fourth Board of Appeal nullified the earlier ruling, declared the trademarks valid, and ordered Cabell to pay the costs. Zorro Productions owns approximately 1,300 other Zorro-related trademarks worldwide. In May 2018, Judge Edward Davila processed a further complaint from Cabell, this one alleging that the company infringed copyright on his musical.

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• 8. Legacy of the Mask

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  Jerry Siegel credited Zorro, along with The Scarlet Pimpernel, as inspirations for Superman, especially the dual identity of mild-mannered reporter Clark Kent. Siegel thought the contrast would make for good drama and humor. Superman's stance as champion of the oppressed, and his devil-may-care attitude in early appearances, also owed something to Douglas Fairbanks, star of The Mark of Zorro and of adventure films such as Robin Hood.

  Bob Kane credited Zorro as part of the inspiration for Batman, created in 1939. Like Don Diego, Bruce Wayne is affluent, heir to wealth built by his parents. His everyday persona encourages others to think of him as shallow, foolish and uncaring, which throws off suspicion. Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns (1986) and The Dark Knight Strikes Again (2001-2002) both contain multiple Zorro references, including Batman inscribing a Z on a defeated foe. In later tellings of Batman's origin, Bruce Wayne's parents are murdered by a robber as the family leaves a showing of the 1940 film The Mark of Zorro.

  Imitators arrived quickly. The 1936 film The Vigilantes Are Coming featured a masked vigilante in a Zorro-like costume. Several countries retitled it after Zorro, including Zorro l'indomptable in France and Zorro - Der blutrote Adler in Germany. Its star, Robert Livingston, then played the real Zorro in The Bold Caballero, also released in 1936. In 1943 José Mallorquí created a similar pulp hero, El Coyote. Republic Pictures had released five Zorro serials between 1937 and 1949 but then lost the license. Its later serials Don Daredevil Rides Again (1951) and Man with the Steel Whip (1954) reused stock footage from those films, relabeling Zorro as new heroes. As a result the costume and body shape keep changing between scenes, and the hero even becomes female in footage from Zorro's Black Whip (1944).

  The echoes run through animation and games. Quick Draw McGraw's alter ego El Kabong in The Quick Draw McGraw Show (1959-1962) is loosely based on Zorro. The 1956 comedy The Court Jester features a masked freedom fighter called the Black Fox. The DC Comics character El Diablo in Justice League (2001-2004) shares Zorro's hat, mask, sash and cape. Puss in Boots in Shrek 2 (2004) wears high boots, a broad-brimmed feathered sombrero and a rapier, and is voiced by Antonio Banderas, who had earlier played Zorro. In 2017 Final Fantasy XIV added a rapier-wielding Red Mage job whose move Zwerchhau closely resembles El Zorro's signature Z-form attack. Texas Tech University's mascot, the Masked Rider, is similar to Zorro. It began as an unofficial mascot in 1936 and became official with the 1954 Gator Bowl.

  In 2015 the M7 Con Western Convention at the Los Angeles Convention Center featured a segment on the history of Zorro in film and television. Maestro Ramon Martinez and actor Alex Kruz demonstrated the Spanish fencing style La Verdadera Destreza, dueling live as Zorro and the Comandante. Meanwhile, a cave used as a filming location in many Zorro productions still stands in Chatsworth, Los Angeles, on the former Iverson Movie Ranch. It is known as Zorro's Cave and now sits hidden behind a condominium complex.

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