Vintage 1976 Ça Va Être Ta Fête Robin Belgium Movie Poster 🏹 Robin Hood Karate Comedy

Remember Robin Hood Meets Karate? 🏹 Robin Hood Meets the 70s Karate Craze

Size: 14" x 22" ~ Unused archive stock. Little to slight wear. Everything in my collection is kept in the dark, under 40% relative humidity, at a steady 72°F, climate controlled, so whatever age a sheet shows, it had before it reached me.

It is the original Belgian theatrical poster for Ça Va Être Ta Fête, Robin! — French up top, the Flemish title 'T Zal Er Stuiven below it — a 1976 Spanish-Italian production that takes the Robin Hood legend and runs it straight into the 70s karate craze. Its English release title spells out exactly what you are getting: Robin Hood, Arrows, Beans and Karate. It is a live-action picture with its own cast, a whole different animal from the red fox Disney put in cinemas in 1973, and a gloriously silly one.

🎬 The Film and the People Who Made It

Robin Hood and his merry men are holed up in Sherwood, protecting Nottingham from a tyrannical sheriff, springing a man named Sir Allan, winning an archery contest, and rescuing Lady Anne along the way. Friar Tuck, for reasons the English title already gave away, brings in a kung fu-trained friend to help even the odds.

Playing Robin Hood is the bodybuilder Alan Steel — the stage name Sergio Ciani took after he left stunt work behind. Ciani was born in Rome in 1935 and worked as a stuntman and Steve Reeves's body double before headlining a run of Italian strongman pictures; he died in 2015. Cris Huerta, a Lisbon-born character actor who spent his career as the portly, bald, bearded sidekick across more than a hundred Westerns and adventures, plays Friar Tuck — that's him swinging the staff in the artwork. And in a bit of casting trivia I genuinely love: a teenage Victoria Abril, long before she became one of Europe's most acclaimed actresses, plays Lady Anne here.

Directing was Tonino Ricci, who was born Teodoro Ricci in Rome in 1927. He came up as an assistant director in the early 60s on peplum and adventure pictures, made his own directing debut with a 1969 war film starring Klaus Kinski, and spent the rest of a career that ran until his death in 2014 moving between westerns, giallo thrillers, a mafia picture, and the occasional oddity like this one.

🍿 Archers, Punches and Black Eyes

Here is the part that makes me grin every time: this was Ricci's second helping of the same recipe. Back in 1973 he made a comedy western called Storia di karatè, pugni e fagioli, released in English as Karate, Fists and Beans, with Cris Huerta cast as a stand-in for Bud Spencer and Iwao Yoshioka playing a character called Moikako. Three years later he took the formula to Sherwood Forest. The Italian title, Storia di arcieri, pugni e occhi neri, is cut from the same cloth and means roughly "a story of archers, punches and black eyes," and the English title carries the beans and the karate right along with it. Huerta is back as Friar Tuck, and Yoshioka is back too, as the kung fu friend Tuck calls in, under very nearly the same name. One Italian reviewer sums it up as a mash-up of swashbuckler, costume picture and spaghetti western, held together by the kind of punch-ups Bud Spencer and Terence Hill were throwing in those same years. You can see that spirit right there on the sheet: take a look at the poor soldier on the right, reeling back and seeing stars.

🎨 What's Printed on the Sheet

The artwork is bold black line work over a ground that fades from orange to yellow: a woman in a white wimple, a bearded swordsman with his blade raised, a bald friar swinging a quarterstaff, and a scrum of soldiers and outlaws below. Both Belgian titles run across the bottom third in big display lettering, with the cast line "met / avec Alan Steel / Chris Huerta" and "regie: Tonino Ricci" printed under them, along with the note that it ran in Techniscope and Technicolor. Down in the corner sits the round mark of the Belgian house that released it, Les Films du Dragon — dragon and all. No printer's imprint appears anywhere on the sheet.

🌍 Why Belgium Did This Its Own Way

Belgium is the only country in the world to use posters of this size, and they were very flamboyant compared to their counterparts across the globe. Due to their desirable size, graphics, and limited availability, these are a favorite among collectors, and once you have a few in hand it is not hard to see why.

🥋 A Small-World Connection

Here is the kind of trivia I collect these for: Alan Steel doubled for Steve Reeves in the final showdown of The White Warrior — the very film that played Belgian cinemas as Les Cosaques Passent à l'Attaque. Same stuntman-turned-leading-man, two pictures, more than a decade apart.

📽️ Where It's Been

This sheet comes from the archive of the now-defunct Cosmopolis Films, kept together as one collection since 2007. Les Films du Dragon was active in Belgium from September 1975 to October 1988, so this print run dates to somewhere in that stretch — after the film's own 1976 release and no later than 1988. Posters like this were made to sell a picture to cinemas, not to collectors, so almost none survived the run; what sat unused in a distributor's own archive is what made it to me, and now to you.