Popular Archery Icons and How They’ve Affected Today’s Archery

Archery has come and gone from the front interest line due to its growing and receding popularity on-screen with either movies or TV series, and even in video games. It becomes super trendy, and cool, and hip when viewers see their heroes handling a bow, and then when the movie or show dies down, or the game gets old, so does the archery trend before it comes right back strong as ever. So here is a tribute to the various inspirations and forms that archery has shown through to make its place in our culture throughout the times.

First off, I am going to start off with one of the classics of our culture; Robin Hood. There have been multiple takes on this very old tale, from the Disney animated movie featuring foxes as the main characters, to the very funny spoof Robin Hood: Men in Tights, and even the more serious feel the 2010 movie featuring Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett gave it. In all of them, Robin’s talents went uncontested and he managed some very impressive tricks with his bow and arrows, which no doubt have fueled the imagination of many a youth.

In the world of video games, I can go all the way back to The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time for inspiration. Playing as Link and shooting everything with the bow and winning challenges and competitions always gave me such a feeling of satisfaction that my own personal love for the art came from there. In more recent years, the reboot of Tomb Raider in 2013 had Lara survive with only a bow and arrows to start off her adventure, which obviously got me hooked, but so did a lot of other players from all the positive reviews the game received.

Probably one the most iconic bow-wielding characters in my opinion comes from the Lord of the Rings franchise. Being a personal favourite of mine, Legolas has all the moves down in the series and just flat-out makes archery look so damn good, and not just because of his looks. His elven efficiency and accuracy just change the name of the game, and he comes up with tactics that we can’t even begin to replicate (lack of having elephants handy being a main one), although when we play, some of us do come out with bruises from time to time, just as he will always sport one of his forehead after a battle.

There have been a lot of popular icons in the recent years popping up on screen, such as Katniss from The Hunger Games, Hawkeye in The Avengers, Merida in Disney and Pixar’s Brave and even Oliver Queen in the Green Arrow TV series, which have all fueled a different wave of archery love. People want to try it out and see how they fare at it, and generally, when archery is picked up, it’s rather hard to put back down. That being said, here at Archers Arena, we want people to find their true potential not only at archery, but at the new sport that has been created from it: combat archery tag. It brings out a whole new dimension reminiscent of video games and medieval combat. This new trend is definitely here to stay.