What a wonder “The Adventures of Robin Hood” must have been to the Depression Era moviegoers who first saw it.

A jaunty Errol Flynn swashbuckler splashed across the screen in the still-new and rare Technicolor, capturing glorious locatations, with Oscar winning art direction, editing and an Erich Wolfgang Korngold score that just sings, it must have been every bit as overwhelming as “Gone With the Wind” and “The Wizard of Oz” were a year and a half later.

It’s a touchstone film for any cinephile, and I’ve seen it on TV, video, and at university film societies over the years. But the most recent Museum of Modern Art restoration of this National Film Registry classic really takes one back to what it must have been like to bowled-over by this masterpiece, directed by Michael Curtiz and William Keighley but nursed to life by producer Hal B. Wallis.

The English folk legend has been committed to film more times than one can count, but this is the version with that ineffable something that makes every other take on the tale pale in comparison.

It’s more fun, sure. There are comic moments in the Kevin Costner “Hood,” even fewer that come to mind in the Russell Crowe version. It’s gorgeous, built around an impressive, soon-to-be-regarded as “all star” cast, and epic in scale. But other renditions of the story have been just as big. Yet nothing else over the decades come even as close as those two recent “Hoods” to matching this 1938 classic.

Watching Flynn in it, we can see the Aussie expat chisel his screen reputation in stone, the true heir to the jolly, grinning Douglas Fairbanks action hero throne. The athletic, charismatic Fairbanks filmed the definitive silent “Robin Hood” 15 years before. That film’s plot has been more of a template for all the “Robin Hoods” to follow. Like the Costner and Crowe versions, Fairbanks & Co. went for something more drawn out, and all those versions of the story were over two hours and 20 minutes long.

The Flynn film zips by in 100 breathless, endlessly-quotable minutes.

“Ho, varlets, bring Sir Robin food! Such insolence must support a healthy appetite!”

Pairing Flynn with Olivia de Havilland, his “Captain Blood” co-star, and reconnecting him with his “Prince and the Pauper” sidekick Alan Hale, Sr., as the iconic rendition of “Little John,” giving the film two delicious villains — not just the delicious “Captain Blood” alumnus Basil Rathbone as Guy of Gisbourne, but Claude Rains at his snootiest as the scheming Prince John, it seems as if every move producer Wallis made paid off.

The story’s waypoints had been long codified before the first scene was shot. A young member of the landed gentry is radicalized by the tyranny that sets in whilst “Good King Richard” the Lionheart was off crusading and getting himself held for ransom by the crown princes of Europe.

Robin Hood is a rabid royalist, of a rank that he has access to confront Guy of Gisbourne, the cowardly Terry Jones look-alike Sheriff of Nottingham (Melville Cooper, hilarious) and cruel, scheming Prince John.

“By my faith, but you’re a bold rascal!”

He instantly gets under the skin of Lady Marian Fitzwalter (de Havilland).

“Why, you speak treason?”

“FLUENTLY!”

The script firmly sets the story in 1191 — just over 100 years after the Norman Conquest, and sets up the conflict between plucky, industrious Saxon Britons and the effete Norman French who rule them at the point of a sword, with a compliant high Catholic clergy (Montagu Love) assisting.

But the French haven’t reckoned on English revulsion at taxation, English notions of liberty or English longbows, made of yew wood and lethal in battle for 250 years.

Robin of Locksley evades capture, and starting with his dandy, lute-playing make Will Scarlett (Patric Knowles) and then Little John and later Friar Tuck (Eugene Pallette), he gets the merry band together and takes over Sherwood Forest. They’ll rob from the Norman rich and give to the English poor.

And Robin, a sporting chap, will not only eschew several chances to kill the venal Sir Guy. He’ll risk his neck to compete in an archery competition, in disguise, just to impress Lady Marian.

So many happy accidents led to this film that they themselves became the stuff of legend. James Cagney was slated to play the Prince of Thieves, but he sued to get out of his contract with the stingy brothers Warner.

That went on for years. And that delay didn’t just allow Flynn to emerge as a star, but made the production’s last minute decision to film in Technicolor possible. Every three-strip color camera in Hollywood was brought to Warners’ soundstages and to Chico and Pasadena and Calabasas for location shooting.

Those years also allowed Wallis to convince Viennese composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold to come to Hollywood and compose his “opera without singing” score and change the way films sounded from that moment on.

Without that playful score, we wouldn’t have that lovely moment where Robin confronts Little John with quarterstaffs on a log bridge, Scarlett strums along on his lute as entertainment, and Little John barks at him to pick up the tempo to something more suited to a fight scene. Will obliges.

The archery stunts involve a real archer shooting real arrows into assorted extras, stunt doubles and cast members. Howard Hill was that archer entrusted with that dangerous task, and you can see him playing Elwyn the Welshman in the archery contest scenes.

“The Adventures of Robin Hood” is quite old fashioned, simplistic morality and politics, corny speeches and trash talk, rear-projection chases on horseback, cuts between Robin swinging from a forest tree to land on a fat tree branch on a soundstage for his signature line, “Welcome to Sherwood, milady!”

Edits like that are a lot less jarring and more seamless in this latest restoration.

Critics back then and the still-young Academy of Motion Picture Aats & Sciences had an easier time acknowledging what they knew to be a classic the moment they saw it. It might not have won any acting honors, and Best Picture went to the stage adaptation of the Pultizer Prize-winning Kaufman and Hart play, “You Can’t Take It With You.” Even then, the “academy” liked to be seen as honoring “art.”

But “Robin Hood,” a dazzling smash when it came out, has endured, aging better than any of its contemporaries, a classic worth restoring and worth revisiting any time you crave a little escape to a legendary time, iconic characters and a sporting cast more than perfect at playing them.

Rating: “approved,” PG

Cast: Errol Flynn, Olivia de Havilland, Claude Rains, Basil Rathbone, Alan Hale, Patric Knowles, Eugene Pallette, Herbert Mundi, Montagu Love, Una O’Conner, Melville Cooper and Ian Hunter

Credits: Directed by Michael Curtiz and William Keighley, scripted by Norman Reilly Raine and Steon I. Miller. A Warner Bros. release on Tubi, Amazon, etc.

Running time: 1:42