Why is this not very well known?

I've always liked this film. In fact it was probably my introduction to Robin Hood.

I'm not sure why it isn't better known. My guess would be that it was a victim of Disney's protectiveness, and habit of withdrawing films for long periods. I saw it in re-release, I guess around 1970. But while other films showed up on TV or doing the rounds of the smaller local cinemas which were still going then, Disney tended to withdraw films for years in the hope of major re-releases, even if just on double bills. And this one rarely, if ever, got picked for cinema distribution. And the pretty strictly rationed their TV exposure, at least in the UK, so that a Disney screening was an "event". As a result, it fell out of the public eye, and for a generation just slightly younger than me, it was unknown. While I do think it was fairly successful, it possibly wasn't quite beloved enough to be heavily demanded by those who remembered it. And I guess Disney didn't wasn't keen to have it compete/conflict with their then new animated version anyway.

Plus it was part of Disney's attempt (largely by necessity) to expand production to the UK after WW2; when that period passed, those films weren't heavily supported.

As I say, this is only a guess based on my subjective experience growing up in the seventies, but I think the fault lies with Disney's business practices rather than the quality of the film itself.

But I'd be interested to hear any other thoughts...

I never saw this film before today. I taped it off the Disney Channel 20 years ago and didn't watch it until today. I'm quite a bit ticked off that I didn't know how good it was and had to wait this long. I don't recall it ever playing on TV when I was a kid, when I really should have seen it, nor did it ever get re-released in theaters the way so many Disney films, including some of the live-action ones, did. I remember making two trips to theaters to see 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA some twenty years after it came out, the second time with a bunch of kids from the community center where I worked as a teen. I saw SWORD AND THE ROSE at a revival screening at the Museum of Modern Art in the late 1970s, so why didn't they run THE STORY OF ROBIN HOOD?

And what if I hadn't taped it off the Disney Channel when I did (in 1995)? The Disney Channel no longer runs classic Disney movies. Only TCM does it once in a while. How many of these movies are even on DVD? Whenever I've looked in the Disney section in a DVD store, all I see are a handful of the most famous classic Disney animated movies and the rest of the section is filled up with recent stuff and all that awful made-for-video animation (e.g. THE RETURN OF JAFAR, BAMBI II, etc.).