In the Golden Age of Comic Books, this was the film to which Thomas and Martha Wayne took their young son Bruce on the night that they were murdered in front of him in Gotham City in 1920, the experience which led him to become Batman.
Douglas Fairbanks was looking to try something new from the normal boy-meets-girl romance movies he had been making for the previous few years. This is when the actor came across the story of Zorro--originally published in the magazine "All-Story Weekly". Previous to Fairbanks' portrayal, practically nobody had ever heard of the Robin Hood-like hero Zorro.
Included among the American Film Institute's 2001 list of 400 movies nominated for the top 100 Most Heart-Pounding American Movies.