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Did you ever have that feeling that you've seen something on MST3K before, when you were young, as a legitimate flick? I had that distinct impression while watching The Magic Voyage of Sinbad, a bizarre Russian fairy-tale about a minstrel and his magic harp. He returns to his home city to discover that the merchants have gotten richer and the poor poorer, and he undertakes a series of strange challenges to win the merchant's cash from them. As [livejournal.com profile] fallenpegasus pointed out, he turned the town's capital into mere cash, and when his second magical challenge comes he then throws more gold into the town's economy without a corresponding increase in captial. It was full of Marxist rhetoric, so I feel it was fine of me to critize the bad economics.

The film was original titled Sadko, but the Americanization of it was retouched to avoid any Russian names because it was made during the McCarthy era. Scarily enough, the American translation was done by Francis Ford Coppola, then 22 years old. The bad translation led to comments like, "Wow, Sinbad is really Nordic!" and "I haven't seen anything vaguely Arabic yet."
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Elf Sternberg

May 2025

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