Monday, January 26, 2009
PERSIAN SAILOR GOES HOLLYWOOD
While searching through YouTube for something that my household shark aficionado could watch that didn't involve divers being menaced but still had the cool creature factor, I stumbled across trailers for the some Sinbad epics that I had seen as a kid, and it got me wondering what the original source of the character was. To Occidentals, he first showed up in Burton's translations of the Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, but the Sinbad (or Es-Sindibad) stories were already old by the time they had been included in that anthology, and may have originated in the pre-Islamic Sassanid Empire.
Like King Arthur, Sinbad has proved to be a solid fixture in modern pop culture as well as legends of an earlier era; Doug Faribanks Jr. depicted him in 1947's Sinbad the Sailor (where Maureen O'Hara played a Persian princess who couldn't have looked more Irish if she had been a pint of Guinness in the hand of Van Morrison on St. Patrick's Day). The fun really got started when Ray Harryhausen brought his special effects into the mix, and three films made a lasting mark in the geekosphere: 1958's The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, 1974's The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, and 1977's Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (which I remember seeing as a kid--it was rated G, despite a scene with a near-nekkid Jane Seymour). There has also been a Japanese cartoon, and a DreamWorks animated movie. How many more stories can Hollywood et al. get out of this at-least-1,500-year-old adventurer?
While searching through YouTube for something that my household shark aficionado could watch that didn't involve divers being menaced but still had the cool creature factor, I stumbled across trailers for the some Sinbad epics that I had seen as a kid, and it got me wondering what the original source of the character was. To Occidentals, he first showed up in Burton's translations of the Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, but the Sinbad (or Es-Sindibad) stories were already old by the time they had been included in that anthology, and may have originated in the pre-Islamic Sassanid Empire.
Like King Arthur, Sinbad has proved to be a solid fixture in modern pop culture as well as legends of an earlier era; Doug Faribanks Jr. depicted him in 1947's Sinbad the Sailor (where Maureen O'Hara played a Persian princess who couldn't have looked more Irish if she had been a pint of Guinness in the hand of Van Morrison on St. Patrick's Day). The fun really got started when Ray Harryhausen brought his special effects into the mix, and three films made a lasting mark in the geekosphere: 1958's The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, 1974's The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, and 1977's Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (which I remember seeing as a kid--it was rated G, despite a scene with a near-nekkid Jane Seymour). There has also been a Japanese cartoon, and a DreamWorks animated movie. How many more stories can Hollywood et al. get out of this at-least-1,500-year-old adventurer?
# posted by toner_low @ 11:56 PM 
