Celebrating once again the cinema of Turkey, the land that copyright infringement laws forgot.
Spend the holiday with friends.
Do you have big plans for the holiday tomorrow? Ours involve a lot of not blogging. We’re going to not blog as hard as we can. But, since traffic here on SBR has grown so much lately we want to re-present the Thanksgiving special we published last year, thereby killing two birds (maybe even turkeys) with one stone.
Yeesh. You can’t really call them “caped crusaders” because they don’t have capes. For that matter, “crusader” may not have the same connotation in Asia Minor. Whatever, the clip is typical of Turkey’s devil-may-care attitude about copyright. YouTube is chock-full of Turkish riffs on most Western geek culture mainstays, riffs that almost always employ (in a clumsier manner than their American cousins) dizzying amounts of violence, sex, and overwrought soundtracks. Did we mention they’re also really cheap-looking? It bears reiteration. Check out the Turkish Star Trek:
As the clip shows, the Turkish Captain Kirk is much better at walking than most American actors. Still, the language barrier makes impossible understanding why a peasant hangs out on the bridge and pesters the legitimate crew members. The bridge set also seems to be in some kind of basement garage, if those metal support posts are any indication.
Still, where there’s Star Trek there has to be its dumber, more exciting cousin Star Wars, right? 1982′s Dunyayi Kurturan Adam (“The Man Who Saves The World”) used bootlegged footage from Star Wars Episode IV as well as stock footage of American and Soviet test rocket flights to tell its weird, garbled saga about… stuff in space? The musical score to this clip’s interminable opening credits sounds like public access television music from the 1970s, and it only gets worse from there.
Not content to hit George Lucas up once, Dunyayi Kurturan Adam also pilfers the themes to Raiders of the Lost Ark as well as Battlestar Galactica. Eventually achieving cult status by sheer power of its awfulness, the film spawned a 2006 sequel. In a case of bad art imitating more bad art,some fans of the original complained the follow-up was a letdown – just like Lucas’ recent efforts.
Finally, given Marvel Comics’ love for merchandising we’re not entirely sure this next clip is even a bootleg. 3 Dev Adam (“Three Mighty Men”) was a startlingly low-budget, brazenly lurid 1973 abomination depicting an ersatz Captain America’s struggle to stop an evil, pudgy Spider-Man knockoff from running amok through Istanbul. Cap was joined in his efforts, for some reason, by a copy of the legendary Mexican luchadore El Santo. Meanwhile ”Spiderman” and his two girlfriends idly torture and kill people in depraved ways or have sex in front of puppets. If you’ve never seen a man guinea pigged to death, here’s your chance:
Probably the single most trivial thing you will learn this week: 3 Dev Adam featured Turkish star Aytekin Akkaya, who also appeared in Dunyayi Kurturan Adam.
That’s about all we can stand right now. We’ll be back next week with our latest edition of Miscellaneous Debris. Have a happy, safe holiday weekend.
- Michael Kabel
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