When is a Sinbad film not a Sinbad film?

When it’s The Magic Voyage of Sinbad!

Sinbad (Sergei Stolyarov) returns to his land after going on a great quest.  He sees that half of the citizens are rich and happy and always dancing.  He sees that the other half are poor and never happy.  Those of us watching see that the film’s version of Persia looks a lot like Russia.  Sinbad announces that he is going to capture the Bird of Happiness and bring it back to his people.  He sets sail and is given help by the daughter of Neptune.  Sinbad visits many lands and spend some time underwater, where Neptune offers him the hand of his daughters and there’s also an octopus hanging around and watching in the background.  Sinbad never finds the Bird of Happiness but it doesn’t matter because he realizes that his people have all the happiness that they need in Persia.

The Magic Voyage 0f Sinbad may seem like a strange Sinbad film and that’s because it was never a Sinbad film in the first place.  It was actually a Russian film called Sadko, about a young Russian man who tries to prove himself by finding the Bird of Happiness.  In America, Sadko was even released under its original name and plot in 1953.  No one paid much attention to it.

Then, in 1962, Roger Corman got his hands on the American distribution rights for the film and he decided to rerelease it.  He changed the title to The Magic Voyage of Sinbad and he hired a young film student to write narration for the film and to also “translate” the film’s dialogue so that it could be dubbed into English.  The very Russian Sadko instead became a film about Sinbad, the legendary Persian sailor.

The Corman version went on to become the better-known version, largely because it was featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000.  Personally, I prefer the Corman version because the badness of the dialogue and the overly solemn narration go a long way toward making up for the fact that this is a 79-minute movie about someone searching for something and failing to find it.  After making so many grand promises, Sinbad returns to his home and tells everyone that he actually lied and they don’t need the Bird of Happiness to be happy.  The film ends abruptly, probably because the people rose up and tossed Sinbad in the ocean at that point.

As for that film student who wrote the script, Francis Ford Coppola later did alright for himself.