It follows the 1940 Thief tradition in that it uses some characters and themes from The Arabian Nights, but the stories told, indeed the entire storytelling strucutres, have nothing to do with the books. Typical of the kind was Sinbad the Sailor, the only one of these films that seems to exist at the Internet Archive. After that there were considerably fewer Arabian Nights movies from Hollywood for a while, which is ironic, considering that Harryhausen was the first one in eighteen years who actually offered something original to the genre. Through the rest of the 40s and most of the 50s, Hollywood released on average one new Arabian Nights film every two years, culminating in 1958 with Ray Harryhausen’s The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. In 1942 came Hollywood’s response, Arabian Nights (the second-ever Technicolor movie), and in 1944 there were two more. The success was spectacular (it is still a magnificent film) and it opened the gates for a flood of imitators. It developed the fantastic characters (the thief, the sultan, the princess, the genie) and their surroundings (the architecture, the clothes, the magical objects), but wove these into completely new stories, not based on the original film nor the books. The 1940 movie did not stay very close to The Arabian Nights stories. Well, not a remake, exactly, since there was very little left of Fairbanks’ story, but it shared the title and a number of central themes. Last week I wrote about the original The Thief of Bagdad with Douglas Fairbanks.
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