There are many adaptations of Marvel’s Spider-Man in years, especially in live-action. One that you may not know about was released in 1973, and since it turns 50 years old in November, a new documentary aims to shed light on the cult film.
Film historian Ed Glaser, who previously found the last 35mm print of the The Man Who Saved the World (aka, “the TURKISH Star Wars”) released another mini-documentary for his “Deja View” series. This one points out the interesting name 3 Dev Adam—alternatively known as either 3 Giant Men or Captain America & Santo vs. Spider-Man. The big claim to fame for this movie is that it was “the world’s first comic book crossover film,” before the MCU or any imitators came on the scene. The other big boast is that this version of Spider-Man follows everything that J. Jonah Jameson said about him, because he is a threat and a real villain who needs two heroes to work together and bring him down.
As Glaser explains in his video, movies starring costumed heroes were big in Turkey in the 1960s and 70s, helped by poor copyright protection for foreign works back then. In an effort to include that, the director T. Fikret Uçak decided to combine several heroes in one movie for the audience to see. While Captain America (played here by Aytekin Akkaya) and Spider-Man (Tevfik Şen) need no introduction, El Santo (Yavuz Selekman) will be something else: the character is a real-life masked luchador named Rodolfo Guzmán Huerta, who first. entered the movie scene in 1958. By 1982, he had starred in over 50 movies. All three of the characters have had varying degrees of popularity in Turkey in the past, so you can see the appeal of a crossover film where they share the spotlight.
The six and a half minute documentary is a fascinating watch, and will show how comic book adaptations are affected by factors unknown to a particular character’s creator. From Glaser’s account of things, and the scenes from the movie shown in HD, it looks and sounds bonkers and fantastic with how it uses the three heroes. And if this interests you, good news—you can watch it only hereeven in 360p.
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