Turkish remakesploitation

Turkey's Yeşilçam industry was, for a stretch of the 1970s, among the most productive in the world by volume, at around three hundred features a year, serving an audience that could not easily get foreign films.

The solution was to remake them without permission.

The famous one

Turkish Star Wars (Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam, 1982) does not imitate Star Wars. It contains Star Wars, optically printed in behind the actors, scored with music lifted from Raiders of the Lost Ark and Ben-Hur.

There are also Turkish versions of The Exorcist, Rambo, Star Trek, Superman and Spider-Man. The Spider-Man one makes him a murderer.

Not all of it was stolen

The same industry, on the same schedules, also printed its own pulp. Kilink, a skeleton-suited master criminal swiped from Italian fumetti neri, ran across a hit franchise from 1967. The Tarkan barbarian pictures put a Turkish hero, a sword and a rubber octopus on screen with no foreign print hidden behind them. It sits on the same shelf as the remakes and looks every bit as cheap, so it lives under the same tag.

Why they look like that

Schedules of a week or two. Prints run until they fell apart. Most of these films now survive only as degraded video transfers, and there is no better copy coming.