Kara Murat, Dracula, and Ali Baba: Adapting Turkish Historical Adventure Comics to the Big Screen

Abstract

Comic strips and comics periodicals featuring sword-wielding and horse-riding Turkish heroes have been quite popular in Turkey, and Turkish filmmakers made four different series of movies featuring characters derived from such comics in the 1960s and 1970s. The last of these were the seven Kara Murat movies released between 1972 and 1978, all starring the iconic actor Cüneyt Arkın. This work will study the Kara Murat film series, concentrating on those entries whose scripts have been adapted directly from the matching Kara Murat comic strip episodes. One reason for choosing the Kara Murat movies over other series in the same vein is that the first-ever Kara Murat comics strip episode itself which was soon adapted as the first Kara Murat movie had in the first place been loosely but unmistakably adapted, without any credit, from an earlier historical novel and hence offers more than one layer of adaptation. The other reason for selecting this series is that one Kara Murat movie which was co-produced by an Italy-based international filmmaker had been exported abroad and theatrically released in several west European countries in dubbed versions and a comparison of the local Turkish and the export version(s) of the same movie reveal interesting dynamics at work in adapting a work through dubbing. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.