"Born with the courage of an eagle, the strength of a black tiger, and the power of a god," read the posters for The Beastmaster (1982), a sword and sorcery fantasy film that appeared the same summer as Arnold Schwarzenegger's blockbuster Conan the Barbarian . The fantasy genre was capitalizing on popularity due in part to the success of the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons . The game had been around for half a decade when writer/director Don Coscarelli created The Beastmaster with co-screenwriter Paul Pepperman. The original story was based on the 1959 novel The Beast Master by Andre Norton, which concerned a Navajo warrior set in the world of sci-fi. However, when Norton read the screenplay, she was unhappy with the changes the writers had made and had her name removed from the credits. According to Coscarelli, he envisioned the film as "a cross between samurai films and Disney."

High priest Maax (Rip Torn) plans to kill the unborn son of King Zed (Rod Loomis) after witches predict the child will one day grow up to destroy him. When Zed gets wind of the plot, he banishes Maax, but not before one of the witches steals the child, Dar (Marc Singer), from his mother's womb and puts him into that of a cow. The child grows up as the son of a simple villager, but has the ability of a "beastmaster," or one who can communicate with animals through telepathy. When the Jun, a group of barbarians, murder the people of his village, Dar goes on a quest for revenge. Along the way, he meets slave girl Kiri (Tanya Roberts), an eagle named Sharak, two ferrets, Kodo and Podo, and a panther named Ruh. Also in the cast were John Amos, Vanna Bonta, Josh Milrad, and Ralph Strait.

The Beastmaster was made with a budget around $10 million. How the money was raised is in dispute. According to a January 1982 article in Screen International , co-producer Sylvio Tabet said that he and Coscarelli spent two years preparing to make the film, with Tabet having financed it completely on his own with European bank loans and private investments, but Variety claimed in August of that year that the film had been financed by a "consortium of foreign investors" and presales of foreign distribution rights at the 1981 MIFED International Film and Multimedia Market in Milan and the Cannes Film Festival. Officially, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and Leisure Investment Company were the production companies, with MGM/UA Entertainment Co. as distributors.

Interiors for The Beastmaster were shot in a former toy warehouse in North Hollywood, with main exteriors and landscapes done on a 3,000 acre lot in Simi Valley, belonging to the Union Oil Company, with additional filming done at Lake Piru, in the Los Padres National Forest, The the Valley of Fire State Park in Nevada, as well as various locations in Arizona. Production lasted from December 1, 1981 to mid-February 1982, with the American Humane Association on hand to supervise the treatment of the animal actors, including twenty ferrets, three grizzly bears, a wedge-tailed eagle and three tigers. Kipling, the tiger who did the majority of acting as Ruh, was dyed black to look like a panther and trained six weeks for his role.

The Beastmaster had been scheduled for a Christmas 1982 release until United Artists acquired the domestic distribution rights and wanted to move the date up to August 20, 1982, when it debuted in Los Angeles and New York. The film was not a hit, only just making back its costs with a $14 million take at the box office. However, The Beastmaster became a staple on cable television in the 1990s. Said TNT programming executive Phil Oppenheim, "It's among our most popular movies. It's in the second tier after Gone With the Wind (1939)." A sequel, Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time with Marc Singer reprising his role, was released in 1991, and Singer played Dar again in a television movie in 1996. Tabet would revisit The Beastmaster once more as a television series on Syfy from 1999 to 2002.

SOURCES:

The AFI Catalog of Feature Films
Browne, David "Why "The Beastmaster"? Entertainment Weekly 1 Sep 93
The Internet Movie Database

By Lorraine LoBianco