The advent of streaming, and its subsequent domination of movie-watching, has effectively eliminated the old universally beloved experience of catching some beloved movie on TV and then dropping everything so you can watch it — even if that same movie is on TV all the time. That’s part of why The Shawshank Redemption is so popular, since it was unavoidable for anyone with basic cable back in the day, but before Andy Dufresne ever started digging his tunnel, there was once a much more surprising contender for the title of “most popular movie” on television: A now-forgotten, franchise-spawning fantasy film called The Beastmaster. In fact, there was apparently a time when the only movie more popular than The Beastmaster on TV was Gone With the Wind, and that movie spent decades as the most iconic thing Hollywood has ever produced.

That’s according to a quote from former TNT executive Phil Oppenheim in a Turner Classic Movies piece on the history of The Beastmaster, who specifically said Beastmaster was in “the second tier” of movies in the early ‘90s after Gone With the Wind (it was a staple of TNT, TBS, and HBO at the time). Now, “second tier” may sound like faint praise, but we’re talking about one movie that is mentioned on the Wikipedia page for “history of film” and another movie that’s best known these days for being the costume Chevy Chase’s Pierce wore in Community’s first Halloween episode — and the joke is that it’s a completely outdated reference that nobody gets… and also that episode aired 16 years ago.

What Is ‘The Beastmaster’ and Is It Better Than ‘Gone With the Wind’?

Image via MGM

Released in 1982, The Beastmaster was directed by Don Coscarelli (who later made super-cool cult classic Bubba Ho-Tep) and stars Marc Singer as a swords-and-sorcery fantasy hero named Dar who is born with the ability to communicate with animals. Along with a human woman named Kiri (played by Tanya Roberts), Dar teams up with a squad of animals (an eagle, two ferrets, and a panther/tiger) and goes on a quest to defeat an evil king (Rod Loomis) and his more-evil adviser (Rip Torn). And, given its legacy and comparisons between it and Gone With the Wind, it was obviously released to universal acclaim and became a smash-hit at the box office! No, just kidding: It made about $14 million, which is less than Tron: Ares if you adjust for inflation, and it has a 50% on Rotten Tomatoes, which is — you guessed it — lower than Tron: Ares.

And yet, its television popularity wasn’t some mass hallucination. The Beastmaster was such a TV hit that it spawned two bad sequels, with Singer returning for both of them. Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time came out in 1991 (he goes to ‘90s Los Angeles, because that’s the natural progression you’d expect from the first movie) and then Beastmaster III: The Eye of Braxus embraced its destiny and went straight to TV in 1996. Finally, there was a three-season Beastmaster TV show that ran in syndication from 1999 to 2002. Unlike the first movie, the TV show was not one of the most popular things on television at the time.

The Beastmaster is currently available on most free streaming services, and Gone With the Wind’s status in popular culture — thanks to its racism, depiction of sexual assault, and the promotion of absurd myths about the heroism of the Confederacy — has just gotten lower and lower. So… hooray for The Beastmaster, then.

Release Date

August 16, 1982

Runtime

118 minutes

Director

Don Coscarelli

Writers

Don Coscarelli, Paul Pepperman, Andre Norton

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