Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger ** (1977, Patrick Wayne, Jane Seymour, Taryn Power) – Classic Movie Review 3717

Patrick Wayne is dull as Sinbad in director Sam Wanamaker’s less exciting 1977 sequel to The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958, played by Kerwin Mathews) and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973, played by John Phillip Law).

Writer Beverley Cross’s rather uninspired screen story is based on the 1001 Nights in which Princess Farah (Jane Seymour) gets Sinbad to remove the spell of evil sorceress Zenobia (Margaret Whiting) on her brother Prince Kassim (Damien Thomas), who has been transformed into a monkey. Sinbad’s quest is to get the Prince to the lands of the Ademaspai to restore him to human form for his coronation.

With some lacklustre acting and unusually ordinary Ray Harryhausen animatronic monsters, this is a mild and moderate fantasy adventure mostly for undemanding youngsters.

Also in the cast are Taryn Power, Patrick Troughton, Kurt Christian, Nadim Sawalha, Bernard Kay, Bruno Barnabe, Salami Coker and David Sterne.

It was filmed in 1975 at Shepperton Studios, Surrey, England, and after the live action filming was done, it took animator Ray Harryhausen a year and a half to do the animation, all from his own home studio. At $3.5 million, it is the costliest of Harryhausen’s Sinbad trilogy.

It is followed by Sinbad of the Seven Seas (1989).

The 7′ 3″ Peter Mayhew makes his uncredited debut as the live suit actor stand-in for the stop-motion Minaton, the bronze mechanical minotaur.

He was working as a hospital attendant at the King’s College Hospital in London when producer Charles H Schneer saw his photo and cast him. A year later he was asked to do the role of Chewbacca, the faithful 200 year-old Wookiee in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope (1977).