‘Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam’: When Çetin İnanç created the “Turkish Star Wars”
Having become the highest-grossing release in cinema history and blown the minds of audiences the world over, it was inevitable that George Lucas’ Star Wars would give rise to a slew of subpar imitators that sought to capitalise on the game-changing sci-fi’s appeal. One of the most notable – or perhaps infamous – was director Çetin İnanç’s Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam. While the Turkish production’s title translates to The Man Who Saved the World, it gained notoriety and took on a second life as a cult favourite after being dubbed the ‘Turkish Star Wars‘.
Why? Well, for reasons that remarkably didn’t result in any legal action from Hollywood. In order to replicate the far-flung backdrops required to tell the fantastical story, the movie decided the easiest way to accomplish its goal was to simply steal footage directly from Lucas’ film and pass it off as its own.
In one scene, characters sit in their spaceships in the midst of an intergalactic dogfight, all while shots of the Death Star and the Millennium Falcon can be seen in the background. That wasn’t the only liberal lifting to be found, either, with musical cues from John Williams’ Academy Award-winning score being heard more than once.
In fact, the entire soundtrack from Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam is lifted entirely from other titles. It included Indiana Jones‘ iconic ‘Raider’s March’ as the main theme, while the soundscapes of Moonraker, Ben-Hur, Flash Gordon, Planet of the Apes, and the original Battlestar Galactica are all present and accounted for in one way or another.
The plot – or, more accurately, what gets passed off as the plot – involves a pair of space cadets who crash on a desert planet following an intense battle. Believing the planet to be inhabited entirely by women, one of them uses a wolf whistle to entice members of the opposite sex to descend on their location, only to be attacked by skeletons on horseback instead.
From there, a 1000-year-old wizard from Earth enlists them as gladiators in his arena before revealing his master plan is to conquer the planet with a human brain in tow after his repeated attempts were thwarted by a ‘shield of concentrated human brain molecules’. It makes no sense; it’s unclear whether it was even supposed to, but its reputation became so mythic that it soon became an underground must-see.
It’s been branded as one of the worst motion pictures ever committed to celluloid, but for some, it might actually be a work of unhinged genius. From red yetis to anti-gravity training with boulders as leg weights, it eschews the “science” in sci-fi for a no-holds-barred fantasy about the secrets of the universe.
If any of that holds even the slightest hint of appeal, then maybe it’s time to track down the elusive Dünyayı Kurtaran Adam and discover what all the fuss is about.
