The scene Arnold Schwarzenegger wants to delete from history: “It was done so cheap”
When a 22-year-old Arnold Schwarzenegger found himself in New York City’s Central Park, staring down a man wearing a truly preposterous bear costume and waiting for the director to call ‘action!’, he must have wondered if all of moviemaking was this ramshackle. Over the years, the former bodybuilder would become one of the biggest movie stars in Hollywood, plying his trade in films with budgets in the hundreds of millions. However, back then, grappling with a guy in a bear costume in a movie that cost a measly $300,000 was about as inauspicious a debut as one could imagine.
Before being cast in 1970’s Hercules in New York, Schwarzenegger had no acting experience whatsoever. He had left his homeland of Austria in 1968 to fulfil a lifelong dream of becoming a bodybuilder in the land of opportunity, the United States of America, and quickly established a name for himself in Los Angeles. During this period, he trained at the world-famous Gold’s Gym in Venice Beach, won the Mr Universe competition twice, and ran an extremely successful bricklaying business with his bodybuilding buddy Franco Columbu.
Throughout this time in his life, despite all the success he was experiencing in other areas, Schwarzenegger would always tell people he was going to be the world’s biggest movie star. He had nothing to back up this claim beyond rippling muscles and an innate charisma, but he landed the lead role in Hercules through sheer force of will. Amusingly, it may have also helped that his agent claimed his client had years of stage experience, which was technically true; the producers just had no idea this meant bodybuilding stages, instead of theatre.
So, with nothing but a zealot’s belief that attaining movie stardom was his destiny, Schwarzenegger set about playing the mythical hero Hercules, who is banished to Earth by his father, Zeus. He lands in New York, becomes a professional wrestler, and makes friends with a pretzel seller named ‘Pretzie’, which only angers his father, who believes his idiot son is making a mockery of the Gods. He then fights some gangsters, has a chariot race through the city streets, and goes toe to paw with the single most “guy in a costume” bear in cinematic history.
In case this description doesn’t make it obvious, Hercules in New York is a truly abysmal movie. It’s too weird to be funny, and too cheap to have any spectacle, winding up in a strange limbo zone. It’s also notable because producers decided Schwarzenegger’s accent was too strong for American audiences to stomach, so his voice was dubbed by an uncredited actor. He was also credited as Arnold Strong, ‘Mr Universe’, with the filmmakers perhaps hoping his growing reputation in the oiled-up competition circles would help juice the box office.
All of this is incidental, though, because all anyone remembers from the movie, if they remember it at all, is that godforsaken bear scene. It’s all Schwarzenegger remembers, too, and he has a love-hate relationship with it. “In one scene, it’s me wrestling a bear, and you could tell the bear in Central Park was not a bear, it was a guy with this coat thrown over him,” he chuckled to Business Insider in 2017, “But it was done so cheap… We shot the movie in 1969; everything was so cheap.”
In many ways, the amateurish scene is embarrassing to the man who later made action classics like The Terminator, Predator, and Commando. However, it also holds some kind of soft place in his heart, because when his children laid their hands on a copy of the film and watched the infamous bear fight, he felt compelled to sit down and watch it with them. “I hadn’t seen it in so long,” he revealed, “and my kids got it and put it on, and they saw me wrestling a bear. I had to stop and watch this entire fight scene with that bear. Just to watch how ludicrous it was!”
