Sabu and the Magic Ring

Thanks to taking a few too many pages right out of "Arabian Nights" this tiny piece of childish mess or should I say -these pieces- for you see that unambitious ultra light entertainment was originally meant as two different pilots for an unsold Sabu television series lazyingly drags on all for nothing.

Slave boy Sabu (played by...Sabu) finds a magical ring inside his sleazy master's stable (Peter Mamakos) from which pops up a Babylon tower sized genie (William Marshall). Our villainous master is eager to get his greedy little hands on this magical ornament in hopes of taking over the kingdom as Grand Caliph. With the help of his fruit selling good friend (Daria Massey) Sabu sets out to protect their realm.

One glaring issue this particular semi-motion picture has besides Sabu still portraying the same character he portrayed as a small child some twenty years back which holds a certain uncanny valley feeling to it is it's cheap sets (stacks of pale cardboard) and costumes (small chunks of colorful cloth). Everything else is quite average - acting, "cinematography", effects, and the lot. Hokey describes it best unfortunately so since this could have been a pleasant sendoff for Sabu's standard movie role.

As a child I looked forward to watching the movies Sabu made. In the earliest years of his career he made his classics and many of those have more than stood the tests of time.

Many don't know that during World War II, he served in the United States Army Air Corps and did so with distinction having won several awards for service above and beyond the call of normal duty. Being of a diminutive size he easily could fit in bomber aircraft tail and belly gun positions. When the war was over and he was discharged from the service, he wanted to return to the motion picture industry. Unfortunately, except for one superb film, Michael Powell's "Black Narcissus", most of the offerings were paltry. Audiences after the war, weren't very interested in his kind of escapism; jungle adventures were not so fascinating anymore. Still, Sabu pushed on and where he got the verve to do so, I cannot fathom except, perhaps, he felt there's got to be something more.

Eventually, he was approached by George Blair the producer/director who had made George Reeves "Adventures of Superman". He wanted Sabu to star in a television series that took place in a kind of Baghdad setting. Two pilots were shot for that series and this is what became "Sabu and the Magic Ring" when the TV show failed to become a series. Like the Superman series this one was also shot in color. The costar of it was William Marshall, he of the rich baritone voice who breathed life into the vampiric "Blacula". Here he played the genie who owned the titular "magic ring".

The plot was a kind of cheap Arabian pantaloon adventure, but it could in no way capture the days of Sabu's majestic 1940 masterpiece "The Thief of Baghdad". It amounted to a lot of running around in cardboard sets culminating in tired rehash. The movie made of this pastiche leaves much to be desired. Actually, it is a hair width's better than the other poorly pieced together Sabu flicks of this time, "Jungle Boy/Jungle Hell" which is two separate films sewn together from one picture.

After this time, Sabu only made a handful of films and died at the very young age of 39. For me, though, he will always be that smiling boy sailing through the azure skies on his flying carpet seeking ever greater adventures.

Based on stories from The Arabian Nights, Sabu and the Magic Ring is a strictly-for-the-kids fantasy adventure originally intended as a pilot for a TV series that never happened. It's not hard to see why it didn't take off: the whole thing looks and feels like a bad pantomime, with cheesy performances, a predictable script, cheap sets (the makers clearly hoping no-one will notice that the stable doubles as a secret passage), and crude special effects.

Sabu, star of the 1940 fantasy hit The Thief of Baghdad, plays a young stable boy who discovers a ring that, when rubbed, reveals a magical genie, Ubal (played by 6'5" actor William Marshall), who is duty bound to do the bidding of whoever holds the trinket. In classic pantomime style, Sabu fails to see the genie at first, then loses the ring, finds it, loses it, and finds it, ad nauseum, while villainous wazir Mazufar (Peter Mamakos) also tries to get his hands on the magical ornament, intending to use its power to make himself Caliph.

With a little help from beautiful fruit seller Zumila (Daria Massey), and a lot of help from Ubal, Sabu eventually saves the day, but not before plenty of excruciatingly bad knockabout farce, a touch of terrible swashbuckling, and some mind numbingly silly nonsense involving a gaggle of geese.

3/10. For Sabu completists only (if such people even exist).