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A lot of the sword&sandal films have deteriorated badly.
I seem to have a yen for them, though this also seems to extend to wanting to collect them, but not always watching all of them.
They were all originally in widescreen, and though the vocal and music tracks sounded as if they'd been recorded in a goldfish bowl, they all had a certain cheesy charm, and some, those art directed by Mario Bava, like the original HERCULES films, had a striking use of color cinematography.
However, practically the versions for many of them now are pan-and-scan, at best, with no one really interested in preserving any of them. Warner Archive restored 4 titles, in widescreen, but hasn't done any more since; so I guess they didn't sell all that well.
I still love them, though, for the exotic sets and locales, and the heroic characters. (The "muscle man" type in these films was the first influence to create a male version of localized attraction in the cinema, which has carried on, with variations, into the present day, where now men are often seen as sex objects, by everyone. This was by no means the case in the 50's, when the first HERCULES film was a smash success.)
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] 
