It should be started by saying that their first appearance was in cheap paper magazines that offered fantasy and science fiction stories, a genre known as pulp . It was in the 1930s, the Depression gripped the United States, and a strange and depressing young man, Robert E. Howard , considered the father of the genre of witchcraft and sword, began publishing the stories of the ultimate warrior in Weird Tales magazine : Conan the barbarian.winstrol half life

 
The popularity of the character was quite important, although already in the middle of the Cold War it needed some reissues to return to the collective imagination. Although when the barbarian really entered the North American collective imagination was in 1970, when Marvel began to publish comics based on the character of Howard. Since I haven't read the original stories yet and I barely own an old compilation of the old seventies comics, I'm going to focus on the famous adaptation that was made of the character in the early 80's. If you want to know a little more about the Conan of the comic format, you can find a short summary of its various stages in Tebeosfera.

 
The most purist fans of Robert E. Howard's original work renounce the film, and I suppose they will have reasons for it, but I who grew up with the image of Conan as a muscular Austrian with a lot of accent considered Conan the barbarian an excellent film, followed of a rather inferior sequel although acceptable for a follower of the film character like me.

The project of taking Conan's stories to the cinema was one of those cases in which it is passed from hand to hand and never seems to come to fruition. Edward R. Pressman , an independent producer, saw Arnold Schwarzenegger in a movie about bodybuilding. Along with him was a producer friend, Ed Summer . They both talked about Arnold and decided that someone with that physique would be perfect for a project on Conan. Summer and a Marvel writer Roy Thomas wrote a first treatment. But finally Oliver Stone was commissionedto write a first draft. It took Stone four months to write the script, after reading each novel and each comic about the character. Stone says that his idea was that the story stretched across twelve films as it was done with James Bond (from Conancompletist.com).

Stone's draft, of which Milius later said was a "low acid fever dream", took place in a kind of apocalyptic future, and only a small part of it survived the second stage in preparing the film.
 
The project gained momentum when famed producer Dino De Laurentiis took the rights to the story. Considering Stone's script was too violent, Laurentiis hired director and screenwriter John Milius to take over the entire project and rewrite the draft.
John Milius, who had gotten away from the management of Apocalypse Now , turned to the Conan project. He got rid of practically all the magic elements that appeared in the script and that came from the original Conan stories. Instead, Milius created an action plot framed in a strange time-lost era, where elements from various historical periods could be guessed. Some stories from the original books remained somewhat blurred in Milius's script (the assault on the Tower or the crucifixion) but the director approached the story to his own restless ones. Of course, all of this does nothing but irritate fans of the old Robert Howard saga, who consider Milius's Conan to have little to do with the original. Even a character likeThulsa Doom , the powerful dark magician, is a character in Kull, the other Howard saga! Still, the story the director finished writing was a very good one, with multiple references to movies, books, and history, and a certain depth that is often overlooked by fans of adventure movies like this one.

Even when other actors were tested, they all seemed to agree that Schwarzenegger was the ideal man for the job. And that was true, he was Conan! Dino De Laurentiis objected for fear that what he said would not be understood due to the strong accent of the actor, although he finally gave his arm to twist. It's funny to think that neither Arnold, nor the actress who played Valeria, nor Milius, few were familiar with Howard's work and Conan's comics. Only Gerry Lopez , who played Conan's partner, Subotai, was a fan of the character.

In reality the world that Milius created, although different from the original Conan, could be just as fascinating. The cast was splendid, and his choice of actor and broadcaster James Earl Jones to portray Thulsa Doom couldn't be more accurate. Thulsa Doom, the necromancer, a holdover from a lost world, a kind of Atlantean, was a really dark character, a kind of devilish guru who constantly reinvents himself to survive in a world dominated by men. Also special mention for an unrecognizable Max Von Sydow as King Osric, who will send Conan to rescue his daughter, prey to the Doom sect, and the friendly Mako as the magician and narrator of the story.

Although without a great care of the visual aspect, the film would have been another failed film about a comic character. Ron Cobb , master of production design, was tasked with designing swords, costumes, armor, and palaces, doing a magnificent job. And by the way, he has a little cameo in the movie as a black lotus seller. The strange warriors of Thulsa Doom, looking like a Viking Manowar fan , were bodybuilders and big guys like Ben Davidson , a former NFL player. Their suits and helmets were practically traced from the Teutonic warriors of the 1938 Eisenstein film Alexander Nevski .

Milius, one of the best at writing bombastic phrases that you never forget later, filled the film with Thulsa Doom's metaphysical speeches and terrifying phrases with lakes of blood and other apocalyptic visions. It was also Milius's idea that strange search for the secret of steel, a kind of leivmotif throughout the film. Another of the movie's most remembered phrases, the one where Conan assures that the best thing in life is to crush enemies, is attributed to Genghis Khan , and is included in the "Secret History of the Mongols".

And finally, there they are, those Spanish places that sometimes look like Martians. Cuenca, Almería, Ávila ... All the exteriors seemed made to appear in the film. The horny thing about choosing Spain to shoot is that they thought Yugoslavia, where the film was originally going to be shot, was too politically unstable. And shortly after starting to shoot in Spain, they had to stop due to the coup d'état of 23-F! Cinema stuff.

In short, Conan the barbarian was and is a great adventure film, which introduced the genre of sword and witchcraft to the general public, quite popular throughout the 80s but that seems banished from the billboards forever. It was long speculated with a third installment, even Milius went on to write a script titled Conan: Crown of iron , but nothing more has been known about that project. Any day they will announce the premiere of a new installment, and that will be great news, although the bar is very high. We will see if the hordes of Crom gallop through the cinemas of half the world again.