And I'll Bet You Didn't Know They Had Amphetamines In The Middle Ages

I was playing around with Adobe Premiere CS6* and I grabbed a few medieval videos off the web to experiment. One was a Soviet treatment of Ivanhoe from the early 1980s. It had some notable differences from the gold standard of all Ivanhoes, Robert Taylor's 1952 classic.

For one thing, there were no references to religion and only one girl, Rebecca. In the original Ivanhoe, the knight champions the cause of the beautiful Rebecca, a drop-dead, gorgeous Jewess played by Elizabeth Taylor while he is betrothed to Joan Fontaine's Saxon princess, Rowena. There's jealousy and a tension about who he's going to end up with, spiced by Jew vs. Christian verbal wrangling. In the end, he fights a duel for Rebecca, but goes back to Rowena**.

In the Soviet version, there doesn't seem to be a Rowena and Ivanhoe ends up marrying Rebecca, but bailing out immediately to do work. Literally. The final scene is Ivanhoe riding off directly after marrying the girl. And not the next morning, either, if you get my drift. It's the age-old Soviet love story. Boy woos tractor, boy loses tractor, boy wins tractor, 5-year-plan is met.

Anyway, I grabbed the video and was scrubbing through it at high speed when I came across the segment below. I laugh out loud every time I see the guys at about 0:05 squeaking like rodents. Enjoy.

* - If CS5 was magical, CS6 is positively otherwordly.

** - No mention was made about whether or not he considered becoming Moslem and marrying them both.