Trivia / The Blade Master

• Old Shame: Played straight with O'Keeffe. It's been rumored that Miles O'Keefe offered the creators of MST3K a drink if he ever met them, for their riff on this film. An installment of TNT's B-movie showcase Monstervision contained a segment where a viewer wrote in to request the Ator trilogy, only for host Joe Bob Briggs to explain that the last time they'd shown them, he received a personal letter from O'Keefe himself calling the films an "embarrassment" and asking politely that they never be shown on the program again (a request which Briggs respectfully acknowledged).
• The Other Darrin: If you’ve seen the previous movie (Ator: The Fighting Eagle), you’ll immediately recognize the hair, costume, and ridiculous bird helmet worn by the character Griba in that film, except now placed on a different actor and referred to as Zor. It seems like Zor was originally supposed to be Griba (who suffered a Disney Death in the original), but at some point during shooting or post-production, they decided to make him a new character. It’s hard to say whether it was because the production team decided it would be too unbelievable, or because they didn’t want to spend time expositing how he survived—mainly because the movie already has lots of unbelievable things and long expository monologues.
• Writing by the Seat of Your Pants: Reportedly the film only had a two-week production schedule and there wasn't time to write a script, so it was largely improvised.

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