Have you seen the Pierre Brice movie called INVINCIBLE MASKED RIDER where he is listed as Don Diego? Does he dress up as Zorro in it too?
No I haven't seen that one, cool poster though.
Although with a few changes it seems to be a swipe from Disney's most standard in-house look for the character and poster art.
It was used for the Italian release of Disney's
Zorro the Avenger, which was a series of Disney episodes, edited and released a s movie over seas.
They just added a few european flairs for Invincible Masked Rider.
The whole character is pretty much a swipe, just Zorro in everything but name, only set in Europe.
Calling him Don Diego, Don is just a title, and Diego a pretty standard name, like Sir John. So I can see how they got away with it.
It doesn't interest me that much, but I might check it out. I'm more interested in works based closer to McCulley's vision.
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Swiping Zorro, and unlicensed productions seemed to have been petty commonplace in that era.
Zorro.inc or whoever defended their trademarks, and copyrights, didn't do a very good job protecting them at all, especially not over seas.
And even when they did officially license, (After Disney) it was often to pretty low-end productions.
McCulley was hired by Disney as consultant/writer on the series, but I don't think after Disney McCulley (and his family) were able to keep or protect the license, seems to have gone to his lawyer Gertz and family. Who seeme to have had no compulsion licensing out the character for any quick dollar.
More criminally they let most of McCulley's actual work go without official reprinting and reproductions, so if you wanted to read it, the only way was, you had to track down the actual original pulps.
Instead they only focused on publishing and licensing "new" material. Which is fine, but they could have done both.
It's only recently small presses have gained rights to reproduce most of of the original pulp stories as they've finally lapsed into public domain.