In 1964, Italian film company Alrugo Entertainment produced a film entitled Italian Spiderman. Featuring actor Franco Franchetti of Mondo Sexo fame, the film was a knowing pastiche of the Spider-Man franchise. Thought lost for over forty years, the film was recently discovered in a sunken sea vessel and lovingly restored by Alrugo Studios Milan, who subsequently uploaded the rare theatrical trailer to Myspace, Yahoo and YouTube. Or at least this is what it says on the press release for the film.

In fact, the trailer for Italian Spiderman was produced in 2007 by a group of film students based at Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia. Taking inspiration from the kinds of transnational adaptations which I have been discussing in this book, the trailer imagined what a 1960s Italian adaptation of Spider-Man might look like, and was filled with knowing tributes to successful Italian film cycles such as the giallo and eurospy film. After the viral success of the trailer, which has received over 5.9 million views on YouTube to date, the group received funding from the South Australian Film Corporation to produce a series of ten webisodes shown in weekly instalments from 22 May 2008 onwards. The inspiration for Italian Spiderman came from the kinds of transnational adaptation discussed in this book – deliberately evoking the aesthetic style of titles such as 3 Dev Adam and James Batman – but it reached out well beyond the limited fandom surrounding these films, and the core creative team Dario Russo and David Ashby have consequently built on this success by producing the highly successful spoof TV series Danger 5 which pays homage to 1960s and 1970s Euro-cult cinema.