June 5: Junesploitation’s topic of the day — as suggested by F This Movie— is Magic!

Lamberto Bava worked on a lot of TV, and instead of just horror, he had plenty of success with this series of films. Based on Italo Calvino’s short story “Fanta-Ghiro the Beautiful,” Bava also borrowed from movies like Legend, Ladyhawke, Willow, Disney cartoons and the fantasy films of his childhood.

It was lucky for all concerned that because the movie was so expensive, it ended up becoming a mini-series—it also aired as a 200-minute compilation, La meravigliosa storia di Fantaghirò and as forty episodes for its twentieth anniversary—and was a big success to the level that it had a cartoon that Bava co-wrote and even a theme restaurant.

Fantaghirò (Alessandra Martines) is one of three princesses born to the King (Mario Adorf). While Catherine (Ornella Marcucci) and Caroline (Kateřina Brožová) act like proper royalty, our heroine is rebellious, well-read and yearns for battle. She’s been training with a White Knight (Ángela Molina) somewhere in the forest and meets the enemy her father has been fighting for years, Romualdo (Kim Rossi Stuart), and he falls for her because of her eyes.

The problem is that he’s challenged her father to a duel, and he plans on sending his daughters, as the White Witch (also Molina) warned him that one of the girls can defeat Romualdo. Catherine and Caroline hate every moment, and Fantaghirò goes into battle alone. She defeats her enemy but can’t bring herself to kill him; her father allows him to keep his kingdom as long as he marries one of his daughters. You can figure out what happens next.

The second movie introduced the big bad for this series of films: Black Witch (Brigitte Nielsen). But that’s another story.

Supposedly, there’s a Disney+ remake coming. It was news to Bava, who told Super Guida TV, “I read it in the newspapers a few months ago, but nobody told me about it, and nobody asked me to cooperate. If they want to make a great Italian production, that’s fine, but if they want to re-propose the same characters, that was our lot because Calvino’s fairy tale is only four pages long.”

You can watch this on YouTube.