The adventure film, similar in many ways to the action film, involves a character who must overcome great adversity and challenges while on a journey. The settings tend to be exotic locales, the villains tend to be nasty, the emphasis tends to be on thrills, often serialized over several Saturday matinee showings. We...

The adventure film, similar in many ways to the action film, involves a character who must overcome great adversity and challenges while on a journey. The settings tend to be exotic locales, the villains tend to be nasty, the emphasis tends to be on thrills, often serialized over several Saturday matinee showings. Well-established adventure heroes from literature and folklore made the jump to the screen with surprising ease (The Adventures Of Robin Hood, The Mark Of Zorro, Tarzan The Ape Man), as did adaptations of classic adventure stories (The Prisoner Of Zenda, King Solomon's Mines, The Thief Of Baghdad, The Three Musketeers). Adventure stories got a resurgence of popularity in the 1980s with Star Wars and Raiders Of The Lost Ark reviving the adventure blockbuster, and hardly has a summer gone by since without a new crop of adventure flicks to whisk away viewers from their mundane lives and transport them into a world of action, excitement, and danger.