Steve Reeves was Mr. Universe in 1950, and he went on to play Hercules and be a big star in dozens of Italian sword and sandals movies. Dave Draper was Mr. Universe in 1966, and the best role he ever got was in this movie as a dimwit musclehead whose girlfriend gets boned by an aging Tony Curtis! Life sure isn't fair.
shareDave wasn't a very dynamic screen presence.
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Are you kidding me? Dave is a great actor! I felt really bad for his character, when he's driving down the road in his hippy van, crying over his lost girlfriend. Have you ever seen Arnold Schwarzenegger cry in a movie? Can you even imagine it? How about Sylvester Stallone? Steven Seagal?
What made Dave Draper a great actor is that he could actually portray emotion, he didn't just go through the whole movie being a pissed-off badass like every other bodybuilder/actor. I think he really deserved a bigger career in Hollywood.
I agree. He should have done much better in Hollywood. Here's the role he was born to play: https://www.facebook.com/garthcomicstrip?ref=br_tf Alas, a Garth film was never made. If it had,Dave would have left Arnold, Stallone, and everyone else in the action/adventure genre in the dust.
shareI get the impression that Dave didn't care much for the limelight. He didn't even enjoy the bodybuilding competitions he was in.
shareMr. Draper had just started winning bodybuilding titles in the early 1960s. So he was just a little too young to become a big name in the sword-and-sandal genre of the fifties and early sixties, which was tailor-made for bodybuilders, and of which Italian peplum movies were a large part. When Mr. Draper appeared in "Don't Make Waves," the peplum genre was already passe.
On the other hand, by the time Arnold brought bodybuilding into the public limelight to a greater degree with his appearance in "Pumping Iron" in 1977, Mr. Draper had already been around the bodybuilding field just a little too long to really take advantage of the newfound publicity and become a big public name himself.
He was caught in the lull that occurred right in the middle.