The Italians used Goliath as the superhero protagonist in a series of adventure films (pepla) in the early 1960s. He was a man possessed of amazing strength, although he seemed to be a different person in each film. After the classic "Hercules" (1958) became a blockbuster sensation in the film industry, a 1959 Steve Reeves film "Il terrore dei barbari" ("Terror of the Barbarians") was re-titled "Goliath and the Barbarians" in the U.S. The film was so successful at the box office, it inspired Italian filmmakers to do a series of four more films featuring a generic beefcake hero named Goliath, although the films were not related to each other in any way (the 1960 Italian peplum "David and Goliath" starring Orson Welles was not part of this series, since that movie was just a historical retelling of the Biblical story).