Although many of the bigger budget pepla were released theatrically in the US, fourteen of them were released directly to Embassy Pictures television in a syndicated TV package called "The Sons of Hercules". Since few American viewers had a familiarity with Italian film heroes such as Maciste or Ursus, the characters were renamed and the films molded into a series of sorts by splicing on the same opening and closing theme song and newly designed voice-over narration that attempted to link the protagonist of each film to the Hercules mythos. These films ran on Saturday afternoons in the 1960s.