ABSTRACT
Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote (1605, 1615) and the two Vietnam War films starring Sylvester Stallone, First Blood (1982) and Rambo (1985), are rarely spoken of in the same breath. One is a great work of literature, the others popular culture rarely on any list of important cinema. Yet book and film share a number of similarities. First, they were not isolated texts but instances of more general cultural tempers. In the case of Don Quixote there were a number of parodies of romantic chivalry written at the same time (de Riquer 1981:901–903). As for Rambo, there were a number of films with similar themes of rescuing American prisoners of war (POWs) in the 1980s. The Sylvester Stallone film maybe the most famous, but it is not the only one on the topic. 1
