Fans of Mexican B-movies are aware of the long-standing popularity of Luchador movies. These feature masked wrestling stars, but their opponents aren't other wrestlers, as one might expect. In film the Luchadores battle ghosts, spies, Frankenstein's monster, Aztec mummies, gangsters, mad scientists, aliens, monsters, and vampires. Sometimes all at once.
According to Wikipedia, the genre dates back to 1952, but Wikipedia is off by a couple of orders of magnitude.
In my copy of Georg Luck's Arcana Mundi, there's a snippet from Pausanius about the battle of the famous Sicilian-Greek athlete Euthymus of Locris, against the undead revenant of a murdered member of Odysseus's crew. Seems one of wily Odysseus's men tried to ravish one of the local girls in the Sicilian town of Temesa, and was stoned to death by the villagers for his effrontery. (Seriously, did Odysseus recruit the dumbest guys in Ithaca to go fight in Troy? Between raping maidens, slaughtering sacred cattle, and messing with magic items contrary to orders, those guys were an endless source of bother for their captain.)
Anyway. For a few centuries the dead man keeps coming out of his tomb in a wolf-like form and causing havoc, so the people of Temesa adopt the practice of making a sacrifice in the form of the most beautiful maiden of the village offered to be the Bride of the Monster.
Then Euthymus arrives on his way home from his triumph in the Olympic Games (circa 480 B.C.), and learns of this horrifying arrangement. He falls in love with the sacrificial girl and fights the undead wolf-ghost in a titanic display of Pankration fighting. Defeated, the dead man hurls himself into the sea, the curse is lifted, and Euthymus marries the fair maiden.
Except for the fact that Euthymus didn't wear a glittery mask, this is precisely the plot of a Luchador movie, 2400 years early! One can imagine a whole cycle of Euthymus adventures, pitting the stalwart hero against a whole menagerie of Ancient Greek monsters. Shades of El Santo! Sadly, highfalutin' scholars like Pausanius didn't record those adventures. I commend the idea to anyone who wants to write them up, or use this as the premise for a Hellenistic-era roleplaying campaign.
If you like stories about people fighting strange beings, check out my ebooks Outlaws and Aliens and Monster Island Tales!
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