Not submitted to the British Board of Film Censors by any distributor, this became the first Steve Reeves epic not to be released in UK cinemas. However, it was purchased by the ITV network in 1988 and they were contracted to show it three times per region from 1 October 1988 to 30 September 1995. Billed as The Pirates of Malaysia (a direct translation from the Italian) and dubbed, HTV West screened the UK premiere on 13 November 1989. After touring the regions, the film's final transmission was for London ITV on 25 September 1995, after which it disappeared for 28 years. Talking Pictures TV started screening the movie again from 8 July 2023 under the title Sandokan: Pirate of Malaysia.
The US video release from Force Video in 1985 was amusingly inaccurate. The title chosen was Pirates of the Seven Seas (actually Sandokan and his crew never left the Malay Straits), and the VHS sleeve managed to get the cast and crew right, but the plot synopsis was from a different movie - Sandrigo and Leonora were the lovers in Le Bourreau de Venise (1963) starring Lex Barker.
Although announced in US publications under an array of variant titles (The Private Prince, The Pirate Prince, Pirates of the Seven Seas, Sandokan the Pirate, etc), sadly this was the first Steve Reeves epic not to be released in American cinemas, (the official trailer still exists and reveals that the release was going to be called The Pirate of Malaya). Reeves fans had to wait until the 1980s for this film to surface on video, and then with even more title variations. Nostalgia Family Video's 1996 VHS went out as Sandokan and the Pirates of Malaysia, whilst Sinister Cinema's 2004 DVD shortened it to Sandokan, Pirate of Malaysia.