With the massive exterior sets, lavish interior sets and a multitude of Asian extras left over from this production, Panda had writers Oreste Biancoli and Duccio Tessari fashion a sword-and-sandal/mythological muscleman epic, Le Géant à la cour de Kublai Khan (1961), placing hero Maciste in a Chinese setting. Genre specialist Riccardo Freda was brought in to direct, Gordon Scott was cast as Maciste (renamed "Samson" for the U.S. version) and Yôko Tani was kept on as the female lead. It became regarded as one of the better films of that genre.