Simone and Matteo a.k.a. Butch and Toby aren't Bud and Terence

The real ones

When in 1970's the movies with Terence Hill and Bud Spencer were so popular, particularly in Europe, the Italian filmmakers begun to produce more movies in their style. They couldn't get the real actors? Never mind. There were plenty of former spaghetti western cowboys, who were able to step in Hill's shoes. And what about Bud Spencer? There's just a need of a huge bearded man. Sometimes fat, sometimes not. Notable clones were:

Bilbao is the one in the brown jacket

Fernando Bilbao, who was a stuntman and appeared in a few movies directed by Antonio Margheriti, including titles like "Hercules Against Karate" and "Manone il ladrone", a clone of Spencer's Flatfoot (Piedone lo sbirro).

Polgar in the middle

Tommy Polgar did his Bud Spencer clone in "Return of Shanghai Joe", also starring Klaus Kinski.

Huerta and Reed pretending being Spencer and Hill

Cris Huerta, known as a bad guy from serious spaghetti westerns, suddenly started to act his Bud Spencer in movies like "Robin Hood, Arrows, Beans and Karate", which is surprisingly a western, co-starring comrade Dean Reed as the Terence Hill type.

There were more movies based on the success of Spencer and Hill. But the best known duo of clones and the one with most movies were Paul Smith and Antonio Cantafora, a.k.a. Michael Coby.

Smith and Spencer

We all know Smith from his later movies. The Midnight Express, The Salamander, Red Sonja, Maverick... He was in almost everything in the 80's. But he started his career in Israel, where he was noticed by Italian producers, who saw his resemblance with Bud Spencer. And Smith really looked like Spencer, and unlike Bilbao, Polgar and Huerta, he was charismatic and knew how to act.

Coby and Hill

Antonio Cantafora played bit parts in several genre movies before - he was in Mario Bava's Baron Blood, he was in Margheriti's And God Said to Cain, he played a Mexican bad guy in Black Killer (both movies starring Klaus Kinski).  He changed his name to Michael Coby, joined Smith and together they made five movies - Carambola, Carambola's Philosophy: In the Right Pocket, We Are No Angels, Kid Stuff (a.k.a. Convoy Buddies) and The Diamond Peddlers. The first two movies were directed by Ferdinando Baldi (Texas Adios, Forgotten Pistolero, Blindman), the last two by Giuliano Carnimeo (the Sartana series, The Case of the Bloody Iris, They Call Him Cemetery) and the Angels movie by Gianfranco Parolini (the Sabata series, the first Sartana movie, Five for Hell).

Kid Stuff and The Diamond Peddlers are in Italian called Simone e Matteo, un gioco da ragazzi, and Il vangelo secondo Simone e Matteo - the two movies are telling stories about two stupid guys going from one trouble to another. When the two movies were in late 70's and early 80's released in Czechoslovakia, the titles were translated - Simone and Matteo became Šimon and Matouš. The movies with the real actors, Terence Hill and Bud Spencer, were released at the same time, but only a few of them, and the Šimon a Matouš movies were apparently even more successful here, so that the people started to call the real Spencer-Hill films "Šimon a Matouš", believing, that Simone and Matteo were played by Spencer and Hill and not by their doubles! The confusion was so big that on some pirate VHS was the western Ace High, starring Hill, Spencer and Eli Wallach, called "Šimon a Matouš na divokém západě", meaning "Simone and Matteo in the Wild West". Many people confuse the actors even today.

But even in the USA the distributor wanted to confuse the audience, so that Kid Stuff was released under the title Convoy Buddies, trying to exploit the success of The Smokey and the Bandit movies. The actor's names were changed once again - Paul Smith and Michael Coby became Bob Spencer and Terrence Hall (sic)! When Paul L. Smith found out about this, he succesfully sued the distributor for changing the name deliberately.

Of course the movies' style comes out of Spencer-Hill ones, but they are even more infantile. I have watched four of them - the Carambola movies were once enough, the Simone and Matteo movies... well, I have watched them as a kid plenty of times. I probably wouldn't watch Kid Stuff again, but with the second one, I watched it again after many years a few days ago and it didn't hurt that much.