*For the next few days, I’m going to add a random film the great Ray Harryhausen worked on. The legendary special effects MASTER passed away on May 7, 2013 at age 92 in London and yes, the film world has lost a true giant as well as a fine and talented gentleman…
When I was much younger, I wondered why Ray Harryhausen didn’t make more films until I found out how long it took him to design all those characters from drawing and painting some outstanding concept art to the construction and creation the visual effects. Let’s just say the man gained all the respect I had after that. That said, 1977’s Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger is an example of what happens when a movie studio decides to rush things a bit too quickly, as it’s not his best work of the decade on display.
Yes, there are some major showpiece moments, but between some awful matte shots and a few creatures missing Harryhausen’s trademark expressionism, the film suffers a bit from a “by the numbers” look that’s noticeable to the point of distraction. Then again, that the film arrived in theaters a few months after Star Wars opened and was still generating a huge amount of money. I’m sure to many viewers blown away by George Lucas’ epic, Sinbad seemed almost like a relic from another decade…
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Ha! Motivation-killer flu, you can’t keep me from posting! Anyway, onward! It took Charles H. Schneer and Ray Harryhausen fifteen years to follow up their classic fantasy film The 7th Voyage of Sinbad with the second of three movies starring the fabled sailor and The Golden Voyage of Sinbad both looks and feels almost as timeless as that first adventure.
For years, I disliked most of Clash of the Titans because by 1981, I’d thought I’d outgrown the type of work Ray Harryhausen was doing and it seems that, despite the film’s OK success at the box office, some movie audiences just weren’t into so much classic stop motion animation in such a large scale film either.
When I was a wee bairn, I actually went to two different schools where some kids thought this 1967 film was based on actual facts and at least one really deluded kid thought it was a documentary. Seriously. My ears still spin in opposite directions thinking about that, but I digress. You’re either watching One Million Years B.C. for its faux historical value, Ray Harryhausen’s excellent dinosaur effects or Raquel Welch with a side order of Martine Beswick in that cave gal cat-fight sequence. Don’t deny it, now…
While I was too young to see this one in a theater during its initial run, I do recall the poster giving me the creeps whenever I saw it in a subway station back then. When it turned up on TV a few years later as an ABC Sunday Night Movie, I can recall watching it and being to scared to stick around for the ending, but not being able to move from my spot in front of the TV. I don’t recall whether or not I slept that night, but I think I was not good for much for a few days afterward.
Yet another Charles H. Schneer/Ray Harryhausen production featuring a brilliant Bernard Herrmann soundtrack, 1961’s Mysterious Island is another classic fans of the master stop motion animator cite as some of his best work of the decade as well as a pretty solid genre entry. It’s certainly got a nicely varied cast of creatures going for it from a giant crab, an very angry and huge prehistoric bird, a few huge bees in their cliffside hive and a majorly over-sized cephalopod near the end. You also get a nice balloon escape at the beginning that gets most of the cast to that titular island, a few ladies tossed into the mix courtesy of a shipwreck and a surprise appearance by Captain Nemo that adds another layer of the fantastic to the film…
With Ernest B. Schoedsack’s 1949 film Mighty Joe Young, stop motion animation fans saw the torch passed from the past master of the technique, Willis O’Brien to his willing, eager and more than able apprentice (and future master), Ray Harryhausen. Where 1925’s startling The Lost World and 1933’s epic King Kong helped pioneer stop motion (and its more comedic sequel, Son of Kong added a neat dinosaur chase scene to the list of O’Brien’s classic scenes), Mighty Joe Young was pretty much Harryhausen’s film from start to finish.
I find it absolutely and awesomely hilarious that the word “Twonky” has been swiped by a few people who probably thought it sounded cool but never, ever saw this oddball 1953 flick that now pops up on Turner Classic Movies from time to time. I’m also sure that some of these hipsters with no sense of film history would be shocked (SHOCKED, I say!) to find out that the titular Twonky of this little film is a nasty alien machine that tries and nearly succeeds to take over the life of the poor sap of a professor who inadvertently ends up with a VERY self-aware robot instead of the TV his wife bought to keep him company.
You can probably consider the 1955 film It Came From Beneath the Sea as (and I quote) “The ONLY six-tentacled giant octopus movie you’ll ever need” and call it a night, but this would be a pretty damn shorter than usual column. Actually, this was another fun Charles H. Schneer/Ray Harryhausen co-production put together to show off Ray’s stop motion animation brilliance and yes indeed, it succeeds quite well on that front.
1969’s The Valley of Gwangi is a bit of a bittersweet classic for many fans of Harryhausen’s work. By this time, stop motion animated fantasy films weren’t drawing the audiences they did ten years earlier, so this film didn’t get the promotion it deserved. It wasn’t the first cowboy meets dinosaur flick at all – that honor goes to 1956’s 
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