*For the next week or so, 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 owes him more than they can ever repay…

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 The Beast of Hollow Mountain, produced by Harryhausen’s mentor, Willis O’Brien.

While that older film’s effects weren’t done by O’Brien (and despite a few cool scenes, it showed), Harryhausen’s vision for the project (which O’Brien had wanted to do for decades) links the two masters together thanks to some incredible animation that ended up being the final dinosaur film he worked on in his career…
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