Ray Harryhausen on left and Bruce Crawford on right
Credit: By permission of Bruce Crawford http://www.omahafilmevent.com

I am going to confess, I love scifi and fantasy movies. Not only do I love them, but there are a lot of closet fans of this type of flick. They may pretend to be taking the children to see one of these films, but they are really going because they enjoy them. Hon, I am going to take little Jimmy to see Star Wars, he is dying to see it, ok? Yeah sure. Over the years special effects have progressed to become mostly computer animation, but that wasn't the way it was in the beginning. People had to construct miniatures and photograph minute movements, frame by frame. Sometimes only eight frames could be photographed in a day. By the way, eight frames is only a fraction of a second when the movie is running.

One of the most successful early movies of this type was King Kong. A little boy who watched it had his life changed by the film. Right then and there he swore to become an animator, not just any animator but a great one. This twelve year old was named Ray Harryhausen. From that point on, animation took a central position in his life. In college he met Ray Bradbury and they became best friends. Ray Harryhausen is responsible for some of the greatest stop motion effects in the movies. You certainly didn't see any strings in his work. Here is a list of his movies:

Mother Goose/Fairy Tales
Mighty Joe Young
The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms
It Came From Beneath The Sea
Earth vs The Flying Saucers
The Animal World
20 Million Miles To Earth
The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad
The 3 Worlds of Gulliver
Mysterious Island
Jason And The Argonauts
First Men In The Moon
One Million Years B.C.
Valley Of Gwangi
Golden Voyage Of Sinbad
Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger
Clash Of The Titans

Don't think for one second that this guy was just some B movie maker. He won the academy award for his work on Mighty Joe Young. Who could ever forget the great ape. He not only convinced us that it was alive, but he gave it a personality of its own by introducing little quirks into the way it reacted to things. Although Mighty Joe Young looked huge on the screen, he was only about 12 inches high in real life. The scene where Mighty Joe is pushing the cage with a tiger in it looks more like a news reel than a special effects job. Perhaps the greatest scene in the movie is where Joe is in a tug of war against several famous wrestlers of the day and not only beats them but lifts Primo Canera above his head and throws him. This was an extremely realistic scene for the time.

I have to admit, one of my favorite Harryhausen work is Earth vs The Flying Saucers. Today it is dated because it is in black and white, but it was made in 1956. In an interview Harryhausen said that the film was shot on a tight budget and this prevented him from using high speed cameras. High speed cameras make things like explosions look more real. This didn't stop the great special effects artist. He used the same technique for explosions that he used for his whole career, stop motion. The movie starts out with saucers buzzing planes and flying over fields and even through a fire lit sky. No one had ever attempted such realism before. Many parts of famous buildings in Washington D.C. are destroyed in the movie. To make it look real, Ray tied bits of wire to precut pieces of model buildings and shot the explosion in stop motion, one frame at a time.

The Sinbad movies were terrific. I personally think that people went to see them only because of the great effects that they contained. You had things like shrinking women, genies, wizards, a huge cyclops and other monsters such as dragons. The cyclops was oversized to make him more menacing, he was supposed to be 50 feet tall and he looked every inch of it. The dragon was said to be 100 feet long. There is a great scene where the cyclops and the dragon fight it out. There is also a cool egg hatching where a giant Roc chick emerges only to be eaten by Sinbad's crew. You don't want to do this when the parent is around. The Sinbad movies were very entertaining. It seemed that as they developed new Sinbad movies, the effects got even better, if that was possible. The Golden Voyage of Sinbad featured a six armed goddess that battles Sinbad and his men and uses all its arms to slash with swords. It was quite a sight. The centaur looked very lifelike and again very large. In his last Sinbad movie, Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger, Harryhausen displayed an incredible range of movement for his characters. One character was a sympathetic, large, single horned caveman. The scene where he fights a vicious saber toothed tiger is just incredible. There is a metallic creature with the metallic head of a bull that has super strength that made kids everywhere shutter. All three of the Sinbad movies are master pieces of stop motion animation

Anyone who likes this kind of stuff has to regard Jason And The Argonauts and Clash Of The Titans as perhaps the two best fantasy, action movies ever made. In Jason and the Argonauts the gods on Mt. Olympus toy with Jason and his crew. A colossal King Neptune appears and so does the dreaded, large seven headed Hydra which Jason is forced to fight. Flying demons are part of Jason's problems as is my favorite character, a bronze man who is the size of the Colossus of Rhodes and is intent on destroying the ship, but there is even something more sinister out there, skeletons that come alive and fight with swords. In one of the greatest stop motion scenes ever made, Jason and his men battle a large group of these creatures. In Clash Of The Titans, the gods are at it again. Persius, son of Zeus is forced to take on all sorts of evil. There are witches, two headed dogs and even a Kraken, a giant mythical monster. The most fantastic scene in the movie is where Persius has to fight the Medusa, a beast with the head of a woman that has snakes for hair and the lower body of a rattle snake. Oh by the way, her stare can turn you to stone. This is even more dangerous than when Persius fought the giant scorpions in the movie.

Ray Harryhausen may not be making movies any longer but his art certainly will not be forgotten. Wait I just read that the old master is now helping to develop some new tv movies along with video games, will wonders never cease? Personally I feel that some of his work was so good that it was at least as good as computer graphics and maybe even better. It may be that computer graphics are cheaper to produce than stop motion, I don't know, but I do know one thing, I still enjoy all his movies as is proven by my dvd collection.