Word: harryhausen
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Soon after seeing "Beast from 20,000 Fathoms," probably in the early '60s and definitely on television, my brother and I began to check out the other items in the Harryhausen oeuvre. The next great one we saw was "It Came from Beneath the Sea"; it's still one of my favorites. The giant octopus wrapped around the Golden Gate Bridge has become an iconic image in American pop. Next time you see it look closely and note the octopus has only five tentacles, three fewer for Harryhausen to move during each day's tedious shooting. The producers saved...
...Beast" and "Beneath the Sea" there was "Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers" - ineradicable images of wrecked saucers slicing through the Capitol Dome - and "20 Million Miles to Earth," where Rome's Coliseum stood in for the Coney Island roller coaster. But by the end of the decade, the genre Harryhausen helped define was dying at the box office. Pop cinema was getting sexier and a lot more violent. As Ray later said about his unsuccessful 1969 picture "Valley of the Gwangi," "A naked dinosaur just was not outrageous enough...
...Harryhausen and his longtime partner, producer Charles Schneer, moved to England (cheaper production costs, the same reason "Star Wars" avoided California) and began working in color, making films that didn't even mention atomic testing and found their sources in myth or literature. Ray was on a roll, making money with his new color process (Dynamation) and paired with the greatest film composer who ever raised a baton, Bernard Herrmann. First came "The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad," followed by "The Three Worlds of Gulliver," then "Mysterious Island," and finally the stop-frame masterpiece, "Jason and the Argonauts...
...what I had been missing. Keep in mind that I'd been a stop-frame fan for years, and here was this article with these fantastic photos that implied that I had somehow missed the greatest stop-frame flick of them all. It was the movie that had inspired Harryhausen...
...opened on March 2, 1933, filling the two largest theaters in New York to capacity - the Roxy and Radio City Music Hall, with 10,000 seats between them - for 10 shows daily. In L.A. it broke box-office records at Sid Graumann's Chinese (where 13-year-old Ray Harryhausen saw it with his aunt). It was a hit in five rereleases as well, especially in 1952, when it helped to inspire the radiation-monster cycle that began a year later with "Beast From 20,000 Fathoms...