Happy Birthday Ray Harryhausen!

Happy Birthday Ray Harryhausen!  He was inspired by King Kong (1933) and worked with stop motion pioneer from that film, Willis O’Brien, on Mighty Joe Young (1949). Harryhausen worked on his own technique called Dynamation which integrated live action with his stop motion work in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953). The story was based on Ray Bradbury's "The Fog Horn" and they had a life long friendship.  Harryhausen began a long time partnership with producer Charles H. Schneer with It Came from Beneath the Sea (1955). His next movie spun off the alien invasion films with Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956).  Harryhausen ventured into the realms of fantasy and the Land Beyond Beyond in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958). He made creatures like the cyclops and the dragon into living, breathing animals. It stands as my favorite Harryhausen film.  A film that has the wonder of Jonathan Swift's novel was The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960).  Another favorite Harryhausen movie was Mysterious Island (1961) which had a group of Civil War soldiers stranded on an island filled with a giant crab and giant bees.

Ray Harryhausen, Comic Con, 2000, photo by the author.

A fan favorite of Harryhausen’s films is Jason and the Argonauts (1963). The skeleton fight at the end is one of the best special effects sequences. First Men in the Moon (1964) based on the H.G. Wells 1901 novel which also inspired A Trip to the Moon (1902). One Million Years B.C. (1966) is a classic for Raquel Welch’s fur bikini alone with cavemen battling dinosaurs. Then, there was The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977).  Harryhausen’s final film was Clash of the Titans (1981). Superior to the CG remake, it has the beauty of the Pegasus and a terrifying Medusa, I saw at a Harryhausen exhibit that the model has tiny threads of red hair which I didn’t see on film!  Ray Harryhausen appeared with the actress from his Mighty Joe Young, Terry Moore, in the 1988 remake. He received the George E. Sawyer Award at the 1992 Academy Awards. Harryhausen wrote Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life (2010) and The Art of Ray Harryhausen (2006). Harryhausen died in 2013, but his work continues with the Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation, his films, and museum exhibits. Happy Birthday Ray Harryhausen!

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