Farewell, Ray Harryhausen

[filkertom]

Great sadness -- one of the legends has fallen. Filmmaker Ray Harryhausen has passed away at the age of 92.

I'm not even going to bother listing his technical accomplishments, or all the filmmakers he inspired; you can read 'em at the Wikipedia link above. What Ray really did was make our dreams visible, right up there on the movie screen. We

Comments

[redaxe]

Aw, nute. Requiescat.

One of my all-time guilty pleasure films is One Million Years B.C., doubtless because of Raquel Welch (the sex symbol of my generation), but with the inimitable Harryhausen touch on the dinosaurs. I sincerely hope it's not cited by bugnuts anti-evolutionists as reality and am scared to google to see if it is.

[hitchkitty]

Clash of the Titans was my first exposure to Greek myth, and I'll nearly always stop and watch at least a few minutes if I catch it while channelsurfing. Sure, it's fun to watch Sir Laurence Olivier as Zeus, but let's be honest, I'm really tuning in for Medusa, scorpions, Bubo, the Kraken...I'm gonna be here awhile.

[unclekage]

Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Rhedosaurus FTW.

[gardnerhill]

Very soft spot for GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD. I loved the way they showed Tom Baker's evil wizard deteriorating with each nasty spell - powerful magic takes a terrible price. (The other nice thing about Ray's animated critters: they were actually there to help tell the story, not stop it dead for 20 minutes of making the audience go Oooh.)

CLASH OF THE TITANS bored me (except for Bubo, who out-acted Olivier in that film, and the gorgeous taming-the-Pegasus sequence) - and I never forgave them for mispronouncing KRAY-kin.

Mr. Harryhausen's casket will be carried by a gorilla, a skeleton, a Medusa, a griffin, a sea-dragon, and a Martian, and photographed one frame at a time. It will take 3 months to film him leaving the church.

[willibald]

Damn, and I nearly bought a copy of "The First Men In The Moon" the other day.

He brought things to the screen that nobody else could, not even O'Brien, and his work continues to inspire today. I remember watching Xena - cool CGI monsters that interacted with the actors like none before - but the skeletons moved and fought like Harryhausen skeletons, because we all KNEW that that was how skeletons moved.

Personal favourites; Telos from Jason, Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (before the Japanese did an remake with a man in a rubber suit), the Selenites, the fact that the octopus in It Came From Beneath the Sea only had six tentacles (putting the other two on and animating them would have bankrupted the movie), Gwangi, One Million Years BC (the first of his films that I saw in a cinema)...

Rest well sir and thank you.