Funny thing about getting older. You *know* it’s gonna happen. But every time one of your childhood heroes passes away, it takes you completely by surprise. I had that reaction when we lost Red Skelton (1997…and yes there’s a song in there). I welled up when film critic icon Roger Ebert left us just a matter of weeks ago. This morning I just stared in silence when I learned that Ray Harryhausen, the master of stop-motion animation, passed away at 92.
Everyone in my demographic – in other words, you’re at least as old as me – knows his work. He worked with tiny models and only one or two – if even that many – assistants. He posed, shot, and re-posed, and re-shot his models one frame of film at a time – standard film is 24 frames per second – bringing to life characters from Greek mythology, dinosaurs, even flying saucers – and all this decades before computers and CGI.
Those of you who grew up in the bay area might have caught his work on Channel 2’s “Creature Features” on Saturday Nights or the Sunday “Monster Mash” on Channel 36. Do any of these sequences take you back a bit?
- The sword-wielding skeleton from “The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad”
- The mutated giant octopus devouring the Golden Gate Bridge in “It Came from Beneath the Sea” *
- The creepy, snakey-haired Medusa in “Clash of the Titans”
Ray Haryhausen was originally inspired by Willis O’Brien’s work on “King King”, created his own animated movies at home**, then apprenticed under O’Brien on “Mighty Joe Young”. Beginning with “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms”, he started leading the effects on his own films. The process was marketed under several names including “Dynarama” and “Dynamation”, but it always meant the same thing: Harryhausen closed up in a small studio for several months, creating magic out of nothing but a film camera and small, complex models.
To learn more and get a chance to really appreciate the legacy Ray Harryhausen left behind, take a look at The Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation, a trust he and a his wife created to help preserve his work, which includes the films and over 50,000 original armatured models, film negatives, and artwork. Meanwhile, this seems like a good night to re-watch “Jason and the Argonauts”.
* Fun trivia on this: Due to budgetary constraints, the octopus only had five arms – less to animate.
** I’m a lifelong special effects geek. I have my own reel of stop-motion animation I made when I was a kid. Will get that posted to YouTube sometime soon.