Ray Harryhausen. When I was a kid, that name meant magic. Probably the first Harryhausen film I saw was MYSTERIOUS ISLAND, and it was one of those films that made me want to make movies. It's still one of my favorite movies. The creatures in that film were so real! How did they do that?
And that's how I got to know Harryhausen's name. I started to look for movies he did special effects on - and discovered fighting skeletons and sea monsters and cowboys who roped dinosaurs... and Dynamation (also, the Super type). This guy made things that could usually only exist in the imagination of a kid into something that could battle Kerwin Matthews on screen! He made magic into reality.
But the problem with being a star special effects guy is finding stories where the special effects were the stars... at least, that was a problem in the pre-CGI times. So CLASH OF THE TITANS was Harryhausen and his producing partner Charles Schneer's new excuse to do some stop motion work... and they cast prettyboy Harry Hamlin and brilliant-but-down-on-his-luck actor Laurence Olivier, and the film was, well, okay. The mechanical owl was kind of silly - I'm sure in response to STAR WARS' R2D2.
But a new generation of kids saw that magic and remembered the film... and became studio executives. So a film that was just an excuse for Ray Harryhausen's special effects has been remade *without* those effects. And here's the teaser trailer...
And here's the trailer for the original film...
- Bill
3 comments:
I can't tell you how many times as a child I tried dropping homemade Hydra's teeth on the ground in hopes that sword-bearing skeletons would emerge. Unfortunately, they never did.
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I remember the trailer for the new Clash of the Titans. It looked uber-cheesy. I didn't bother to see the movie.
But to remake it *without* special effects? That's crazy.
Mind you there was one place where they cut all the songs out of Sound of Music (Singapore, I think) because the running time was too long. It was still a smash hit. So maybe...
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