Creator / Ray Harryhausen

The master of monsters.

Raymond Frederick Harryhausen (June 29, 1920 – May 7, 2013) was an American movie visual effects pioneer of German descent.

Inspired by the works of Willis O'Brien (The Lost World and King Kong most notably), he became the most prominent Stop Motion animator in the film industry from The '50s all the way to The '80s and worked on such classics as Jason and the Argonauts, Clash of the Titans, three Sinbad the Sailor films (The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger), as well as some of the most notable dinosaur films of the pre-Jurassic Park era.

These adventure / fantasy movies would often be more showcases for Harryhausen's talent than anything else, but this is reason enough to watch them. The man has inspired many special effects artists to this day.

A lesser known fact: most of the settings in these films were made using matte painting, another visual effect technique he was a master of.

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Projects Harryhausen Worked On:

Comic Books

• Several of his classic films have been given Comic Book sequels, or adaptations, which include his original sketches as an extra. These include
  • It Came from Beneath the Sea... Again!
  • 20 Million Miles to Earth
  • Earth vs. the Flying Saucers
  • The Elementals - An unproduced Harryhausen Project.
  • Wrath of the Titans

Film — Live-Action

• Mighty Joe Young - Harryhausen's first Hollywood gig, spiritual sequel to King Kong (1933). The effects were a collaboration between O'Brien and Harryhausen.
• The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms - While not the first monster to attack a city, it was the first monster to be created by The Bomb. Very loosely based on the short story of the same name by Harryhausen's friend and fellow guy-named-Ray, Ray Bradbury. Because of the movie's success and only vague connection to the story, Bradbury renamed his work "The Fog Horn" to differentiate the two.
• It Came from Beneath the Sea - Giant Octopus attacks San Francisco. Notably, the City Fathers didn't want to have their newly built Golden Gate Bridge destroyed in the film for fear it would show the bridge being a weak structure. The producers filmed guerrilla-style and put it in anyway. The octopus only has six tentacles, to save on animation time.
• The Animal World - Started as a Documentary about life, but the Stop Motion dinosaurs stole the show. It also reunited Harryhausen with his idol Willis O'Brien.
• Earth vs. the Flying Saucers - Alien Invasion done with little subtlety. Some of the most iconic Monumental Damage occurs in this movie when Washington is attacked, including a saucer crashing into the Washington monument and knocking it onto people as well as a Saucer destroying the dome of the Capital Building. Footage from this movie later showed up in several rather less well done SF films like The Giant Claw and The Three Stooges in Orbit, as well as in the excellent Orson Welles quasi-documentary F for Fake. It also showed up in the classic Twilight Zone story "To Serve Man".
• 20 Million Miles to Earth - Harryhausen's second alien movie, but this movie's Venusian beast, the Ymir, isn't here to conquer, and is instead a tragic frightened animal along the lines of Kong. Harryhausen later authorized the colorization of It Came from Beneath the Sea, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers and 20 Million Miles to Earth. The colorized versions were released as a DVD box set, with the option of watching the films in the original black and white.
• The 7th Voyage of Sinbad - Swashbuckling nautical fantasy adventure in "Arabian Nights" Days. His first full-length color film, and Trope Codifier for Harryhausen, introducing one of his most iconic creatures: the living skeleton, as well as a Cyclops, some two-headed Roc Birds, and a flightless dragon. Despite its title, this was the first of three films Harryhausen would make about Sinbad the Sailor. In particular was heavily inspired by Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor.
• The 3 Worlds of Gulliver - An adaptation of Gulliver's Travels. Features the most low key creatures Harryhausen had animated, a squirrel and a crocodile.
• Mysterious Island - Sequel to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Charles Shneer threw in various giant animals to give Harryhausen something more to do.
• Jason and the Argonauts - Another nautical fantasy swashbuckler, this time a Sword and Sandal adventure based on Classical Mythology. This was Harryhausen's first world-recognized achievement occurs with a bronze giant and a battle with 7 skeletons. It took him several days to film one second of film—and he got the scene done in a single take! Also one of the Trope Codifiers and most iconic of Harryhausen's films. Tom Hanks has called it the greatest movie ever made.
• The First Men in the Moon - Steampunk Victorian astronauts meet Ant People on the moon.
• The Valley of Gwangi - Cowboys versus Dinosaurs, noted for the epic scene where the cowboys rope Gwangi himself, a vicious Allosaurus.
• One Million Years B.C. - A cavemen-and-dinosaurs movie often noted more for Raquel Welch as a Nubile Savage in a Fur Bikini than for Ray's special effects. But they're very good effects. Supposedly, the Archelon model had a lot of critics complaining that Harryhausen used a real turtle. A remake of the 1940 film One Million Years B.C. which did use real animals and is generally considered to be not as good.
• The Golden Voyage of Sinbad - A not-quite-sequel to 7th Voyage, but in a similiar vein of "Arabian Nights" Days adventure. Epic scenes include a statue of Kali swordfighting Sinbad with all six arms and a centaur-cyclops. Also notable for being the film that brought Tom Baker (who played the evil magician Koura) to the attention of the producers of Doctor Who. This movie in particular was heavily influenced by an earlier fantasy film, The Thief of Bagdad (1940), of which Ray was a big fan.
• Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger - The last of Harryhausen's Sinbad movies. Sinbad goes to a Lost World and battles a giant saber toothed cat. There's also a prince who got turned into a baboon and a gigantic, good-natured "troglodyte", the latter of whom is often considered one of Ray's most sympathetic and appealing creations.
• Clash of the Titans - Ray's swan song, featuring his last act in the Medusa battle done by flickering firelight. The complexity of that scene wows FX artists to this day. Also the film in which Sir Laurence Olivier gives the memorable order to "release the kraken".

Live Action TV

• Many of his effects were reused in famous television series—most notably The Twilight Zone (1959) reusing his Flying Saucers in "To Serve Man".

Western Animation

• Harryhausen's first gig was making shorts for the Army. Infamously, the short How To Build a Bridge had no visuals of soldiers putting the bridge together, and the superiors worried that the soldiers would think the bridges would build themselves!
• Harryhausen also did several fairy tale adaptations, but few are of note, as they were fully animated Gumby-style shorts.

Homages and Shout Outs:

Comic Books

• George Pérez cited Harryhausen as a chief inspiration for his Wonder Woman run, most notably in the "Challenge of the Gods" story-arc, where the skeleton-army sequence from Jason and the Argonauts is homaged down to the Hydra-teeth.

Film — Animation

• Speaking of Shout Outs, two stop-motion films that came out in the same year had the exact same nod to the man: both The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Corpse Bride had a "Harryhausen" piano in there.
• Harryhausen had an upscale restaurant named after him in Pixar's Monsters, Inc..

Film — Live-Action

• Army of Darkness features a very Harryhausen-inspired battle sequence with an Army of Skeletons. Some of which were stop motion.
• Jurassic Park has a scene where the Tyrannosaurus lunges out from cover, grabs a Gallimimus, and shakes it to death in a manner very similar to the titular character from The Valley of Gwangi ambushing a Struthiomimus. This scene was animated by Phil Tippett, a lifelong fan of Harryhausen.
• While it mostly uses the traditional People in Rubber Suits that comes standard with Tokusatsu, Kamen Rider ZO features a stop motion fight with a giant spider monster that is rather Harryhausen-esque.
• The skeleton fight between Brendan Fraser and a bunch of skeletons in The Mummy is acknowledged by the director and art department as a deliberate tribute and throwback to Jason and the Argonauts, right down to looking ever so slightly slapstick.
• Pacific Rim, while not directly related, is stated to be a tribute to both Ray Harryhausen and fellow Monster movie creator Ishir⁠ō Honda.
• Sinbad: The 5th Voyage is a Genre Throwback to the aforementioned Harryhausen Sinbad movies, going as far as using actual stop motion animation (albeit far more technologically advanced) for the creatures.
• Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas is, in many ways, an homage to Harryhausen's body of work, combining the Sinbad and Greek mythology films into a single setting full of giant monsters. Especially in the "Cyclops Island" short included on the home video version: Sinbad's reaction to encountering the one-eyed giants is "Not again!"
• Spy Kids 2: Island of Lost Dreams has a skeleton army too; the island itself, full of creatures of varying sizes and natures, wouldn't be out of place in the Harryhausen canon either. Although most of it is done with CGI, it's CGI that is designed to capture the look of stop motion.

Live Action Television

• Hercules: The Legendary Journeys did a Jason and the Argonauts story which climaxed with a battle against (CGI) Skeletons in Harryhausen fashion.
• Scenes from both The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and Valley of Gwangi have been used in the Newsflash game on Whose Line Is It Anyway?.

Multiple Genres

• It's hard not to find a Medusa or Gorgon design not influenced by Harryhausen's design: from Dungeons & Dragons to The Incredible Hercules, they all nod to Harryhausen.

Music

• The video for Jon Spencer Blues Explosion's "Burn It Off" is a pastiche of Harryhausen movies, with members of the band chased by CGI versions of his monsters (especially the skeletons) around an island and on a ship.
• The Hoosiers song "Worried About Ray" is named for him, and the video even features stop-motion creatures reminiscent of Harryhausen's works.

Video Games

• Age of Mythology has several Greek myth units based directly on Harryhausen's version of them - cyclops, bronze giants and medusa, for example.
• The God of War series draws a lot of inspiration from Harryhausen's movies, namely the Classical Mythology inspired ones. In particular, the second game includes several shout outs, including fighting skeletons while following Jason.
• Several Killer Instinct 2 characters pay homage to Harryhausen's movies, notably Spinal and Eyedoll.
• The giant stone heads at the very beginning of Capcom's Legendary Wings are similar to the head of the Talos statue in Jason and the Argonauts, including the way they turn around.
• The Cyclops in the PlayStation game for Xena: Warrior Princess was quite obviously modeled on the ones from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad complete with a horn on its forehead and (if you use the camera to see its lower body) satyr-like legs.

Web Video

• Phil Tippett's Surreal Horror stop-motion series Mad God has a statue of the cyclops show up in one scene.

Western Animation

• One episode of SWAT Kats, Bride of the Pastmaster, had two of its three Cyclops adorned with horns on their foreheads like the ones in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.
• Class of the Titans is full of Harryhausen movie shout-outs, starting of course with the title.
• An episode of The Angry Beavers has them transported to ancient Rome where they face off against a Cyclops that looks Harryhausen-esque, even moving as if stop motion animated.
• In the Gravity Falls episode Little Gift Shop of Horrors, Harry Claymore animated stop-motion skeletons and a cyclops for the Sword and Sandal film The Voyages of Loinclothiclese. Which is to say he used black magic to bring to life actual-size clay monsters, which turned on him after the advent of computer animation.
  Harry Claymore: Do you really believe someone moves these figures one frame at a time? I'm not a masochist.
• The horned cyclops appears in South Park's "Imaginationland" trilogy among the evil imaginary characters.

Tropes found in the films Ray Harryhausen worked on:

• Artistic License – Paleontology: One Million Years B.C. is set in a prehistorical world where humans and dinosaurs coexist.
• Behemoth Battle: There's very often more than one monster in his films, and some can end up fighting each other to the death.
  • 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957) - Alien/elephant battle
  • The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) - Cyclops/dragon battle
  • One Million Years B.C. (1966) - Carnosaur/ceratopsian battle and pterosaur/pterosaur battle
  • The Valley of Gwangi (1969) - Allosaurus/styracosaurus battle, and later the same Allosaurus fights an elephant
  • The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974) - Griffin/centaur battle
  • Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) - Troglodyte/smilodon battle
• Dem Bones: The hero fighting animated skeletons only comes up in two of his movies — The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonauts — but it's become one of his trademarks. The ghouls scene from Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger is close in spirit since these creatures have visible ribcages and are seemingly impervious to being stabbed.
• Evil Is Hammy: Expect the villains (the Evil Sorcerer kind especially) to be grandiose.
• Fantasy: Jason and Clash are both adapted from Classical Mythology, the Sinbad movies come from Arabian myths^note (with some classical mythology monsters thrown in the mix; the Islamic Golden Age was heavily influenced by Greek ideas).
• Monumental Damage: Harryhausen helped codifying this trope in a few of his earlier films, with The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms climaxing in the destruction of the Coney Island amusement park (that film directly inspired Godzilla, besides), It Came from Beneath the Sea's Signature Scene being the Golden Gate Bridge getting pulled into the sea, and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers showing a saucer crashing into the Washington Monument and the Supreme Court dome.
• Ms. Fanservice: There were some gorgeous actresses to accompany the heroes with Fanservice-filled outfits such as Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C., Caroline Munro in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Jane Seymour (Actress) and Taryn Power in Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.
• The Quest: In the Greek mythology-based films and Sinbad films especially, the heroes embark on a journey to find magical artifacts and battle an Evil Sorcerer.

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