Ray Harryhausen's Film Fantasy Scrapbook

[Sir Masksalot]

"The Valley of Gwangi" was on TV yesterday. Once it ended I reached for
my rather battered second edition of RH's FFS, intending to re-read
only the "Gwangi" chapter. Afterwards, I figured 'What the heck, I may
as well re-read the entire book'.

Following an introduction by literary great Ray Bradbury, we meet the
source of Mr Harryhausen's inspiration: "King Kong" 1933. RH's stop-
motion experiments on 16mm film eventually led to an apprenticeship
with Willis O'Brien on 1949's "Mighty Joe Young" for which RH claims
to have animated 85% of the scenes! He doesn't commit much text to
the "Mother Goose Stories" and other fairy tale adaptations he worked
on. He only fleetingly mentions George Pal's "Puppetoons".

Soon came his fortuitous teaming with producer Charles Schneer which
led to the creation of all those Dynamation classics we know and love
today. He respectfully credits much of his movie magic to the composers
who scored them: the likes of Bernard Herrmann and Miklos Rozsa.

My first theatrical viewing of a Harryhausen picture was "One Million Years B.C.".
I was only nine in 1966 so you may well imagine its effect on me. The allosaurus
attack on the caveman settlement was quite disturbing!

If you also have this book or just admire Mr Harryhausen's contributions
to cinema, drop a comment.



 

[Mike Scott]

I do have that edition of the scrapbook. Don't remember if I read about it in a monster mag first, or just discovered it in a bookstore, but the '70s were exciting times (book wise) for fantasy film aficionados! Recent years have seen more scholarly tomes on Rays movies, but finding RHSB, back then, was like Manna from Heaven! 

A couple of other notable scores from Harryhausen films are Laurie ("The Avengers") Johnson's score for "The First Men in the Moon" and Jerome ("The Big Country") Moross' score for "The Valley of Gwangi".