As a kid in the 1960s I loved the Sunday afternoon movies. Sometimes a Tarzan flick, sometimes a Kung Fu movie, sometimes a Hammer Horror, and sometimes it was a creature feature. Sure Godzilla or Mothra were fun, but the BEST creature features were done by a guy by the name of Ray Harryhausen.
Harryhausen was inspired by the work of one Willis O’Brien, and specifically by O’Brien’s 1933 film King Kong that used stop-motion animation beside live action. On O’Brien’s advice, the teenaged Harryhausen dove into graphic design and sculpture classes and, along the way, made friends with an aspiring writer named Ray Bradbury. When World War II came about, Harryhausen enlisted and was stationed with the ‘Special Services,’ the entertainment branch of the Army, where he served under Colonel Frank Capra and worked with Ted Geisel. If those names sound familiar – the former was already a directorial giant in the movie industry before enlisting, and the latter became known to folks as Dr Suess.
Post-war, Harryhausen began creating shorts of classic fairytales, a series that kept returning to over the next 50 years, and finally got on as an assistant on another Big Ape film Mighty Joe Young, released in 1949.
In 1953, Harryhausen found himself in full charge of technical effects for the movie Monster From the Sea, during which he developed his signature technique of “Dynamation” that split apart live-action foreground and background and allowed him to use miniatures of the background to animate his models against. Remember that friend of his, Ray Bradbury? Well, Bradbury had sold a short story called The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms and one of the scenes in Harryhausen’s movie was a lot like that short story. So, Harryhausen bought the film rights to Bradbury’s story and renamed the film for it. Bradbury later renamed his short story to The Fog Horn. (As far as I can tell, no one renamed anything to Monster From the Sea, if anyone’s wondering.)
In 1958 Harryhausen got his chance to work with color film on his first of three Sinbad films, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, and refined his Dynamation technique to account for color issues between the live-action and animated layers. This movie inspired countless numbers of young Sinbads to 
swashbuckle around their neighborhoods. Mine included.
His offering Jason and the Argonauts, however, was what put him on my young map. Released in 1963, and probably shown on Sunday afternoon TV by the late 60s, I had never seen anything cooler than actual sword combat with skeletons. Yeah – SWORD COMBAT WITH SKELETONS! That alone vaulted that flick into my all-time top five movies EVER. Even with Raquel Welch, everyone’s imaginary girlfriend among my peers of the day, 1966’s One Million Years B. C. couldn’t unseat its place as my Harryhausen favorite.
By the time Clash of the Titans was released in 1981, Harryhausen had established himself as the Hollywood’s king of stop-motion animation despite his living in London since 1960. That change of address probably resulted in the lack of an Oscar on his shelf until the award of the Gordon E. Sawyer Academy Award lifetime achievement in 1992.
You can learn more about Ray Harryhausen in a short interview from 2008 titled Ray Harryhausen: Master of Animation on Kanopy, or the DVD Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan
~ Posted by Jay F.
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