It was the early 1970s, I’m not sure what year. I couldn’t have been more than five years old.
A birthday party for one of the neighbor kids was barreling along on that warm spring day, and I was just another grade-schooler coming down from a birthday cake-induced sugar buzz. I wandered away from the other screaming and laughing children crowding the dining room of our neighbors’ apartment, and glanced towards the living room at their TV.
On the flickering screen, two men were walking along a sandy beach, into a valley full of massive bronze statues. One statue in particular — a gigantic sword-bearing warrior in an attack-ready crouch — loomed over the men with blank menace. Unease crept through my little-kid mind, but I walked into the living room mesmerized.
The men — Greek warriors Hercules and Hylas, it turned out — entered the statue’s base, finding mountains of glittering treasure within. Then they exited, Hercules recklessly toting a golden javelin purloined from the vault. I watched the two men look askance at the statue as they walked on.
Then the bronze giant turned its huge head to observe the thieves’ progress. Through a chorus of deafening metallic creaks, the statue rose from its base, and in an instant my life was changed.
Even at my tender age, I knew this wasn’t a man in a suit, or a cartoon, or some marionette. But soon I gave up even trying to figure out how this was done. Dumbstruck awe kicked in.
For the first time, a movie completely transported me. I forgot I was a snot-nosed kid in front of a wood-panel Zenith TV on a military base outside of Lakewood, Washington. Talos, titanic guardian of Zeus’s treasure, was lurching towards foolhardy mortals, ready to stomp them like so many scurrying ants. I was bearing witness to the wrath of the Gods writ in towering, terrifying grandeur. And I believed.
That movie — 1963’s Jason and the Argonauts — instilled an abiding love of fantastic cinema within me that remains undimmed four decades later. And the architect of that movie — special effects pioneer Ray Harryhausen — died at the age of 92 on Tuesday.
Harryhausen was never a household name, but his impact can’t be overstated. Throughout the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, his films represented the ultimate in state-of-the-art movie magic. They were, simply put, the Avatars of their day. His primary medium was stop-motion animation, a painstaking art form that involved sculpting doll-sized miniatures, moving them fractions of an inch, and shooting them one frame at a time. The process enabled Harryhausen to bring mythological creatures, dinosaurs, space aliens, and more to vivid life.
Remarkably, he created these dazzling worlds more or less by himself, constructing a gallery of creatures and their exotic habitats in his own studio. In an age when it takes small armies of tech-heads millions of dollars in software to craft cinematic illusions, the fact that one humble guy could manufacture entire worlds from foam rubber, metal armatures, fake fur, and his own boundless imagination can’t help but inspire. Modern effects may possess fewer seams, but Ray Harryhausen’s creatures possessed way more heart.
Harryhausen’s feature films, from 1953’s The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms to 1981’s Clash of the Titans, were meant to be crowd-pleasing entertainments, not profound artistic statements. But his knack for imbuing his menagerie of non-human characters with distinctive personalities made him the closest thing to an auteur the special-effects industry ever had, and that unique touch inspired more than a few wonder-struck kids to pick up cameras themselves. If you’ve enjoyed any of the movies of Tim Burton, James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, or Peter Jackson — all of whom have overtly acknowledged his influence over the years — you’ve experienced the ripple effects of Ray Harryhausen’s genius.
I missed Harryhausen’s appearance at the EMP Science Fiction Museum a few years ago, but was fortunate enough to meet him some twenty years previous, at a horror convention in Baltimore. Soft-spoken, gracious, and generous to a fault, he was less your kindly uncle and more your introverted pal — the one who was so low-key, you’d never have suspected what brilliance lay beneath his placid surface. I brought a folder full of Harryhausen stills and lobby cards, but only pulled out two for signing: It was a few years before paying celebrities for every autograph became de rigueur, and I didn’t want to impose on his time and generosity.
After signing the first two stills, he opened the folder unprompted, and began autographing the others. Before I knew it, he’d signed several with careful but rapid elegance, and showed no sign of stopping until I told him he didn’t have to sign them all. He looked up at me alertly and with a gentle smile said, “Are you sure?”
It took all my resolve to not let him keep going.
Tom Hanks presented Ray Harryhausen with an honorary Oscar in 1992, gushing that the greatest film ever made wasn’t Casablanca or Citizen Kane, but Jason and the Argonauts. The awestruck kid in me, as well as millions of other awestruck kids and kids-at-heart, would surely agree.
