JCC RIP Ray Harryhausen

Go educate yourself wocky!!

And sadness to this news.

 

A giant has fallen.

It bears noting here that beyond being merely a skilled technician, Harryhausen was always closely engaged with the development and production of each film he worked on. His wiki page sums it up nicely:

Harryhausen was always heavily involved in the pre-production conceptualizing of each film's story, script development, art-direction, design, storyboards, and general tone of the his films, as much as any auteur director would have on any other film, which any "director" of Harryhausen's films had to understand and agree to work under. Only the complexities of Director's Guild rules in Hollywood prevented Harryhausen from being credited as the director of his films, resulting in the more modest credits he had in most of his films.​

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I remember being blown away by the Sinbad films of the 70s; even before Star Wars I was a fan of fantasy, magic and special effects, thanks to Ray's ingenious work on those electrifying movies. I had the poster for Eye of the Tiger on my wall for years. And I saw Clash of the Titans six times in the theater in 1981 (it played double feature with Dragonslayer, which with its more realistic go-motion techniques does not hold up as well because it simply isn't as much fun).

Tom Hanks famously said, "Some people say Casablanca or Citizen Kane...I say Jason and the Argonauts is the greatest film ever made!" I wouldn't go that far -- for one, Clash is by far a superior film -- but Harryhausen's innovations and contributions to world cinema cannot be overstated. Without his stunning work we would not be reveling in the current abundance of genre pictures, and the likes of Lucas, Spielberg, Cameron, Burton and Raimi would never have been inspired to become the visionaries that they are.

A giant has fallen.