HAPPY 87th BIRTHDAY, RAY HARRYHAUSEN!

I saw It Came from Beneath the Sea on TV one Saturday afternoon around 1965, when I was but about five and the movie around ten years old. My parents, sister and I lived in the suburban Sacramento neighborhood of Citrus Heights, a mere 80 miles or so from San Francisco. As I watched the movie’s climactic action sequences, terrified, stealing glimpses from between parted fingers, I asked my mother, who was busily doing housework and attempting to ignore the television altogether, whether or not our relatives, who lived in the East Bay Area, specifically Oakland, were likely to survive such an attack. She, of course, assumed I was speaking theoretically and laughed my inquiry off the way mothers do. But I insisted, and it became clear enough to her that I wasn’t speaking theoretically. I was asking her if our relatives had survived this particular attack. I remember thinking, while watching the giant octopus take down sections of the Golden Gate Bridge, that our proposed family trip to San Francisco would probably have to be called off, as the city would surely be devastated. I also remember being glad that Citrus Heights was far enough inland that a giant octopus attack on our neighborhood was highly unlikely.

Of course, I knew what I was watching was a movie, but I was still young enough to be able to take that imaginative leap and spin a mental web that made room for the possibility that this terrifying occurrence might have some basis in fact. It would be several years later on before I connected that afternoon showing of It Came from Beneath the Sea with the name Ray Harryhausen, who, I would discover, also rattled my spine and piqued my imaginative curiosity with other films I encountered in much the same way, films like The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958), Mysterious Island (1961), Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), First Men In The Moon (1964), The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953), 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957), The Three Worlds of Gulliver (1960) and One Million Years B.C. (1966), a movie that, thanks to star Raquel Welch, piqued my interest in ways that had nothing to do with dinosaurs. The first Harryhausen epic I actually saw on the big screen was The Valley of Gwangi (1969), a cowboys-and-dinosaurs tale that used, as many movies of this ilk had before it, the original King Kong (1933) as its template. I would later read all about how the creator of that film’s groundbreaking effects, Willis O’Brien, would mentor Harryhausen’s career and usher in the delights and horrors that Harryhausen and his grand imagination would unleash. And I would also be lucky enough, thanks to a re-release sometime in the mid ‘70s, to see Harryhausen’s masterpiece, Jason and the Argonauts (1963), for the very first time on a theatrical scale. Of course, it was a revelation—scenes that I had experienced only on truncated Super-8 Castle Films versions came roaring to life. Harryhausen, whom I had imagined I’d outgrown, had captivated me all over again, and during the era that would soon render his handmade stop-motion techniques allegedly too unsophisticated for audiences who now held Star Wars as the gold standard. Looking back from the vantage point of today, 26 years after he made his last movie, Clash of the Titans (1981), it is the very handmade-ness of Harryhausen’s movies, the imbuement of his fantastic characters with the unpredictable currents of life, that separate them from the untouched-by-human-hands sheen of most modern CGI special effects. His is a lost art, as far as the trends of Hollywood go. But fortunately, for those of us who remember, and for those of us who care to pass on his legacy to our children as a touchstone of real movie magic, his movies remain.

Happy birthday, Ray Harryhausen!