Stop Motion Dreams: The Greek Myths of Ray Harryhausen!

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Brilliant genius Ray Harryhausen made some of the greatest and most memorable kinos of all time, which were my absolute jam throughout my childhood and manchildhood, and hold up just as well today - better, in fact, because they told classic tales of heroism, instead of lamely and redundantly ""deconstructing"" them.

"Nooo you can't just heckin kill evil monsters! I'm going to make a statue reversing this! If you were media literate you'd know evil monsters are misunderstood and cool heroes are the real monsters" - both unironic Moviebob fans.

Jason and the Argonauts

Remember to stay hydrated.

Jason opens with a major plot intrigue never to be resolved: Jason is rightful heir to the throne of Thessaly, but in exile because the wicked Pelias rose up and killed his parents. Jason saves Pelias from drowning, unaware of who he is, but Pelias is forewarned that Jason will take his revenge, so steers Jason into what he believes is an impossible quest to find the Golden Fleece on far-flung Colchis. You'd expect the movie to conclude with Jason returning in triumph to overthrow Pelias, but this never happens, indicating they were hoping for a sequel. Whatever the case, I never felt short-changed the forty or so times I watched this as a kid, because the movie is packed with great setpieces and imagery.

I always liked this notion of the gods playing chess with the lives of mortals, although now I look at it, this game looks more like Risk.

Jason becomes a proxy in a game between Zeus and Hera, who are on friendlier terms here than they were in Kevin Sorbo's Hercules. Hera grants Jason five wishes, through which he burns at an impressive pace. I suppose he could just wish for the Golden Fleece, but maybe that would be against the spirit of the game. Anyway, Jason assembles a crew for the voyage that includes Hercules, and Hylas, an upstart who presumes to beat him at discus throwing by skipping the discus like a stone over the water. There's a moment where Hercules takes a beat to react to this and then cries out with delight, hoisting the little guy aloft in the air. It's a scene of bro bonding kino numales will sadly never understand.

They then went on a panty raid and TP'd the crusty old dean's house.

Even sadlier, this pair is doomed to disappear from the story in tragic scenes suggesting a redemptive Hercules spinoff was also mooted, but never produced. For the Argonauts run afoul of TALOS, who does this to their boat:

He swaps his sword to his other hand to do this because he's right-handed. Fucking imagine having that kind of attention to detail.

One thing about Harryhausen is that he knew the limitations of his medium of choice, and wisely opted to animate subjects in whom slightly stilted movements would seem natural, like giant bronze statues and, most famously of all, skeletons. For this is the one with the most famous stop-motion sequence of all time: the skeleton fight!

The design on the shield to the right of frame looks a bit like the Kraken that would later appear in Clash of the Titans. It could just be a coincidence, or maybe Harryhausen had a prototype already in mind, making this a reverse Easter egg. In support of this conjecture, note that the one behind it is clearly Medusa.

Harryhausen already dropped one banger skeleton fight scene in The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, but this one is far more complex, with seven skeletons all fighting Jason's crew at once. The logistical legwork required to make this sequence land is literally incomprehensible to anyone alive today.

To put this in perspective, I can't even draw a fucking skeleton.

That wide shot alone must have taken more effort than most entire films, but the action doesn't tap out at a few sword swipes and shield blocks. Here our hero yeets a skeleton over a cliff using its charging momentum against it:

Come on, dub it with a slide whistle.

Beheading also works:

His surprised reaction to losing his head is so genuine. There are A-list stars in Hollywood right now who can't sell this much human emotion, and this is a muppet of a skeleton.

We might, however, question the utility of stabbing one between the ribs:

Nooo not the air between my ribs! My only weakness nooo!

Clash of the Titans

Me on the crapper.

Harryhausen's final epic saw him retvrn to the Greek myths at the dawn of the 1980s, when Star Wars was all the rage and Conan just around the corner. Clash concerns the legend of Perseus, who, with the aid of an invisibility helmet must tame Pegasus, the winged horse, rescue Princess Andromeda from marriage to the deformed Calibos, follow a golden owl to the three witches from MacBeth to learn the way to slay Medusa, whose gaze can turn any living creature to stone, and use her severed head to in like manner petrify the Kraken, so saving the princess chained by the sea's edge in sacrifice to Thetis, Calibos' vengeful mother, who has an ongoing beef with Zeus. This might seem like a convoluted plot, but, like all Harryhausenkinos, it largely serves as a shuttle between one setpiece and the next.

weee

Because it dropped at such a specific moment there's a clear time-capsule appeal to Clash: Perseus' pet golden owl boops and beeps like R-2 D-2, and he's given friendly guidance by Mickey (Burgess Meredith) of Rocky fame. In fact the cast was so packed with famous names the guy that actually played Perseus got eighth billing in the end credits, being relegated to the "Mortal" category of cast:

Brutal.

I remember as a kid I always looked away when the Medusa came onscreen in case she turned me to stone. I choose to champion this as evidence of the power of cinéma instead of further proof that I'm retarded, but the memory stays vivid either way. Nor was Medusa the only formative nightmare fuel in the picture: Calibos looked creepy as hell too:

IDK why they chose to switch between an actor for the closeups and a model for the wides. Maybe synching the animation to the character's dialogue would've been prohibitively time-consuming. We should take a moment to appreciate his taste in furniture: this is the edgiest chair I've ever seen (I want it).

But the coolest of all Harryhausen creatures hands-down is the Kraken. Though invariably depicted as an octopus or giant squid in lesser hands, the master said fuck that and designed the sum of all cool monsters land-locked or aquatic. Harryhausen's Kraken is like King Kong meets the Creature from the Black Lagoon but with four arms and an immense crocodilianesque tail. Its arms even appear to have little suckers on them, making them halfway between arms and tentacles.

"I endorse the aquatic ape theory and the historicity of Atlantis" - Ray Harryhausen (I assume).