Stop Motion Dreams: Ray Harryhausen's Sinbad!

If I were ever to bring a little goblin of my own into this world, I have a plan to show him only silent movies in his early years, raising him to appreciate that lost art and believe it was the full extent of the potential of cinema (which is not far off base). I have always maintained the great tragedy of film is that the values of Griffith and Chaplin - didactic messaging, editing for logical continuity - took hold whereas the values of Méliès and Keaton - dream logic, editing as magic tricks - did not.

1,000 hours in MSPaint.

But when my spawn has emerged sufficiently from its larval stage, I will spring on it another kind of long-abandoned cinemagic in the form of the creations of Ray Harryhausen, the stop motion animator behind Jason and the Argonauts, Clash of the Titans and One Million Years BC. Besides Greek myths and dinosaurs, Harryhausen persistently returned to the topic of Sinbad the Sailor from the 1001 Nights. Unburdened by continuity, I like to think of these films as simply other stories about Sinbad that might have developed out of word of mouth over the centuries. Like classic James Bond, the details change but the sense of adventure and wonder provides the only throughline we need.

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad

Opening to the catchy strains of Bernard Herrmann's score, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad freely adapts episodes from any voyage of Sinbad's but the 7th as well as Homer's Odyssey. Landing on a strange island Sinbad (Kerwin Mathews) and his crew encounter Sokurah the magician (Torin Thatcher), fleeing with a purloined magic lamp from a one-eyed belligerent obsessed with roasting Arabs alive.

Harryhausen tried to warn us.

Fortunately Sinbad and his crew are able to hold Rep. Crenshaw off long enough to escape to their ship, but the cyclops capsizes their boat and recovers the lamp. Sokurah is determined to get back to the island and reclaim the lamp, but Sinbad keeps refusing all the way back to Baghdad. Eventually Sokurah resorts to magic to shrink Sinbad's princess gf (Kathryn Grant), telling him the only way to restore her to normal size is to return to the island and brew a potion out of roc eggs.

A subplot introduced but never mentioned again is that the shrinkening fucks up diplomatic relations between two kingdoms, threatening war if it is not reversed. The fact that this is totally incidental fallout from Sokurah's monomaniacal plot makes him such an endearing villain. All he wants in the world is his lamp! Sokurah INNOCENT!

Despite the amazing coincidence that the only way to reverse the spell is to go back to Sokurah's island, Sinbad never seems to figure out that Sokurah is behind the shrinking, giving us the only clue we have to Sinbad's characterisation: he's an immense dumb-dumb. This is wildly consistent in spirit with the original tales, in which Sinbad was not so much a hero who set out to right wrongs as he was an Arabian W.C. Fields whose trade voyages always ran into disaster after fuckup until he made it back to Baghdad with an inexplicable fortune in gold, only for the same thing to happen to him again a few years later. This may be attributable to Scheherazade making shit up on the fly, but if in nothing else these movies are remarkably faithful to the fact that Sinbad has the best and worst luck in the world at the same time, whereas his endless succession of hapless crews have all the worst and none of the best.

Damn, Brittany and Abby Hensel look like that?

It's fun having kind of a double plot in which Sinbad has one goal and Sokurah another, both barely tolerating the other until the first opportunity presents itself to fuck the other over. Even the crew, who get variously rekt by the roc, the cyclopses and mother nature, are mostly scumbags on conditional release from the hangman's yard who think nothing of betraying their captain whatever chance they get. Yet this is charmingly offset by the tiny princess and her interactions with the genie of the lamp, which have a well-judged childlike whimsicality. The movie ends with a cool creature fight in which Sokurah's pet dragon pwns Crenshaw epic style.

America first bitch.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad

Harryhausen returned to Sinbad in the 70s with Golden Voyage, a non-sequel featuring TV's Doctor Who, Tom Baker, as its villain, Prince Koura, who seeks a magic fountain that will restore his youth which he keeps losing every time he casts one of his spells. Despite this, he keeps doing it throughout the movie.

There's nothing quite so intimidating as a villain who will die if he uses his powers too much. Fortunately he makes it to the third act, because Sinbad would have felt awkward otherwise. This rather dumb device aside, Golden Voyage has some great animated antagonists to make up for Grampa's brittle spine, most memorably the Kali statue, who busts some sicc moves:

I guess they never miss, huh?

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger

Disappointingly, Eye of the Tiger doesn't feature Sinbad fighting Rocky to the strains of Survivor, but it does feature a prince transformed into a baboon, a retvrn to monke Sinbad cruelly seeks to reverse in order to stop some other dude from ascending the throne and Sinbad's love interest (Live and Let Die's Jane Seymour).

Do not try this with a real baboon.

The said other dude is the son of Zenobia (Margaret Whiting), a main antagonist more campy and hammy than a panto villain. Sinbad and his crew travel to frozen Hyperborea to find a cure for the prince's simian transfiguration with Zenobia, her son and a gold minotaur ("Minoton") who rows their very coolly designed boat in pursuit:

Since Zenobia's whole plan is to get her rather dopey son onto the throne, presumably so she can puppeteer him, it seems really dumb of her to bring him along with her, especially when we know she can conjure minions with her magic, which she does in the opening scene. At least her characterisation is consistent though, as everything else she does in the movie shows a similar amount of cognitive reasoning skills. At one point she turns into a seagull, shrinks herself, gets caught and put in a jar by our heroes, and has so little of her magic potion left to reverse the transformation that she ends up with a seagull foot permanently. Good thing it wasn't the head.

Womp womp.

It's a shame Zenobia is such an egregious bumblefuck because her boat and Minoton are cool. Or would be, except the Minoton goes out like a bitch pulling away a block to create a door into the pyramid.

And it was all for nothing. Zenobia would have chewed her way through that much scenery in no time.

Fortunately this is offset somewhat by the climactic creature fight between Troglodyte and the sabre-toothed tiger. This location was cool and the fight was particularly brutal.

Eye does the least out of the three to disguise the fact that these movies are written around a bunch of stop motion setpieces, but as a kid I didn't give a fuck because the creatures were cool. There's no way they would ever do more of these with stop motion animation, and that's probably for the best because Hollywood would balls it up like they do everything, but maybe one day we will see more unrelated Sinbad adventures.