May 7: Death of a Giant

I'm going to take a little departure from the normal subject matter of Saint Marty to write about the death of a giant who created giants.

When I was a kid, my oldest brother took me to see the movie Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.  Aside from displaying nearly naked women, the movie also had special effects created by Ray Harryhausen.  It had a walking, killing, bronze Minaton; an immense sabre-toothed tiger; and a goofy, giant troglodyte.  I was immediately hooked.

On the weekends, I watched Creature Features on TV, including other Harryhausen flicks like Mysterious Island and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.  By today's special effects standards, the stop-motion creatures in all of these movies are laughably unrealistic.  But that's what made them so great.  They didn't pretend to be real.  There was something magical about them.  Ray Harryhausen didn't aspire for realism with his work.  He aspired from something less tangible.  Call it what you want--imagination, fairy tale, myth.  Harryhausen didn't want to create horrifying life.  Rather, he wanted to create three-dimensional wonder.

Ray Harryhausen died today at the age of 92.  He did immense things in his lifetime.  He got to work with his idol, King Kong creator Willis O'Brien.  Harryhausen's work was the gold-standard of special effects for decades.  Even George Lucas paid homage to Harryhausen with a little chess game aboard the Millennium Falcon in the original Star Wars (before it was Episode IV:  A New Hope).

Not too many people know (or will remember) the name Ray Harryhausen.

But ten-year-old Saint Marty will never forget him, not to mention his troglodyte frolicking with a very nude princess on the shores of the lake in Hyperborea.

Ray and a few friends