When it comes to giant creatures wreaking havoc across the Earth, one name stands apart: Ray Harryhausen. The special effects pioneer picked up where Willis O’Brien left off with King Kong, taking stop-motion animation to new levels with effects work in such films as 20 Million Miles to Earth, Jason and the Argonauts, and his final feature, Clash of the Titans. His work directly influenced current megabuck filmmakers like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg. You can now watch Harryhausen’s earliest creations on DVD with the newly released Ray Harryhausen: The Early Years Collection. Unlike the alien monsters and mythological beasts that he later became synonamous with, these Mother Goose shorts, commercials, and experiments are more child-like. We asked Harryhausen what his inspirations were for these sometimes surreal examples of the stop-motion animation art form.
How did you first get interested in stop-motion animation?
Well, the whole thing started in 1933 when I saw a film called King Kong for the first time, at Grauman’s Chinese Theater – and I haven’t been the same since. So that shows how effective a film can be. It changed my life.
What was it about King Kong that so captivated you?
There was something that struck me. You know, lot of people look upon it as just another horror picture, but it’s more than that – it’s one of the great fantasy films of all time. Nothing like it had ever been done before. The Lost World was silent and King Kong, of course, had this great Max Steiner score which boosted it above the average type of film. It was almost like an opera; he did the leitmotifs you have in an opera, and he followed the action and he made the image on the screen bigger than life – which to me is the essence of what film music is all about. He was one of the first ones to do it. In later years, in our films, we always insisted that we have top-rate composers because music is so important in fantasy films. [Many of Harryhausen’s films were scored by the great Bernard Hermann, composer of such landmark soundtracks as Vertigo and Psycho.]
Your new DVD, Ray Harryhausen: The Early Years Collection, gathers your work from the period before you got feature film work. How are these pieces different from your trademark monsters?
I always call this my “Dr. Jeckyll period,” before I became Mr. Hyde. I started the Fairy Tales right after I got out of the Army. My original job before the war was with George Pal’s Puppetoons. I did two years with him – I animated most of the first 12 short-subject pictures that he did. Then the war came along and I went into the special services division, and when I got out I didn’t want to go back to that [
I admired O’Brien’s technique where he had a single figure, so I started some Fairy Tales. I thought the schools would need them, and I made a lot of experiments. I had this thousand feet of outdated Kodachrome – it was only about two months outdated, and the Navy threw it on the junk pile, so I retrieved it and wondered what to do with it. So I made the Mother Goose stories: “Little Miss Muffet,” “Humpty Dumpty,” “Old Mother Hubbard.” And they’re all on this DVD.
So how did you go from scavenging film stock to getting studio work on full-length features?
It took a long period – it wasn’t just overnight, you know. I made some Fairy Tales, people saw my work, and word got around. Not many people were experimenting with that type of thing [stop-motion
Very little was known; there were no books on animation, and stop-motion was relatively new. So I got the opportunity to do a commercial for Lakewood Homes, which is on the DVD. I did three – I think they last 2-3 minutes. They didn’t have color then, but on the DVD it’s in color – they were shot in color but projected in black and white. That was way back when you could buy a three-bedroom house for $59.50 a month.
Where were these early works stored?
I had a lot of storage space in my mother’s garage, and when she passed away we rented the house but we kept a little section to store my things in the garage. My producer Arnold Kunert and I went to the garage and we found these old commercials, so they’re on the DVD as well. I had forgotten I’d made them. We went one Sunday afternoon and found all these goodies almost rusting away. They were almost forgotten. I guess it’d been 50 years [since they'd been stored], and not in very good conditions.
