Today, Harryhausen is 83 and semi-retired. But Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life, a brand new oversized hard cover coffee table book puts his over sixty-year career in Hollywood into sharp focus. Its over 300 pages are profusely illustrated with color and black and white movie stills, behind the scenes photos, storyboards, and plenty of reminiscing from the master.
Its back cover has numerous blurbs from those influenced by Harryhausen's pioneering work, including Lucas, Spielberg, James Cameron and Kermit The Frog(!) ("He's a master manipulator", the superstar Muppet reluctantly admits).
Almost every big budget film released by Hollywood over the past 25 summers owes something to Harryhausen's efforts. However it's kind of a shame that Harryhausen himself never got the budgets to work with that filmmakers are accustomed to today. But as the back cover blurbs to Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life indicate, they couldn't have done it without him.
A Guilty Pleasure of the Small Screen
Harryhausen's films were guility pleasures of the big screen. But a guilty pleasure of mine (and a surprisingly large number of other people) on the small screen was the cheesy 1970 science fiction TV series UFO, about a top secret paramilitary organization dedicated to saving the world from invading alien spacecraft. The series starred veteran expatriate American actor Ed Bishop, who played the lead role with such stiff-jawed toughness he made the heroic Capt. Kirk seem like Alan Alda.
But the show was loaded with enough gadgets, futuristic cars and air and spacecraft to make every boy who was 12 years old or younger (I was about five when it first debuted on American TV) to drool in anticipation of each episode. And for slightly older boys, just as with the original Star Trek the female officers in miniskirts didn't hurt either.
Chris Bentley's new book, The Complete Book of Gerry Anderson's UFO is an 8X11-sized trade paperback book with color covers and scads of black and white photos throughout its 176 pages. It begins with a foreword by Ed Bishop, and is then divided into a look at how the show came to be, an episode and cast guide, look at the technology behind the show, and then some of the toys, models, and other marketing gimmicks that were released after the show's run.
Article comments
1 - Eric Olsen
Thansk Ed, very interesting. I'm not sure how I missed UFO, must have watching someting else.
2 - JR
I think you were watching somewhere else. It was a British series.
3 - Ed Driscoll
JR,
Indeed it was. However, in the States, CBS picked it up to run for a season on Saturday nights (at 7:00 PM, I believe) in 1971 and then it ran perennially in syndicated afternoon reruns throughout the 1970s. The Sci-Fi channel dusted it off for a couple of years, when that channel debuted on cable in the mid-1990s.
Ed
4 - Jim Carruthers
UFO scared the crap out of me, especially the liquid oxygen used by the space astronauts. And the phones.
But the best tribute to Harryhausen is Evil Dead 3.
5 - Joe
I actually had the UFO lunchbox! Well, it was a handmedown, but still. Gerry Anderson also was the creator of Space 1999 (I still carry a torch for the woman with the chocolate chip eyebrows) as well as the guy responsible for Supermarionation, Captain Scarlet, Thunderbirds and all that other cheezy goodness.
6 - Jim Carruthers
The only lunchbox I own is a "Milk And Cheese" tin box. Ghod knows what that will do to me down the years. And it isn't even a good size to keep booze in.
And you don't even want to know the kerfuffle posting a year ago about the live action Thunderbirds movie.
7 - harry larry
awesome stuff man!