Goodbye, part of my very soul

http://io9.com/r-i-p-ray-harryhausen-monster-innovator-and-visual-ef-494048387


I can think of few others who were as foundational to me as I was growing up. Seriously, I cannot even think of a teacher who impacted me like Harryhausen's films did. To say nothing of the fact that he was one of the absolutely nicest men in the business. I have an outstanding documentary about him on laserdisc, and I was searching for it on Youtube but could not find it (partly because I cannot remember the title,) so instead I leave you with one of the most astonishing scenes ever committed to celluloid:

It happens to the best and worst of us. He gave so much to cinema.

Dare I say that I did not recognize the name, but I did see that there was also and obit in last week's Time magazine.

Harryhausen's is a name that has been near and dear to my heart since young childhood. I am too young to have seen Jason and the Argonauts or The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad in the theatre, though of course I watched them repeatedly on television. However, I did see The Golden Voyage of Sinbad in 1973 at the ripe old age of seven, and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger a few years later (plus Clash of the Titans, of course.) My childhood was shaped by Ray Harryhausen, Willis O'Brien, Ishiro Honda & Eiji Tsuburaya, plus abundant quantities of sharks and dinosaurs. There are a lot of worse things to grow up on!

Amazing, I don't understand how come you didn't grow up to be a crazed killer.

I always say the same about my childhood with it's steady diet of Westerns. As kids we altered between playing Cowboys and Indians, North vs South (since it was approaching the 100th anniversary of the Civil War), and Americans v. Nazis & Japs (since it was less than 10 years from the end of WWII). It's also amazing how we turned out to be such openminded adults considering how unpolitically correct we were as children.

It shows that while there may be a link between childhood activities and adult behavior/point-of-view, there is just as much evidence, if not more so, that other factors are more important. I also played with toy guns and toy soldiers, and had the usual fascination with the tools of war. However, as an adult, I abhor guns and war in general. In my case, the people who I have known who met their ends via a bullet shaped my opinions far more than any childhood fantasies ever could have. And, by the way, I play violent video games with no problem, but I have always clearly delineated fantasy and reality, even as a child. That was why I was fine watching movies like Jaws at the ripe old age of 8; even then I had no doubts about the shark, bodies and blood all being fake. In a way, craftsmen like O'Brien, Harryhausen, and Industrial Light & Magic may have been a major influence there, because even at that age I devoured any reading material that I could find about how special effects were done, so I always saw the wizard behind the curtain even at a young age.

The one thing that I did NOT play with as a child was cowboys and indians, and "politically incorrect" or not, that is a big regret of mine. I grew up in the Seventies post-2001 generation, and more importantly, the Star Wars generation, when Westerns were no longer "cool." And I really missed out as a result. It was not until the very early Eighties when I read Danny Peary's A Guide for the Film Fanatic that I turned that around. Peary's book guided my film fandom nearly as much as the likes of Harryhausen did. In the Introduction, he talked about how you simply cannot be a film fan while rejecting entire genres which are a cornerstone of film history, and used Westerns as an example. Point blank, he said that you cannot be a film fan and not like Westerns. So I went through his recommendations in the book and launched into a years-long Western "re-education," and now Westerns are among my favorite films of all time. He was right. So the fact that I avoided them as a child gave me a slow start at appreciating one of the most thematically interesting genres in American film.