It's Howdy Doody time
It isn't worth a dime
Let's turn to Channel Nine
And watch some Frankenstein.

Kids these days, they got their three hundred channels and their DVDs and their Internet. Back in my day we had seven channels (two, maybe three of them on a good day, without snow), and we were glad! (Waves ear trumpet. Pounds cane.)

Having a brother 13 years younger than myself meant I also saw the Sinbad films during the 70s, plus some re-releases (in 3-D!) of It Came From Outer Space and Creature From the Black Lagoon.

Wait a minute -- I think I know what film you mean. Is it the one where the aliens, when separated from their human hosts, look like human brains with attached eyes and spinal cords?* If so, there was at least some stop-motion animation** in it, even if it wasn't up to Harryhausen's standard. It's really not a bad movie, for what it is. Still, it's not Harryhausen, and it must have been terribly disappointing.

* The film also featured a crusty old English senior scientist, a handsome young North American post-doc, and a beautiful female grad student. But that could be any Brit SF film, TV program, or radio play.

** IIRC, the brain monsters would scuttle about on their spinal cords like snakes before launching themselves into the air like springtails. There was also some graphic alien ichor, which earned the movie a British X certificate and a US children's matinee showing.

Before he turned to low-budget SF, Arnold had been directing pro-Union documentary shorts. Pretty much anything he did (other than Monster on the Campus) was great. His best was probably The Incredible Shrinking Man.

The armature that was a useful prop
and brought delight to viewers on the screen
will now be reconfigured for that scene
when all the cast and crew that was created
will move again with life, re-animated.

A real frustration for a geek kid: Many genre movies and shows got stuck in the weekend afternoon doldrums, where they were liable to be preempted by ball games. I came to utterly detest some guy named Kiner, for his Kiner's Corner post-game show.

I saw two or three Harryhausen movies in the theater. Not Clash of the Titans, which I never have seen, but Sinbad movies.

HP: Could that have been one of the Quatermass movies? Try searching for that name on IMDB.

Very nice!

No, no brains on disembodied spinal cords. In that film the evil space aliens were pure electrical energy (which didn't show up on screen). They duplicated people at an isolated, modern-day, house. If I recall correctly there were four actors, but they played eight people: The original humans and their evil space-alien duplicates (who never appeared in the same shot together).

The last scene showed four burned outlines of the real people in the bottom of an empty swimming pool; the water rushes in and obliterates the ashes while the four space aliens, perfectly disguised, get in the car and drive off, presumably to infect the rest of the world. The end.

Project Terror

I remember one time when they lost the opening narration, so they had one staffer announce in a boring monotone:

"Project Terror, where the scientific and the terrifying emerge."

I am unable to turn up the stop-motion brain monster British SF movie. I thought I had it in my DVD collection, but either it never got filed or it got lost in a move. Now I'm tired and hungry and need to eat supper and go to bed. But c'mon, stop-motion brain monsters with spinal cords! Somebody must know! I didn't dream it.

Did I confabulate them having googly eyes?

One of the first movies I saw at the cinema was a re-release of The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (not the actual first movie, which was Thunderbird 6.

I later saw The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger and Wrath of the Titans at the cinema, too, during their first runs.

I have several of these on DVD, but my philistinic children roll their eyes at the special effects, and prefer the recent CGI remake of Wrath of the Titans (which is not as bad as some reviews make it out to be).

Same children are looking forward to Star Trek: Into Darkness, but nearly died laughing the other day when we watched the original series episode with the Horta (and this is the DVD version with all new space effects!).

Yep, that sounds like it! Now I wonder why I remembered it as British....

Back to Mysterious Island (which, alas, I still haven't seen), one of the user reviews says,

"...stop-motion isn't an effects technique. It's an art form. If you can't enjoy it for it's own sake, then you can't enjoy it.

...

"We go to a Harryhausen film for Harryhausen, just as we go to a Chaplin film for Chaplin. If you came in for some other reason, then you picked the wrong movie."

How sweet! I am very touched that you would like to quote it. When you do, could you clean up the second line? I realized later that it has too many feet--my bad ear for meter. Revise however you like.

Attribution should go to Ben Franklin, who gave me the idea for an epitaph that puns on livelihood of the deceased. You remember his, right?
"The Body of B. Franklin, printer
Like the Cover of an old Book
Its Contents torn out
And stripped of its Lettering & guilding
Lies here food for worms
For, it will as he believed appear once more
In a new and more elegant edition
Corrected and improved by the Author."

I wonder if there are even older versions of that joke?

And a comment on color, TV, and movies: It wasn't until I was close to forty that I realized that Dorothy Gale's pinafore was a gingham check. I might have been thirty before I knew it was even blue.

Bless Channel 10 -- Flippo the Clown aired movies every afternoon from 4:00 pm to 6:00 pm. That was where I saw the Douglas Fairbanks "Thief of Baghdad" for the first time. Between that and "Chiller" I got to see most of Harryhausen's films and some wonderful pirate movies too.

(Dare I admit that I'm old enough to remember when American Bandstand was on for two hours every afternoon?)

On other themes -- we didn't get a color TV 'til I was in high school.

Mary Aileen #32: The only time I've seen the Ted he was in tears listening to our university's choir.

* I have good friends who served in Vietnam and, in consequence, have other opinions. Their worst anger, however, is reserved for Tricky Dick and Henry the K.

Several years ago, I was putting together a portfolio page with descriptions of animation and modeling projects on my Time Warner homepage — with links to YouTube for the actual animations. Here is the description of a dancing skeletons project, and the corresponding YouTube link. This had got more attention than any of my other projects — because, skeletons, I imagine.

Also more dislikes — I figure from people who know square-dancing, and know this isn't it, and maybe people who think I'm abusing hip-hop dancing (which was the source of the motion capture).

At one point, Phil Tippett's website had a skeleton homage on Harryhausen's birthday — skeletons wearing party hats which collapsed into a pile of bones spelling out 'Happy Birthday Ray' (can't find a link just now, sorry).

On the topic of TV movies, in the 60s we had 3 channels. One of the stations regularly showed SF and horror movies in the afternoons after school. A couple of movies would be shown Saturday afternoons, and one or two more Saturday nights.

The demise of this charming custom I blame on Ronald Reagan and his administration loosening the FCC regulations. When station owners needed to have content to embed their commercials in, there was an incentive to show these old movies. When they were allowed to show commercials in half-hour blocks, so long to all of that.

My parents didn't get a color set until the mid to late 70s.

As a geek in a geek-culture-deprived decade, I watched anything remotely fantastic. This included the 60s TV version of Batman. Somewhere along the way I watched the flabby, low-budget Batman movies. In one of these, the villain kidnaps a dozen or more UN diplomats by zapping them with a devices that reduces them to powder.

By the end of the episode the vials of powder are retrieved and set out in a conference room, where a device simultaneously drips sufficient water into the vials. The diplomats appear and immediately begin arguing. Batman and Robin crack a joke that didn't really make sense. End of movie.

Fast forward to the mid 80s. I'm in the college SF club, BSing with friends about the 60s Batman.

And I learn that the diplomats at the end of that movie had been reconstituted with red, blue, green, and etcetera skin.

------------

Back in New York, it seemed to me that every time Channel 11 couldn't find a film for their Creature Feature they showed Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. They showed it a lot. It wasn't that good the first time....

Speaking of CGI skeletons, I have been in a fruitless search for an animation of running skeletons and robot lions that was in the SIGGRAPH 1984 demo reel. I think it was done by a company called Toyo Links but I am not sure.

Is this the film you want? "Osaka University Computer Graphics Research Group along with Toyo Links Corporation... Bio-Meta Team" presents "Bio-Sensor" (1984), along with a 1988 parody of it by Fantom, "Sio-Benbor." Don't skip the parody.

"Bio-Sensor" mostly features a motion-capture mechanical tiger, walking along an endless mirrored plain. Eventually it gets to a truncated pyramid. I won't spoil the plot, because there isn't much to spoil!

At one point the tiger acquires ghostly flesh by "blobby modeling." With hindsight, one can glimpse a thousand CGI creatures descended from this one in the decades to follow.

I was at the 1984 SIGGRAPH in Minneapolis, serving as a superannuated gopher-- though I don't recall anything about this particular film.

I believed that the theater where the SIGGRAPH annual films were shown was the coolest room in the entire world on that night. And I have had no reason to revise that opinion since. It was clear to me that computer animation would be big, someday.

Another notch of coolness was achieved because on one of the nights of the conference, we filed into the Omnimax domed theater at the Science Museum of Minnesota. A small number of research groups had submitted films to be rendered on the gigantic sideways 70mm frames used by an Omnimax projector, with its nearly-hemispherical lens system. For a while, we were surrounded by computer-generated images. Glorious.

How can you say such awful things about Bert I. Gordon?
("Easily.")
Last week's meeting of the SF club included the showing of Bert's "Village of Giants", which featured Tommy Kirk in hot pants, Beau Bridges in an improvised peplum, and, hey, that's Bladerunner's Tyrell as the sheriff.

'I was there too. He was tall and instantly recognizable. He pulled behind him a smallish green or brown roll-y suitcase, about a foot and a half by two feet. Completely mundane and i had wondered why he had brought his luggage from the hotel. He gave his slide show talk in one of the smaller lecture halls in Javits, and then invited everybody to gather around the bag he had put on a table next to the lectern. Unzipping it and taking off a few layers of black silk, he pointed down and said "That's the Medusa."

"A model?" somebody asked.

"No. that's the Medusa."

(As in: straight from the set, in living color, CAMERA ORIGINAL.)

My hair stood on end.

Next to the Medusa was a skeleton, or should i say a Skeleton! from the landmark fight sequence in "Seventh Voyage of Sinbad." If i remember correctly he didn't take them out of the bag but everybody gathered around and looked in.

Afterwards a security guy and i watched that nondescript bag like a hawk, and i marveled at how ordinary it looked and how priceless it's contents were. The Lead Curator at the Smithsonian would have gibbered and drooled with joy at the thought of adding those national treasures to the collection.

I-Con Memories,
Jeff TheSmofThatTalks W.'

Go figure.

[The word "I" uncapitalized. -- Moroi Risoe, Duty Gnome]

* I didn't have a color TV until after I left the Army, and spent my spare time that summer building one.

Both those poems are lovely. Thank you for them.

I am not familiar with Lou Bunin's work, but I am suspicious of this sentence:

Another early stop motion piece by Bunin, also in the 1930s was Bury the Axis, a short, satiric film about World War II probably commissioned for the US Government as a WPA grant.

Perhaps one of Fragano's students spends his or her spare time editing animation articles on Wikipedia.

I'm afraid to look at "List of stop motion films."

There are two Fleischer Superman cartoons, which are indeed gems, but most of the rest are ludicrously bad. A heavy handed public service cartoon about a dragon who refuses to smoke in spite of heavy peer pressure. An episode of "DoDo, The Kid from Outer Space," and another of "Colonel Bleep." An George Pal Puppetoon featuring a embarrassing racial stereotype.

But . . . it's got a genuinely cute and well done Ray Harryhausen short, "King Midas."

I really enjoyed watching that tonight. Thanks, Ray. You really cared about your art.

I was more than surprised to have him turn up in Melbourne, and felt privileged to see him.

It's a D&D adventure log from a gaming group I wouldn't want to join; the kind that regards gurlz as weird alien beings from another plane of reality, for one. Also the DM is so in love with the Warforged (magic-based androids, for those who don't play) that he even tried to shoehorn them into his Greek myths campaign . . . by putting them in turbans and caftans. And don't ask why they ride giant scorpions, theyjustdoooo. OTOH, he is trying to top the last guy to run a campaign using this setting, which is why he borrows the other DM's cool idea for a mechanical owl just so he can make fun of it; real mature there, yep. Did I mention that he is also very Grim! Dark! and Serious! so that he portrays everything as Grim! Dark! and Serious!, even the weather in Greece? Plus the players can't speak in character even with a copy of Bulfinch open on the table, so they talk like angry guys in a spy flick. And the guy playing Perseus wants everybody to know that he has a high'n'tight manly haircut like a high'n'tight red-blooded manly hero, not like those Greeks, we all know what they were.

I think Burgess Meredith's Ammon was my favorite character in "Clash of the Titans".

I believe the real animation genius behind Burton's films was Henry Selick, now at Laika here in Portland (the studio Phil Knight of Nike ripped off from Will Vinton). I agree he's very good, but IMO the three I named are the ones most responsible for creating and extending the techniques and art of stop motion. I could name a lot of others who were great, including Lotte Reiniger (paper doll animation), Will Vinton, George Pal, Jiří Trnka, and Oskar Fischinger, but you have to stop listing somewhere.

Incidentally, one of the great things about stop motion is that it's fun to do. I've done some paper cutout and some clay experiments, and I enjoyed doing them as much as looking at the final result.

[Mentioning "Nike," a brand of shoes, makes the gnomes' nose-hairs tingle. -- Norie Boriito, Duty Gnome]

Harryhausen made a significant contribution to our culture.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrfszN5qo_Y

on a Mr. Potter:

Alack and welladay
Potter himself is turned to clay

On a Ms. Fuller:

Here lies Fuller's earth

Stefan Jones @43, I think your memory must be slightly garbled, unless there is an alternate ending to the 1966 Batman movie that I don't know about. What I remember was that the reconstituted diplomats wound up speaking in one another's voices and languages, and Batman's comment was that "this strange mixture" might be the best hope for world peace.

Mind you, I'm going on the word of someone else. I don't think I've seen the movie since.

My favourite in that line was not occupationally related. It was an epigram on the suicide of a gentleman named Munday:

Hallowed be the Sabaoth, and farewell all worldly pelf,
The week begins on Tuesday for Munday hath hanged himself.

Thanks, that's the kind of stuff I was referring to.