I’ve dug Ray Harryhausen to the max since childhood. I’ve seen nearly every one of the movies that contain his special effects. Possibly all of them. Many of those flicks came to me via my family’s tiny little black & white TV, the aqua-colored one my parents perched on a high shelf due to lack of space. That was way back when I was a “trailer kid”…
…and conjures up my first big memory of television: A crick-in-the-neck experience if you watched too much. Unless something too amazing like Lost in Space–the first season or two, before it got “silly haha”–was on, you did better to play outside among the dirt and weeds, or feed alligators in the sewers. (And yes, kids–once upon a time there was no such creature as a giant, flat-screened color TV in every living room. No video games either. Scores of neighborhood children did this unheard of thing called playing outside. We weren’t plugged into any contraptions. No iPods or Bluetooths or…I know, I know. Say it isn’t so. But it’s true!)
I can honestly say that my personal “release date” was in the same month and year as that classic, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. I guess that puts me into the “getting on in years” category. Okay, December 1958. There. All upfront and everything. But I’m a very young fifty-one! (Isn’t that what all the coolest Baby Boomers say?)
Check this out. Tony Trov’s “Ray Harryhausen Inspired Everything that I find Awesome.” I second that. And yeah. Pure awesomeness:
A New Favorite Video
(Oh, and for anyone who’s wondering: Interviews are brewing and cooking, and before you know it that part of the blog will be up and running. Interviewing, I’m finding, can be much, much fun!)
