Welcome to the Ray Harryhausen Museum!
This is a tribute to one of the most influential filmmakers and special effects wizards of all time. His work has probably created as many famous directors as he has created living breathing monsters on the big screen.
His interest in the medium started early, when he first saw the original King Kong. He had to know how Willis O’Brien brought Kong and the other monsters to life. Ray soon made his own dinosaurs out of clay, and even used his mother’s fur coat to create a bear. He filmed the results with a 16 mm camera, and later his dad helped him make a studio in their garage. Living in Los Angeles, he started to meet other aspiring monster-loving people, like Forrest Ackerman and Ray Bradbury. He went to school and studied photography, film editing, and anatomy. He was drafted during World War II and worked in the Army’s Motion Picture Unit, making the animated segments for orientation films. When he was released he began some of his own projects, creating versions of famous fairy tales like Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, Hansel & Gretel, and King Midas.
He had gone to school with the niece of his hero, Willis O’Brien, and in 1949 O’Brien asked Ray to help him with a movie he was working on, which turned out to be Mighty Joe Young, another movie about a giant ape. O’Brien won an Oscar for the movie, and Ray Harryhausen’s career in the film industry had begun.
His early sci-fi themed films like It Came From Beneath The Sea and The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms were enough of an influence that Japanese filmmakers started their own successful like-minded series of giant atomic monster movies like Godzilla, Rodan, Mothra, and Gamera. His swashbuckling movies about Sinbad were probably responsible for similar heroes like Indiana Jones. His stop-motion techniques helped influence young aspiring filmmakers the world over, like Tim Burton and Peter Jackson, to continue this kind of work and make their own ground-breaking improvements. There were a host of other filmmakers out there making monster movies, but few had the solid story-lines and grand scales of a Ray Harryhausen movie. The quality work that went into every aspect of one of his films is what set him above the rest and made him an inspiration to so many. Even Tom Hanks has said that the greatest movie of all time is not Citizen Kane, but Jason and The Argonauts.
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