Ray Harryhausen

Posted on the Facebook page for the Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation:

The Harryhausen family regret to announce the death of Ray Harryhausen, Visual Effects pioneer and stop-motion model animator. He was a multi-award winner which includes a special Oscar and BAFTA. Ray’s influence on today’s film makers was enormous, with luminaries; Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Peter Jackson, George Lucas, John Landis and the UK’s own Nick Park have cited Harryhausen as being the man whose work inspired their own creations. 

 Harryhausen’s fascination with animated models began when he first saw Willis O’Brien’s creations in KING KONG with his boyhood friend, the author Ray Bradbury in 1933, and he made his first foray into filmmaking in 1935 with home-movies that featured his youthful attempts at model animation. Over the period of the next 46 years, he made some of the genre's best known movies – MIGHTY JOE YOUNG (1949), IT CAME FROM BENEATH THE SEA (1955), 20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH (1957), MYSTERIOUS ISLAND (1961), ONE MILLION YEARS B.C. (1966), THE VALLEY OF GWANGI (1969), three films based on the adventures of SINBAD and CLASH OF THE TITANS (1981). He is perhaps best remembered for his extraordinary animation of seven skeletons in JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS (1963) which took him three months to film.

The first indelible Harryhausen experience I had was seeing the skeleton fight from Jason and the Argonauts on cable as a kid. Harryhausen's work is a fundamental influence on many of my favorite films and filmmakers, and it's why the effects in movies like Jurassic Park look so good, and hold up today. The skeleton fight from Jason:

He had a long life, and thankfully saw an enormous swell of popularity that I think comes in large part from the rise of the internet. When I worked for the Alamo Drafthouse, I tried and failed to get both Harryhausen and Ray Bradbury together to present "the two Rays" with Fantastic Fest Lifetime Achievement Awards. Neither was well enough to travel, and now they're both gone. I wish that I had the ability, venue, and audience to throw a weekend-long, all-Harryhausen festival.

The only way I can crystalize how much Harryhausen's work meant to me is by saying that his version of movie magic helped my dreams grow, and my imagination follow suit.

Below, I've put together how to seek out his some of his best-known movies on disc and streaming, with trailers where I could find them. To my wife's chagrin, I may be spending the Amazon store credit I have on further filling out my Harryhausen shelf.

The Valley of Gwangi

The Valley of Gwangi

I'm particularly partial to this "cowboys and dinosaurs" movie that people don't know as well as the others listed above. If you've never seen it, you can sign up for the trial of Warner Archive Instant and watch it on your TV via Roku or in a browser window. I bought the DVD the moment it was available from them. I would kill for a Blu-ray, but those cost a ton of money to make. The DVD looks great, and the HD stream on WAI is gorgeous.

The 7th Voyage of Sinbad

It Came from Beneath the Sea
20 Million Miles to Earth
Earth Vs. The Flying Saucers
One Million Years B.C.
7th Voyage of Sinbad 

All of these are part of a really solid box set that Sony put out in 2010. They're all piled high with extras, which are all quite thorough. The transfers are all great, too. I'm heading over to Fry's to see if they still have copies of the 2010 Sony box that include the figurine of Ymir.

Jason and the Argonauts

Jason and the Argonauts

Sony's Blu-ray looks as good as I think this movie can look (the above grab is from the disc), and it includes dual commentaries, one with Harryhausen himself plus historian Tony Dalton, and the other with Peter Jackson and effects guru Randy Cook. There are interviews and other solid featurettes included as well, and it's rare you find the Blu-ray for more than around $15.

Mysterious Island

Mysterious Island

Unfortunately, the only time this was on Blu-ray was by way of Twilight Time, whose releases are limited to 3000. You can find it second-hand for nearly $100 on the secondary market, but I would never recommend you go for that. You can buy it digitally from iTunes in HD for $15.

Clash of the Titans

Clash of the Titans

A grainy, but cleaned-up transfer is worth the sub-$10 price you generally find for the Blu-ray that WB put out just in advance of the awful remake coming out. An added bonus to ordering from Amazon: you can watch the movie for free via Amazon Instant Video once you've ordered the Blu-ray.

Nintendo Wants to Siphon Smartphone Games

On the heels of my forwarding the idea that Nintendo should be making their own phones in this piece about Nintendo, The Japan Times reports that Big N is doing the opposite:

Nintendo Co. is trying to modify its game consoles so customers can use smartphone applications on them as it searches for a way to return to profitability, company sources said.

The game console and software maker has offered professional-use conversion software to application developers so they can produce smartphone games that can be played on Wii U, a struggling home video game console that helped widen the firm’s operating loss in fiscal 2012.

The way this reads implies that they are trying to create iOS and Android middleware that will make it easy for those developers to port existing games to Wii U. That doesn't change the fact that people will be more likely to carry those games around on their non-Nintendo smartphones.

Nintendo hopes smartphone software will help spur console sales, which will in turn lead to an increase in popular game titles for them, the sources said.

They will have to massively simplify their interface, and make the long-needed move of unifying the Virtual Console for both the Wii U and the 3DS, with Apple-like redownloading. The biggest problem facing Nintendo is that, like Toho Co., they are a 100-year-old company run by 100-year-old men. They will look at backward solutions like this instead of proper overhaul tactics. Even when things are broken, the solutions do not go far enough to properly correct their course. They still view themselves internally as a Japanese company that happens to have a "foreign" audience, instead of a global company based in Japan.

Nintendo will also focus on developing new software on its own, the sources said.

The entire contents of the story read like a controlled leak designed to shape this story as "Nintendo on the upswing". The software they should be focusing on is their own Android fork ("NintendOS"?) to go with their own phone hardware.

Daily Grab 130: Stealing Tools

James Garner starting to "scrounge". This is one of his best roles in a career full of best roles.

The Missing Disc: BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS with Ebert Commentary

This movie is readily available on DVD, but the now-OOP Special Edition carries an indispensible Roger Ebert commentary that is missing from the in-print version. I don't know why this commentary disappeared when the movie was re-issued, but I presume it may have had something to do with licensing terms with the Ebert company. It could have just been Fox Legal not wanting to do some additional paperwork, I don't know.

Knowing it isn't there makes the movie un-purchaseable for me. I bought the "old" version from a local secondhand DVD shop with money that could have gone toward a reasonably-priced new copy.

The Missing Disc looks at movies that are either not available on disc at all, or which exist only in A/V quality and packaging that film fans and scholars find lacking. Every movie should be on Blu-ray, but life isn't fair, and there isn't necessarily enough restoration and remastering money around. This column fights the most reasonable fights possible.

Code Monkey Adds Goal, Princess Saves Self, Film at 11

Since posting this update this morning, Greg Pak and Jonathan Coulton's Kickstarter take has leapt from $215k to over $230k. If they hit a quarter million dollars, they will also:

...make a CHILDREN'S BOOK based on Jonathan's awesome song "The Princess Who Saved Herself"! That's right, A WHOLE NEW BOOK, to be delivered digitally to every backer at the $15 level and above! And if we go far enough over the stretch goal, we'll consider the possibility of printing actual physical copies as well. 

"The Princess Who Saved Herself" tells the story of a tough, tomboy princess who encounters a scary dragon and creepy witch -- and recruits them to play in her rock band. It's a beautiful, fun, funny song, and with your help, it's going to be a great kids' book. If we make the stretch goal, the whole "Code Monkey Save World" creative team will shift over to work on the children's book once the graphic novel is completed.

Click here to listen to the song: greg-pak.tumblr.com/post/48830950120/the-princess-who-saved-herself-by

Click over to the Kickstarter to see the gorgeous cover art and for more info. I interviewed Greg and Jonathan a couple of weeks ago on Giant Size (subscribe in iTunes). I'm finally pledging in myself tomorrow.

THE IT CROWD Finale Films in a Few Weeks

It's been known that a final 40-minute episode was in the works, bending around the conflicts of a cast who are all very, very busy now. Presumably, this special episode will air in the late summer or fall. I've missed this show, but with a track record like they ended up with, I'd rather it all be good than have a bunch of filler crammed in around the good stuff.

As a bonus, here's the awful US pilot/remake of the show, which is not awful on account of any of the actors:

Warner Archive DVD of Liberace's SINCERELY YOURS on 26 May

Technically, this should bear an enormous "EXCLUSIVE!" tag in the headline, since Warner Archive's George Feltenstein just announced this publicly for the first time on the latest episode of Screen Time (which will post by Wednesday).

Just in time for the premiere of Steven Soderbergh's Michael Douglas-starring Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra on HBO, Warner Archive is putting 1955's Sincerely Yours on DVD for the first time. It was Liberace's one big starring turn, and it flopped big-time. 

Here's a clip from the opening, from TCM's website:

Watch for it to pop on their store three weeks from today if you want the full Liberace Experience.

Indie Dev Cracks Their Game for (and to Defeat) Pirates

A great story, linked by John Gruber last week. I now own this game, even though I may not have time to play it as obsessively as "Tycoon"-type games generally make you wish you could.

Daily Grab 129: Hoofs

Jane Withers in 1941's Golden Hoofs, now available from 20th Century Fox Cinema Archives. I had a delightful chat with her on Thursday. It should post early next week.

Heroes of Small-Town Cinema

My pal John Gholson tweeted a link to this story, which is partly an obituary of cinema owner/operator Bill Schulman, but more a compact history of his family independently owning and operating movie theaters in non-metropolitan towns in Texas:

One of those theaters included the Manor East 3 in Bryan, one of the first six theaters in the world to implement the Dolby Sound stereo system. This theater was so popular, “The Man from Snowy River” ran 38 consecutive weeks, longer than it ran at any other theater in the world.  Mr. Dolby himself visited their theater in Bryan when it showed “Star Wars.”

It's a great series of stories that not enough people will read. Just as important is Gholson's personal tribute to the man:

That key allowed me to go in and make up and break down the films that would arrive, but also (with Mr. Schulman’s permission, of course) allow me and a guest or two to sit up in the formerly “coloreds’ only” balcony of the old place on weekends and watch trash cinema (biker flick The Devil Riders, faux-documentary Forbidden Sexuality and Texas-made stag cheapieCommon-Law Wife) and Woody Woodpecker reels that he’d collected over his many years of theater operation. I can draw a direct line backward from my current job as a movie critic and blogger to the days when I was a teenager with my own access to a movie theater any time I wanted.

Stewart/Colbert/Hardwick and the Future of The Late Show

I missed writing about this earlier in the week, but wanted to chime in on Comedy Central positioning a new Chris Hardwick show just after The Colbert Report. Chris is one of the smartest guys working when it comes to new media, and this lineup shores up Comedy Central's play for the 18-35 demographic, and a serious late-night player. This is just as big a get for Hardwick as it is for Comedy Central.

Having his profile raised alongside Stewart/Colbert is a big deal for his future. It's so big that when, if ever, David Letterman steps away from The Late Show, it would be difficult to not think of Hardwick as part of the succession plan, either taking the top spot himself or taking over Craig Ferguson's stomping grounds at The Late Late Show.

I'm just as excited by Hardwick's showrunners being Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant. This increases the value of my Hulu Plus subscription even more.

Why DEFENDERS?, or: Doctor Strange Reading List (Supplemental)

My podcast pal Merlin (whom I address that way due to having never met him in person) asked me how to get into Doctor Strange. That's a longer conversation than just a pithy post can cover (expect an upcoming Comic Shack to cover this). What I can do is recommend Marvel's recent Matt Fraction-written The Defenders series, which is all now available in trade paperback: Volume 1 runs about $15, and Volume 2 goes for $18. They total 12 issues worth of self-contained story, and it's a hum-dinger.

Why do I recommend this as the way into Doctor Strange at the moment? Issue 4 is one of the best one-and-done Strange stories I've read in a long time, for starters.

More importantly, it's become apparent that there are a lot of timey-wimey things going on in the Marvel Multiverse right now (Age of Ultron, All-New X-Men, the upcoming Battle of the Atom crossover, the arrival of Spider-Man 2099 in the present day's Superior Spider-Man this fall, maybe even the upcoming Infinity event...the list might keep going on and on forever. From Comic Book Resources' Q&A with Superior Spider-Man writer Dan Slott at C2E2 last weekend:

Can you talk at all about Miguel's state of mind or motives when he arrives in the present day? And at what point in the classic "Spider-Man 2099" run does his time travel trip take place?

Slott: If you're paying close attention to the Marvel Universe, there are a lot of time anomalies and time travel stories that all seem to be happening during Marvel NOW!. We have the younger selves of the original five X-Men now in the present, the "Age of Ultron," plus, there are a couple of other surprises on the horizon. And now there's this. Something seems to be happening to Time in the Marvel U., which makes it the perfect time for someone from the future to come to the present.

If a brand-new comics reader, you may initially get lost wondering where this Red She-Hulk came from, or why this Atlantean dude Namor is such an egotistical jerkface, or who the hell "Iron Fist" is, but in the space of 12 issues, you actually get a nice little introduction to who everyone is as a person, in a general sense. Silver Surfer, Black Cat, Ant Man, and Nick Fury bits all gel nicely as well.

The story spins out of a crossover called Fear Itself, which is absolutely not required reading, since we find out rather quickly what's going on. That is to say that this group of heroes get together to try to prevent reality from breaking apart when a machine that can change existence itself goes haywire.

I have a feeling that this series was planned to run exactly these 12 issues and no more, as sorry as I am to see it gone.

In a more just world, there would be a Defenders movie franchise, too.

"Goodbye Circus Circus"

Here's a rundown on where things are at in the lead-up to WWDC for iOS 7 according to All Things D. The de-skeumorphication of iOS is something I heartily welcome if it cleans up the interface and (possibly) improves performance by reducing the unnecessary animation, graphics, and other things that make my iPhone drain battery like there's no tomorrow.

Great Horsepower Brings Great Driver Responsibility

Car commercials didn't previously quote iconic comic book lines, did they? Does this mean that Ford is about to do a 30-second piece using lines from Star Trek?

"When on the road of life, the needs of the many...outweigh the needs of the few. The new 2014 Ford Expedition Ultra: boldly going where no family has gone before..."

Sam Smith's Process for Criterion's RICHARD III

My pal Sam Smith breaks down his process for the packaging and menu design of Criterion's Blu-grade of Laurence Olivier's Richard III. Clean, classical, and gorgeous work.

Netflix Instant Loses Nearly 2000 Titles Today

My friend Christina Warren over at Mashable has it wrong that all of these expiring movies are going to Warner Archive Instant...since none of the expiring titles were WB to begin with. I'm surprised she had never heard of WAI, too.

Part of Reed Hastings' statement on letting their Viacom deal lapse was saying that, more broadly, Netflix is letting go of non-exclusive content.

If Warner is putting more of their deep cut stuff on WAI, then it would theoretically be Netflix's choice in a future when they start dropping WB titles, and not greedy, evil Warners yanking away the content.

Update on 2013-05-02 01:36 by Moises Chiullan

When I posted this, I didn't realize how crazily this whole thing had spread. Makes me hate the internet.

I'm more angry than I was earlier about this particular paragraph that Christina wrote, which has yet to be amended, corrected, or retracted:

So why are these titles leaving Netflix? Licensing. The titles belong to Warner Bros., MGM and Universal and will soon only be accessible through the Warner Archive Instant service — a service I didn't even know existed. For $10 a month you can get a selection of streaming films only slightly better than what Redbox Instant offers.

The "WB/Uni/MGM titles will go to Warner Archive Instant"? Completely untrue. Her assessment of WAI's selection following a soft-launch as being "only slightly better than what Redbox Instant offers"? That's her opinion, but I would point out that this snark toward WAI is undeserved, especially from an entertainment journalist who writes for one of the most-read sites on the web who didn't so much as notice that a major studio launched a streaming service almost exactly one month ago.

Most importantly, if you're going to say "all this stuff is going to this other service", at least attribute a source. Where did this info drop out of the sky? I'd love to know.

Shame on Ars Technica likewise for rallying more torches and pitchforks, heaping culpability on WB without doing any due diligence of their own.

Also worth noting...the "2000" titles are expiring throughout the month of May, not all at once on this day of "Streamageddon". Here's InstantWatcher's dynamically-loading list of titles soon-to-expire.

Southern California Public Radio made an italicised partial correction at the bottom of this post. Author Mike Roe cries tears for the James Bond movies Netflix had disappearing, but this has happened before.

Someone just find me this magic list of "hundreds of Warner Bros. movies" that have allegedly been greedily snatched away, and I swear I'll shut up.

Malick Working on Longer Cut of TREE OF LIFE

The Playlist unearthed this by interviewing frequent Malick editor Billy Weber. The longer version would be destined for some sort of home video release at some point, but there's no concrete info on whether there would be a small theatrical run as well. Their speculation about Criterion is just that: speculation. I liked Tree of Life very, very much, and I welcome a longer cut.

The tiny bit of info about the IMAX-destined Voyage of Time is that it's scheduled for a 2014 release, but who knows what state of completion it's in.