A Master of Movie Marvels

How many special-effects designers are bigger celebrities, more beloved and admired, than the actors who starred in their movies? We can think of only one, and his name was Ray Harryhausen.

Over five decades, Harryhausen fashioned tabletop models of marvelous beings — dinosaurs, space aliens, mythological creatures — out of latex and jointed metal skeletons. He brought them to life by positioning them, photographing them and positioning them again, frame by painstaking frame, to create the illusion of movement.

The process seems quaint now. But stop-motion animation, as it's called, was state of the art from the silent film era until the early 1990s. If a filmmaker wanted to show us a giant monster, he could put a man inside a monster suit, like Godzilla. Or he could wrangle a real critter and photographically enlarge it, like the spider in "Tarantula." Or, if he was serious about thrilling audiences, he could hire Ray Harryhausen ... or hope to find someone just as good.

Forget it. No one was just as good.

From the cyclops and fire-breathing dragon in "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad" to the pterosaur that scooped up Raquel Welch in "One Million Years B.C.," Harryhausen's movies seamlessly blended the real and the unreal. They transported viewers to far-off lands of imagination.

And they were, above all, his movies. He didn't write them, direct them or act in them. His special effects were the stars. In his last movie, 1981's "Clash of the Titans," Sir Laurence Olivier played Zeus. But nobody remembers it as an Olivier movie. It was a Harryhausen movie.

In 1993, computer-generated imagery gave us ultra-realistic dinosaurs in "Jurassic Park," and suddenly Harryhausen-style effects seemed old-fashioned. It didn't matter. By then, Harryhausen had left his mark on a generation of new moviemakers.

"Without Harryhausen's effects work over the last five decades," director Steven Spielberg said in 2003, "there never would have been a 'Star Wars' or a 'Jurassic Park.' "

Ray Harryhausen died Tuesday, May 7. He was 92. He's gone but his creations will live on, as long as people love the magic of the movies.

REPRINTED FROM THE NORTHWEST FLORIDA DAILY NEWS

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