Ray Harryhausen, Pioneer of the Imagination and a Good Man

A film giant has passed. Special effects wizard Ray Harryhausen, dead at 92. “Jason&the Argonuats” and many others.nyti.ms/10mmLk1

— Philip Turner (@philipsturner) May 7, 2013

In my family, the passing this week of Ray Harryhausen evoked real sadness, along with fond memories and appreciation for this film pioneer who was—as we learned when my son Ewan, now a teenager, was just a toddler—also an extremely kind and gentle man. When Ewan was growing up he steadily worked his way through a movie diet that included many of the science fiction and adventure classics—”King Kong,” “The Blob,” “Creature from the Black Lagoon,” “Them,” “The Day the Earth Stood Still,” and once he discovered them, all the films that Harryhausen worked his magic on: “Mysterious Island,” “20,000,000 Miles to Earth,” “The Beast at 20,000 Fathoms,” “Jason and the Argonauts,” the three Sinbad features, “The Valley of Gwangi,” and from the early years of Harryhausen’s career, his Mother Goose fairy tales, which were reissued beginning in 2002. What’s more, TCM, in addition to showing the movies to which Harryhausen had contributed, aired and re-aired a fine documentary about his career, “Master of Fantasy.” From that program we learned about his friendship with Ray Bradbury, going back to their days as teenage pals in Los Angeles. I’m sure it was a blow to Ray Harryhausen when his lifelong friend died last June.

Safe to say, that much as our son came to love these movies, so did my wife and I, capturing as they did great imagination and vivid storytelling. Ewan even adapted his own form of stop-motion animation, Harryhausen’s signature technique, to make some short videos of his own. In 2004, when Ewan was just 8, Harryhausen came to Lincoln Center’s Walter Reade Theater for a special screening of some of his films. I had to be in the Bay Area for a publishing sales conference, but Kyle and Ewan–who had already exchanged a letter with Ray—got tickets and went to the cinema for this special occasion. After the films were shown, they met Ray, and as the pictures below show, he was warm, charming, and very patient while photos were taken of him with Ewan. He autographed our copy of his book,  Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life, and the two of them left, feeling they had just met a really fine and nice man. I”m sure that one of the reasons Ewan has a creative spirit and a questing imagination is thanks to his early enchantment with the work of Harryhausen. Below is a video a fan compiled with many of the creatures and monsters Ray crafted, from “Mighty Joe Young” to the rattling skeletons of “Jason and the Argonauts” and pictures from the day Kyle and Ewan met him, along with other images of Harryhausen’s work.