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We're having a look at 1981's Clash of the Titans, the last great Harryhausen film.

Next month: A trip back to Lovecraft Country, starting with The Aquarium by Carl Jacobi.

Comments

Chris80

“Release the Kraken” - You guys just made my day. Clash was and still is one of my absolute favourite movies and I have really fond childhood memories of watching it. Thanks for bringing them back.

Anonymous

I suppose that, in the Internet era, we do owe the Release the Kraken! meme to this movie, though I'll bet a lot of kids using it online today don't know the origin of it.

Crom Thews

Real Housewives of Olympus? Sign me up.

Anonymous

Oh! If you're revisiting Lovecraftiana, you could cover Colin Wilson's "The Return of the Lloigor!"

Tomas Rawlings

This was also a film I LOVED as a kid. Such a joy to hear you guys cover it. More Ray Harryhausen movies please! (I've got the boxed set of them and am showing to my kids to bring them into the fold...)

Tomas Rawlings

I think this is an audio version of the next story - https://theweirdtalespodcast.podbean.com/e/the-aquarium-by-carl-jacobi/

Jason Thompson

Re: CGI vs stop-motion, I agree with you that stop-motion looks more immersive than bad CGI, but I also grew up watching these movies so it could be my generational bias. IMHO what really looks the best is Henson-style animatronics, like in the greatest animatronic movie ever, Little Shop of Horrors, where they filmed that giant plant puppet and sped up the film when the operators and the mechanism couldn’t move it fast enough to look convincing. I never even realized how they’d done it till 20 years later; it just looks great.

Anonymous

Just FYI (because everyone gets this wrong) Immaculate Conception is different than Virgin Birth. Immaculate Conception refers specifically to the idea of Mary being already forgiven for her sins (including Original Sin) at the moment of her conception (she was still conceived in the traditional human manner by mortal parents). Although the term is often used to refer to a Virgin Birth (whether Christ's or others) that usage is erroneous. Sorry to be "that guy", but you guys always seem to appreciate learning new things so I thought I'd mention it. :)

Anonymous

The synchronicity is incredible - I had already decided to rewatch this for the first time in gods know how long, prompted by the kraken-talk. What really struck me about it was how it *sounded* contemporary for the time, but beyond even the Harryhausen stop-motion, the whole look of the film, whether that's down to the film stock, the lighting, or whatever else it might be, looked like a film 10-15 years older than it was. It didn't look like your Raiders, your Superman, your Dark Crystal, your Empire, etc. I've seen the medusa scene a hundred times just by itself, and it's always been one of my favorite sequences in film, but it struck me last night, how amazing it is that it still almost totally holds up. The atmosphere, the light, the set design, the sound design, the suspense, it's an actual masterpiece that justifies the rest of the movie by itself. It's still genuinely scary! Oh man did I want a medusa toy. I had completely forgotten how much naked there was in this. All this time I had been thinking Airplane! was my first glimpse of cinematic bosom, but I guess I was wrong!

Anonymous

The world really has changed. Perseus is the real villain, Medusa has the support of #metoo and is killed in a "home invasion", and Zeus is a Trump stand-in.

Anonymous

I too had the same issue with Judi Bowker as Andromeda. Seeing this movie as an adult was a much different experience.

Steve

It's a bit weird that the owl is called Bubo, which is Latin for owl, and not Glaux which is Greek.

Anonymous

Harryhausen is almost solely responsible for my love of monsters and my eventual job as an illustrator/artist working with dark and fantastic subjects. I think something that keeps the magic of stop motion alive (see also Nightmare Before Christmas, Kubo and the two strings etc) is that you can see and understand the artistry of the models. In CGI the painstaking attention to detail is rendered invisible by the precision and computer generated textures. For model making, particularly Harryhausen‘s work, you can see signs of the mark making and can (mostly unconsciously) imagine what tools and movements may have made the form of the model. I feel it is this same quality which makes hand drawn animation feel so enchanting.

Anonymous

Yeah, Audrey II actually feels like a real creature in a lot of their scenes. Even the SFX extravaganza of the original ending. That's probably tje main reason they manage to be so intimidating in such a wacky plot.

Anonymous

Oh, on the subject of how awful Medusa's tale is, I would like to direct your attention to this beautiful sculpture by Luciano Garbati, "Medusa With The Head Of Perseus:" https://images.app.goo.gl/FCgyn4ptgLW2r6y97

Anonymous

You beat me to this, Blake. I'm a stickler for this clarification because the association of being immaculate and virginity has perpetuated centuries of bias against sexually active women. The miracle of the Virgin Birth isn't that Mary never had lawful sex with the man she married, it was that a child was conceived without sexual intercourse, and the notion that sex depurifies people is one that's used to demonize women to this day. Now, I don't think said demonization began with this biblical misconception; it more likely comes from men wanting to protect their legacies, and also good old fashion jealousy. But as I said, the misconception acts as an excuse to perpetuate this bias. Now that I'm done being Mr. Negative, GREAT EPISODE!

Anonymous

I'm sure I'm not the first one to imagine what Harryhausen might have done with a Lovecraft story. A stop-motion Cthulhu is probably the first thing that comes to mind. Perhaps they could have combined Call of Cthulhu with Dagon: a group of characters run aground on R'lyeh after it rises from the depths, and have to deal with all sorts of stop-motion Lovecraftian monsters. Then the cultists who have read the signs show up for the unveiling of the big guy at the end. I think Dark Adventure Radio Theatre did something similar with "Dagon: War of the Worlds," though I haven't head it yet. Anyway, these are the things I think about when I should be working.

Anonymous

Honestly, "Cthulhu" as-written already has a scene like that, and Cthulhu *was* stop motion in it in the HPLHS film adaptation.

Anonymous

Such a fun movie for a third-grade nerd to see when it first came out, and for a middle-aged nerd to stream now with a wife who's never watched it before. "Harry Hamlin was in this?" "Is that . . . Laurence Olivier?" "OH MY GOD IS THAT MAGGIE SMITH?"

Darth Pseudonym

Sorry to be that guy, but Chris? Cerebus (ser-eh-bus) is a controversial long-running comic about an aardvark. The three-headed dog of Hades is Cerberus (sir-burr-us) in Latin or Kerberos (care-bear-ose) in Greek.

Anonymous

This movie is good, but do you know what is the best, most accurate movie based on Greco-Roman-Starwarso mythology? Hercules starring Lou Ferrigno. You can’t beat seeing the true story of how Ursa Major was formed by Herc throwing a bear into space.

Darth Pseudonym

Do not trust Ovid. Ovid had some kind of massive problem with the Greek gods and wrote a bunch of hate-fic plays that are simply not supported by any prior works (as far as we can tell). He's the ancient Greek equivalent of somebody publishing a bunch of stories about how Sauron was just a victim and <i>it's the elves who were bad, actually</i>. Most of the worst examples of the Greek gods being cruel come right out of Ovid, while in most of the rest of the stories, they're presented as largely benevolent to humanity, or at worst, distant and uninvolved representations of nature's unimaginable power. In the older stories like Hesiod's Theogeny, all the Gorgons, Medusa included, were the offspring of primordial sea-deities Ceto and Phorcys (along with a whole bunch of other monsters).

Darth Pseudonym

Probably because they were aiming for something that sounded cute and a little bit like "Threepio" or "Artoo", and Glaux sounds like a brand of industrial lubricant.

Jeremy Impson

My favorite horror movie review yt channel did a great overview of Harryhuesen's work. https://youtu.be/VJZDLP_spIg

Jeremy Impson

Chris briefly mentioned that the Kraken of myth is a squid. I'm surprised there was no discussion of how Dagon-esque (As I imagine it) the film's Kraken was. Although I suppose it was inspired by the Creature from the Black Lagoon.

Chris80

I raise you “Hercules in the Haunted World” aka “Hercules vs. Vampires”, which has Hercules fight against, you guessed it, vampires led by Christopher Lee. It also shows the true story of Theseus who didn’t fight the Minotaur but fell in love with, anD helped Hades favourite daughter - Persephone (something fishy here) - escape the Underworld. Now that is Greek myths at its finest. But joking aside, it’s a wonderful campy movie that’s a lot fun to watch as long as you don’t think too hard about the plot.

Anonymous

Re suspending disbelief for old special effects. Sometimes clunkiness makes it easier to accept. When I rewatched Babylon 5 I found the super clunky 90s CGI less jarring than, say, the effects from the Star Wars special editions because the special edition effects kind of fell into the uncanny valley whereas my brain could accept as something like a theatre prop- obviously not realistic but a stylised representation of an imagined reality.

Anonymous

So, they were impersonal, before Ovid? Chaotic Neutral (or Chaotic Annoying)?

Anonymous

Thanks for covering this! I loved this movie as kid, and still have a comic adaptation with great art by the late Dan Spiegle. I re-watched the movie a few years ago for the first time in ages , and as some others have mentioned, was shocked by the amount of boobage it contained. Either that didn't register with my young mind or i had only scene an edited for TV version! Just wanted to add that i joined this tier strictly for the Manimal coverage and getting Clash of the Titans and Alien coverage is an awesome bonus! I am really getting my moneys worth! Keep up the great work.

Anonymous

Fun fact: Hephaetus is played by Pat Roach, the only actor other than Harrison Ford to appear in the original three Indiana Jones films. He's also General Kael in Willow.

Anonymous

“Put her in the slut box! No sluts in the name of Zeus!” - Dan Harmon https://www.instagram.com/p/CDHhyCSjsuE/?igshid=5e8b3plu5w52