Movie Mania: Harryhausen Monsters!

 

It's the second post of the last full week of the month, and I decided it was time for something new that goes with some other stuff I've had for a very long time. It's time for Harryhausen collectibles, and I have a selection of what we had to work with back in the 2000s. As it happens, they're all from one of Ray's most famous films, The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad. Let's start with the one that's almost generic, the griffin!

For the backstory, this and the other items here ate part of a set of Harryhausen collectibles released by X Plus in 2001. The full set would have included Ymir from 20 Million Miles To Earth, the cyclops and dragon from The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad, Talos from Jason And The Argonauts, and the Minoton from Sinbad And The Eye Of The Tiger. Around 2007, I acquired two of them for a chunk of a gift certificate that I think was about $50. Since then, X Plus seems to have remained the most prolific suppliers of Harryhausen models and collectibles, and the prices of their new and old offerings have gone up accordingly. Here's a couple more pics of the griffin.

Now, if you haven't seen the movie, you might be wondering what the Hell a griffin is doing in a movie about an Arabian sailor. That is, indeed, getting right to a core problem with the movie. This was perhaps the most egregious example of a movie where they clearly started with what Harryhausen could animate and built the story around it, though they at least did a far better job than in The Mysterious Island. In fairness, a good deal of the source mythology and iconography does in fact come from the Arab cultures, as while as the neighboring regions of Persia and Egypt. From there, it found its way into Greek and later European lore, though more as a figure of heraldry than of legend or belief. That really sums up the continuing role of the griffin in modern fantasy, where it usually is second banana to something else. I always wanted to do my own treatment, undoubtedly inspired by the classic Victoria tale "The Griffin and the Minor Canon", but always got bogged down more quickly than usual. Golden Voyage at least gave the creature a fair shake, summoning it as the implied embodiment of good in a losing fight with an evil sorcerer. That brings us to the other side of the fight, the very bestial centaur.

This is the creature that feels most like a Harryhausen monster, surely modeled on the cyclops of 7th Voyage. He looks grisly, and swings a mean club. The toy is a good likeness, complete with the rubbery look of Harryhausen's models. I will admit that at one point, I considered selling off the pair, and finally decided to keep the centaur and trade in the griffin, only to have the latter declined by the store I took it to. In hindsight, it's just as well, as both are definitely worth a lot more than I could ever have gotten for them when I was ready to sell. Unfortunately, that worked directly against me when I went looking for my new acquisition, the dancing/ fighting Kali statue. Here she is, in full glory with the Truckstop Queen. Who, as I've regularly pointed out, is huge herself.

Now this character has my longest backstory, as I remember seeing the sequence in 8th grade with no idea what it was from. I also swear, it was supposed to be to teach us about Hinduism, which I'll get back to. It was probably about a decade before I finally saw the movie, but I'm sure I thought about it in the meantime. I believe in junior high or high school, I had already thought of my own version, just featured in the adventures of Chelsea the (bad) social worker, of the Shiva/ Kali statue as a bureaucrat wielding DENIED stamps instead of swords. As for the movie itself, the scene is easily Harryhausen's best straight-up monster fight. The moments that fascinate me the most are the buildup, which starts with the dance as the sorcerer played by Tom Baker brings the idol to life. To me, the truly freaky part is when the sorcerer throws a scimitar to the statue, after a hilariously ill-advised gesture of fair play from Sinbad, and five identical swords seem to sprout from each hand. It's utterly uncanny, and there's absolutely no internal explanation for it. My fan theory is definitely that the statue has life and power independent of the sorcerer, perhaps from sources he hasn't counted on. At any rate, here's more pics, and one thing that will be self-evident is that this thing does not want to stand up.

And here's a couple closeups of that tag, which I don't think is even a major factor in the balancing issues. The other two must have come with their own, but even I don't remember them.

And here's one more pic I took with a phone before the pics for this post, I swear of this thing standing completely on its own. Clearly, it can stand up; it just didn't want to in front of my good camera.

This leaves me with one more thing: Was this movie disrespectful or even sacrilegious toward Hinduism? It was definitely a product of a different time and very different attitudes, already in evidence in the treatment of the Arab main characters. If there's a defense for the film, it's that the story already puts any fault on the villain. He invades a native people's place of worship, brings their sacred object to life to trick and frighten them into tolerating his presence, and then tries to use it as a murder weapon. It all goes along with a further thought of mine, that magic is fundamentally different from religion. Religious worship, even at its most self-serving, is about convincing your God or gods to do what you want. Magic treats the supernatural realm as subject to impersonal, even mechanical cause and effect, and it all presupposes that whatever spirits or forces you draw upon have to obey you. It's the "magical" view that drives the villain's actions, and a big part of what makes the character one of the most memorable and disturbing in the Harryhausen canon. And with that, I'm calling it quits for another day. That's all for now, more to come!