# Best special effects in classic movies? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [December 4, 2019, 4:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-special-effects-in-classic-movies/844365 "2019-12-04T16:52:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 6\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [December 6, 2019, 2:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-special-effects-in-classic-movies/844365/61 "2019-12-06T14:38:15Z")
> [@Dropo](#): > > Looks like rear projection to me. At the 40 second mark, Ms. Kidder is standing in front of an RP screen on set. The footage being projected is of the entire BG of the set as well as Mr. Reeve as he takes off. Subsequently, they pan off the RP screen with Ms. Kidder as she walks screen left. The foliage she walks behind at the 53 second mark is critically placed because it is hiding the edge of the RP screen. When she gets to the other side of it, the BG is part of the set. I’ve just re-watched it several times. Possible. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [December 6, 2019, 2:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-special-effects-in-classic-movies/844365/62 "2019-12-06T14:44:42Z")
I’m still impressed by the effects in the original **The Day the Earth Stood Still**. They still hold up remarkably well. Many are very simple effects – make things glow so bright that you can easily hide the substitution of “melted” guns for the original ones – but are still sophisticated-looking all these years later precisely because they were so simple. The “invisible” grooves of the ramp of Klaatu’s ship were apparently done by filming in reverse, so that there were no visible seams before the scene started. My favorite is Gort’s “laser visor”. That visor slowly being raised, and the view of the light inside _still_ looks good, even after all these years. Gort's suit was supposed made of thick leather painted to look like metal (I'm told they did the same for the Tin Man's suit in \*The Wizard of Oz\*), and they used different suits from scenes showing Gort's front and his back, so the seams wouldn't show. One nifty thing was that the leather suit let his knees flex without obvious hinges, as if the metal itself were bending, which is pretty neat in 1951. I still think that the 1951 Gort still looks infinitely more believable than the CGI model one in the 2008 remake. [![](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/LiuP8h1JbkE/hqdefault.jpg "The Day The Earth Stood Still |2008| All Alien Destruction Scenes [Edited]") ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiuP8h1JbkE) ---
**Author:** ![Patch](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/a183cd/32.png) [@Patch](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Patch)\ **Post date:** [December 7, 2019, 7:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-special-effects-in-classic-movies/844365/63 "2019-12-07T07:10:15Z")
> [@Jasmine](#): > > If you’ve ever watched the plethora of 1950’s black & white sci-fi films, then you know how bad bad can get when it comes to not-so-special effects. A remarkable exception to this, however, is the 1953 version of, “The War of the Worlds”, starring Gene Barry and Ann Robinson. Not only is it in color, but it has, what was for that time anyway, rocking special effects. It just totally stood out from its 1950’s peers in terms of quality. I really wish they’d go back and clean that movie up. For the first battle when the ships come out of the crater, the ‘shots’ bouncing off the clear shields look terrible, and you can clearly see the wires holding the ships up. The obvious stock footage is also horribly cut in. It needs an updated special edition. It’s a cheesy premise, but I really liked the special effects in _The Monolith Monsters_. Water is really hard to model in miniature, and you see a lot of bad model shots in movies. They must have built a huge set when they filmed their dam break, and it looks better than stuff even out of the 80s. ---
**Author:** ![Cayuga](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/3e96dc/32.png) [@Cayuga](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Cayuga)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2019, 7:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-special-effects-in-classic-movies/844365/64 "2019-12-09T19:42:35Z")
> [@CalMeacham](#): > > I disagree strongly. Reeve does NOT look like a rear projection. Ho _goes over the edge of the balcony_, which is NOT a projection, because the camera swivels with Kidder as she turns and goes to the door. If they’d only shown Reeve after he’d cleared the balcony wall, I could agree that it’s a rear projection. But the fact that he crosses that shows that he and the wall are in the same camera shot . And the fact that the camera subsequently moves and the wall disappears from sight shows that the wall is not itself part of a rear-projection shot. > > Reeve clearly didn’t have time to divest himself of a harness. It had to be under his Clark Kent jacket, which is believable, since I’ve seen actors on stage in flying harnesses that were concealable under clothes. > > The Clark Kent outfit need not have been the full suit it appears to be. They could prepare a shirt/vest/tie front that got slapped onto him really quick (like an “anti-breakaway” outfit), then put the suit jacket on him. It’d be a real quick change, but it could be done. > The alternative is that they “blended” two separate shoots at the moment that Lois walks behind a plant after turning away from Superman (at 6-7 on that Youtube video). It doesn’t completely hide her, but it would make any sudden “jump” from editing two scenes together a lot less obvious. And it would explain why she had to walk behind that plant, which is otherwise not necessary. I agree with you … in that You Tube clip, Reeve does NOT look like a rear projection. But I guarantee you that if you were sitting next to me on the couch all those years ago, and you saw Reeve and the buildings across the street all of a sudden go grainy and desaturated while Kidder, the low wall, and all the planters remained unchanged in appearance, you’d have said, “Holy crap! He was a rear projection!” I’m not going to argue with you, dude. You can believe whatever you choose to believe. I know what I saw. ---
**Author:** ![CalMeacham](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/calmeacham/32/35_2.png) [@CalMeacham](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CalMeacham)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2019, 8:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-special-effects-in-classic-movies/844365/65 "2019-12-09T20:05:05Z")
> [@Cayuga](#): > > I agree with you … in that You Tube clip, Reeve does NOT look like a rear projection. But I guarantee you that if you were sitting next to me on the couch all those years ago, and you saw Reeve and the buildings across the street all of a sudden go grainy and desaturated while Kidder, the low wall, and all the planters remained unchanged in appearance, you’d have said, “Holy crap! He was a rear projection!” > > I’m not going to argue with you, dude. You can believe whatever you choose to believe. I know what I saw. That does make sense. Versions shown on TV, I’ve noticed, must be later generation duplicates, because the flaws start to show in the effects work. It particularly bothered me that the first couple of _Star Wars_ films shown on the cable channels used to have clearly-defined rectangular regions around the starships, which had to be some artifact from the matte work. Since then they’ve switched to better copies, or they were fixed up, because I don’t se it anymore. I never saw that effect when I saw the films in the cinema, or on home video. Nowadays they almost certainly do the effects shot with digital effects, so it’s not an issue. But the TV version used to bring out the worst in the effects. I can easily believe that the shown-on-TVB version of _Superman_ did this, too. And, in case you missed it, I acknowledged that it probably was rear projection above in the thread at post #61. ---
**Author:** ![dropzone](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/dropzone/32/7515_2.png) [@dropzone](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dropzone)\ **Post date:** [December 9, 2019, 8:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-special-effects-in-classic-movies/844365/66 "2019-12-09T20:38:24Z")
> [@Senegoid](#): > > Just for historical completeness, in case anyone here hasn’t seen it yet, we have [Dream of a Rarebit Fiend](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=awOFDc5vyVo), 1906. Utterly primitive (by any imaginable modern-ish standard) film full of early “trick photography” (as I suppose it was then called). 7 minutes long. Is that the first spit take in cinematic history? My favourite Harryhausen is in Mighty Joe Young, where he filmed at a frame rate closer to that of the live action scenes. Elsewhere he tends to be jerky. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/best-special-effects-in-classic-movies/844365.md?page=3)