I’ve just re-watched it several times. Possible.
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.
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.
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.
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.