I dimly recall seeing a program that talked about the animation in Dragonslayer. I seem to remember that the animation was vastly expensive and tremendously complex for some reason, because of a particular technique they used. Can anyone advise?
Do you mean go-motion, as described there?
Ah yes. That must be it. I remember the discussion about the blurring being very important to the animation. Thanks!
I hadn’t heard that it was temendously expensive. It was an early use of computer processing to create “blur” in the animation.
You see, “dimensional animation” of real posable models (the kind Willis O’Brien did for King Kong, and Ray Harryhausen, and Jim Danforth, and George Pal, and lotsa other folks) suffers from a problem called “strobing”. When you photograph a real bird flapping its wings, you don’t get a perfect image of a still wing. For a shutter speed that’s reasonable you get a blur. so a still from the animated model and one from a real-life creature won’t be identical. Even at 24 frames a second, your eye catches that still picture and realizes that it doesn’t look right. It looks like what would be captured by a strobe photo, or what you see under a strobe light – hence the name.
Harryhausenm knew about this, and didn’t let it bother him. Jim Danforth used to try to have things like wings in motion, worked by strings, so that they’d blur. When they did the animated scenes of bids on bicycles flying across the moon in E.T. 9some of the scvenes used miniature models), they had the bicycle wheels attached to little motors so they’d blur (a process they called “Go Motion”.)
For Dragonslayer, they used computers to blur the rapidly-moving wings and other extremities. They still used models for animation – computers in 1981 still hadfn’t progressed far enough for animation itself (look at The Last Starfighter from three years later), but it was up to the task of blurring.
Vermithrax looked pretty good, as even Harryhausen is supposed to have admitted (Quote: “Nice Moves”). Maybe it was pricey, but I can’t believe “tremendously expensive.”
As I said, it is dimly remembered, and I’m not a movie effects buff, but man, I could swear the line was something about Dragonslayer involving the most expensive animation effects ever, at the time. Then again, who knows? I don’t even remember which channel aired the special…
I’m pretty sure that’s from one of the Marion Zimmer Bradley *Sword & Sorceress * anthologies.
Zeus, I miss those.
In the same volume (which had a sacrificial maiden theme), a young woman about to be sacrificed to an ogre finds herself with two potential rescuers: a young man who’s being trying to persuade her to give it up, and a middle-aged woman. The boy, himself a virgin, discovers that (a) ogres really do prefer virgins, because (b)they want to have sex with the victims much more than they want to eat them, and © the ogre in question is actually an ogress, who is (d) likely to make him walk funny for days. The middle-aged woman turns out to be an army recruiter, and in exchange for rescuing the damsel requires her to sign up for the service and sign over her bounty as well as sharing her bed for the duration.
Hm. I may have been mistaken, but I recall both stories. I must have read that S&S as well. Huh.
The condor isn’t the largest flying animal now, and there were plenty of bigger birds in the past. Condors can weigh as much as 10kg, but Great Albatrosses can weigh up to 11kg. Still, the Great Bustard beats even that, with males weighing more than 20kg.
And let’s not forget the extinct Argentavis magnificens, which beats them by a long shot at up to 100 kg (that kg, not lbs) and with a wingspan of 25 feet.
My point is that the movie was logical from within the framework of a work about dragons, sorcery and that ubiquitous sorta pseudo-european medieval setting. Dragons eat virgins, or rather… humans believe they do. You might as well ask why pandas only eat bamboo… it is what it is. BTW In the movie Valerian does have sex with the hero in order to avoid any future lotteries and very soon after she was ‘outed’ as a boy. It’s also established that the families that lose daughters are exempt from taxation for five years as compensation. One may be cynical and suggest that the value of their daughter’s virginity (and life to some extent) was worth the off chance that they might be picked, which in any case would be compensated for. It’s not as if we don’t have untold thousands of examples of female oppression in patriarchal societies in order to shackle female sexuality.
One of the things I love about the SDMB is the fact that you can read a thread with twenty nine replies in less than twelve hours about a minor plot point in a twenty six year old movie.
It is worth every nickle!
Loved that book, and it’s wonderful and slightly haunting explanation for why dragons collect gold. Linky-link
Good to know. Still, 100kg is not nearly enough body mass for a creature big enough to threaten whole communities of humans.
If you willing to believe in dragons, then you will also buy that only married women have sex. Only unmarried women are in the lottery.
Well, the chick shoulda given it up!
Let that be a lesson to all you virgins out there. (Yeah, right, on this board! 
)
Ah, now there’s a true connoisseur of the classics … “I’d show you my dragon-slaying scars to prove it, but they’re placed where I can’t exhibit them in public.” 
Since we’re talking about Dragonslayer, I thought I’d mention that Caitlin Clarke, who played Valerian, would have been 55 tomorrow (May 3). Unfortunately she died a few years ago of ovarian cancer. Damn shame.
Speaking of Dragons, this thread brought back a memory of a book I want to pick up at the used book store on the weekend ,but the title escapes me at the moment along with the author.
An M113 APC gets transported from the Vietnam war, to a fantasy land to shoot down a dragon, ring any bells ?
Declan
The Doomfarers of Coramonde by Brian Daley; it has a sequel, The Starfarers of Coramonde. Quite good.
Linky-link to one of the songs we used to sing in my SCA-style group.
If the plural of “forum” is “fora,” and the plural of “auditorium” is “auditoria,” what is the plural of “scum”? 