Old movie special effects that still hold up well

Cafe Society
1

The parting of the Red Sea in 1955’s The Ten Commandments is still pretty damn impressive.

The attack on the Death Star in Return of the Jedi is still the best looking space battle of all time. Amazing that they could transform the blocky movements of the spacecraft into pure fluidity in just six years.

Jeff Goldblum’s makeup in The Fly remake is just as yucky and oozing as it was when it was first released.

And I don’t care what you say, Daddy Granthum’s zombie corpse in the first chapter of Creepshow is still the gnarliest looking zombie I’ve ever seen. He still had a bit of sinew attached to his jaws when he talked. Awesome.

Demerits are awarded to:

The plane crashing into the mountain in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Just pathetic.

Luke running through the Rancor’s legs in Return of the Jedi. Pathetic squared.

2

The tornado approaching the Gale farm in “The Wizard of the Oz” is impressive. Apparently it was a swath of burlap attached to a motor and filmed in the studio. Well, everything was filmed in the studio then. Next time you watch the movie, have a look; it’s still damned impressive.

3

The space vehicles in “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) look more real than the computer generated ones of today. Admittedly they didn’t fly around like fighter jets, but moved the way real spacecraft would, adding even more realism.

It’s all in the eye of the beholder, I guess. To me, the parting of the Red Sea looks like an impressive 1950’s special effect. It doesn’t look like I’m looking at the real thing. Whatever your theology takes that to be.

4

The parting of the Red Sea looked like jelly in slo-mo closeup to me. Some stagehands were jiggling the table, weren’t they?

5

No. No. It’s composited footage of waterfalls. Totally optical.

6

The underground caverns of the Krell in Forbidden Planet are still awe inspiring to me.

7

The matte paintings in Gone With The Wind are pretty good.

I also was amazed at the effects work in Darby O’Gill and the Little People, though it’s been a decade since I saw it last and perhaps now I’d be more critical.

8

Return of the Jedi is an “old movie”? Pardon me while I go have a good cry. :frowning:

9

The GWTW matte paintings are so good most people are surprised to find out how many there are. And “Darby O’Gill” was years ahead of Peter Jackson in putting big people and little people in the same frame convincingly, sometimes without optical work, just by positioning the actors at deceptive distances from the camera.

10

Furthermore, the cliff that the Nazis in the car are bumped off of in Raiders of the Lost Ark was a matte painting. Ditto the warehouse of crates at the end. I remember seeing a TV special on it and they said there were only five painters in the world who could create mattes with that kind of realism.

11

The CG sequence that comprises the Genesis Project proposal in Star Trek II was one of the first of its kind and despite being 25 years old, still looks pretty cool.

12

The original “War of the Worlds” has some excellent special effects. There are a few shots where you can see the wires holding up the models, but otherwise most of the effects hold up well even today.

I second this. It’s absolutely flawless, right down to the shape of the debris cloud and the way the funnel cloud twists and turns. Somebody must’ve studied stock footage of tornadoes very carefully before designing the effect.

13

I opened the thread to say that.

And this too. And the sounds too ( theramin generated I think ) are very good. Intimidating.

14

Yeah, but the Hedison-Fly screaming “HELLPPPP MEEEEEE!” is its equal, IMHO. No matter how cheesy it looked, the creep-out meter pegged just as high as in any of the sequels.

15

oh HELL yes, blondebear. MAJOR creep factor.

and that dates from the first time i ever saw the original ‘fly,’ long ago as a pre-teen (that, and the sequence when delambre sends poor dandelo into eternity… SERIOUS goosebumps even now!).

IIRC, either in current hedison interviews on the newly-issued vttbots dvds (thank you irwin allen estate and/or fox studio for allowing this to FINALLY happen for all us long-suffering voyage fans!!!) or elsewhere, he’s *always * asked about ‘the fly.’

he’s mentioned in other interviews about how much he hates how that final version ended up looking - and sounding - on screen (he didn’t know they shot him in ECU (extreme close-up) or that they intended to monkey with his voice in post-production), but even he’s admitted its effective.

well, yeah…

we’re talking about a major classic screen icon here!! say ‘help me!’ in that high, squeaky voice to a random group of people and i guarantee you a good chunk of them will know what that means and probably the origin!

there’s a fine line between looking silly and being scared silly - and hedison, bless him, makes it work despite the studio’s tinkering (AFAIC, they shoulda left his damn voice alone!!). he’s a little too pretty for my taste (think ‘too much brad pitt’), but i’ve always thought he was a majorly-underrated actor and deserving of more respect.

frankly, because the movie **still ** freaks me out - even though i have a perfectly lovely videotape of it - i haven’t watched it in years. i minored in film in college - have a degree in it - but i can’t watch that movie. :smiley:

the jeff goldblum version? piffle. nice - but bring it on. hmm. that’s probably a sacrilege of some kind…

:eek:

16

Little Lord Fauntleroy kisses his mother — and Mary Pickford plays both roles. (See at 4:30.)

17

My favorites have mostly been said already, but I’
ll re-iterate, and add:

– Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still, especially the way his laser-beam visor worked. The slow opening and closing of that visor, and the glimpsed throbbing light behind it that spewed out some sort of beam (this was a decade before the public debut of the laser) looks awesome and dignified and impressive, and would not need to be re-done today to look just as good.

– The flying saucer in TDTESS and the way the effects were all handled.
–The “flying over Altair 4” shots in Forbidden Planet look as good today as they did then. This is one of the few movies I can think of from back then that actually showed the planet with clouds over it as they really are. Look at Universal pictures from the 30s and 490s and the globe is cloud-free.

– The Krel Laboratory and the Krell Underground Power Complex in FP look pretty damned impressive, aside from a few outlandishly cartoony shots.

– Pretty much all the work in 2001. I don’t put down CGI work as others here have done, but the static shots (some of those ships in orbit are too clearly paintings) actually mimics space movement very well. A lot of film from the Apollo Days dooes look like unmoving paintings. And, as noted, 2001 is practically the only film in which spaceships really do move as they’re supposed to in space (there are a few glimpses elsewhere, but only 2001 does it for extended periods)
– A special thumbs-up to some of the “Star Gate Tri[p” shots from 2001. Those shots of nebulae and exploding galaxies were the first things filmed. Instead of using CGI (unavailable then), they used interacting chemicals “in a field the size of a paperback book” (according to Jerome Agel’s book “The Making of Kubrick’s 2001”)It still looks great, and infinitely better than the poor imitation of it used for the opening credits of Superman over a decade later.

–A lot of matte work from the early days is so good you can’t pick it out, which is the mark of a good effect. Notre Dame was a mix of live action sets and matte work in the silent Hunchback of Notre Dame. An awful lots of the work in King Kong is multilayered model work, glass painting, and matte work – and that includes a lot of shots that don’t include any animated creatures. The atmosphere of Skull Island was created by heavily composited shots of , for instance, Jack Driscoll walking through a jungle that’s part studio set, part glass painting, and part composited movibng waterfall that was shot in the mountains of California. That people didn’t pick up on this is testament to the skill used in putting this together.
– I think a lot of the effects work in the 1924 Thief of Baghdad still stands up pretty well. Some is very obvious and pretty bad by the standards of 50 years ago, but some of it was very well done.
– I’m not as impressed by the Parting of the Red Sea as I used to be. Even when I first saw it, the ragged edges of the blue screen/green screen work was jarring, and you could see it in the edges. It’s an impressive work (there are many layers of compositibng in that scene), but despite all the secrecy at the time, it was pretty clear to an effects-happy kid how they did it.

18

Under “bad,” I’ll go with the monsters in Clash of the Titans.

In a post-Star Wars world, I don’t see how Ray Harryhausen got any work ever again, but sure enough, he did. And I don’t think he really improved in the decades between Mighty Joe Young or Jason and the Argonauts and Clash. Same herky-jerky, claymation-looking beasties. Weak.

19

Is it just me or does Walloon’s link not work? Tried in Firefox and IE and got blankness.

CalMeacham has already referred to some aspects of The Day The Earth Stood Still. I’d also like to mention the way the spaceship opens and closes in a way that apparently leaves no seam, join or trace of an opening. It was very nicely done, and all the better for being under-played in the movie.

I think a lot of Ray Harryhausen’s work stands up to modern scrutiny. Of course, CGI figures can move in a compeltely different way that many would consider more ‘realistic’. But in a fantasy movie, ‘realistic’ isn’t necessarily the only benchmark. I particularly admire the sequences where Ray deliberately imposed tough challenges on himself, and delivered breathtaking artistry. Good examples, to my mind, would be ‘Kali’ from The Golden Voyage Of Sinbad (six arms all moving independently) and the ‘Medusa’ from Clash Of The Titans (seven snakes for hair, again all moving independently).

The George Pal version of Tom Thumb, starring Russ Tamblyn, was made back in 1958, but pretty much all of the effects work (credited to Tom Howard) stands up to scrutiny. In fact, it’s not easy to see how the film could have turned out any better than it did even with today’s arsenal of digital effects.

Citizen Kane isn’t usually thought of as an “effects” movie, but in fact it employs just about every trick in the book. In one scene, the camera is looking up at the Thatcher Memorial statue, then pans down from the statue and its plinth to the desk where the dialogue takes places. There was no statue. The shot originally began with the plaque on the front of the plinth. Welles later decided he wanted the shot as we now know it, so the effects team built a maquette of the ‘statue’ and created the almost perfectly seamless shot using the optical printer to marry the ‘pans down from statue’ shot to the material already in the can. If you didn’t know about this, you would never notice it.

Another mention for 2001. Not only do the space ships, for the most part, move as they would in ‘reality’, but it was one of the first movies I can recall which respected the fact that in space there is no ‘up’ or ‘down’, ‘left’ or ‘right’.

20

Blasphemy.
As a long-time lover of Ray Harryhausen’s work, I have to defend the Great Man. His work was superb for its time, and Clash of the Titans was the last gasp of his computer unenhanced and go-motion unaided craft. It was a sendoff with a bang. By his time, The Empire Strikes Back and Dragonslayer had come out as part homage, part improvement on his work, but with a battery of texchnicians. And unadorned stop-motion still had a place for stuff not presuming to try to be realistic, as the Aardman stduios work of Nick Park and others showed with Wallace and Griommit and Chicken Run.
The inherent strobing “jerkiness” of stop-motion is perfect for mechanical objects, and Hartryhausen would have shown if he’d been able to complete his 1950s War of the Worlds project. (I would’ve loved to have seen that – although I’d still have criticisms), and as Lucas’ bunch showed with their AT-AT “Walkers” in The Empire Strikes Back, an effect that still does stand up.