Ray Harryhausen’s The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad was one of my favorite movies, when I was a kid. In those long-ago pre-Star Wars, pre-CGI days it was the ultimate in special-effects-laden fantasy. Aside from the short segment he and Willis O’Brien did in the Animal World, and his fairy tale shorts, it was his first commercial color production, and it rocked. The Giant Cyclops with its Pan-like goat feet. The Two-Headed Roc. The Dragon. The Snake Lady. The Skeleton Fight. And the non-animated parts were great, too, especially Shakespearean actor Torin Thatcher as the evil magician Sokourah.
For years I had to await its chance arrival on TV or at cinema retrospectives or kiddie matinees. When it came out on VHS I rented it several times, even when I didn’t have a VCR and had to rent or borrow one. Now I own VHS and DVD copies.
I recently saw the Dell comic adaptation (from 'way back ion 1958), and picked it up. What a disappointment! And this was the only way kids back then had to relive the experience:
http://www.goantiques.com/detail,seventh-voyage-sinbad,470054.html
Look at that cover. No Cyclops, or Dragon, or Roc. It could’ve been almost any movie about a sailor. There’s no compelling reason to pick it up.
Worse, inside, the comic diverges significantly from the film. It seems pretty clear to me that the writer and artist not only hadn’t sen the script, they hadn’t seen any stills or production drawings of the better parts. They evidently did see some [pictures of the main actors, because Sinbad, Princess Parisui, her maid Sadi, and the Sultan are accurately portrayed. Sokourah isn’t, and neither is the genie.
But the worst part is that the monsters – the animated creatures – are incorrectly portrayed and aren’t doing the right things. The Cyclops has a normal human body (aside from the single eye and horn). The Roc (and its chick) have only one head each. The Snake Woman is gone completely. The genie doesn’t look right, and his showier magic is gone. There’s no skeleton fight, or molten lava. They talk about the Giant Crossbow, but you don’t really see it. If the illustrator had seen these, they’d have shown them, because they’re so photogenic. Instead, the writer and illustrator were reduced to inventing events like bats in the cave, and losing their torches. the roc drops rocks on Sinbad and his men (as happens in the original story of Sindibad in The Arabian Nights, but not in the film).
Why? Maybe they viewed the comic as so low a priority that they got minimal help. Maybe they didn’t want to spoil the film by giving away the good parts. Maybe the FX photos weren’t ready and they didn’t want to use the sketches (When the Jurassic Park calendar came out circa 1992, they only had pictures of the animatronic dinosaurs, and none of the CGI stuff, I suspect for the same reason)
Now that I think about it, other Dell movie adaptations of the period fit the same mold – my comic book of The Lost World doesn’t really look like the movie – the features and traps look as if they were described to the writer and illustrator, rather than having them see the film lor stills. They got the resemblances of the actors right, but not the effects stuff.
(Although my comic book of Jack the Giant Killer has some panels that look as if they were lifted directly gfrom the movie. Evidently they cooperated mopre closely with the folks at Dell.)
http://www.goantiques.com/detail,jack-giant-killer,1041419.html