I noticed this was airing on TCM so I DVR’ed it and watched it for the first time in years. I forgot how good it was. What surprised me was how fast the plot moves and how it takes itself just seriously enough without being self important (I remembered it being just the opposite, very campy). Also Burgess Meredith makes for a good comedy relief, funny but not annoying or stupid. And of course you have the Harryhausen effects which have their own charm (especially, I suspect for people my age that grew up watching them).
It’s not the greatest movie in the world but I really enjoyed it (unlike the remake from a few years ago which I barely remember).
You are so right about the remake being forgettable. One of the few things I do remember is the mechanical owl they leave behind when starting out on the quest. You all know where THAT came from.
As were all of his creatures except maybe his sword fighting skeletons which didn’t need any foam. People seem to use Claymation and stop motion animation interchangeably. All Claymation is SMA but not all SMA is Claymation.
I adore Clash of the Titans. The last time I saw it was in a waiting room, of all places, in an outpatient surgery waiting to get my son’s ear tubes put in. I was so disappointed when they called us back!
The other movie in this vein that I love is Excalibur.
Those were two films that I watched REPEATEDLY throughout my formative years.
In fact, I was so obsessed with Clash of the Titans that I would get the toys, break them, and then get them again. At one point they no longer made them in Virginia and I would pester my parents to let me spend a week (or so) with my grandparents in Florida because they still had a store down there that sold them.
Edit: I remember watching Excalibur recently and I realized that Picard was in it… I guess they had another time travel episode of the next Generation that I missed…
Another CoT lover here. I wanted to name my daughter Andromeda, but I had sons, and their mother wouldn’t let me anyway… What ever happened to Judi Bowker? Off to wiki…
I can’t think of a Harryhausen movie I didn’t like the effects in.
Jason and the Argonauts was the bane of my childhood … see, I was raised Baptist in western NY state. Therefore Sunday mornings were fixed - church from 10am to noon, then a family meal with our Grandparents either at their summer house or at Letchworth State Park’s Glen Iris Inn. So from the age of 5 in 1966 until I was 12 and rebelled at the church part, the Shhh! Show started at 830 with a couple of short cartoons and then a feature film starting at 900. So, whatever I was watching ended for me at 10 minutes to 10 when we left for church. I must have seen the beginning of Jason 10 or 12 times … just to be dragged away right after I got invested in watching it. sob It would be YEARS before I managed to actually see the wonder that was Jason and the Argonauts all the way through!
Reasonably good movie, although it suffered initially because it came out around the same time as “Raiders of the Lost Ark”. Although I remember “Circus” magazine reviewed both in the same issue and preferred “Clash”.
The Harryhausen special effects have always struck me as, well, movie special effects. I am sure they took a lot of time, energy, and skill but they seem stilted.
Why did they cast Ursula Andress as Aphrodite and give her nothing but stand on a checkerboard and nod when Zeus/Olivier mentions her? To get a name they can use to promote?
I appreciate TCM left in the scene with Judi Bowker’s butt (more likely a body double). Gratuitous sex is always appreciated.
Clash of the Titans will always have a special place in my heart. It was the very first movie I watched on my family’s newfangled contraption we got about that time. Something called a “VCR.”
Actually, “Claymation” was a trademark of Will Vinton Productions, and using it to describe all plasticine (not clay)-based stop motion animation is like using “Kleenex” to descibe all disposable tissues. People do it, but the Kleenex people still keep buying pages in writer’s magazines asking people to say “Kleenex brand disposable tissues” . (Even though the only writer I’ve ever seen do this is Dave Barry, wwho’s clearly poking fun at the whole concept).
When the remake first came out, there were blogs on the internet complaining about the poor writing of the remake, compared with that of the original film. It wasn’t concise, lacked direction, and suffered from having the ending changed while the thing was in production.
Beverly Cross (who wrote the original screenplay, not to mention that for Jason and the Argonauts, and contributed to Lawrence of Arabia) had a Classical background, and knew whereof he wrote. There are several nods to the original Greek sources that most people wouldn’t catch, but he wasn’t slavish to them. His writing is succinct and direct, he sets up his conflict early and well (and in the process changes the myth somewhat, but a lot of artists do that) He wasn’t the first to put Perseus on the back of Pegasus, not by a long shot, although that’s not the “classic” myth as recounted in most sources.
Some of the changes were clearly Harryhausen’s idea, to make for more stop-motion goodness. Having the scorpions become gigantic, for instance, or making Andromeda’s former suitor (whose name the script changed to Calibos) a half-monster. The nly change I didn’t care for was that damned owl Bubo, which looks like an attempt to copy R2D2, although Harryhausen swore it wasn’t.
Harry Hamlin got a little extra mileage out of that role years later. In Veronica Mars, scenes from the movie were used to establish his character’s “action hero” persona.
What ever happened to Judi Bowker? Off to wiki…