When we look back at old sci-fi and adventure movies, the special effects cheesy as hell. Obvious models, wires, scaling problems… to those of us used to modern CGI effects they are laughable.
But back when they were made, such effects were the best they had. I’ve always wondered, what did moviegoers of the time think of their movie effects? Were they content to watch and think they looked good, or did it pull them out of the movie the way they can today?
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Colibri
General Questions Moderator
This is more of a IMHO than GQ answer, but speaking for myself, the pre-star wars the effects of Ray Harryhausen were the most amazing thing I had ever seen. Of course they are and were obviously fake, but we had more ability to suspend disbelief.
When I was 8, the FX of The Wolf Man were amazing. And I was 8 in 1975. So people in 1941, seeing it on a screen, must have been terrified. The audio-commentary on my original King Kong is by a film studies expert who was old enough to have been a kid in a theater seeing Kong when it first came out, and he says he just about wet himself. That’s another one I saw on TV some time around age 7-9. It was very cool.
The FX in Escape to Witch Mountain that I saw as a kid were also amazing. On the other hand, so were the ones on the TV show Bewitched. So at least some of it has to do with being a kid-- my kid, born in 2006 saw Escape to Witch Mountain when he was about 6, and enjoyed it.
I agree that* Star Wars* was as much a game-changer as Jurassic Park.
However, it’s not impossible to try to put yourself in the head of someone seeing an old movie in its time. I saw the 1910 version of Frankenstein, and the creation scene was made by burning an effigy that was built in layers, so it had a skeleton inside, and then the footage was spliced in backwards-- and the effigy had wires, so it was writhing a little-- not terribly convincingly, but good enough-- anyway, the monster seems to assemble itself out of the air. It must have mesmerized people in 1910, and if you watch it now, it’s not all that hard to try to imagine seeing it when it first came out, and what that must have been like. I’m impressed by it. It doesn’t seem cheesy at all. It takes a modest amount of imagination, and maybe just a little empathy.
There is a pair of films you might look at The Fly (1958) and a newer version: The Fly (1986). The 1986 version has vastly superior special effects, yet oddly many people prefer the 1958 version:
http://www.warpedfactor.com/2015/10/fright-nights-fly-1958-vs-fly-1986.htmlhttp://www.warpedfactor.com/2015/10/fright-nights-fly-1958-vs-fly-1986.html
Cronenberg’s fly STILL creeps me out! I just watched it like a month ago for the first time in probably 15 or 20 yrs.
Then I watched Vincent price’s and…well…it was good. But not really scary. But having said that, I can totally see how it could have been creepy back in the day.
Nah. I way prefer the 1958 version.
During the 1970s, some kids thought live action animation like that on TV was really cool, while others turned their noses up because it looked fake. I was of the “Oh boy, special effects!” school. Much preferable to a 1930s black and white feature about elocutionists seated in living rooms.
I was around in the 50s and my friends and I considered the effects laughable. But frankly I’m of the same opinion with much of the effects today. They are so obviously CGI that they don’t seem real at all.
Visual effects are a weird mix of “so good they are seamless” and “so bad they are distracting” even now, partially due to budget and technology constraints, and a small amount of skill (or lack thereof). I remember watching some movies in the 80s where the effects blew me sideways, but if I look back on them now I can see how crappy they actually were. On the other hand I can also remember being disappointed by some awful effects even back then.
But that is with the benefit of living in a post-Star Wars era, and my being age 10 in 1980. Pre-that age, and pre-that film, any dodgy effects were indiscernible and I just accepted them at face value.
It’s impossible for me to know if the adults of the 50s accepted an obvious toy ship in a shallow pool as being real, or a staccato King Kong as genuine, but I can certainly believe they wouldn’t have noticed some of the high-quality matte painting work by artists such as Albert Whitlock and Harrison Ellenshaw, many of which still hold up today even on UltraHD.
This is not an effect from the 40’s and 50’s, but it still baffles me on how this shot was constructed from the Wizard of Oz. I couldn’t find a video of Dorothy and crew running along the castle parapet but did manage to find an image here.
The 1953 War of the Worlds did pretty well on special effects. The held the standard for a long time along with Forbidden Planet of course. Also, neither remake came close to these classics despite modern special effects.
But *War of the Worlds *pushed what could be done believably at the time and did a fine job of it.
Like this. The black area is a live action set on stage, the rest is a matte painting.
In the 1950 Jimmy Durante movie A Christmas Wish/The Great Rupert there is a jerky, clumsily-done stop-motion squirrel, and apparently some people thought that it was a real trained animal.
What about 2001: A Space Odyssey? Kubrick overwhelmingly used effects that looked real. 1968 of course, but saying far better than Harryhausen and before Star Wars.
More on matte painting. Given the era, the Dawn process (named after Norman Dawn) was undoubtedly used.
Plenty of effects were cheesy, but lots of them were pretty impressive, especially if not looed at by modern eyes jaded by experience and surfeit of these. Before The Lost World came out in 1925, Arthur Conan Doyle got hold of the footage and showed parts of it to newsmen in new York. They were blown away by it. Some seemed to think they’d actually found dinosaurs, or a Time Portal, or something. When King Kong opened eight years later*, people were impressed. Yet today The Lost World wouldn’t fool a ten year old, and the animation in King Kong frequently looks “jerky”.
If you think effects are all “crappy”, with obvious wires and puppetry, you need to look at the history of static mattes, travelling mattes, Ray Harryhausen’s “reality sandwich”, forced perspective, glass painting, rear projection on cellulose acetate screens, front projection, miniature rear projection, and so on. Ray Harryhausen’s work was artful, with Beast from 20,000 Fathoms using breakthrough technology and innovative staging (like lighting a nighttime attack by what are made to appear to be electric flashes). Ditto for his 20 Million Miles to Earth and It Came from Beneath the Sea.
Otherr practitioners did well, too. As Robert Heinlein says, in promoting Destination Moon (which he co-wrote the screenplay for, and which is based on one of his novels) you know that the partial sets showing the rocket are people-sized, and you know that the scenes of the rocket taking off aren’t real, but he’d bet even money that you choose the wrong point in transitioning between them. (Similarly, the much earlier FRitz Lang film Die Frau im Mond has some truly impressive shots – it looks as if they filmed a pre-Nazi German rocket program, but it’s all effects).
To my kind the effects in The Day the Earth Stood Still hold up, even after all these years. The slowly-opening visor on Gort, and the internal “laser” effect are pretty damned good. And Gort looks better in this version than his CGI counterpart in the recent remake does.
There are onbvious “bleeds” from the matting of Technicolor shots in 1956’s The TEn Commandments, but it hold up pretty well, overall. The way they did the Parting of the Red Sea was kept secret for many years, and still looks damned good onscreen. The Angel of Death is also an impressive effect, which Spielberg was heavily influenced by, and copied. My only real complaint about the film is the poor appearance of the animated flames and the animated “Finger of God”, which I think looked hokey even at the time.
Disney did pretty good effects in the fifties, too. 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea is filled with wonderful effects shots of what we’d now call the “steampunk” submarine**. Disney also did good work on their TV specials about the future of space exploration, done in collaboration with Werner von Braun, Willy Ley, and others.
As usual, you notice a lot of these effects because they’re showing something that doesn’t exist. The same techniques were used in non-fantastic settings to make a small set serve for a panoramic shot, or to save money during filming, and you rarely notice these.
*with effects by the same Willis O’Brien and company
**I think that this film marks the real beginning of the “steampunk” style. Designer Harper Goff redesigned Verne’s submarine from a sleek, streamlined craft into a steel-riveted thing covered with appurtenances to make it more visually interesting, if less functional.
I have Citizen Kane on DVD and in this version, there is a commentary track by Roger Ebert. He talks about the use of special effects in the film (also discussed in the Wikipedia article). I think Ebert said something about how it’s as much a special effects film as Star Wars. But you really don’t notice them or think about them when you’re watching the movie.
And actually, a lot of modern non-SF films have lots of special effects.
I was born in 1953. ANY special effects were special in the 1950’s and 1960’s as far as I was concerned, and Star Trek seemed cutting edge technology.
I think it was Roger Ebert who said “Stop motion looks fake, but feels real, and CGI looks real but feels fake”. I wasn’t watching movies in the 40s, but in the fifties they felt real as real can be.
