# Your favorite pre-CGI special effects scenes?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-pre-cgi-special-effects-scenes/832137
**Category:** Cafe Society
**Created:** [April 6, 2019, 6:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-pre-cgi-special-effects-scenes/832137 "2019-04-06T18:07:39Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 3
### Author:  [@Quimby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Quimby)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2019, 2:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-pre-cgi-special-effects-scenes/832137/41 "2019-04-07T02:36:28Z")
> [@kenobi\_65](#):
>
> Just for reference, the two films which were seen as really pioneering CGI for use in special effects were _Tron_ (1982) and _The Last Starfighter_ (1984). Both were revolutionary for their times, but both of them, even back then, clearly looked computer-generated.
>
> _Tron_ example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcyCWEsbsPU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VcyCWEsbsPU)
> _The Last Starfighter_ example: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmPGuMGs8cg](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nmPGuMGs8cg)
Another CGI Milestone was the movie Willow (1988) which was the first use of Morphing.
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### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2019, 2:40am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-pre-cgi-special-effects-scenes/832137/42 "2019-04-07T02:40:49Z")
IIRC, the first use of CGI in a film to represent something that wasn’t CGI was in _Lady and the Tramp_, where it was used to generate street traffic as seen from a skyscraper.
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### Author:  [@Darren\_Garrison](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Darren_Garrison)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2019, 3:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-pre-cgi-special-effects-scenes/832137/43 "2019-04-07T03:08:24Z")
Pretty much any of the spaceship scenes in _CE3K_. And ghost scenes in _Ghostbusters_.
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### Author:  [@Peter\_Morris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peter_Morris)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2019, 3:29am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-pre-cgi-special-effects-scenes/832137/44 "2019-04-07T03:29:45Z")
> [@Chronos](#):
>
> IIRC, the first use of CGI in a film to represent something that wasn’t CGI was in _Lady and the Tramp_, where it was used to generate street traffic as seen from a skyscraper.
Cite? It doesn’t sound likely that they’d be using it in 1955.
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### Author:  [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2019, 4:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-pre-cgi-special-effects-scenes/832137/45 "2019-04-07T04:00:34Z")
> [@Peter\_Morris](#):
>
> Wasn’t that deliberate? I mean \*Tron \*is largely set in a world inside a computer, and \*Last Starfighter \*is about a video game that is really a battle training simulation. Looking computer generated is perfectly in keeping with the plot.
That’s very true, though I suspect that it wasn’t so much “we made it look that way intentionally,” so much as “we were at the limits of how sophisticated CGI could look at that time, and it just so happened to fit the story being told.”
Also, in the case of _The Last Starfighter_, yes, the plot involves a video game which is a training simulator, but scenes like the one I linked to didn’t take place in that simulator – they were meant to be actual space combat. (That said, having an aesthetic in which the “real life” spaceships still _looked_ like CGI might still have fit. 🙂 )
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### Author:  [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2019, 4:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-pre-cgi-special-effects-scenes/832137/46 "2019-04-07T04:02:20Z")
> [@TriPolar](#):
>
> At MAGI we did the best we could on Tron to get the animation done in a reasonable amount of time. Rendering time was often over a minute per frame. We had the fastest machines out of any of the 4 companies producing CGI for Tron and ended up doing close to 90% of all the CGI in the end because the other guys couldn’t keep up.
Ohh, cool! I had no idea you worked on that film!
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### Author:  [@Peter\_Morris](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Peter_Morris)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2019, 4:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-pre-cgi-special-effects-scenes/832137/47 "2019-04-07T04:17:18Z")
> [@kenobi\_65](#):
>
> That’s very true, though I suspect that it wasn’t so much “we made it look that way intentionally,” so much as “we were at the limits of how sophisticated CGI could look at that time, and it just so happened to fit the story being told.”
Possibly the other way around. “This is a story about a computer-generated world, so let’s use computer graphics to make it.”
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### Author:  [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2019, 4:19am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-pre-cgi-special-effects-scenes/832137/48 "2019-04-07T04:19:05Z")
> [@Peter\_Morris](#):
>
> Possibly the other way around. “This is a story about a computer-generated world, so let’s use computer graphics to make it.”
Quite possibly so. 🙂
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### Author:  [@El\_Kabong](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/El_Kabong)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2019, 5:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-pre-cgi-special-effects-scenes/832137/49 "2019-04-07T05:16:31Z")
Doing it old school, the tornado in _The Wizard of Oz_.
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### Author:  [@The\_Tooth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/The_Tooth)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2019, 7:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-pre-cgi-special-effects-scenes/832137/50 "2019-04-07T07:46:59Z")
The launch of the Enterprise in _The Motion Picture_
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### Author:  [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2019, 9:39am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-pre-cgi-special-effects-scenes/832137/51 "2019-04-07T09:39:10Z")
> [@Peter\_Morris](#):
>
> The city of the future in _Metropolis_.
I was going to go with the robot transformation scene.
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### Author:  [@I\_Love\_Me\_Vol.I](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/I_Love_Me_Vol.I)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2019, 12:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-pre-cgi-special-effects-scenes/832137/52 "2019-04-07T12:56:32Z")
> [@Darren\_Garrison](#):
>
> Pretty much any of the spaceship scenes in _CE3K_. And ghost scenes in _Ghostbusters_.
You mean GB?
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### Author:  [@Jonathan\_Chance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jonathan_Chance)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2019, 1:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-pre-cgi-special-effects-scenes/832137/53 "2019-04-07T13:30:19Z")
For most spectacular, I’d offer the train wreck scene from The Fugitive. I know that’s post the beginning of real CGI in film but they did it by actually crashing a train. The remains of the effect are still there in North Carolina.
> **[The Fugitive Train Wreck (Sylva, NC)](https://www.strangecarolinas.com/2017/06/the-fugitive-train-wreck-sylva-nc.html)**
>
> If you're travelling along Haywood Road in Sylva and glance down at the river, you might notice a horrific crash. Two train engines, o...
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### Author:  [@teela\_brown](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/teela_brown)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2019, 2:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-pre-cgi-special-effects-scenes/832137/54 "2019-04-07T14:05:30Z")
The Hitchcock movie _Foreign Correspondent_ has some brilliant effects, and I still can’t figure out how some of them were done.
There’s a scene set out in the flatlands of, I believe, Holland, with windmills. It can’t really be Holland and real windmills, yet the cars and actors in the same scene are real and it looks completely seamless.
Later, there are shots of a plane wreck tossed on the open ocean, with the passengers scrambling out and onto the top of the plane, and some washing away. It looks utterly real and terrifying. It’s a brilliant scene.
This movie was filmed right on the cusp of World War II, so these effects must have been groundbreaking for their time.
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### Author:  [@Shoeless](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Shoeless)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2019, 2:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-pre-cgi-special-effects-scenes/832137/55 "2019-04-07T14:07:47Z")
That train crash in The Fugitive _was_ spectacular. I could have walked out of the theater at that point, perfectly content that my money had been well spent. The rest of the movie was just a bonus!
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### Author:  [@mako88sb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mako88sb)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2019, 2:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-pre-cgi-special-effects-scenes/832137/56 "2019-04-07T14:13:59Z")
> [@MichaelEmouse](#):
>
> OP,
> Do you really mean “pre-CGI” or “non-CGI”? If “pre-CGI”, could you give us a year? There’s quite a big of Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park special effects which were practical. CGI in T2 represents only 5 minutes and it’s not like T2 only has 5 minutes of good special effects.
>
> [https://youtu.be/FOD0DZRdQ9w?t=95](https://youtu.be/FOD0DZRdQ9w?t=95)[https://youtu.be/gQbQi77ibA4?t=76](https://youtu.be/gQbQi77ibA4?t=76)
Yes, your right. “non-CGI” is a better description of what I was asking for.
A couple more from me:
From Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N.(1951). Yes, more nautical themed from me:)
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwwZMk4fnIc](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwwZMk4fnIc)
Silent Running(1972). Some interesting trivia from IMDB.
“The dome jettisoning sequences were based on Trumbull’s viewing of actual footage of Apollo Saturn V rocket stage separations. The miniatures of the dome couplings were 10 inches in diameter, and were filled with mica and compressed air to get the separation effect Trumbull wanted.”
“The “Saturn sequence” was originally intended to be featured in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), but the technology needed for the visual effects team to do such a sequence was not ready for use.”
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-OBV49gvmk&list=PLhY1TWNTuqyXkgIwTSktiEHMr7qH21i7H](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R-OBV49gvmk&list=PLhY1TWNTuqyXkgIwTSktiEHMr7qH21i7H)
the making of Silent Running. The Dome jettison scene is at around the 39 minute mark:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xtsNdLj1F4](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xtsNdLj1F4)
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### Author:  [@Jonathan\_Chance](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jonathan_Chance)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2019, 2:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-pre-cgi-special-effects-scenes/832137/57 "2019-04-07T14:15:03Z")
Yeah, I gotta admit I was astonished when, ten years later, I heard that the approach to that crash was simply, “Fuck it, let’s throw a train at a bus and film it.”
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### Author:  [@mako88sb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mako88sb)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2019, 2:35pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-pre-cgi-special-effects-scenes/832137/58 "2019-04-07T14:35:44Z")
For plane crash scenes, the one from “Alive” is simply terrifying. Might not be a good idea to watch this for anyone with a fear of flying.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rr1xiAeBeig](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rr1xiAeBeig)
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### Author:  [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2019, 2:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-pre-cgi-special-effects-scenes/832137/59 "2019-04-07T14:42:02Z")
One that amuses me: When the first of the modern _Spider-Man_ movies came out (around 2000?), there were a lot of complaints that the “CGI” used for the wall-crawling looked fake and unrealistic. When, of course, they actually did it the same way they’ve _always_ done Spider-Man’s wall-crawling: By putting a wall set piece horizontally on the floor and letting the actor just crawl over it.
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### Author:  [@mako88sb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mako88sb)
#### Post date: [April 7, 2019, 2:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/your-favorite-pre-cgi-special-effects-scenes/832137/60 "2019-04-07T14:50:37Z")
Another plane crash scene from “Mother Lode”(1982). This was unintentional as they simply wanted a normal landing but reworked the script and kept it in the movie:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FajUNuriZw](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FajUNuriZw)
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