Another CGI Milestone was the movie Willow (1988) which was the first use of Morphing.
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.
Pretty much any of the spaceship scenes in CE3K. And ghost scenes in Ghostbusters.
Cite? It doesn’t sound likely that they’d be using it in 1955.
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. 
)
Ohh, cool! I had no idea you worked on that film!
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.
Doing it old school, the tornado in The Wizard of Oz.
The launch of the Enterprise in The Motion Picture
I was going to go with the robot transformation scene.
You mean GB?
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 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.
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!
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
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
the making of Silent Running. The Dome jettison scene is at around the 39 minute mark:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xtsNdLj1F4
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.”
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
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.
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