A nuclear blast in the frozen tundra above the Arctic Circle has released
a monster from another age, but this ancient terror's only eyewitness,
Professor Tom Nesbitt, is believed to be suffering from a concussion when he
tries to explain what he saw. After the enormous creature begins wreaking havoc
at sea and along the coast, Professor Nesbitt is finally able to assemble
other witnesses and positively identify the menace as a living dinosaur called a
rhedosaurus. With the help of a respected paleontologist and his assistant, Nesbitt
warns the United States military to track down and defeat the carnivorous
anachronism as it slowly makes its way towards New York City.
Before we begin, if you could hit that like button,
it will help me rampage through YouTube, but you know, in a good way.
If you really do like what I'm doing, don't forget to subscribe for more content.
Thank you in advance. With that out of the way, let's get back to the subject at hand.
In the mid to late 1920's, a young boy named Raymond Frederick Harryhausen
was absolutely fascinated by dinosaurs. He showed an
aptitude for art--particularly paintings and clay sculptures--and prehistoric
animals were a common subject. Already a frequent visitor to the Rancho La Brea
Tar Pits and the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History, where he
gawked at fossils and the lifelike dinosaur paintings of Charles Knight, he
went to the theater and saw The Lost World, in which dinosaurs are brought to
life through stop-motion animation. In 1933, he had the chance to see another
movie that would leave an impression on him: King Kong. Utterly entranced by both
the titular giant ape and the film's dinosaurs, he became obsessed with
figuring out how it was done. He saw King Kong multiple times over the
course of the summer of 1933, and through a combination of magazine articles and
his father's brief discussions with low-level technical workers at RKO,
Ray Harryhausen discovered the magic of stop-motion animation,
of filming a scale model one frame at a time as it is carefully and slowly
manipulated against a miniature background. In his teenage years,
Harryhausen experimented with producing his own stop-motion animation, building
models himself and filming them with a borrowed 16 millimeter camera. When he
was 18, he had the chance to show some of his work to his personal hero, Willis
O'Brien, the lead special-effects designer on both The Lost World and King
Kong, and O'Brien told Harryhausen to take classes and hone his skills and maybe he
could make something of himself someday. Also when he was a teenager, Harryhausen
befriended the future literary giant Ray Bradbury, and the two often talked about
their dreams to make it big, to maybe even grow up to make a science-fiction
film together about dinosaurs, bonding over their shared love of 1925's The Lost World.
Bradbury could write this imagined movie, and Harryhausen could animate it.
On this foundation, the two remained friends for the rest of their lives.
After a couple of years of art and film courses
at the University of Southern California, Harryhausen used a homemade
demo reel of stop-motion dinosaurs fighting to land a job doing animation
for George Pal's Puppetoons. When World War II broke out, he worked on propaganda
films for the army under Frank Capra, after which he started making short
films for schools. Then in 1949, Harryhausen was hired as an animation
technician for the film Mighty Joe Young by none other than Willis O'Brien. Not
content to be swallowed up by the studio system, Harryhausen took all he had
learned over the years--from Pal, Capra, and O'Brien--and decided to strike out on
his own. After Willis O'Brien turned down a low-budget dinosaur movie from
independent film producers Jack Dietz and Howie Chester called The Monster
from Beneath the Sea, he suggested they approach Harryhausen, who
enthusiastically agreed. The Monster from Beneath the Sea was a story about a
dormant dinosaur awakened by nuclear testing who begins to lay waste to
civilization, and it was conceived as a combination of the big monster spectacle
of King Kong with the growing nuclear panic of The Day the Earth Stood Still.
Meanwhile, as pre-production was underway, Harryhausen's old friend Ray Bradbury
had a short story published in the Saturday Evening Post called The Beast from
20,000 Fathoms. Bradbury's story was about a sea monster attacking a lighthouse.
Reports vary about who first noticed the similarities between Bradbury's story and
Dietz's movie, but based on the Post's illustration of an uncannily dinosaur-esque
monster, Jack Dietz purchased the film rights, out of a desire to avoid a
lawsuit, if nothing else. "Shh! You wanna get sued?" Ray Bradbury would retitle his
story The Fog Horn in later publications, and Dietz's film took the title The
Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Thus, in a roundabout sort of way, Harryhausen began
designing the effects for a dinosaur movie based on Bradbury's writing, and
the childhood dream of the two Rays was realized.
While Harryhausen was given unprecedented levels of freedom
to design and create the effects for the
film--working alone for the most part--it still needed a proper director for
everything else. Dietz and Chester hired Eugène Lourié, a hard-working
assistant director, production designer, and screenwriter who had worked under
the likes of Jean Renoir and Charlie Chaplin, but who had yet to direct his own
film. The male lead for the movie, the nuclear physicist Tom Nesbitt--
"I am Mrs. Nesbitt!"
--is played by the Swiss actor Paul Hubschmid, credited as Paul Christian, whose thick
accent would have probably precluded him from landing the lead in a proper studio
film. Opposite him is Paula Raymond as the female lead, Lee Hunter. Raymond had
been in a few films, like Challenge of the Range and Devil's Doorway, but
nothing of much note. The only really well-known actors were given more
secondary roles. Cecil Kellaway, known for The Postman Always Rings Twice and The
Luck of the Irish, in which he plays a leprechaun, delivers the film's most
memorable performance as the enthusiastic paleontologist Dr. Thurgood
Elson-- "This is a great moment for me." --who at one point remarks about the
non-existence of leprechauns, and Kenneth Tobey, notable for his starring role as
Captain Hendry in 1951's The Thing from Another World,
plays the very similar character of Colonel Evans, who makes another
wink-wink nudge-nudge joke, this time about aliens. Of course, no actor or
character is as important as the titular dinosaur itself. The fictional rhedosaurus
is a four-legged carnivore with a head reminiscent of a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
Early versions of the animal had an armored shell and a beak-like mouth,
as well as an ability to breathe fire that was nixed for budgetary reasons.
Harryhausen realized it using a technique of his own design, which would
come to be known as Dynamation. Put simply, Dynamation is a clever mixture
of rear-projection, stop-motion, and simple split-screen
compositing, and though it didn't use any new technologies for the time period, it
had a profound impact on the effects industry, allowing for the relatively
seamless combination of live action with stop-motion animation.
Dynamation is ultimately Ray Harryhausen's most important legacy, and
it is responsible for that unique look you only seem to get from movies with
Harryhausen behind the effects. The exciting climax and ending at Coney
Island was imagined midway through production, and though it contained by
far the trickiest effects in the whole picture, Harryhausen enjoyed every
painstaking minute of its creation. Once the movie was complete, Jack Dietz showed
it to Warner Brothers, who purchased it for over $400,000, which was twice the
$200,000 budget. Though Dietz considered that a big win at the time, after the
film was released in June of 1953, it made over two and a quarter million
dollars at the domestic box office, making it Hollywood's seventh
highest-grossing film that year. In retrospect, Dietz regretted letting it go
for less than half a million. Watching it nowadays, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms
doesn't seem all that special. There's a long, tedious build-up to the admittedly
fun climax, but most of the plot is centered on a physicist trying to
convince everybody he's not insane when he says he saw a dinosaur. However, few
movies can claim to be as influential as this one, as it spawned the atomic-
powered giant monster craze that would dominate science-fiction for several
years. It inspired films like Them!, It Came from Beneath the Sea, and most
importantly, Godzilla. Indeed, in many ways, Eiji Tsuburaya's iconic Tokyo-stomping
monster is a direct rip-off of The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, complete with the
fiery atomic breath that Dietz and Chester couldn't afford. And it's not
just the timely relevance of the story's unique mixture of monster madness and
nuclear fear that make this film so incredibly important. It's also the
career-launching effects work by Ray Harryhausen. Without this movie rocketing
the stop-motion animator into superstardom, we might not have his other
subsequent masterpieces, films like The 7th
Voyage of Sinbad, Mysterious Island, Jason and the Argonauts,
One Million Years B.C., and of course, Clash of the Titans. Harryhausen's work is a
testament to the imaginative power of film. From inspiring a young boy to
pursue a career animating dinosaurs for a living to birthing a whole new genre
of science-fiction, film gives us joyous aspirations to attain, modern nightmares
to exorcise, friendship bonds to last a lifetime, and terrifying monsters to vanquish.
And that's all for today, my fellow Earthlings. What's your favorite
Harryhausen movie? Let me know in the comments, and maybe I'll cover it in a
future video. Don't forget to like and subscribe if you haven't done so already,
and if you really do like what I'm doing, check out my website at emagill.com, where
you'll find written reviews of several more science-fiction classics in both
film and literature. Also consider supporting me on Patreon, where you can
vote on future videos, get your name in the credits, and more. But until next time,
when we'll be doing something pretty pretty pretty pretty different, this is
the Unapologetic Geek, telling you to never be ashamed of what you love...
...as long as you're not hurting anybody.
"From Arquette, Canada today comes word of a second ship destroyed by an enormous
beast, according to her captain George LeMay. He really ought to stop smoking
that stuff and try Virginia Golds, because--"