By Mintyblonde (Minty’s Menagerie)

It’s beginning to look like a vintage year in terms of NFT activity, as well as a few very exciting events and seasons coming up over the next few months I attended a very special gala celebration yesterday evening, a BAFTA sponsored tribute to one of the few remaining bona-fide legends, a technician without which theLord of The Rings franchise would not exist, without whom Spielberg, Lucas, Dante, Jackson, Cameron, Burton, Del Toro, Lasseter and others wouldn’t prevail as we know them, one of the undisputed titans of the adventure, fantasy and SF film, a 90th birthday celebration of the life and work of Ray Harryhausen.

I’m a huge genre fan and like anyone else of my or previous generations we owe an enormous amount of respect and awe to his phenomenal contribution to the art-form, I’ll admit that his films don’t litter my DVD collection but every time one of his movies crops up in the TV listing I’ll always record them for future re-visits. Some of the pictures are naturally clunky by todays standards but if you look beyond the contemporary situation you can see an astonishing level of skill and craft combined with a simple, sheer love of movies, an adoration of fantastical storytelling that have ensured his position in the pantheon along with his mentor and guide Willis O’ Brien.

I can’t possibly craft a comprehensive reproduction of this magnificent gala but I will litter this post with similar clips from Harryhausen’s career in much the same way that the programme ran, hopefully you’ll get some flavour of the evening from my rambling recollection.  The evening was compared by the incorrigible John Landis, a long term fan and friend of Harryhausen whose inspirational viewing of The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad (and let us never forgot the his bad-movie admiration of the legendary Trog) led to his career in the industry and…

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