‘Harryhausen’ Celebrates Master of Special Effects

As part of its “Hollywood Real to Reel” series, American Movie Classics tonight presents Richard Schickel’s “The Harryhausen Chronicles,” a delightful and informative one-hour documentary on Ray Harryhausen, whom Schickel aptly describes as having become as much a legend as the wondrous creatures, dinosaurs and mythical monsters he envisioned as one of the movies’ greatest special effects geniuses.

Harryhausen, who has enchanted several generations of audiences and aspiring filmmakers, is well-remembered for such ‘50s sci-fi classics as “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms” and “It Came From Beneath the Sea” and for such later adventures as “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad” (1958), “Jules Verne’s Mysterious Island” (1961) and “Jason and the Argonauts” (1963), Harryhausen’s favorite and generally regarded as his masterpiece.

Certainly, it is the epitome of Harryhausen’s mastery of combining stop-motion model animation and live-action footage, involving such complicated creations as the seven-headed hydra guarding the Golden Fleece and the rising of skeletons from their graves to protest the stealing of the Fleece.

The point of Schickel’s affectionate portrait of Harryhausen, warmly narrated by Leonard Nimoy, is to call attention to the kind of personal artistry and dedication, involving tremendous individual imagination and craftsmanship, that in the special effects field has been supplanted by technology and massive team efforts.

Harryhausen, who worked without assistants but in a long collaboration with producer Charles Schneer, suggests provocatively that the worlds he created on the screen, in seeming “not quite real,” actually had “added value” in transforming reality in the imagination into fantasy. For many fans, for example, the more technically perfect King Kong of the 1976 remake lacked the poignancy of the slightly awkward, halting gorilla of the original.

Indeed, seeing “King Kong” in 1933 at the age of 13 at Grauman’s Chinese was the watershed event of Harryhausen’s life. “I haven’t been the same since,” he said, having become inspired as a result to make and film his own creatures in their own fantasy worlds.

He was encouraged by his parents and by “Kong’s” special effects wizard Willis O’Brien, with whom Harryhausen made his feature debut in 1949 with “Mighty Joe Young.”

Fittingly, Dennis Muren, an Oscar-winning special effects supervisor with LucasFilm, in paying homage to Harryhausen, tells how at the age of 12 he managed to see “Jason and the Argonauts” eight times in one week.

* “The Harryhausen Chronicles” will be broadcast at 6 tonight on AMC, followed at 7 p.m. by “The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms.”