bloodyrosemccoy | Jun. 10th, 2010

I hereby wish to declare that Ray Harryhausen does AWESOME DVD commentaries. I now want every commentary to include at least one old man who doesn’t remember anything about production and can’t bring himself to believe that anybody cares about it, anyway.

The film is 20 Million Miles to Earth, which for a lousy B-movie actually has some decent 50’s effects—courtesy Ray, who made a pretty nifty stop-motion monster for it. The monster even manages to look like it’s interacting with the people and everything.* And for the 50th anniversary DVD they got a mostly-dead Ray to sit down (via satellite) with some less-dead special effects artists and commentate. The other guys—including Dennis Muren, who is an effects wizard himself**—all kind of understand DVD commentaries and ask interesting leading questions that give Ray an opportunity to impart his Moviemaster Wisdom.

Ray, on the other hand, is fuckin’ 87 years old and made the movie fifty years ago, when nobody in the audience cared much about The Making Of This Movie, and thus he is eminently practical and unromantic when he hasn’t forgotten what happened:

DENNIS***: So, Ray! Why did you decide to set this movie in Rome?

RAY: I wanted to take a trip to Italy.

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DENNIS: You know, we have all noticed that your interestingly lifelike models tend to have bent elbows. This lends them a strangely inhuman look. Was that a conscious trademark?

RAY: Actually, I just didn’t want to have to animate swinging arms.

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DENNIS: How did you come up with this particular design for the spaceship, Ray?

RAY: I looked at some pictures of rockets, and came up with this one.

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Ray is also totally fascinated by the colorization process (“Amazing that those computers can make the color follow the moving people!”) and thinks it’s great that they’re doing this commentary via satellite from London and Berkeley respectively and yet “it sounds like we’re all in the same room!” Movie Magic strikes again!

(Also, for the record, that monster he made was adorable. I think it was its droopy mustache.)

*As opposed to most B-movies I’ve seen, in which the monster is either Some Guy In A Rubber Suit or a process shot of an iguana or a tarantula or something.

**Industrial Light and Magic, yo. Star Wars, Indiana Jones, Terminator …

***Or somebody. There were a couple of other guys, but I didn’t catch the names.