Sinbad

It’s only within the last few decades that Ray Harryhausen’s work has come to be appreciated as something more than childish fantasy. Perhaps because an entire generation of filmmakers grew up watching his stop-motion masterpieces like Jason and the Argonauts and 7th Voyage of Sinbad, much the way Harryhausen himself idolized the work of King Kong creator Willis O’Brien. Things have come full circle, only this time on a much grander scale.

Yet in the 1970s, Harryhausen saw his work falling out of style. The realism achieved in films like 2001 and Star Wars were the death knell for the stop-motion process, which only had a handful of practitioners anyway; and which made The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1973) and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977) seem somewhat antiquated even when they hit theaters. But 40 years later, those same movies (or at least the effects used to create them) have a personality and vitality lacking in most modern special effects. Today’s blockbusters are cut from the very same cloth, but without the master’s meticulous care.

The Golden Voyage of Sinbad finds Harryhausen back in familiar territory: a mythological landscape of evil wizards, mysterious islands and, of course, plenty of monsters. John Phillip Law (Danger: Diabolic) brings a great deal of charisma to the role of Sinbad, delivering lines with a twinkle in his eye but never mocking the material. And Caroline Munro’s push-up bra is a monument for the ages. But it’s still all about the monster.

To its credit, Golden Voyage has a script that’s more entertaining than many Harryhausen worked with, but it takes a while to get to the good stuff. After a lengthy intro the parade begins including a one-eyed centaur, winged homunculus, and, most impressively, a six-armed statue of Kali brought to life to do battle. It’s a sequence as brilliant and exciting as anything put to film.

Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger slips into repeating much of the same material; different quest, different characters, different monsters, but an unfortunate sense of Harryhausen recycling his own ideas. And it doesn’t help that Patrick Wayne (John Wayne’s son) is the most stiff and uninteresting of all the cinematic Sinbads. This time our heroic captain agrees to help a princess (Jane Seymour) find a cure for her brother who has been turned into a baboon.

Tiger benefits from a change in scenery (the expedition to a frozen tundra adds a little something) and attempts to tell a story with the scope and scale audience’s wouldn’t see again until Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy. But the budget and technology just aren’t there to pull it off. Except for a wonderfully animated giant walrus, even Harryhausen’s creatures seem a bit cut rate and lethargic here.

Released on blu-ray as part of Twilight Time’s limited edition series (only 3000 of each title are for sale exclusively at ), one might wonder whether the hi-def format would only serve to highlight flaws in the stop-animation process. That is most definitely not the case. Golden Voyage looks so good there aren’t enough adjectives to describe it. It truly is like seeing the film for the first time, with details visible on Harryhausen’s models you could never see before (check out those tiny teeth on the evil wizard’s flying servant!) and a warm glow to all the live-action scenes. Eye of the Tiger looks a bit drabber by comparison, but that seems to be the fault of the film itself with multiple day-for-night scenes and plenty of cut-rate optical effects.

Golden Voyage includes three extra featurettes - these showed up previously on various Columbia DVD titles and include info on Mysterious Island, 3 World of Gulliver and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers – plus a theatrical trailer and isolated score track. Eye of the Tiger includes a retro This is Dynamation featurette, trailer and isolated score track as well.