The sequence would have shown them being ‘filed away’ by a machine that raised each Selenite up to its own hexagonal honeycomb-like chamber.” Nonetheless, the effects sequences which survive have the usual Harryhausen awe. He writes in An Animated Life (2003), “Among the lost sequences was a scene in which the scientists are ‘put to sleep’ and stored for when next they are required. The time spent trying to make his animation work for widescreen meant sacrificing some of the planned FX sequences.
Columbia insisted the film be shot in widescreen Panavision, for which Harryhausen had not adapted his “Dynamation” process. To avoid an eternity in animating the creatures en masse, I found it necessary to build insect suits in which we placed small children.” But that was not the only reason that stop motion is scarce in First Men in the Moon. Harryhausen has stated as much in his Film Fantasy Scrapbook (1981) he wrote, “I have never been an advocate of ‘men in suits’ to represent animaloid creatures, but with our project the script called for masses of insect-like beings swarming over the Space Sphere. It’s easy to see why the decision was made to present so many scenes with the Selenites as costumed actors: it was difficult enough for Harryhausen to animate seven living skeletons at once in Jason and the Argonauts imagine trying to populate a city of aliens by the same method. But except in certain brief shots, the Selenites themselves are not stop-motion, but actors in occasionally shoddy-looking costumes.Ī Mooncalf, on a rampage, is zapped by Selenites. We are an hour and twelve minutes into the film before the first stop-motion creation appears – the Mooncalf, a caterpillar-like creature with pincers which the Selenites put down with a laser gun. Really the only thing which seems a bit out of place is the infrequent use of stop-motion animation. The screenplay was co-authored by Nigel Kneale, famous for creating Professor Quatermass Kneale’s classic script for Quatermass and the Pit (1967) seems to borrow a few ideas from Wells and his Selenites.
#First men in the moon cavorite sphere series#
Absent, unfortunately, was composer Bernard Herrmann, though Laurie Anderson of the TV series The Avengers ably fills in. Schneer, who had worked with him since It Came From Beneath the Sea (1955), and director Nathan Juran of The 7th Voyage of Sinbad and 2o Million Miles to Earth (1957). (All right, perhaps there’s a good deal of fantasy adventure here too.) The film reunited Harryhausen with two recurring collaborators: producer Charles H.
#First men in the moon cavorite sphere free#
With the powers of Cavorite, Harryhausen now breaks free of the Earth’s gravitational pull and heads for the Moon to uncover the secret underground city of the Selenites. One could argue he had been absent from the genre for longer than that: Mysterious Island (1961), though ostensibly a work of science fiction, leans harder on elements of fantasy adventure like his prior films The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960) and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958). Wells, presented Ray Harryhausen with the opportunity to return to science fiction following a visit to Greek mythology in the career-best Jason and the Argonauts (1963). First Men in the Moon (1964), an adaptation of the 1901 novel by H.G.
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