I'm Roger Corman, and welcome to a special edition of Real to Real.
If you're looking for trouble, you came to the right place, because tonight we have a
mammoth documentstrosity for monster film fans.
From King Kong to Godzilla, from the lost world to lost in space, tonight's Real to
Real is a terrifying tribute to the giants of the industry.
So sit back, a little further back please, and get ready for the attack of the 50 foot
monster mania.
Their razor-sharp teeth can rip the flesh from your bones.
Their deadly claws will snap you in half.
Their giant feet are coming to crush your city, so lock your doors and prepare yourself
for a show of monumental proportions.
When it comes to terror, it doesn't get much bigger than this.
Throughout history, mankind has conjured images of giant creatures.
Some have been benevolent spirits sent by the gods to guide or protect us, but most
have worn the face of destruction.
One of the things that having a giant monster does is it makes us all feel that we have
a common enemy, and it actually draws us together.
The advent of the motion picture created a new arena in which people could share and
explore their fears and fantasies.
At the turn of the century, French magician turned filmmaker George Milliez was astounding
audiences with his motion picture illusions.
For his 1912 film, Conquest of the Pole, Milliez built one of the cinema's first giant monsters.
In this short fantasy adventure film, a group of explorers travels to the North Pole.
Upon their arrival, they meet up with a horrifying creature of the ice.
The evil specter rises from the frozen depths, angry and enormous, but in spite of their
efforts to subdue the monster, one of the adventurers is consumed.
The rest are left trembling in fear.
In the end, however, man triumphs over monster.
Movies were such a novelty that George Milliez's films were, in a sense, the first cinema rides,
which some may argue is very weak on story and characters, but delivers far more than
the usual film in terms of special effects.
Equally fascinating, but far less frightful, was this early creation by American animator
Windsor McKay.
A former cartoonist for the New York Herald, McKay brought film animation to a new level.
Over 10,000 drawings were needed to bring Gertie the dinosaur to life.
Gertie proved a huge hit when McKay incorporated the film into his vaudeville act.
Windsor McKay himself rides on Gertie's back in an ingenious blend of animation and real
life action.
But it was trailblazing filmmaker Willis O'Brien who added a whole new dimension to movie monsters
when he applied the basic methods of animation to three dimensional objects.
Willis O'Brien is considered the father of stop motion animation.
He did The Lost World way back in 1925, which was about dinosaurs.
He made stars of the dinosaurs.
People remember the dinosaurs, but they don't remember who was in the picture.
Based on Arthur Conan Doyle's classic novel, The Lost World followed a group of explorers
to a land of huge and terrifying prehistoric creatures.
The Lost World is very important in the history of this type of movie because it established
two basic themes.
One is the theme of the idea of people going to a place, whether it's an island, a mountaintop.
In this case it was a plateau where prehistoric monsters still exist, still roam.
It was also the first movie to have a giant monster, in this case a huge dinosaur, attacking
a modern day city.
So it was from this one movie that stemmed all the films that followed, The King Kongs,
The Godzillas, etc.
The Lost World was also the first movie in which dinosaurs were portrayed accurately
based on what scientific information they had available at the time.
And if you put it in the perspective of when it was made and what was known back in 1925
and you think of all the years that have followed and all the movies that have been made during
those years, it's still one of the only movies ever made to portray their prehistoric creatures
in a realistic light based on what was known at the time.
The Lost World was a box office sensation.
But it took the teaming of Willis O'Brien with producer Marion C. Cooper and director
Ernest B. Schoedsack to bring audiences the greatest giant monster film to date, King
Kong.
My first interest in animation, I blame onto an old film called King Kong, which was the
original 1933 version.
I walked into Grandma's Chinese Cinema on Hollywood Boulevard and I haven't been the
same since.
So that shows how influential a film can be.
He was a king and a god in the world he knew.
But now he comes to civilization, merely a captive.
Look at Kong, the eighth wonder of the world.
Willis O'Brien gave King Kong an enormous amount of character.
Kong was misunderstood, he was brought out of his environment so you can't blame him
for doing a little destruction.
He's a star of Hollywood and he was just a little figure about 18 inches high covered
with rabbit fur.
Kong's lifelike personality was created through a process called stop motion animation in
which a model such as this original 18 inch version of King Kong is painstakingly moved
one frame at a time.
King Kong was so popular that despite the enormous effort involved in creating the special
effects, a sequel was rushed into production and released later that same year.
Having captured the public's imagination, Kong proved to be more than just a movie monster.
Now a cultural icon, the screen giant became a king of movie merchandise as well.
Over the years, Kong's stature grew ever larger and so did his ability to sell products.
If you've been looking high and low for a big car as good as a Volkswagen, maybe you
should look into our big car, the Volkswagen 411.
It has some things no Volkswagen ever had, like four big doors and lots of room and luxury
for the whole family.
So now, there's a Volkswagen big enough for just about everyone.
On the heels of King Kong's blockbuster success came a number of lower budget science fiction
serials.
But rather than employ the painstaking stop motion techniques of Willis O'Brien, the makers
of these Saturday afternoon kitty matinees used real lizards covered with makeup.
The results were often less than convincing.
They were playing mostly to kids between eight and 16 who just enjoyed that kind of somewhat
silly, exciting, fast paced sort of adventure.
Faced with the challenge of producing a serial week after week, filmmakers had to work fast
and cheap.
No one doubted that stop motion animation would have been more convincing, but real
lizards were far less expensive.
Perhaps even more threatening than giant gorillas and lizards was a giant human.
Dr. Cyclops was made by Ernest B. Schoedsack who had done King Kong, and I think the idea
was initially essentially to do a King Kong like picture where instead of having a giant
monster you have tiny people being threatened by a regular sized person who then, relatively
speaking, becomes a giant monster.
To them, a crocodile becomes as huge as a prehistoric monster, a rifle as unwieldy as
a siege gun.
A landmark of the genre, Dr. Cyclops flawlessly blended rear screen projection and other proven
techniques with innovative new special effects.
What are you going to do?
As you and your fellows develop toward normal size, you will again interfere with my work,
and that is something which I cannot permit.
Ironically, the David and Goliath-like plot of Dr. Cyclops seemed to mirror the escalating
conflict in Europe, but the giant monsters of Hollywood paled in comparison to the horrors
of the Second World War, and for the next few years, America's nightmares came not
from the silver screen, but rather from mankind itself.
Japan has surrendered and their jubilation around this earth.
With the Allied victory in 1945, the monster genre was reawakened.
Hollywood's first post-war giant hit the theaters in 1949.
Mighty Joe Young was a movie monster in the classic King Kong mold.
Here's the kind of movie you're waiting to see as John Ford and Mirian C. Cooper present
Mighty Joe Young, whose sensational exploits will startle you, thrill you, electrify you
with hair-raising excitement and suspense.
See Mighty Joe Young as he savagely resists capture in his native Africa.
One of the great periods in my life was to be able to work with Willis O'Brien when
he started Mighty Joe Young.
I was with him when he started his first sketch of the gorilla, of what it would look like
and its relation to the person.
I gave him a lot of character by having him pound the ground every time he was angry.
Though the film's stop-motion effects were the best yet produced, audiences found Mighty
Joe Young to be more sweet than scary.
But it took a blast of cataclysmic proportions to bring the horror back to gigantism.
What terrified us now was the threat of Armageddon and the devastating forces that science had
unleashed.
I think the bomb really indicated that we had the power to eliminate ourselves.
We had the power to destroy the world.
And I think it changed the view that we have about violence and power.
The bomb meant you could have the power to destroy large populations.
In the 50s, with all the atomic stuff, that was a pretty scary time.
I can remember, in school even, where you did the thing where a bomb goes up, the atomic
bomb goes off, and you jump under your chairs.
I think that's really going to help you a lot.
You'll just be cooked under there, but at least you'll be under the chair.
With the possibility of annihilation looming over the nation, the monster genre was reborn
with the creation of the atomically mutated beast.
I think the bomb shook us up.
I think what it also did, it created a great understanding of genetics.
And where there's genetics, there's mutations.
Things can go wrong.
There was some science actually backing this up.
So when you mix bomb, genetics, DNA all together, it's a great setting from which to create
mutated monsters.
But whether it was the pitfalls of a new technology or space invaders, fear was at an all-time
high.
Radiation was used primarily as a pretext.
It was so permeated into the culture of the time that people didn't think in terms of
electricity, which is what created the monsters back in the 30s and the 40s.
They thought of radiation.
It was bigger and more powerful than electricity and scarier because unlike electricity, which
you control by flicking a switch, radiation is out of control.
Nobody knew what it did.
The world had become a warped, bizarre place.
Where the war was cold, the atom huge, and like small insects, paranoia was growing.
Perhaps Americans couldn't define these fears, but Hollywood could.
These movies had teenagers screaming across the nation and reveling in the golden age
of the giant monster.
Seemed to me that the films went wild on mutation.
We had giant ants, we had giant bugs, we had giant frogs.
Everything was gigantism for a while, all blamed at the foot of nuclear power.
The isotope triggered our nutrients into a nightmare.
A blunder that transformed a tiny insect into the hundred foot spider that was now ravaging
the panic-stricken countryside.
A lot of these films, it was like watch out for what you're doing, don't carry stuff
too far.
Most of the scientists in the sci-fi movies of the 50s were like crazy guys experimenting
with atomic stuff.
How many big giant bugs did you have on account of setting off the atomic bombs in the desert?
There were tons of movies made that way.
Another message was watch out, mankind is doomed if you don't.
And I think a lot of it was due to atomic energy stuff, because at that time it was
still very mysterious.
Unfortunately animals and insects weren't the only ones affected by our nuclear fallout.
Human molecules proved to be just as vulnerable.
In the 1957 film, The Incredible Shrinking Man, an American vacationer undergoes a gradual
yet terrifying transformation after being exposed to a mysterious radioactive mist.
There's no medical precedent for what's happening to you.
I simply know that you're getting smaller.
That's impossible.
X-rays prove it beyond any doubt.
I felt puny and absurd, a ludicrous midget, easy enough to talk of soul and spirit and
essential worth, but not when you're three feet tall.
I loathe myself, our home, the caricature my life with Lou had become.
I had to get out.
Strikingly imaginative, the film managed to turn even ordinary objects into a source of
danger.
What happens with The Incredible Shrinking Man is you see a gradual process of someone
who gets smaller and smaller, and as you get smaller and smaller, the chance that you could
fall through the cracks really hits a nerve that many people can relate to.
You don't have to be small in size to have that fear that you can fall through the cracks
of this world, and so there's a lot of identification with the vulnerability of that person.
The following year, American International Pictures and producer Bert I. Gordon created
their own tale of people surviving under reduced circumstances with Attack of the Puppet People.
Why, I'm your friend.
If you were cute and little like this, you'd naturally fear a man six times your size.
He said tonight he was going to kill us all.
See, Attack of the Puppet People.
Bert I. Gordon also produced and directed two more films for AIP, exploring the question
does size really matter?
The Amazing Colossal Man and its sequel, War of the Colossal Beast, concern Army Officer
Glenn Manning, who is horribly burned in an atomic test.
He not only heals overnight, but begins growing at a rate of 10 feet per day.
The Colossal Man is loose in Los Angeles.
Like many films of the 1950s, the movie resolved itself with an electrifying death scene that
shocked the monster as well as the audience.
At the climactic moment, the movie switched to full color.
But for real fireworks, nothing could be worse than cheating on a spouse, especially one
that's nine times your size.
Once a normal, voluptuously beautiful woman, she drove into a nightmare of horror.
In 1958, allied artists countered AIP's Colossal Man by giving equal rights to Attack of the
50-foot Woman.
The film starred Alison Hayes as a woman whose genetic balance is altered in an alien encounter.
Not only does she grow in size, but her jealousy grows to match.
By
the late 1950s, drive-in theaters became increasingly popular, and movie monsters began turning
up all across the country.
For couples on a date, there was no better excuse than terror to seek comfort in each
other's arms.
These high-concept, low-budget monster pictures were rarely believable, but it didn't matter.
Teenagers couldn't get enough.
The kids that went to see these just ate them up.
I mean, they couldn't make them fast enough, and they made a ton of those things throughout
the 50s.
There were just tons of them.
In 1958, Burt I. Gordon brought teens, giant monsters, and rock and roll together in Earth
Versus the Spider.
Life, I can't see.
Are you okay, Carol?
I think so.
What's that noise?
Mike, what is it?
Clutch, Mike!
I got it!
Now what?
There's a rubber glove.
Put it on!
Much like War of the Colossal Beast, the movie has an electrifying climax.
The Spider is killed when a live power line is attached to its web.
But while mutant spiders seem to be the most prolific monster of the Atomic Age, they were
by no means the most popular.
That distinction belonged to one creature alone, a Japanese import who burst onto the
scene like a wave of destruction.
Bigger, meaner, and almost as noisy as the atomic blast that created him, Godzilla became
an immediate cultural icon.
It's interesting that the impetus in Godzilla is more on the destruction he causes and the
attitude of the people toward this destruction than it is toward the fact that they have
this giant dinosaur stomping around in their city.
For the Japanese, they really have had destruction like that.
Unlike the painstakingly animated creatures of Willis O'Brien, Godzilla was portrayed
by an actor in a rubber suit.
I think there's something about a guy just plodding around in a monster suit sometimes
that's really got a charm to it.
It's got a feeling that's really kind of fun.
You know it's a guy in a suit running around, but you don't care.
Much of the success of the Godzilla films was due to their striking use of detailed
miniatures which Godzilla angrily stomped and burned.
Our own complicity in the monster's existence made it a little easier to forgive his destructive
rampages.
In fact, over the years, Godzilla came to be viewed more as a hero than a menace.
The success of Godzilla led to a series of other Japanese monster movies such as Rodan,
Ghidra, and a winged Avenger named Mothra.
More benevolent than destructive, Mothra returned in numerous Japanese monster films, often
doing battle with Godzilla.
Despite their rather crude special effects, Japanese monster films struck a chord around
the world and became one of the country's chief cultural exports.
In 1962, giant monster fans had their greatest dream realized in what was surely the battle
of the century.
King Kong vs. Godzilla.
Pitting legend against legend, this matchup had all the drama of professional wrestling
and about as much credibility.
To audiences, it didn't seem to matter who won, as long as lots of real estate got trampled.
For nearly half a century, Godzilla has proven to be unstoppable.
With over 20 films to his credit and more than 200,000 fan club members around the world,
the rampaging reptile has become an enduring emblem of Japanese pride.
Halfway across the globe, British filmmakers tried to horn in on Japan's top monster with
a Godzilla-like creation of their own.
Gargo is one of the best giant monster movies.
Gargo has an interesting distinction, as it turns out Gargo is in fact a baby.
His mommy comes up out of the Irish Sea and takes Gargo away and they walk off back down
the Thames with everybody saying, well, I'm glad they're leaving.
Having taken on Tokyo, the British next tried to topple America's box office king.
Though undeniably campy, these bargain-bin horror films had a laughability factor that
gave them a certain charm.
There's a huge monster gorilla that's constantly growing to outlandish proportions, loosing
the streets.
While some monster movies took their inspiration from classic films, others were inspired
by historical events.
The Land Unknown was said to be based on Admiral Byrd's expedition to the South Pole, but it
was a loose adaptation to say the least.
Unchained since prehistoric times, the Land Unknown, could man have survived in the dinosaur
age of mighty monsters?
Shudder at history's most ferocious killer, Tyrannosaurus Rex, huge carnivorous man-eating
plants.
The incredible water monster, Elasmosaurus.
While Hollywood churned out these low-tech treats, Ray Harryhausen single-handedly brought
the giant monster genre to a new level of sophistication.
Harryhausen is really important because what he did was just as Willis O'Brien inspired
him as a kid, he inspired a whole generation of people.
He was like a primary force.
I don't think anybody in this world can say enough positive things about Ray Harryhausen.
Having learned his craft from Willis O'Brien during the filming of Mighty Joe Young, Harryhausen
brought both his talent and imagination to the animation in The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms.
I was offered The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms and of course the first remark was, we don't
have very much money but we want to put something important on the screen.
I think The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms cost about $200,000 and you can't even buy a costume
today for that.
I cut as many corners as I could so they wouldn't show and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms became
a cult film.
Many fans think it's our best picture.
The picture was well received and it looked much more expensive than it was.
While the film may have only cost $200,000 to make, it grossed more than $5 million,
setting the financial precedent for monster films to come.
A tidal wave of terror engulfs the screen as a raging monster from the dawn of creation
attacks the world of man.
1958's It Came From Beneath the Sea held even more creative challenges for Ray Harryhausen.
His budget was so low that instead of having a giant octopus he had a quintipus because
he couldn't afford to put the extra tentacles on so he had five tentacles instead of eight.
They were trying to shoot footage on the Golden Gate Bridge and the city fathers of San Francisco
wouldn't allow that.
They didn't want anybody to think that their bridge could get destroyed by a giant octopus
so they actually snuck all this footage and used them as background plates.
Harryhausen's next film left the era of atomic mutation behind.
The airship XY-21, which crashed into the Mediterranean Sea on the 11th, was a single
stage astral propelled rocket launched 13 months ago from a site within the United States.
The rocket, with its complement of 17 men, had landed on the planet Venus.
Venus?
The planet Venus?
Some of you may also have heard the story of a monster now confined here in Rome Zoo.
That beast is from Venus.
Twenty million miles to Earth featured a hideous and destructive monster brought to life with
terrifying realism by Harryhausen.
But of all the Harryhausen creatures, none were as spectacular as the ones created for
his films based on ancient mythology.
I got tired of destroying New York.
I got tired of destroying Washington with Earth versus the flying saucers and San Francisco
we pulled down the Golden Gate Bridge.
It got rather repetitious.
So I was looking for a new outlet for stop motion animation.
This medium seemed to be just made for mythology and the so-called fairy tale.
So I looked through all the mythology books and finally I came across Sinbad who personifies
adventure.
Journey to a magical time when demons and heroes battled for the golden treasures and
human spoils of forgotten kingdoms.
One Voyage of Sinbad was to the 50s generation, what King Kong was to the 30s and what the
Lost World was to the 20s.
That was the primo giant monster movie.
Taking the best from classic old films like King Kong and Mighty Joe Young, Harryhausen
brought new life to stories which were thousands of years old and created monsters that were
like nothing ever seen before.
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad turned the world around.
People had not seen anything like that in years there or anything remotely like that.
And what he did in the next few years spoke to the hearts of children the world over and
I think has changed the direction of movies.
The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.
She was once a beautiful princess, the sadistic magician shrinks her to the size of a tiny
doll and now Sinbad must destroy a legion of hell spawned monsters to save her.
See the attack of the giant two headed bird, see the spectacular battle between the one
eyed cyclops and the fire breathing dragon.
In 1963, Harryhausen topped the success of Sinbad with the even more spectacular Jason
and the Argonauts.
Now from the makers of Sinbad, Columbia Pictures presents Jason and the Argonauts, the mightiest
band of warriors the world has ever known.
The next step was the legends of Greece.
After we made Sinbad, we made Jason and the Argonauts.
Sailing to the ends of the earth, caught in the clutches of the towering bronze giant
Talos, taming vulture as harpies, facing the dreaded seven headed hybrid, battling the
merciless army of skeletons, Jason and the Argonauts, the search that became a legend.
In 1966, Ray Harryhausen returned to his prehistoric roots with a remake of 1940's One Million
Years B.C.
When the earth parted and the mountains fell, primitive man and monstrous beasts fought
against each other to inherit the earth.
See the fascinating strange and fearful creatures who roamed and ruled the earth a million years
B.C.
In the film, Harryhausen blended live action lizards with his traditional stop motion creatures
to give new life to this classic theme.
The Pterodactyl, a flying reptile with giant teeth.
But this time, Harryhausen's effects were not the only attraction for audiences.
Introducing the fabulous Raquel Welch, the sensational star discovery of this or any
other year in One Million Years B.C.
Ray Harryhausen's effect on movie makers and just regular people cannot possibly be overestimated.
He may be the greatest single individual other than Walt Disney to have had an impact on
the way people view fantasy films.
During the 1960s, other filmmakers were also inspired by literature and myth.
Based on a novel by Jules Verne, Henry Levin's Journey to the Center of the Earth concerns
a group of 19th century explorers on a wild adventure.
One of the highlights of the film was this sequence in which the giant creature emerges
from the earth's core.
Do you realize we know less about the earth we live on than about the stars and the galaxies
of outer space?
The greatest mystery is right here, right under our feet.
Starring Pat Boone, James Mason and Arlene Dahl, the film was nominated for three Academy
Awards, including Best Art Direction and Best Special Effects.
Another classic was brought to the screen when Arthur Conan Doyle's novel The Lost World
was remade in 1960.
The film revisited the theme of an exhibition leading to the discovery of dinosaurs.
Douglas O'Brien was hired to supervise the special effects.
O'Brien had hoped to pattern the new monsters after his remarkable animated dinosaurs used
in the first silent version of The Lost World.
But much to O'Brien's disappointment, the new film used actual reptiles magnified on
screen to giant proportions.
I knew it!
A dinosaur!
I don't believe it.
And what will they say to this at home?
They'll say you're a liar and a charlatan.
In the face of Malone's photographs?
Fakes they'll say, fakes.
The film was kind of a disappointment to Willis O'Brien because he'd made his life
career off doing these stop motion dinosaurs that looked very realistic.
First of all they looked like dinosaurs, they didn't look like lizards, and he could have
them do whatever he wanted through moving them a frame at a time and shooting a frame
of film.
I think it was kind of a heartbreak for Willis O'Brien to have to use lizards when he knew
he could have been doing so much better.
The film is notable, however, as producer Irwin Allen's first foray into the big special
effects film genre.
Throughout the 1960s, Irwin Allen's name became synonymous with popular science fiction
entertainment, full of adventure, high tech visuals, and larger than life monsters.
In 1961, following the success of The Lost World, Allen produced the underwater adventure,
The Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea.
Three years later, Allen reincarnated his hit film into an equally exciting and successful
TV series.
Look at it.
It's a giant.
As far as the giant monsters go, I think Irwin Allen probably did more of them collectively
than anybody else.
Almost every week on Voyage or one of these shows he had a giant octopus or a walking
mummy or an alien or something or other.
Each episode featured impressive special effects.
Seen here in this rare behind the scenes footage is just one of Irwin Allen's unique miniature
props.
Yeah, little kids who saw those shows loved them because they were full of monsters.
They wanted to see big people in weird suits grabbing onto the sea view and shaking it.
Lost in Space followed in 1965 with a galaxy of strange and amazing extraterrestrials including
the Boulder Hurling Cyclops.
But Irwin Allen's most significant contribution to the giant genre appeared in 1968 with the
wildly inventive Land of the Giants.
Set in the future, the series marooned human travelers on a planet similar to Earth with
one very big difference.
Their lives were constantly threatened by oversized men, animals and children.
Land of the Giants pilot episode was the most expensive TV show ever made up to that time.
Although the technique of combining oversized props with rear screen projection was not
new, Irwin Allen nevertheless turned cinematic tradition into a pop culture art form.
He had a handle on what the audience loved to see I think.
He was pretty much a visionary.
Look at the TV shows that he did, Lost in Space and Land of the Giants.
I watched all those shows.
I always watch them.
I still look at them today.
With motion pictures, TV shows and magazines like famous monsters of film land fueling
the fire, the giant monster craze blazed across America.
Boys and girls played games and built models of their favorite monsters.
Although children's fascination for movie creatures seemed tireless, among older audiences
Hollywood's usual special effects seemed to be losing their luster.
Having explored the world from every angle, size and perspective, it was time for something
new.
In 1966, Fantastic Voyage introduced us to gigantic terrors never before seen.
But this time, the monsters weren't animals or aliens.
They were cells of the human body.
The movie was aimed at adults with a taste for the psychedelic.
It was sort of a groundbreaking film.
We did lots and lots of things for the first time.
A lot of effects were sort of dreamed up on that set.
There is a sequence in the picture in which the antibodies, which are the great threat,
come and glue themselves onto people.
We had sort of plastic antibodies which came zooming through, all done in reverse motion,
you understand.
I mean, that's the way we finally figured out how you can do this.
We tried throwing them at people, didn't stick and stuff like that.
And finally what we did, all the scenes were done in reverse.
When Fantastic Voyage came out, I had seen it and my wife asked me, what would you like
to do for your birthday?
And I said, well, I've got about 55 friends around town, I'd like to see them, see the
picture with me.
I was glorying in every gasp and every applause, but yeah, I loved Fantastic Voyage.
But with no new techniques being developed, the special effects genre was coming to a
standstill.
Audiences found these films less and less believable.
Old school science fiction films like Bill Rebane's The Giant Spider Invasion found a
limited audience in 1975.
Equally disappointing was Bird Eye Gordon's adaptation of the H.G. Wells novel Food of
the Gods.
Now, American International Pictures brings this most incredible H.G. Wells science fiction
classic to the screen, The Food of the Gods.
The giant monster movie seemed to be growing smaller with each passing year.
By now, it had been reduced to showcasing little more than unsophisticated special effects,
poor dialogue, and obvious exploitation.
I want you to make love to me.
It is crazy, isn't it, at a time like this?
Will H.G. Wells' most frightening prediction in The Food of the Gods also prove accurate?
Think about it.
Despite the film's heavy promotion, audiences didn't bite.
And Hollywood's big budget remake of King Kong was also disappointing.
Instead of the landmark special effects promised by producer Dino De Laurentiis, most scenes
in the film featured makeup artist Rick Baker in a gorilla costume.
Some science fiction filmmakers were beginning to wonder if giant monsters were doomed to
extinction.
But even as these creatures seemed to be taking their last gasp, the dying genre was resurrected
by a new generation of Hollywood visionaries.
With the release of Star Wars in 1977 came a renewed interest in fantasy films and state
of the art special effects wizardry.
Until now, even the most innovative effects movies were limited to methods like blue screen,
stop motion animation, and puppetry.
But the digital age has brought sweeping change.
Special effects artists raised on the work of Erwin Allen and Ray Harryhausen are now
able to take the best of the past and combine it with the unlimited visual potential of
CGI, creating new giants and whole new worlds for mankind to battle and explore.
In 1997, Paul Verhoeven's thriller Starship Troopers pushed the envelope of computer-generated
effects.
Ironically, the film itself was an intentional throwback to the mutant insect movies of the
1950s.
Saying that Starship Troopers was an attempt to revive the giant bug thing from the 50s
is exactly accurate.
I happen to know the producer and the writer, and that is precisely what they had in mind.
They wanted to do a giant bug movie only half soldiers fight the giant bugs.
And I both remembered reading Heinlein's novel back in the early 60s, and they said, gee,
maybe we could turn that into the movie, use that as the basis.
And that's definitely an attempt to revive the giant bug movie.
That same year, Walt Disney Studios revived another monster, the giant gorilla.
In its 1998 remake of Mighty Joe Young, a classic film gets a digital update.
The film ingeniously blends contemporary computer-generated images with more traditional special effects
techniques.
Once again, the incomparable Rick Baker is responsible for creating the lifelike gorilla
costume.
One successful picture will stimulate a whole series of other pictures.
Of course, the CGI is so flexible and a marvelous tool to have in filmmaking today that it continues
to breed the so-called destruction pictures and monster pictures.
We have come full circle, in a sense, from where Millier introduced us to effects and
effects ride at the turn of the century.
We are back at that same point.
The movies being made today have a science-fictional content, have the same sort of appeal to mass
audiences as films that Millier made at the turn of the century.
As we enter the 21st century, what will our greatest fears be?
And what new monsters will we create to manifest them?
In the nearly 100 years since Millier's Arctic Monster, movie makers have brought countless
amazing creatures to the silver screen.
No doubt the next century will bring surprises and horrors that we can scarcely imagine.
So much the better, because the best monster is one audiences don't expect.
We don't see it coming, even when it's 50 feet tall.
We don't see it coming, even when it's 50 feet tall.
We don't see it coming.