That night, the dancing thing grows to giant size and reveals its conceptual kinship with the horned giant in The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. Pendragon shows up in disguise, looking sickly green, at the 18th birthday party of Princess Elaine (Judi Meredith) and presents her with a charming-yet-sinister dancing mechanism in a music box. Pendragon is the family name of King Arthur, but this is never discussed. He also practices tossing back his cape until he’s got it perfect. Set in never-never Cornwall, the film begins by establishing that an evil magician named Pendragon (Thatcher) bides his time in a black castle with hideous goblins and witches and whatnots while scheming to seize the throne. However, the fact that this knock-off is as good as it is, reveals how much the other men contributed to the Sinbad project, and also how Harryhausen’s influence became so positive and pervasive that others learned from his magic.

If the resulting film remains a notch below its inspiration, that can be traced to Harryhausen’s absence. He hired Juran, Matthews, and Thatcher to do more or less what they’d done before. So the first delicious irony is that when Sinbad set the box office on fire, Small decided he wanted something just like that. Driven by the effects of Ray Harryhausen, that blockbuster is a landmark in fantasy cinema.Īccording to critic Tim Lucas’ historical commentary for Jack the Giant Killer, Harryhausen later recalled that when he was shopping his idea, the prolific independent producer Edward Small at United Artists never took his calls.

If you were asked to name a fantasy film driven by wondrous stop-motion effects with Kerwin Mathews as the swashbuckling hero and Torin Thatcher as the magical villain, as directed by Nathan Juran–well, you’d name The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958), and rightly so. Jack the Giant Killer (1962) Director: Nathan Juran These aren’t nostalgia trips for me, as I hadn’t seen them before. These thoughts are inspired by two revelatory Blu-rays from Kino Lorber that constitute rescues of mishandled, little-seen films aimed at Saturday matinee denizens of the Sixties: Nathan Juran‘s Jack the Giant Killer (1962) and Jules Bass‘ The Daydreamer (1966). I’m tempted to look back upon the 1960s and ’70s as a golden era of children’s films in all formats: live-action, traditional animation, stop-motion, effects-driven films, modest character studies, and heady mixtures of all. I confess to some ignorance of what films are made for kids these days beyond a vague notion that they’re all made in 3D animation.

Jack the giant killer musical version