Ray Harryhausen

Stop motion was a dominant form of animation when I was growing up. It infiltrated so many shows and movies of my childhood in large and small ways - Star Wars, Vision On, Sesame Street, Land of the Lost, and ultimately Clash of the Titans, the final great show reel of the movie making genius of Ray Harryhausen. My first encounter with Harryhausen's work had been a TV clip of Jason and the Argonauts' famous skeleton fight - still an effective and masterfully-choreographed mix of live action and animation. You've seen it - of course you have. Let's all watch it again:




Classic work, with some assured, slight, genius touches 'humanising' the bony killers - I love the occasional cutaway to those oddly expressive and malevolent grinning skulls, the deft wall vault one makes around the 2:45 mark, and of course that initial baleful scream - in my opinion much mimicked (on more than one occasion by Sam Raimi's Evil Dead and Xena franchises) but never equaled.

Of course Ray Harryhausen's work amounts to more than a standard Basic D&D level party melee, although you can be sure that a fair few skeleton encounters in my D&D playing games were based on that encounter and replayed in my head as a variation thereof. Surely that scene is why living skeletons are in the game to begin with? Speaking of which, surely, once again, there is a causal link between Golden Voyage of Sinbad's animated murderous ship figurehead and a similar murderous ship's figurehead in (SPOILERS!) AD&D Adventure Vault of the Drow. Even in my teens and pre-Jurassic Park the dinosaurs we encountered in our games were the stop motion monsters of Valley of Gwanji (still a favourite - somebody remake it. No, on second thoughts don't!), and though my adolescent adventurers never encountered a colossal Iron Golem, you can bet I'd have visualised it as Talos.

There are a lot of posts on the Internet about Harryhausen's effect as a movie pioneer and the filmmakers he inspired. I don't think there are as many championing his ability to penetrate the imagination. His work could amuse, enthrall, emote and horrify - the latter being ably exemplified in this sequence from my only big screen Harryhausen viewing (but it was a good one), 1982's Clash of the Titans' Medusa battle:


Probably a good ten years ago some friends and I revisited and experienced again Ray Harryhausen's entire oeuvre. Great early evenings of a mad scrabble from the office to the cable car and up to a viewing at VUW's AV suite. The movies were old and increasingly cheesy (particularly the Sinbad series), but made all the more enjoyable - the best viewing yet, in the company of friends.

Thanks for the thrills, Ray.

Minty Fresh!

Well, it's finally here - Judge Minty, the not-for-profit Dreddverse fan film, all 27 minutes of it which you can view on a lot of blogs, YouTube, and through the embed here:

I'm mightily impressed. For a low budget film it looks very slick (if a little loose towards the end), and its dedication to the world of Dredd and Wagner and McMahon's vision is absolutely second to none. Here's the comic strip Judge costume done in a believable way, with a modernised Lawgiver and, once again, the Lawmaster bike true to the comic original.

There's lots here for the die-hard fan - cameos and shout-outs to such Dredd legends as Otto Sump, Skysurfers, Judge Anderson, Judge Pal, the Aggro-Dome, not to mention a not-too bad realisation of the Gila Munja, humanoid reptile assassins who changed their appearance a few times over the lifetime of the comic. I loved the visual nods to the strip, too - the 'No Law' sign of course, but also a stricken Land Raider - very nice CG, all told.

A Kickstarter for a sequel is, as I understand it, not in the offing due to the rights to the character and universe being in the hands of Rebellion and the strip's creators, but that aside it's really very very cool that the same people have rallied behind the film, put in a lot of good words and promotion for it and generally given it the thumbs up. After the disappointment of Dredd 3D's reception it's nice to now the faith is still strong.

So, lads. How about a Helltrekker story next time, eh?

Oaken's Twelve coda: Dain Nainsson

With the Company of Thorin Oakenshield done, there's now only one remaining Dwarf from The Hobbit to cover.

Well, there is Thrain, Thorin's father, but Dain is the last Dwarf to make a personal appearance in the story, and despite its fleeting nature, he is kind of a big deal. John Rateliff calls Dain son of Nain the sine qua non of Dwarves, and identifies in his personality and actions everything that Thorin ought to have been but fails to be either through his own rashness or the growing dragon-sickness once Smaug's treasure is recovered. Dain proves himself patient, diplomatic and well-resourced. As later King Under the Mountain he is a generous ruler, dispensing treasure to those promised and forging new alliances with his neighbours. All of this important to recognise because, as mentioned above, Dain's role in The Hobbit is not too obvious compared to Thorin's, and it's not hard to see his late appearance and triumph as usury if not also something of a cheat on top of Thorin's sacrifice.

Dain is therefore a complicated character, but for all that is easier to read if face value can be relied on - his influence lies beyond the story of The Hobbit as well, with Gandalf recalling his part in the War of the Ring alongside Bard's descendant Brand of Dale, and we can infer that he refuses Balin's request to attempt to re-take Moria - once again proving that he is a Dwarf of some wisdom. 

All of which gives me some pause when I anticipate Peter Jackson's version of Dain, to be portrayed by Billy Connolly.Seriously, he comes into the story riding a giant boar with a mohawk (Dain I mean, not the boar, mind you...)? This is going to be distracting, I can tell. And it's not as if Jackson has been the first to cast Dain as a Dwarven 'Hard-Ass' (even if the aforementioned vision sounds the most GW-inspired of all the Hobbit trilogy's visualisations). Here's GW's War of the Ring-era Dain, squeezed into their licence by virtue of the LotR Appendices:

I painted that five or six years ago, based on GW's own catalogue picture; but I've no desire to commit to this figure being Dain - he just doesn't feel like Dain to me. He's just a well 'ard Dwarf with a big axe.

This is my Dain, comprising nearly as much green stuff as the Bombur conversion, including chain mail, cloak, braids, hands and his base - which I'm really quietly proud of as it used up a heck of a lot of old rolled up green stuff scraps.yes, I know. I'm stingy with my supplies!

 

Here's the original Dwarf Warrior from GW's 'Khazad Dum' expansion of their Rings movie licensed line:

Note the beard tucked into the belt? That was a big factor in picking this pose. But add to that Tolkien's own description of the Iron Hill Dwarves (knee-length chain hauberks, braided beards tucked into belts, round shields, and a picture builds as much as a worksheet.

As for the the finished product, the axe, I must point out, is not the figure's original and it was only in seeking a picture of the original model that I realised I could have saved myself a few evenings of work and plastic filing. Oh well. A few colour changes occurred along the way as well - my dain was originally grey-haired with less brass highlighting and more chestnut (I was using his Dain Ironfoot epithet as a design template, basing the palette on metal and rust colours), but decided I wanted more warmth in the figure. He is an old, humane character, and setting him up in such steely colours didn't convey that. Also, it tied in nicely with the other colour clue offered by Tolkien's appendices, his 'red axe' he uses as a very very young warrior avenging his father's death in the Battle of Azanulbizar.

Of course it might not literally be a red axe, more an axe red with the blood of orcs, but it's Tolkien - you take what you can get!

That's it for the upright Dwarves of The Hobbit! There's one last visit I'll make to the members f the Company - well, two at least, and then I'm on to pastures new.

Let's Play...

I've posted this on the Lead Adventure Forum's Mediaeval board, but thought I might spread the net a little wider (by about twelve people perhaps.) A family member has unearthed these figures - a chess set from the mid to late Eighties cast in metal (by the soft appearance I'm guessing a lead alloy as most figures were cast in back in the day), but neither of us know what they are meant to represent or who made them.

Anyone out there have an idea?

League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 1969

The beat goes on...or does it?

By 1969 (Century's second volume) the events of interim adventure The Black Dossier have already played out, Mina and Allan are fugitives from the Government and working for Prospero, Shakespeare’s exiled Duke of Milan now ruling over The Blazing World. Pointedly here is now no ‘League’ as such, all Imperial obligations having been tossed aside with the surviving members near-fugitives themselves and only the Dossier’s eternal wastrel Orlando hanging on, dropping names and changing genders with deliberately tedious regularity. In fact, tedium and the tedium of immortality appear to be a running theme in this trilogy, the three League survivors now being themselves, effectively, immortal and in pursuit of an immortal enemy, Alan Moore’s adopted Aleister Crowley analogue Oliver Haddo, who collects new identities and earthly vessels almost as regularly as Orlando replaces his. The two crucial 'new' allies of the League, Orlando (an immortal and ultimately impotent wreck, deliberately drawn, I'd say) and ‘prisoner of London’ Andrew Norton, (another immortal and cryptic Greek chorus - pointedly also not able to directly intervene in the story) lend another disturbing themes to the Century storyline – impotence. The League are, it would appear, designed to never win, or never achieve a victory that isn't itself Pyrrhic.

And so to Moore’s alternative pulp literature London the league drift, transported by Nemo’s daughter Janni aboard the Nautilus; however as much as stepping off the submarine Mina, Allan and Orlando are also stepping away from the series’ past and the kernel of Moore’s conceit. We’ve already had one out-of-sequence story in The Black Dossier (itself a format-challenging collection of multimedia in-jokes – a 45 rpm record, a Tijuana Bible, Orlando’s randy and bloodthirsty story told as a series of Look and Learn picture stories), now it seems the added conceit (admittedly Moore’s strongest suit in this series) – recreating the world of the past through fictional analogues, has beaten Century’s plotline to near impotence itself. It’s very clever, of course, and Kevin O’Neill’s witty artwork does wonders to mollify the loss of intrigue, but I came away from Century 1969 feeling like I’d read less and merely traipsed along with Mina, Allan and Orlando through a literary Where’s Wally? Which was much of the fun of the original series of course, but by 1969 popular culture is everywhere, more recognisable (I can – only just – say it’s outside my own lifetime) and with its familiarity less exotic. Where in the past there was an intrigue to the inclusion and rubbing of shoulders between Conan Doyle’s Moriarty, Fu Man Chu, Verne’s Nemo and Wells’ Professor Cavor, there’s less surprise and novelty in seeing Thunderbirds’ Parker filling up on a motorway lay-by while Michael Caine’s Jack Carter provides voiceover. Even more, the cameo of Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor passed me by, and I can’t decide whether it’s because he’s already too familiar a face to me as a Doctor Who fan, or because on reflection the brief appearance of a Sixties time traveler in a story about literal time travelers is just not that interesting.

That said, 1969 does at least push the major story line forward in a way, teasing out the series finale by way of another thinly-veiled franchise-bothering character (“My first name’s Tom, my middle name’s a marvel and my last name’s a conundrum.”) Once you’ve reached that point you’ve perused appearances from all James Bonds (a lovely scene, really), Nicholas Roeg’s Performance (every Rutles needs a Stones analogue, naturally), and crucially, a denouement borrowing heavily from the Hyde Park memorial concert for Brian Jones, deftly tying three plot strands together, but stranding the hapless League all the more. It’s a downbeat ending to an important chapter, but I cared less this time around. Where to from here?

Oaken's Twelve: Rounding out the Posse

Naturally, the Company of Oakenshield isn’t complete without a Wizard and a Thief…

My Gandalf and Bilbo figures are, as you might expect, not official Hobbit figures, although they are from Games Workshop’s Tolkien license line. Gandalf is one of five or six metal variants on the character (including two mounted and one on a cart), and is simply the easiest and most appropriate to use. This being a LotR version, there’s no silver scarf as mentioned in the book, but short of making one from green stuff, this will do – the important elements, his hat, staff and sword Glamdring, are present, and you can’t ask better than that.

 

Bilbo, on the other hand, is not Bilbo at all, but Frodo repainted and chosen for his pose and for having his sword/letter-opener Sting in hand. In his other hand ought to be the One Ring on a chain, as supplied by Bilbo himself, but as this was not present in The Hobbit I’ve remodelled things slightly and used the opportunity to include the scarf Bilbo wears in An Unexpected Journey. The green cloak loaned by Dwalin is, of course, not present in the movie (for shame!), but I’m happy to include it here, and the backpack is a nice touch and a happy accident, as the movie most definitely features one. No walking stick as seen on the big screen, however, but I’m not worried.

Bilbo, it has to be said, is not really just Frodo with different coloured hair. That said, I’ve not made any attempts to bulk up this hobbit or change his physique too much, hoping instead that a judicious paint job on his face will soften the more sculpted cheekbones and jawline of Elijah Woods circa 1999 and nod towards something closer to Martin Freeman circa 2011.

My base for Bilbo here incorporates some Mirkwood leaves – using the old modeller’s trick of dried birch seeds. I’ve not mentioned this before, but my original intention with these figure conversions some five years ago was to portray the company as they were making their way through Mirkwood – hence Fili’s grappling hooks, and giving me a reason to keep weapons like bows on the models (bows and knives being the weapons Beorn gives the non-sword-bearing party members in the book.) My birch leaves date from then, so they’re getting pretty withered now, and I’d based the figures originally with medium-grain local beach sand and herbal tea leaves – all of which needed to be scraped off after moth larvae took a shine to the Raspberry Zinger (or whatever it was I’d used.) Gandalf, of course, doesn’t accompany Thorin’s team through Mirkwood, so that idea is now laid to rest.  

And so, with the Company complete, here’s the whole gang gathered at last:

Next time: I’m still not done with Dwarves!

Once on Chunuk Bair

So far as I know there is no Simian family blood in the soil at Gallipoli, nor the Somme.

view of Anzac Cove from Lone Pine

Some families have stories of great heroism in their past; the stories of the Simians' combined families are perhaps more ordinary, somewhat anonymous in their loss - two brothers among the hundred of New Zealand troops killed in the futility of Passchendale, a young Kiwi aboard a bomber shot down over Cologne, each in themselves small incidents in far greater events, but each one a devastating, irreversible blow to our respective families. My Nan kept a picture of her late brother, Sgt Walter Foch Kelcher, in her hallway, and as a young man I fancied I saw some physical resemblance between he and I; we had similar faces and shared the same slightly stocky build. He wasn't a big man, but in the picture stands fit to burst with pride in his RNZAF uniform, the picture taken, I believe, in Canada where he trained for a time.

Walter's name stayed with me through my high school years, listed as it was on my school's roll of fallen old boys in our school hall, surrounded by austere stained-glass windows depicting Richard the Lionheart, and a New Zealand soldier, with the names of our great World War battlefields - Crete, Tunisia, et cetera, winding around him in heraldic tape. Every ANZAC Day the school service would of course feature the head boy reading the long list of the school's fallen, and Walter's name was of course on it - they seldom got the pronunciation right.

It's on my list of things to do, to visit Walter's grave in Reinholt War Cemetary. In its stead, and because Turkey was on our itinerary during our brief overseas holiday thirteen years ago, we visited Gallipoli.

The tour was one of the worst I've been on, a combination of booking mix-ups which had our friendly guide questioning the validity of our presence constantly, and a general lack of knowledge of the area we were visiting (he took us to Troy as well, but coped better with guiding us around the site by reading aloud the English descriptions off the signs posted around the place). Because we were two Kiwis in a tour party of four, however (the other two being Swedes), ANZAC Cove and the Gallipoli Peninsula were ours.

Flagstaffs, Anzac Cove

Which isn't entirely true of course. The Peninsula and its highest point is no more 'owned' today by the people of New Zealand and Australia than it was on 10 August 1915 when it was decisively held by Ataturk, and it's his statue which rightly is posited on Chunuk Bair , and his holding of the point one of the few true victories of the campaign. As much as we believe that the nationhood and identity of New Zealand was born on the slopes of this cratered line of hills, it's also the birthplace of modern Turkey, its general and future leader's decisive moment of valour, now as much dedicated to the man who would free his country from its Ottoman past and bring it into the modern world, and of course it is his words in relief on the shores of ANZAC Cove, among the most eloquent and poignant lines of rhetoric I have ever read.

Ataturk's dedication

Gallipoli today is of course important to Turkey as a tourist destination as much a place of reverence and history. The battlefield museum on its lower slopes is a storehouse of some wretched stories and grim artefacts and remains, dead shells and bullet casings, shreds of cloth and shards of bone, each described on small cards as the belongings or remnants of a "martyr", regardless of its nationality (if ever such things could be determined from the shattered landscape.)

Off-season the battlefield sites are incongruously serene; the day we had set aside was warm, dry and blessed with azure skies a startling contrast to the mingling indigo waters of the Bosphoros and the turquoise Aegean. For all of this the landscape could easily have been that of home - the blasted cliffs of Anzac Cove simply resembled the similarly blasted quarry face of Cape Wanbrow, and I found myself constantly noting mentally that the soil on which I was standing was itself a burial ground, spent lives ploughed over by repeated assaults on the summits, the dry clay holding innumerable stories and pieces of other people's homeland. 

Grave markings on the beach

Also on the beach, a stray dog who knew the tourist market as well. He got some lokum for his trouble (it was all we had!) but looked like he could have used something a little more substantial in his diet.

Reaching Chunuk Bair by van and walking track was perhaps twenty minute's worth, past sites familiar to me from ANZAC Days past - Quinn's Post, Lone Pine, Johnson's Jolly, and the Canterbury Commonwealth Cemetary. Again, no familiar names, and the joshing of local stallsmen plying their wares on the road up to the summit ("why aren't you crying?" "this is a sad place!") was more than a little distracting. On to the top, then, for some peace and quiet and away from the wagons of painted plates and soft drinks.

restored trenches

Once on Chunuk Bair the entire Peninsular is evident, from the Dardanelles to the Aegean, we could apparently see Lesvos on the horizon, a tantalising glimpse of the nearest parts of Greece we'd see. Kicking the shingle at my feet near the Ataturk statute my toe caught a chip of blue-green shell, perhaps abalone, but maybe paua, no doubt left there by a traveler before me. It was utterly silent, and a perfect place for reflection, easily the most distant spot from home I could imagine. Despite there being no family blood spilt there, it's a place I'll not forget, and to which I still feel an eerie attachment.

Blogger and fellow tourists, Chunk Bair, September 2000.