During the deadening nineteen fifties, when oafs were oafs, presidents were non-existant war heroes and teenagers throughout the' land measured their status in terms of the height of their Cuban heels and the amount of grease in their hair, far-sighted Ray Harryhausen was doin’ us all dirt. While Eisenhower innocently played his wellpublicized golf games, young Ray was insidiously setting loose an honest-togod dinosaur in Coney Island. When Tony Bennett was only THINKING of leaving his heart in San Francisco, Harryhausen was already sending in a two hundred foot octopus into town to tear down the Golden Gate Bridge. When the U.S. government hedged on the flying saucer question, balding Ray had a fleet of bona fide saucers crashland in Washington D.C.

Harryhausen lives in a land of fantasy and, through a vast amount of talent and skill, the inspired Mr. H. has chosen to share his world of supernatural craziness with all of us regular mortals through a series of mind boggling films: Jason and The Argonauts, MysteriouJ Island or The 7th Voyage of Sinbad. California-born Ray got his first taste of screen fantasy whilst viewing Willis O’Brien’s mammoth masterpiece, King Kong. Legend has it that Ray has seen the film over one hundred times... and who can argue legend? What King Kong did to Ray, either on the first or fiftieth sittings was get him interested in a monster-making film process called stop motion animation, a movie technique wherein inanimate objects are brought to life via painstakingly slow, frame-byframe exposures in-between miniscule