In a roundabout way, the recent flurry of attention given to stop motion animation as shown so delightfully in the original King Kong, led me to rediscover this childhood favorite from Ray Harryhausen.
Mysterious Island.
Yes, I saw the new King Kong and gave myself over to the suspension of disbelief that it was just pleading for throughout. I got the DVD of the original and was totally sucked in by the documentary about Meriam Cooper, the madman hero who created it. And I got sucked in to all the amazing stuff about the guy who did the special effects. I love this sort of basement ingenuity. Well, Harryhausen was there along with Peter Jackson and crew and I thought of all those great Sinbad movies and I thought of this one.
Well, my wife got me a boxed set for christmas that included this. What I think about to this day is the weird way the giant bee seals the guy and girl in the honeycomb. I was mesmerized as a child. And the bizarre giant freaky chicken creature is just awesome.
But my favorite part of the movie is the world weary Nemo sitting at the organ in the nautilus, contemplating the doom of all his scientific research. Something there still resonates in my imagination. He was the model for something mysterious and powerful. Now I can think of him as a victorian ideal on a par with Sherlock Holmes. Holmes as well has a strange resonance these days. Modern men before modernism.