Swords & Stop-Motion

The tv promos for the upcoming Clash of the Titans remake has got me thinking about the fantasy films of animator Ray Harryhausen and the impact they had on both my love of fantasy and fantasy gaming. The only one of these films I saw in the theater at its original release was Clash of the Titans from 1981, but the others playing as a network TV movies of the week, or on a Saturday afternoon in the early days of cable, were treasured treats. Before the today's digital effects, the stuttering vibrancy of Harryhausen's creations gave the fantastic a weight and reality that cel animation and men in unconvincing suits couldn't hope to match.

Ray Harryhausen got his start on George Pal's Puppetoon shorts. Pal was later to be the animator responsible for effects in 1953's War of the Worlds and 7 Faces of Dr. Lao. Then Harryhausen worked as an assistant to Willis O'Brien, the animator for the original King Kong, on 1949's Mighty Joe Young. In 1953, Harry Harryhausen was the primary animator on his first feature, The Beast from 50,000 Fathoms.

It was in 1958 that Harryhausen made his first fantasy adventure film, and his first foray into the previously unchronicled adventures of Sinbad of 1001 Arabian Nights fame. The 7th Voyage of Sinbad has never held the attraction for me that the seventies Sinbad films do, but it does have a dragon, a two-headed roc, and the iconic goat-legged cyclops.

7th Voyage featured a fight with skeletons, a set-piece Harryhausen would reuse in 1963's Jason and the Argonauts. This one's got an appearance by the Second Doctor, Patrick Troughton, as Phineas, but of course the big stars are the creatures--which include the hydra, the bronze giant Talos, and the harpies. The iconic moment in this film is skeletons sprouting from sown dragon's teeth to fight Jason while Jack Gwillim, as Aeëtes, gleefully overacts.

1973 and 1977 brought us The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, respectively. The Golden Voyage had Danger: Diabolik's John Law in the lead, with the Fourth Doctor, Tom Baker, as an evil wizard, Koura. Depending on how old you were when you saw this, the stop-motion may have taken something of a backseat to the obvious charms of Caroline Munro as the slave-girl, Margiana. Still, it had a griffin, a centaur, and an animated statue of Kali. Eye of the Tiger (no relation to the Survivor song...probably) had Patrick (son of John) Wayne donning the blousy shirt as Sinbad, and doubled the feminine pulchritude with Jane Seymour as Princess Farah, and Taryn Power as Dione. Sinbad and crew go to Hyperborea with an alchemist (Patrick Troughton again) to find a cure for Farah's brother who's been changed into a baboon, by the witch Zenobia who's got a mechanical minotaur called the Minaton. We also get a giant walrus, insectoid ghouls, and a sabretooth tiger.

Harryhausen's heyday came to an end with 1981's Clash of the Titans. Like Jason, this was another foray into Greek mythology, with a few extra-mythic flourishes. Hey, records from that period are spotty at best. Maybe there was a clockwork owl, and a mishapen Calibos? I could do without the neon nimbus around the head of Zeus, though. The coolest thing in Clash has to be the kraken, followed closely by the phrase that heralds his appearances: "Release the kraken!"

By the eighties, stop-motion was beginning to seem quiant, and digital effects were on the horizon. Now we live in an era where whole worlds can be can be created with computer animation, not just individual creatures. I'm by no means a Luddite. I really enjoy digital animation and the vistas it's opened, but I do feel its ease and ubiquity has removed some of the specialness of Harryhausen's and other's stop-motion creations.

When I see a dragon these days, its going to be digital, the only question is its quality. But in the previous era, a dragon could be a bored looking iguana with a fin stuck on its back, or a product of craft and imagination--that was made all the more fantastic because it was unexpected.

Urban Decadence Made Easy

There are a lot great urban settings in fiction--Lankhmar, Shadizar the Wicked, Valkis, the Sprawl, and New Crobuzon, to name a few. As evocative as they are, these dens of iniquity pale against other colorful cities, made all the more interesting because they were real. Lankhmar never had prostitutes that advertised the particular fetish services they offered by various color combinations of boots and lacing, nor does even New Crobuzon sport boy-gangs with costumes like the Indian Chief in the Village People. Weimar Berlin had both. Want a place where adventurers roam streets run by crime-lords with sobriquets like Big Ears Du and Pock-Marked Huang? Look no further than 1930s Shanghai.

These two cities and more are found in two nonfiction resources, which will no doubt inspire in number of details for gaming cities and adventures to have, therein:

1920s Berlin is detailed in all its decadent, cabaret glory in Voluptuous Panic by Mel Gordon. Essentially an R-rated coffee table book (for people with R-rated coffee tables, I suppose) Gordon provides a lot of interesting text, too. He gives, for example, brief dictionaries of underworld slang, and a catalog of types of prostitutes (divided by indoor and outdoor) that's halfway to random encounter table. The focus is mostly on sex, but the expanded edition also has a chapter on the occult underground of the era.

Legendary Sin Cities is the DVD collection of a three-part, 2005 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary. It lacks the detail of Voluptuous Panic, but makes up for it in scope. The three segments cover Paris, Berlin, and Shanghai, roughly over the 1920s and '30s. All three cities were, of course, drenched in vice, but each has its own character--Paris is jazz and art, Berlin is the last party in the looming shadow of Nazism, and Shanghai is a a crime-ridden cultural crossroads. At 210 minutes, the whole series is pretty short but enough to get a feel for the cities it profiles.

There are any number of ways either of these resources could be used to inform gaming. The context and character of the cities could be ported over to a fantasy world with only a little translation, or details could be yanked to add color to an already existing locale, or as a springboard for an adventure.

Regardless of their considerable inspirational value, they're fascinating windows into some interesting places and times.

The Marsh God

The Marsh God is a Sword & Sorcery graphic novel written by Bruce Durham and illustrated by Michael "Mikos" Mikolajczyk.  It's the story of the mercenary, Dalacroy, who's the sole-survivor of an ambush.  In making his way through the marsh, he picks up an escaped slave-girl as a companion, and they soon find themselves facing the sort of dangers that Sword & Sorcery protagonists are called upon to face, including the titular god.

When a friend sent me the link to the graphic novel, I didn't realize untl I began reading the sample that it was an adaption of Durham's short-story I'd read way back in the late, lamented Flashing Swords e-zine, when it was under the editorship of Howard Jones, now of Black Gate Magazine.  "The Marsh God" appeared in issue 2 (one of my humble efforts, "God of the Catacombs," appeared in issue 6--there were a number of "gods" and "marshes" in Flashing Swords).

"The Marsh God" is classic Sword & Sorcery in a Howard-esque vein--no big deviations from the formula, but it does what it does well.  Mikolajczyk's art stumbles at times, but when he's on he's got a nice style more illustratorly than most current comic book artists--somewhat reminiscent of Barry Windsor-Smith in his Conan days.  He obviously put a lot of work into the panels.

If the above sounds good to you, you should check it out.  I recommend it.