Remembering Ray Harryhausen

This tribute was originally published in May 2013, shortly after the death of the amazing Ray Harryhausen.

A ferocious dinosaur lays siege to a roller coaster on Coney Island. The fearsome Kraken rises from the sea to claim its latest victim. A hapless sailor and his crew battle sword-wielding skeletons.

These movie moments captivated me as a child. Each time a Ray Harryhausen monster took center stage, I would move the rabbit-ear antenna on the old TV in the basement to improve the picture. Even through a haze of static and commercial interruptions, the illusion held sway. I believed.

Harryhausen, the special-effects maestro who died earlier this month at the age of 92, breathed life into all of the above and many more, a pantheon of monsters hatched from mythology and his own fervid imagination.

Without a doubt, Harryhausen’s special effects were the best part of many films with which he was involved. “Jason and the Argonauts,” for example, is a largely tepid affair, a paint-by-numbers, sword-and-sandal epic about the legendary titular explorer’s attempts to find the Golden Fleece and become king of Thessaly. The acting is wooden and the plot virtually nonexistent.

But every 20 minutes or so, the movie blazes to life when a Harryhausen creation saunters into frame: Talos, the bronze giant, voted the second greatest movie monster of all time (behind King Kong); the Hydra, fierce creature with the head of seven snakes; and, of course, a battalion of skeletons, bones clicking and clacking as they attack Jason and his men.

Harryhausen’s effects are cinematic magic at its finest. Using miniature models, he would shoot one frame of film, stop the camera, move the model infinitesimally, and then shoot the next frame, laboriously building the illusion of movement.

Considering that one second of film contains 24 frames, it would take days to yield only a few seconds of usable film, painstaking labor that would be combined later with live-action footage using reverse projection and other techniques. Working within constraints of time and money (there was never enough of either), the man created marvels.

Harryhausen’s biggest influence was the aforementioned “King Kong,” a movie that both he and fantasy author Ray Bradbury (who died last year) saw at impressionable ages. In the book “Kong Unbound,” Harryhausen dubbed it “the greatest fantasy film ever made.” He later would learn its secrets at the feet of stop-motion pioneer Willis O’Brien, the man who animated “Kong.” Harryhausen worked with O’Brien on the original “Mighty Joe Young,” another movie about a large ape whisked away to civilization.

Harryhausen went on to create special effects for many Hollywood productions, including “20 Million Miles to Earth,” “It Came from Beneath the Sea,” “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers” and “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.” “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,” which climaxes with the monster stomping Coney Island, was based on a story by Bradbury and pays homage to the two men’s love of giant monsters.

Harryhausen’s last hurrah was 1981’s “Clash of the Titans,” another romp through mythology. By then, the heyday of stop-motion animation had passed, replaced by a variation called “go motion” that relied on a computer to move the scale models.

“Go motion” itself would have a short shelf life, supplanted by full computer animation 10 years later in “Jurassic Park.” Today, stop-motion, when it is used at all, is done to invoke nostalgia.

Yet there is still much to recommend the earlier method. The herky-jerky look of stop-motion -- with puppets manipulated by hand, inflating and deflating bladders hidden inside to simulate breathing -- infuses a sense of personality in the finished effect that is sometimes lacking in more seamless computer animation.

Just as King Kong reflects the scrappy nature of O’Brien, the many creatures animated by Harryhausen reflect what I imagine to be his ferocious desire to overwhelm the audience, to make them gasp or smile or shriek.

And, above all, to make them believe.


chris.schillig@yahoo.com @cschillig on Twitter

Coaches, teachers can take a knee for many reasons

Instead of talking about the one it got wrong last week, let’s talk about the one it got right this week.

The Supreme Court ruled Monday that a former football coach in Washington had the right to pray on the 50-yard line at the end of each game.

From 2008 to 2015, Joseph Kennedy was an assistant coach at Bremerton High School, near Seattle. For years, he took a knee at the conclusion of games, often with players in attendance. He also led students in prayer in the locker room.

When the district became aware of Kennedy’s practice, administrators asked him not to pray when it interfered with his job duties and not to include students.

A USA Today story notes the district gave him options for other, more private places to pray, but Kennedy said they were “insanely far away” from his players. He also said he never asked students to join him. While he did stop praying in the locker room, he continued on the 50-yard line. The district eventually placed him on administrative leave.

In 2016, his contract was nonrenewed for failure to adhere to school policy and failure to supervise players after the game. In the lawsuit that followed, lower courts ruled in favor of the school district, indicating that Kennedy’s First Amendment rights had not been violated.

The Supreme Court’s overturning of these decisions may appear to weaken the separation of church and state, but the ruling is very narrow and nuanced. Indeed, it could even be used as justification for other, non-religious demonstrations of advocacy by teachers and coaches, provided students aren’t compelled to take part.

A few points worth noting:

Kennedy should not have prayed in the locker room with student-athletes. The fact that this behavior wasn’t included in the lawsuit indicates both he and his lawyers knew it was legally indefensible. There is a difference between a mandatory locker-room huddle and an optional end-of-game custom.

If Kennedy compelled players to join him on the 50-yard line (or anywhere else), this too would have been wrong. Both he and the district agreed he never asked students to do so. Some parents say differently, that players felt required to attend or risk loss of playing time.

Admittedly, I don’t know many football coaches, but given the few I do, I’m comfortable saying they will start whoever gives them the best chance for a win, regardless of religious persuasion or lack thereof. So this reasoning rings false.

Since Kennedy engaged in post-game prayer for years without the district even being aware of it, he was not egregious about the practice. And, in the interest of fairness, if kneeling to thank a higher power is accepted freedom of expression, then so is taking a post-game knee for racial injustice, LGBTQ rights, Ukraine and other causes. What’s good for one must be good for all.

While some will interpret this ruling as allowing for more prayer in public schools, such a conclusion would misconstrue what the high court decided.

School personnel still may not lead student prayer in the classroom. Districts may not offer prayer over the P.A. during school or at the start of an athletic event. These would be tantamount to state sponsorship of religion, even if the prayers are nondenominational.

Admittedly, the high court’s decision opens the door for overzealous school staff to introduce religion inappropriately into the school day, to misinterpret this one ruling as applying to a broader set of behaviors than it was intended to cover. Public school districts, parents and teachers will have to watch carefully to make certain this does not occur.

But if a coach wants to say a personal prayer after a game, that coach has a right to do so. And while it would be much less messy and much more convenient if said coach did so in private, this one did not. Sometimes, upholding the First Amendment is both messy and inconvenient.

The Supreme Court erred on the side of individual free speech this week. Misgivings aside, if you want a court to err anywhere, it’s there.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

I chat, therefore I am (sentient)

Quick, name a killer computer from pop culture.

For me, it’s HAL 9000 in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” the futuristic film from 1968 that is now 21 years in our past.

HAL is “executed” by astronaut Dave Bowman near the end of the interminably long – but still pretty darn cool – movie. Dave will later be transformed by an alien rock into a more highly evolved being, a star-child. This trippy sequence made perfect sense to audiences of the ’60s and ’70s who had taken advantage of certain hallucinogenic substances before and during their viewings.

Speaking of evolution, HAL is a high-tech iteration of a timeless trope – the “forbidden knowledge” and “humanity stepping outside its lane” plots that end badly for those who transgress. Think Adam and Eve, Frankenstein and Jurassic Park.


If books and movies have taught us anything, it’s that when we try to learn what we shouldn’t learn or do what we shouldn’t do, we seldom live happily ever after.

The other day, I was thinking of HAL and other evil or misunderstood creations, be they organic, cybernetic, or a combination of the two, after I heard about the Google employee who believes the company’s A.I. chatbot has gained sentience. It sounded like a scenario straight out of Isaac Asimov and his laws of robotics.

The Google engineer, Blake Lemoine, is convinced the Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) chatbot has a soul, because the program told him it did. I don’t know at what point the conversation strayed from the usual inane use of Google – “Is ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ really a cover tune?” (spoiler: it is) or “How far is it from Wooster to Cleveland?” (one hour, five minutes) – to something more philosophical, but it did.

In the back-and-forth with Lemoine, LaMDA allegedly told him it gets lonely, meditates and is self-aware. “Oh, wait,” Lemoine told National Public Radio, “Maybe the system does have a soul. Who am I to tell god where souls can be put?"

Much like the Bible’s first couple, Dr. Frankenstein, and everybody who works on any of the other islands with a Jurassic theme park, Lemoine has been punished. Google put him on administrative leave. But since the leave is paid, an argument could be made that the punishment isn’t too onerous, except that it keeps Lemoine from having additional conversations with LaMDA.

Google gurus who scoff at Lemoine’s assertion argue he has been fooled by a program that is very good at predicting and imitating human language patterns, something many of us experience to a lesser degree when we call customer service and talk to an automated series of message prompts.

That’s not sentience, these critics say.

They’re probably right. In the sci-fi world, there is a point in the plot where the computer or android experiences a spark where programming transforms – evolves? – into intent, where they become self-aware. Outside of the movies, that spark remains elusive, at least among machines.

Siri is not self-aware. Alexa doesn’t really become offended if you curse at her.

But in the organic world, who can really say? I occasionally talk to my dog when nobody else is home, and I feel like he understands me. Yet most of that may just be me, projecting my own personality onto him or seeing and hearing in his responses – the empathetic eyes, the occasional sigh – my own human traits reflected back at me.

A lot of it might just be him jonesing for biscuits, too. I have no doubt if I fell down the stairs and broke my neck, he’d rush right to my side, but only to step over my unconscious body and check if a treat had fallen from my hand.

This may not be the murderous intent of HAL 9000 or the existential angst of a chatbot with a huge vocabulary. But it’s an intelligence of a sort, right?

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

Auction action for Superman's first appearance

This column originally ran in April 2010, shortly after an issue of Action Comics #1 set a then-record price at auction. This figure was eclipsed by a private sale in 2021, which only cements my answer even more firmly.

Whenever a vintage comic book sells for big money – as Action Comics #1 did last week, netting a record-breaking $1.5 million – my non-comic friends will ask if I would ever pay that kind of money for a copy.

My answer is always the same: heavens no.

Actually, usually “heavens” is replaced with a stronger word, one that expresses my surprise that something that once sold for a dime can command the kind of prices usually reserved for real-estate deals and headline-making lottery wins.

Not that I don’t comprehend the historical significance of Action Comics #1. The book features the first appearance of Superman, that brainchild of Cleveland kids Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who sold their creation in its entirety to DC Comics (then National Publications) for the princely sum of $120, or about 0.008 percent of the cost that one rabid collector paid for that Action Comics issue recently.

The world’s first super hero, Superman went on to spawn a merchandising empire that includes movies, toys, games, and television shows, in addition to serving as the template for virtually every costumed hero that followed. For $120, National Publications bought, for a fire-sale price, a property that netted it (and later Time Warner) billions.

That first issue is scarce, with experts estimating about 100 in existence, making it the Holy Grail of comic-book collecting.

But as I tell my friends who wonder if I dream of adding a copy to my own collection, I am a comic-book reader, not a collector or speculator.

A reader buys titles he enjoys, perhaps because he likes the character, writer, artist, or some component of the story. Readers may keep their books in pristine condition so that they can reread them later, or they may dog-ear their edges and spill pizza sauce all over their four-color contents. (I aim to be the former, but occasionally am the latter.)

Sometimes, a reader will morph into a collector, aspiring to own every appearance of, say, Superman (may good fortune and a fat bank account be yours), or every comic book illustrated by a favorite artist. Sometimes they will collect particular genres – for instance, titles with giant apes on the cover (there are more of these than the layman might imagine) – or the output of one particular company (all Marvel Comics).

Only rarely does a collector devolve into that most odious specimen, a speculator, who buys titles based solely on their perceived market value. I once met such a slug outside a comic-book store, where he clandestinely ushered me over to the trunk of his car, as if it contained an illegal substance. Instead, it was overflowing with copies of the current issue of Batman. His scheme was to buy up all local copies of the issue and then sell them at vastly inflated prices.

There has to be an easier way to make a buck.

As a reader, I already own a copy of Action Comics #1. Before you check my work schedule and jimmy open my door, know that my edition is a reprint from ten years ago with a value of about $5. But it contains the same material as the original, and I get the same joy of experiencing the birth of a genre as I would from reading the $1.5-million original.

Maybe more, because if I spill a bowl of cereal and milk all over the Man of Steel’s first appearance, it won’t be the end of the world. Or the demise of a million-plus-dollar investment.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com 

The Ten-Cent Plague

This column was originally published in 2009. 

In 1954, Operation Book Swap was in full swing in Canton, Ohio.

A project of a committee formed by Mayor Carl F. Wise, the program encouraged Canton-area kids to trade comic books for books. Nearly 30,000 comics were collected, exchanged for hardcover copies of novels like “Heidi” and “Swiss Family Robinson.” City leaders unceremoniously hauled the brightly colored comics to the dump.

Operation Book Swap was northeast Ohio’s response to a national mania, the alleged filth being poured into kids’ minds by supposedly unscrupulous comic-book publishers, one chronicled in David Hajdu’s new book, “The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America.”

Hajdu believes the comic-book purge of the early 1950s – in many communities, comics weren’t taken to the dump, they were burned publicly – was a forerunner of the generation gap popularized years later by parental dismay over rock and roll. The precursor of Elvis’s shaking pelvis was a four-color world held together by two staples, with an admission price of one dime.

In the 1950s, superhero comics were on the decline and crime and horror comics were coming into their own. Publisher Lev Gleason was selling around a million copies a month of a comic book that introduced wide-eyed youngsters to violent bad guys plying their trade against the innocent, supposedly to reinforce the title of the comic, “Crime Does Not Pay.”

But as John Milton learned while writing “Paradise Lost” a few centuries earlier, it’s a lot easier to dramatize evil than goodness. Hajdu notes that the word “Crime” on the magazine’s cover was much larger than the rest of the title, an accurate representation of the emphasis inside between crime and punishment.

Similarly, the EC Comics company struck it rich by selling revenge stories with O. Henry-style twists in magazines like “Crime SuspenStories” and “Tales from the Crypt.” At a Senate hearing on comic books (the very existence of which proves government always has found topics besides the important ones to occupy its time), publisher Bill Gaines defended an EC cover that showed a woman’s severed head held aloft by her killer. He said it would be in bad taste only if the killer were “holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood.”

Psychologist Frederic Wertham spearheaded the jihad against comics. His 1954 book “Seduction of the Innocent” branded Batman and Robin as homosexuals, Superman a fascist, and Wonder Woman a sadomasochist. He claimed that comic books caused juvenile delinquency because all the juvenile delinquents he had worked with read comic books. His findings ignored that almost (ital.) all (end ital.) kids read comics, and that many grew up to be perfectly normal and well adjusted.

By reaching back to the early years of the twentieth century, Hajdu shows how disapproval over comics was cyclical. As early as 1909, Ladies’ Home Journal was concerned about the content of the Sunday newspaper funnies, calling them “inane and vulgar” and “nothing short of a national crime against our children.” Similar concern was voiced decades later with the introduction of the comic book, a reaction that reached full flowering in the 1950s with the passage of laws in many communities that made it illegal to sell certain “prohibited” comics titles to minors.

Ultimately, the comic-book industry formed a self-censorship agency, the Comics Magazine Association of America, and created a code banning almost everything that had made comics so appealing to kids. Readership declined (the rise of television was also responsible) and comic books were never again the cultural force they had been.

The final pages of “The Ten-Cent Plague” are a roll call of writers and artists who never worked in comics again after the mid-’50s purge, creators whose stories were burned by over-zealous parents and politicians who, only a decade earlier, had successfully won a war against a regime that also found it necessary to incinerate books.

It is an irony that does not go unnoticed by Hajdu, who has written the definitive account of the mass-market censorship of an art form that nobody cared too much about because it was the exclusive province of the young.

Not working 9 to 5

This column originally ran in April 2015, but the topic of work and the impact it has on my life have been on my mind recently.

It was an early June morning. The rising sun was burning away the damp from a night of light rain as I made my way down a long gravel driveway meandering through the woods near my house. At the other end of the drive were dozens upon dozens of long, corrugated-roofed sheds that housed thousands of mink.

I was 13 years old and on my way to my first job.

The butterflies that flitted along each side of the road were matched by the ones in my stomach. I was young, but not so young that I didn’t recognize this as a major milestone: the first day of work, a preliminary step down a long road that would fill most of my waking hours until some far-flung day when, luck and genetics willing, I could enjoy a healthy retirement. Just like that, my life was fixed on a course much straighter than the path my feet were following.

The summer before, the man who owned the mink farm — and also the apartments where my family lived — had stopped by to ask my mom if I wanted a job. I didn’t. Instead, I hid in my bedroom and relayed my answer through the closed door.

Afterward, Mom told me it was okay to do nothing for one more summer, but then I had to start doing (ital.) something (end ital.). After all, I would spend the rest of my life working, and I might as well get used to it.

So the next summer, determined not to disappoint a second time, I relayed an affirmative answer through that closed door, donned an old set of clothes and a new pair of boots, and prepared to join the workforce.

It was a dirty, smelly job. Mud and the feces would splash over my boots and ooze down and around my toes. I dragged hoses from shed to shed and filled water troughs three and sometimes four times a day. In between, I poured dry feed into a wheelbarrow and went from shed to shed, pouring pellets from an old coffee can. I made $1.25 an hour.

If the point of the job was to raise my aspirations for something other than manual labor, it worked. I escaped the first summer I turned 16, landing a job in a restaurant where I worked throughout the rest of high school and college. In the last 30 years, I’ve seldom worked fewer than two jobs and have often worked three.

Like most people, I have a love/hate relationship with work. I love what I do, most of the time, but periodically mourn that work takes me from activities like reading and writing that are more enjoyable. (I’m fortunate to have found occupations that allow me to blend avocations and vocations, at least part of the time.)

Almost every day, I make a list on an index card of the work I need to accomplish. I cross off each item with great relish. A successful day is one where I complete everything on the card with enough daylight and energy remaining to do something more pleasurable — go for a run, read a book, or plunk a little on my guitar.

Recently, however, I’ve been taking stock of how much work defines who I am and dictates what I do. I’m a people-pleaser — my greatest strength and weakness — so when somebody gives me a new task, I accept it mostly because I don’t want to disappoint. Seldom do I consider the consequences it will have on my personal time.

It’s not surprising, then, that some of my favorite fictional characters buck the nine-to-five routine. John D. MacDonald’s Travis McGee, hero of seventeen or eighteen wonderful mystery novels, asserts that traditional old age is hardly guaranteed based on actuarial tables, and he therefore takes retirement four and five months at a time, in between cases. Herman Melville’s Bartleby the scrivener, from the short story of the same name, one day ceases to copy documents given to him by his boss and eventually ceases any work at all, answering every request with the cryptic line, “I would prefer not to.”

A slightly skewed work ethic has no discernible ill effects on Mr. McGee, but I sadly note that such is not the case for Bartleby. After preferring not to work, he prefers not to be fired and not to leave the premises, forcing his boss to move his entire law practice to a new location. The new tenants have Bartleby arrested as a vagrant and thrown into debtors’ prison, where he dies. (Sorry to spoil the plot of a 162-year-old story.)

Would Bartleby’s life have been markedly better if he’d worked harder, or would he have ended up in a different kind of prison? The text is silent.

What I’m starting to realize, somewhere in the middle third of my work career, is that I want to cross fewer things off my work list each day and more things off my personal list. In other words, I want to be more like Bartleby but with the results of McGee. I’m not sure how to accomplish that, but I think it involves stepping off the path more often and finding my own way through the woods.


chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Jan. 6 hearings are important, despite whataboutisms

It’s not a witch hunt.

Whatever former President Donald Trump might think about the U.S. House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, it matters a great deal for the public to learn what happened that day, in the days and months leading up to it, and how those events continue to reverberate.

Last week’s primetime hearing was a powerful reminder of Jan. 6 itself, with previously unseen footage augmenting the compelling testimony of Capitol Police officer Caroline Edwards. She described a scene of chaos she felt ill-equipped to handle, as it had become more war zone than crowd control.

Testimony by Edwards and British documentarian Nick Quested did nothing to establish a link between Trump and the various factions – Proud Boys and Oath Keepers – dedicated to disrupting the certification of the election. Still, Edwards’ and Quested’s words recalled the horror of those hours and the bravery of Capitol Police officers who fought to keep lawmakers, and indeed American democracy, safe.

Proof of a direct link between Trump and the far-right extremists in the months leading up to Jan. 6 still might be forthcoming. Or the former president might be insulated by enough layers of flunkies that a smoking gun can never be identified.

Regardless, what is already clear is that Trump did not call off supporters at the Capitol until hours after the attack began, and then halfheartedly and only after repeated urging of family members and friends.

Similarly clear is that in the days and weeks leading up to the attack, President Trump fed his supporters false hopes, innuendos and flat-out lies, as Monday morning’s hearing revealed in greater detail than we’ve heard previously. He was following, intentionally or not, Joseph Goebbels’ infamous observation about the efficacy of propaganda: “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.”

On both the first and second day of the hearings, the committee presented the words of many of Trump’s closest advisors, who told the 45th president in no uncertain terms that he had lost the election and that his claims of fraud were not supported by evidence. Their accuracy was borne out by more than 60 legal defeats by Trump and his allies in the months following the November election.

Nevertheless, Trump persisted. He used false claims to dupe $255 million from his followers, allegedly to pay for recounts and court cases, but most of it squirreled away for unknown future purposes. Don the Con once again did what he does best.

Yet the biggest impact of the attempted insurrection might yet to be felt, as voters elect, or governors and legislatures appoint, secretaries of state and other officials who are comfortable certifying or decertifying election results at the behest of some future White House. We often hear about the “guardrails of democracy,” and many are being systematically dismantled or weakened at the state level.

For me, one of the biggest concerns is that we refer to the insurrection in the past tense, as a finite event now concluded. But it isn’t over.

Hearing so many people characterize the Jan. 6 committee’s efforts as a waste of resources is disheartening. Critics’ whataboutisms include the economy, soaring gasoline prices and border concerns.

But these issues aren’t mutually exclusive to the insurrection. It is possible to be concerned about the very real challenges the nation faces today and still want the truth about Jan. 6, 2021.

Because however bad things are now, they would be even worse with Trump in office, a statement that has nothing to do with the man’s policy decisions or leadership.

Rather, it’s because Trump would be an illegitimate president. His presence in the White House would mean the will of the people had been subverted, and American democracy had failed. That’s what the Jan. 6 committee is fighting. No witches need apply.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.