Late in his career, Ray Harryhausen returned to the subject
of one of his hugest mid-period successes to make The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and Sinbad
and the Eye of the Tiger. Neither of these films received the accolades or
classic status of 1958’s The 7th
Voyage of Sinbad, though I suspect the main reason is that folks started viewing
Harryhausen’s DynaMation stop-motion technique as a bit old-fashioned in light
of the special effects developments displayed in recent films like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Planet of the Apes. That Eye of the Tiger came out the same year
as Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind probably didn’t do it any favors
in that department either.
Watching these films today is a totally different
experience. While the knowledge that all modern special effects are done by
some nerd with a computer has robbed them of their “Wow!” value, Harryhausen’s
effects are all “Wow!” In The Golden
Voyage of Sinbad (1973), a bat-like homunculus drops a prized golden amulet
in the famed sailor’s ship, sending him on a treasure hunt in which he duels
with his ship’s animated figurehead and a six-armed Kali statue and encounters
a giant Cyclops-centaur and a griffin. In The
Eye of the Tiger (1977), his mission to rescue a prince transformed into a
stop-motion baboon leads him to fend off a gaggle of bug-eyed goblins and a
dinosaur-sized walrus, while also befriending a giant, horned troglodyte. These
creatures are as magical as any in Harryhausen’s more critically lauded films,
so it’s kind of unfair that they get short shrift just because of the era in
which they appeared.
The stories that surround these animals and monsters are
better than their reputations too, though the human characters are usually up-staged
by the creatures. This is actually particularly true of the better film, Golden Voyage, which drags for the mostly
creature-deprived opening 38 minutes but takes off like a monster-packed rocket
for the final hour. Still, that film’s Sinbad, played by the reasonably
charismatic John Phillip Law, is much more enjoyable than the
personality-devoid Patrick Wayne, who plays our hero in Eye of the Tiger. That film makes up for his shortcomings with a
stronger gang of supporting players led by Jane Seymour as the baboon-prince’s
sister and Sinbad’s girlfriend (she’s a much more engaging heroine than
Caroline Munro’s nearly dialogue-less slave girl in Golden Voyage) and Patrick Troughton as the wizard with the
knowledge to un-monkey her brother.
However, these being Ray Harryhausen films—the only kinds of
films we think of as belonging to the special effects guy rather than the
director—the effects are paramount, which is why Golden Voyage comes off as superior. Tiger’s goblins are like poorly designed retreads of Harryhausen’s
legendary skeleton soldiers from Jason
and the Argonauts. The baboon-prince and the troglodyte are both
wonderfully articulate and disarmingly emotive creations, but the other animals
are less imaginative than the monsters of Golden
Voyage. The overuse of bad traveling matte shots is another issue with Eye of the Tiger.
So it is fitting that Twilight Time has put a lot more
effort into their new Golden Voyage of
Sinbad blu-ray than their Eye of the
Tiger disc. Both films look excellent in high-definition, which is a real
relief considering the possibility that stop-motion might not have translated well
in such flaw-revealing clarity. Golden
Voyage has received an especially careful restoration. Take a look at the
details on those fabulous costumes: the golden texture of the Grand Vizier’s
frock, the spangles on the villain’s black robe, and the nap of the little
patches of purple velvet on his sleeves. Eye
of the Tiger isn’t quite as dazzling because it’s a lot less colorful with
too many poor-contrast night scenes, though that’s probably more the film’s
fault than the restoration’s.
Golden Voyage has
some nice extras to match it spectacular visuals. There are three Harryhausen
interviews focusing on his earlier films Mysterious
Island, The Three Worlds of Gulliver,
and Earth vs. the Flying Saucers. He
talks about his special effects techniques (including animating a real dead
crab in Mysterious Island), use of
travelling mattes, locations, and props. In the Earth vs. the Flying Saucers featurette, interviewer Joe Dante gets
to manhandle the actual UFO prop used in the film, ostensibly because he wants
to explain how it works… but you know he just wanted to play with a really cool
toy. There are no details on when these interviews took place, but based on how
young Dante looks, I’d guess late eighties/early nineties.
The Golden Voyage of
Sinbad also features a booklet essay and an isolated musical score track.
These extras are included on the Sinbad
and the Eye of the Tiger blu-ray too, though the only featurette is a
three-minute 1958 documentary on DynaMation. It has nice retro value, but
Twilight Time would have given this disc more value had it spread those
interviews between both discs instead of hording them on one. So Golden Voyage is the totally essential disc,
but both are well worth checking out for their underrated main features. But
you better not dilly-dally because they’re both only available as limited
editions of 3,000 units, as are all Twilight Time releases. The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger are only available at Screen Archives.com.
