The success of King Kong led to a number of other early special effects films, including Mighty Joe Young, which was also animated by O ' Brien and helped to start the careers of several animators, including Ray Harryhausen, who came into his own in the 1950s.

The score was composed by Bernard Herrmann, who also worked on other fantasy films with Harryhausen, such as Mysterious Island and The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.

Apart from being the composer's fourth collaboration with Ray Harryhausen ( The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, The Three Worlds of Gulliver and Mysterious Island, made in 1958, 1960, and 1961 respectively ), Herrmann also wrote the music to Journey to the Center of the Earth.

In the early 1970s, Harryhausen had also concentrated his efforts on authoring a book, Film Fantasy Scrapbook ( produced in three editions as his last three films were released ) and supervising the restoration and release of ( eventually all ) his films to video, laserdisc, DVD, and currently Blu-ray Disc.

In 2011 the last volume, called Ray Harryhausen ’ s Fantasy Scrapbook, was also published.

Harryhausen and Terry Moore appeared in small comedic cameo roles in the 1998 remake of Mighty Joe Young, and he has also provided the voice of a polar bear cub in the Will Ferrell film Elf.

In 2010, Harryhausen had a brief cameo in Burke and Hare, a British film also directed by Landis.

Near the turn of the 21st century, Harryhausen was also honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

The ABC TV 90s children's puppet animation series " Bump In the Night " makes a variety of veiled tributes to Harryhausen, also.

The 2005 Warner Bros. film, Corpse Bride also pays homage to Harryhausen in a scene where character Victor Van Dort is playing the piano in the Everglott's home.

The movie also pays homage to spy movies such as the James Bond series ; the crew included special effects makers Ray Harryhausen and Derek Meddings, both of whom had worked on Bond movies.

Management at Warner Brothers and Seven Arts also changed and the film was released with little promotional effort on a double-bill with a biker film ; it thus missed its target audience and was not as successful as earlier Harryhausen efforts.

Harryhausen was also co-producer of the film, and retired from filmmaking shortly after the movie was released, making this his last main feature film.

He also directed, in 2005, a documentary called The Sci-Fi Boys, featuring interviews with Forry Ackerman, Ray Bradbury, Ray Harryhausen, and many more sci-fi notables.

Harryhausen also animated the falling stones when saucers crashed into buildings, in order to make the action appear more realistic.

There were also many previous films combining live action with stop motion animation using back projection, such as the films of Willis O ' Brien and Ray Harryhausen in the United States, and Aleksandr Ptushko, Karel Zeman and more recently Jan Švankmajer in Eastern Europe.

Harryhausen also said he planned to have Sinbad and his crew fight a yeti in the arctic, but that this idea was rejected in favor of a giant walrus.

Introvision uses front-projected images with live actors instead of the traditional rear projection that Harryhausen and others used.

Bradbury often attended meetings with his friend Ray Harryhausen ; the two Rays had been introduced to each other by Ackerman.

Ackerman was credited with nurturing and even inspiring the careers of several early contemporaries like Ray Bradbury, Ray Harryhausen, Charles Beaumont, Marion Zimmer Bradley and L. Ron Hubbard.

Ray Harryhausen extended the art of stop-motion animation with his special techniques of compositing to create spectacular fantasy adventures such as Jason and the Argonauts ( whose climax, a sword battle with seven animated skeletons, is considered a landmark in special effects ).

O ' Brien and his wife developed Emilio and Guloso ( AKA: Valley of the Mist ), about a Mexican boy and his pet bull who save their town from a dinosaur called " Lagarto Grande ", which was optioned by producer Jesse Lasky, with O ' Brien and Harryhausen on board to do special effects, before falling through.

O ' Brien worked with Harryhausen one last time on the acclaimed dinosaur sequence for Irwin Allen's nature documentary The Animal World ( 1956 ).

* The Animal World ( US, 1956 ) ( with Ray Harryhausen )

In June 2010 it was announced that the Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation had agreed to deposit the animator's complete collection of some 20, 000 pieces with the National Media Museum.

Directed by Don Chaffey in collaboration with stop motion animation expert Ray Harryhausen, the film is noted for its stop-motion creatures, and particularly the iconic fight with the skeletons.

The skeletons ' shields are adorned with designs of other Harryhausen creatures, including an octopus and the head of the Ymir from 20 Million Miles to Earth.

The disc's special features include two new audio commentaries, one by Peter Jackson and Randall William Cook, the other by Harryhausen in conversation with his biographer Tony Dalton.

The sword fight scene between Sinbad and the skeleton proved so popular with audiences that Harryhausen recreated and expanded the scene by having an army of armed skeletons fight the Greek hero Jason and his men in Jason and the Argonauts.

Harryhausen draws a distinction between films that combine special effects animation with live action and films that are completely animated such as the films of Tim Burton, Nick Park, Henry Selick, Ivo Caprino, Ladislav Starevich and many others ( including his own fairy tale shorts ) which he sees as pure " puppet films ", and which are more accurately ( and traditionally ) called " puppet animation ".

Harryhausen became friends with an aspiring writer, Ray Bradbury, with similar enthusiasms.

It was on The Beast From 20, 000 Fathoms that Harryhausen first used a technique that split the background and foreground of pre-shot live action footage into two separate images into which he would animate a model or models so seemingly integrating the live-action with the models.

A few years later, when Harryhausen began working with color film to make The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, he experimented extensively with color stock to overcome the color-balance-shift problems.

An occasional assistant, George Lofgren, a taxidermist, assisted Harryhausen with the creation of furred creatures.

Other than that, Harryhausen worked generally alone to produce almost all of the animation for all his films, until he hired protégé model animators Steve Archer and two-time Oscar-nominated Jim Danforth to assist with major animation sequences for his last feature film Clash of the Titans ( 1981 ).

Harryhausen soon met and began a fruitful partnership with producer Charles H. Schneer, who was working with the Sam Katzman B-picture unit of Columbia Pictures.

While in production, the filmmakers learned that a long-time friend of Harryhausen, writer Ray Bradbury, had sold a short story called " The Beast from 20, 000 Fathoms " ( retitled " The Fog Horn ") to The Saturday Evening Post, about a dinosaur drawn to a lone lighthouse by its foghorn.

Reluctant at first, Harryhausen managed to develop the systems necessary to maintain proper color balances for his DynaMation process, resulting in his greatest masterpiece ( and biggest hit ) of the 50s, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad ( 1958 ), a major inspiration for Dennis Muren, decades later a long-time multi-Oscar-winning head of George Lucas ' Industrial Light and Magic special effects company.

Another long-time close friend was " Famous Monsters of Filmland " magazine editor, book writer, and sci-fi collector Forrest J Ackerman, who loaned Harryhausen his photos of King Kong in 1933, right after Harryhausen had seen the film for the first time.

Raymond Frederick " Ray " Harryhausen ( born June 29, 1920 ) is an American visual effects creator, writer and producer.

) Harryhausen has attributed these lapses to producer Cooper, who insisted Joe appear larger in some scenes for dramatic effect.

" Stop-motion master Ray Harryhausen was requested by Columbia Pictures to create the demon for the production, but was already committed to The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, with producer Charles H. Schneer.