Rare O'Brien Photos and More

Tuesday, 02 November 2010 20:28
Last Updated on Tuesday, 02 November 2010 20:42
Written by Marc Spess

Rare Willis OBrien Photos

What was it like working on a stop motion production in the 1930's? These rare photos give us some insight.

Rakshasa who regularly collects old production photos uploaded many pictures of some of the major pioneers of stop motion on the Monster Kid Classic Horror Forums. Willis O'Brien is one of the subjects, as well as one we saw with Ray Harryhausen standing on stage. What can we learn from the pictures?

For one, I find it interesting that almost all of the crew look to be over 40 years old. Nowadays just find some behind the scenes footage or pictures from something like Robot Chicken, Wallace and Gromit, the latest Laika feature Coraline or others and you notice the artists barely seem older than 30. It's usually the producers and directors who are over the hill. This could explain the lack of fart jokes in King Kong :)

It would be easy to try and get into a lot of detail over the pictures here, but it's already been talked about on the forums they were posted on. Plus if you are interested in the build-up puppet making techniques you can read our recent post about the Lone Animators videos on the process here.

To see the rare images go to this page here as well as this page here.

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written by Vincent Tetreault, November 02, 2010

Woot ! Woot !

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written by John Oakley, November 03, 2010

You're over the hill at 40? Being uner 40 means you are more receptive to fart jokes? I've got a word for you -- it begins with "d**k" and ends with "head"...

-1

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written by Marc Spess, November 03, 2010

Wow John, thanks for that wonderfully mature comment lol. I have a whoopie cushion I\'d like to sell you.

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written by John Oakley, November 03, 2010

You mentioned mature, but I think you got away with it. Seriously, Ron Cole is way over 40, Ray Harryhausen did a lot of good work over 40, need I go on? Are they over the hill? You will be over 40 soon enough, I'm sure -- will you retire then?

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written by Marc Spess, November 03, 2010

The point I'm making is culturally - it was very different back then. Can you imagine Harryhausens medusa farting arrows? Just pick up a book he wrote and notice his tone. Oh and don't take my opinion so seriously your head could explode.

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written by Tim Smyth, November 06, 2010

In case anyone does not know, or for those interested, the man second from the right is famous producer Irwin Allen, and the man next to him, to his left is Willis O'Brien, and this is a behind the scenes photo from the movie the Animal World. That big Dinosaur sculpture could be for one of the live action mechanical puppets that were built for the film to speed up the stop motion process. Marc is right, these guys are pretty old in this picture, they are probably all high up in the production, O'Brien is around 70 years old, and he was still designing puppets, and animation set ups. These were the first foam caste puppets for monster movies, there were some caste before, pre foam latex days, and of coa**e Lou Bunin, rhymes with runnin, did urethane foam caste puppets. Great photo Marc, thanks for re-posting it here. One more note, there are some great King Kong debates over at that website, so anyone interested should check them out.

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