I doubt this is a surprise to anyone. First, its absence the rest of the week has been obvious. Second, I’ve stated several times over the years that this is my all-time favorite Ray Harryhausen sequence–which is saying something. Man, that crab is great. This is surely because Mr. Harryhausen used a real crab shell to build his armature on, and so it looks amazing. The film has several other fun segments; the roc, the nautilus, the bees…but this towers over them all, certainly among the greatest scenes the Maestro has done. The scene is on YouTube if you haven’t seen it in a while.
When I was a tyke, our local powerhouse independent TV station Channel 9 (WGN) used to play this movie every year on a show called Family Classics, which unsurprisingly presented a generally recurring roster of great classic era movies. It was always my private rejoinder to Roger Ebert, who had a dictum that there was never a good movie with a giant air balloon in it. Special notes should be made of another terrific score by Bernard Herrmann, one of the best to ever compose for the movies.
