Following 1960, Bert I Gordon slowed down production a bit. He seems to have spent a hunk of the next couple of years, for instance, trying to break into syndicated TV. In 1961, for instance, he hired Vincent Price as the host for the television pilot Famous Ghost Stories. In this, Mr. Price introduced a ghost tale that was, as it turned out, an edited version of Mr. Gordon’s own Tormented.
The following year, however, saw perhaps the oddest and arguably most ambitious film, the kiddie fantasy epic The Magic Sword. Shot in color and loosely based on the tale of St George and the Dragon, the movie clearly emulated sword and sorcery flicks like Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad series. No stop motion here, although Mr. Gordon pulled out all the effects stops he’d learned from directly a batch of ‘50s sci-fi movies. Toplined by a villainous Basil Rathbone, and costarring Estelle Winwood and Gary Lockwood, the film is an odd duck in the Gordon filmography, not completely successful perhaps, but entirely fun.
The best part is a clunky but utterly fantastic animatronic fire-breathing dragon at the end of the movie. It’s just marvelous.
By the way, on YouTube there’s only one short clip, but a damn enticing one, of Mr. Gordon’s next project after this. Clearly inspired by My Favorite Martian (which itself was inspired by the Jerry Lewis movie Visit to a Small Planet), Take Me to Your Leader looks to be a typical ‘60s high concept sitcom. The cast included Jack Albertson playing the Gale Gordon role. If watching the like 40 seconds on YouTube doesn’t make you want to see the whole thing, then I don’t know what to say to you.
