Muppets on Steroids and Arabian Nights

The world of film fantasy is often unwittingly married to that of science fiction when critics review movies. Some avid fans of fantasy will go into a rage when their favorite motion picture is tagged as science fiction. In spite of this, some science fiction films have so much more fiction than science that it causes the line to blur. Don't fantasy films have monsters and magic? Not always.

The following films were all big box office draws when they came out, and they had many showings on television in the past, but now most of them have been all but forgotten. Their stories of dragons, evil magicians, ghosts, and gods may very well be lost on today's audiences, which are more familiar with computer animation than the painstaking stop-motion animation made famous by such masters as Ray Harryhausen and Jim Danforth. Dates in parentheses are the film's original release date. Ladies and gentlemen, grab your shield and let your minds wander to fantastic worlds of the past and the future.

1) The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (December 23, 1958). Kerwin Mathews plays the swashbuckling Captain Sinbad, who is to be married to the lovely Princess Parisa. When an evil spell shrinks Parisa to miniature size, the wizard Sokurah (an especially evil Torin Thatcher) says that a potion made from the eggshell of the giant Roc bird can restore her. Ray Harryhausen's stop motion animation, renamed "Dynarama" for this film, set new standards, and those Cyclops scenes are fantastic!

2) The Invisible Man (November 13, 1933). What makes this film interesting is that Claude Rains made his film debut in it, yet you only see his face for about fifteen seconds at the end. During the film he is either in bandages or just not there in the title role. A decent rendition of the H.G. Wells novel, it attempted to achieve new heights in special effects. Unfortunately, at times you can see the strings that hold up the objects the invisible man is supposed to be handling, and in at least one scene where the title character is obviously naked and runs away, he leaves behind the imprints of shoes in the snow. In spite of these goofs, it still stands the test of time.