Bad And Sinbad

Thank you very bloody much, RMT. The one day this week I have to be at a meeting and the union calls a sodding three-day strike that shuts down virtually all of London Underground.

Even if I got a mainline train in, I wouldn’t be able to get the tube over to where I needed to be. Instead I took two buses there. Wary of how long it would be with the increased traffic, I ended up arriving almost an hour early. Still, it gave me a good chance to write like fury, dependent on the potholes.


To make up for the general aggravation, once home I put my feet up and started working my way through the three-disc DVD boxset of Charles H. Schneer and Ray Harryhausen-produced Sinbad movies: The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad and Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger.

The stories may be a little bit corny at times and occasionally lack the pace required in today’s movies, but that’s all part of their charm. And they whup the likes of Dreamworks Animation’s lame Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas when it comes to pure imagination.

More importantly there’s the stop-motion animation that brings a gallery of exotic and deadly creatures to life. Audiences may want everything done on a computer these days, but Harryhausen’s painstaking work still astonishes.


A couple of years back, just prior to the release of Peter Jackson’s King Kong, a job Work Buddy and I were doing involved filming a brief interview with Harryhausen. Because of the time restrictions and how the material would be used there was only really time for the most rudimentary questions.

Because he was sitting, to keep his eye level right for the camera, I ended up having to kneel before him. It only seemed right.