6 Things You Never Knew About Ray Harryhausen

4. Ray Turned Discarded Army Film Into His First Demo Reel

7c2a1ffc-ef75-4f0c-9594-01d900c16417 Ray worked for the Army Motion Picture Unit during World War II, creating animated educational and training films. This led Ray to finding a large amount of unused 16mm film that the Army was throwing in the trash, which he began using to make short films for children based on fairy tales, the last of which would be The Story of King Midas in 1953. These films, among a variety of other shorts, became his demo reel. After showing this reel to his idol, Willis O€™Brien, Ray became an assistant animator on his first feature film in the year 1949. O'Brien was so busy solving the multitude of technical problems of the film that Harryhausen ended up animating most of it himself. This film was the Academy Award winning box-office disappointment, Mighty Joe Young. O'Brien won the Academy Award for Special Effects for the film. Talk about ingenuity! Ray was always using whatever he had at his disposal to make his dream come true, working with what little he had to his advantage, and this trait was with him until the end.
 
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A writer in spirit, a baker by profession. Carl has been a comic shop impresario, comic book illustrator, record store clerk, electronic musician, late night radio DJ, club promoter, graphic designer, and other cool things you wish you could be. He mistakenly had purple dreadlocks once. For three years. Which made him way less cool. He doesn't actually know what the word impresario means, and is way too lazy to Google it. Carl is also an American, and for that he apologizes.