Italian (and metric) poster for the Harryhausen favorite


20 MILLION MILES TO EARTH, just one of the many visual delights found in Mike Hankin’s books.


an actual frame from a rare 70mm blow-up print of FIRST MEN IN THE MOON produced for Cinerama theaters in Germany.


Roughly 120 pages of appendices complete


VOLUME 3, including of particular note an aston- ishingly detailed list of every known magazine ar- ticle devoted to Harryhausen ever published, compiled by John M. Ballentine. It’s actually pre- sented twice, once chronologically (which truly charts the rise of attention to Harryhausen’s work)


and then again alphabeti- cally. This time, the girlie gallery is annotated with an assurance that no ani- mation effects shots were sacrificed to make room for the parade of admit- tedly lovely faces and fig- ures. (A flicker-book of a sword-waving skeleton provides more serious content to the lower right corner of these pages.) What has been sacrificed, however, is a sense of clo- sure, as Hankin’s main text stops aburptly at the end of his CLASH OF THE TITANS chapter, with no sense of the thirty years following ex- cept for a few titles in Appendix N, devoted to unrealized projects. It goes without saying that Hankin’s in-progress overview of Harryhausen’s career is unlikely to be surpassed; other books may offer different pic- tures, different vantages and depths of specific in- formation, but the totality of Harryhausen’s achieve- ment is best represented here. It’s unfortunate that the two extant books are presently unavailable ex- cept at high cost, but any- one aspiring to a library of essential books on fan- tasy cinema will need to acquire them. As for the future of these books, no less an oracle than Ernie


Farino prophesied to me that VOLUME 1, still in production, may be in print as early as Summer 2012. Asked if there are any plans for Archive Edi- tions to reprint the two OOP volumes, he writes, “I have no plans to reprint them individually; when all three volumes have been released (and after the upcoming VOLUME 1 sells out), I may very well reconfigure them slightly as a new boxed-set edi- tion, updated and revised. But that’s only a distant possibility at this point.”


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