Normally, when I talk about the fiction that I’m most thankful for, I wind up telling people about how a Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot loving 8th grade Josh discovered Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep and how its poetic grit utterly changed my life forever. But the thing is, that trip into the gutters of these mean streets only affected me so much because I’d spent so much time on Mount Olympus. The vast treasures of the world’s pantheons and heroes were my first literary love, and I owe all of that to 1981’s Clash of the Titans. It’s a film that has affected me and my storytelling immeasurably and for which I’m incredibly grateful. The reasons I’m grateful for it are diverse and varied and, most amazing to me, have grown and changed over the course of my life even as I have.
For those of you who don’t know, Clash is a retelling of a bunch of Greek myths with visual effects by the stop-motion genius, Ray Harryhausen and starring such luminaries as Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, Burgess Meredith, and Harry Hamlin. For those keeping score at home, I was four years old when this movie released, which means I almost certainly didn’t see it at the theater. However, I virtually guarantee that this was an early HBO favorite because once I did see it, I remember seeing it a lot.
It set my mind aflame, people!
Yes, of course, I’d already seen a galaxy far, far away and fallen in love with space wizards from the future-past. But I was predominantly a reader and, shocking as this is in 2017, there wasn’t a lot of Star Wars available to read. But mythology….oh, yes, that positively choked the library shelves.
The discovery of mythology is the first thing for which I owe a debt to Clash. I loved classical mythology with the heat of Helios’s own chariot for years and years before it finally cooled to merely like-like in the face of Beowulf, Arthur, and the Norse myths. It’s the reason I purchased a copy of Dungeons & Dragons: Deities & Demigods and then read it to tatters. That book is where I first heard of Aztec, Hindu, and other non-Western deities as well as entirely fictional (whatever that means) pantheons like Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8X7W-oPhY48]
None of that happens if I don’t see Clash of the Titans at such a formative stage. And in case you missed it, that’s why I bought the only Dungeons & Dragons book I can remember spending my own actual money on. Which means that Clash is at least indirectly responsible for the other great hobby of my life: tabletop roleplaying. Which is really just more storytelling, only with friends and an outcome randomizer.
To this day, at least once every week, I get together with friends, my bag of dice, some pencils and paper, and we create a world, an adventure, and some heroes. I don’t really play Dungeons & Dragons and rarely ever have, but that’s no shade. It’s just a game about one thing, and I want to play all kinds of games about all kinds of things. The worlds my game group creates can be as big as an entire cosmos or as small as a single household. The adventure can be to save a universe or it can be to save the soul of a forgotten toy. The heroes can be bright shining paragons or straight bastards. I have the pleasure of co-creating a brand new fictional vista week in and week out because Clash indirectly pointed me at a book for a game I barely played that nevertheless opened up all the worlds inside me.
Speaking of all the worlds inside of me, Clash taught me a lesson about adaptation I’m still thankful for. You know that iconic look for Medusa combining a writhing snake’s body with a human torso that doesn’t quite mesh? That’s not what Gorgons are in Greek myth. You know that towering octopus monster at the end? Krakens aren’t from Greek mythology, they’re from Norse. And they didn’t look like the thing in the movie. You might also be shocked to discover that there are no clockwork owls in the original myth.
And yet, if you get somebody who hasn’t seen the flick in a decade or two, those are the bits they’re going to remember. You might throw a giant vulture in that mix as well because that thing creeped me the hell out as a kid. But guess what? There wasn’t a giant vulture in the source material either. Many of the most memorable parts of the adaptation were, at least, vaguely inspired by the original or, at most, invented whole-cloth for the movie.
Considering that at this point in history, we are all standing on the shoulders of creative giants while adapting the same stories over and over and over, this is an intensely valuable lesson for me as a storyteller. Originality has extremely limited value. It’s only the most recent times in human history that it’s been prized at all. Back when the tales in Clash were new, if you tried to tell something other than Perseus, or Heracles, or Theseus, or the like, you’d have been booed away from the campfire.
Ovid retold these stories with his tongue planted firmly in cheek. Shakespeare is just Ovid fanfiction with more dick jokes. For every angry declaration of “no spoilers!” there are a hundred stories that people return to over and over because they love the story and its telling. So to Hades with originality. Just start telling the story in your way and you’ll find the places to put your stamp on it. No matter how well worn the story is, I can still make it MINE. And what’s more, the parts that are most me might, in fact, become the best parts.
Wow. That’s magical. And speaking of magical…
The last reason (at least so far) that I’m thankful for Clash of the Titans is going to require me to tell you a little about Ray Harryhausen. While just a boy in the theater watching King Kong, Harryhausen decided that making movie magic would be his career and vocation. He spent many years honing his craft as illustrator, sculptor, and stop-motion filmmaker. This man was a genius and invented from scratch special effects as they were known for decades. Tiny models of skeletons were made to fight full-sized actors. Monstrous models were doubled in for actors because prosthetics weren’t up to the challenge yet. Statues were made to talk. Horses sprouted wings and flew. Harryhausen made magic, and nobody else even came close to his wizardry.
Until 1977. A kid named George Lucas, who had grown up idolizing Harryhausen, got the chance to make a weird little space fantasy picture called Star Wars. In the process, Lucas had to utterly reinvent how special effects were made. Harryhausen had passed the torch whether he liked it or not.
So you may have noticed that not one but two Star Wars pictures came out before Clash of the Titans. The British Board of Film Classification said that the effects might appear “old hat” in a world that had watched Star Wars and Superman.
Old hat. The guy who invented special effects had, in his lifetime, become old hat.
We call this a liminal space. We stand on the threshold of the new but the new is so new that the old isn’t entirely sure it’s old yet. We were between the eras of Harryhausen and Industrial Light & Magic and didn’t even know it yet.
Well, honestly, I bet Harryhausen knew it. He had to have heard of Star Wars and because he seems like this kind of guy, it probably made him a fan of George Lucas. There were probably a lot of studio people whispering behind their hands about making a stop-motion mythology movie when there were all these space wizards and laser swords making bank.
But you know what? Harryhausen made the goddamn mythology movie anyway. It became one of his most famous pieces. It also sparked the fires of my imagination like a supernova that has burned for three decades. And that’s just me, a single face in a crowd of Clash lovers. Hell, it made a fan out of my son as we watched the movie in preparation for this essay!
So I’m thankful for Clash of the Titans teaching me this latest lesson: Technology cannot limit genius rendered limitless by imagination and craft. A story well told will shine through even when it’s a bit old-fashioned. Or a bit low class. Or just not quite to the public taste yet. Nobody liked Jane Austen’s stuff when she was alive. Raymond Chandler wrote detective novels because he thought there wasn’t any reason genre pieces shouldn’t be literature. Guillermo del Toro made an art piece about giant robots fighting giant monsters. Jack Kirby drew the first issue of Fantastic Four when he was 41 and was 54 when New Gods hit the stands. Last year, HBO’s highest rated series was a remake of an early 70s movie many have forgotten.
All us storytellers, whether in film, prose, comics, animation, or epic poems, should just ignore the haters and even reality if need be. Just keep doing what we do as well as we can possibly do it. We never know when we might just make one of the best things we’ve ever created.
That’s a veritable titan of a lesson right there. The kind of lesson that is so huge it demolishes the cities of excuses creators are happy to construct for themselves. So take a page from Zeus’s book and let loose the Kraken of Clash of the Titans! You’ll be grateful you did.
