Ray Harryhausen

Raymond Frederick Harryhausen (June 29, 1920 – May 7, 2013) was an American artist, designer, visual effects creator, writer and producer who created a form of stop-motion model animation known as "Dynamation".

His works include the animation for Mighty Joe Young (1949), with his mentor Willis H. O'Brien, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects; his first color film, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958); and Jason and the Argonauts (1963), which featured a sword fight with seven skeleton warriors. His last film was Clash of the Titans (1981), after which he retired.

Harryhausen moved to the United Kingdom, became a dual U.S.-U.K. citizen and lived in London from 1960 until his death in 2013. During his life, his innovative style of special effects in films inspired numerous filmmakers. In November 2016 the BFI compiled a list of those present-day filmmakers who claim to have been inspired by Harryhausen, including Steven Spielberg, Peter Jackson, Joe Dante, Tim Burton, Nick Park, James Cameron, and Guillermo del Toro. Others influenced by him include George Lucas, John Lasseter, John Landis, Henry Selick, J. J. Abrams, and Wes Anderson.

Harryhausen was born in Los Angeles, California, the son of Martha L. (née Reske) and Frederick W. Harryhausen. Of German descent, the family surname was originally spelled "Herrenhausen".

1930s and 1940s

After having seen King Kong (1933) on its initial release for the first of many times, Harryhausen spent his early years experimenting in the production of animated shorts, inspired by the burgeoning science fiction literary genre of the period. The scenes utilising stop-motion animation (or model animation), those featuring creatures on the island or Kong, were the work of pioneer model animator Willis O'Brien. His work in King Kong inspired Harryhausen, and a friend arranged a meeting with O'Brien for him. O'Brien critiqued Harryhausen's early models and urged him to take classes in graphic arts and sculpture to hone his skills. Meanwhile, Harryhausen became friends with an aspiring writer, Ray Bradbury, with similar enthusiasms. Bradbury and Harryhausen joined the Los Angeles-area Science Fiction League formed by Forrest J. Ackerman in 1939, and the three became lifelong friends.

Harryhausen secured his first commercial model-animation job, on George Pal's Puppetoons shorts, based on viewing his first formal demo reel of fighting dinosaurs from a project called Evolution of the World, which was never finished.

During World War II, Harryhausen served in the United States Army Special Services Division under Colonel Frank Capra, as a loader, clapper boy, gofer and later camera assistant, whilst working at home animating short films about the use and development of military equipment. During this time, he also worked with composer Dimitri Tiomkin and Ted Geisel ("Dr. Seuss"). Following the war, he salvaged several rolls of discarded 16 mm surplus film from which he made a series of fairy tale-based shorts, which he called his "teething-rings".

In 1947, Harryhausen was hired as an assistant animator on what turned out to be his first major film, Mighty Joe Young (1949).

1950s

The first film with Ray Harryhausen in full charge of technical effects was The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (1953) which began development under the working title Monster From the Sea. The filmmakers learned that a long-time friend of Harryhausen, writer Ray Bradbury, had sold a short story called "The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms" (later re-titled "The Fog Horn") to The Saturday Evening Post, about a dinosaur drawn to a lone lighthouse by its foghorn. Because the story for Harryhausen's film featured a similar scene, the film studio bought the rights to Bradbury's story to avoid any potential legal problems. Also, the title was changed back to The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. Under that title, it became Harryhausen's first solo feature film effort, and a major international box-office hit for Warner Brothers.

It was on The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms that Harryhausen first used a technique he created called "Dynamation" that split the background and foreground of pre-shot live action footage into two separate images into which he would animate a model or models, seemingly integrating the live-action with the models. The background would be used as a miniature rear-screen with his models animated in front of it, re-photographed with an animation-capable camera to combine those two elements together, the foreground element matted out to leave a black space. Then the film was rewound, and everything except the foreground element matted out so that the foreground element would now photograph in the previously blacked out area. This created the effect that the animated model was "sandwiched" in between the two live action elements, right into the final live action scene.

In most of Harryhausen's films, model animated characters interact with, and are a part of, the live action world, with the idea that they will cease to call attention to themselves as only "animation." Most of the effects shots in his earliest films were created via Harryhausen's careful frame-by-frame control of the lighting of both the set and the projector. This dramatically reduced much of degradation common in the use of back-projection or the creation of dupe negatives via the use of an optical printer. Harryhausen's use of diffused glass to soften the sharpness of light on the animated elements allowed the matching of the soft background plates far more successfully than Willis O'Brien had achieved in his early films, allowing Harryhausen to match live and miniature elements seamlessly in most of his shots. By developing and executing most of this miniature work himself, Harryhausen saved money, while maintaining full technical control.

A few years later, when Harryhausen began working with color film to make The 7th Voyage of Sinbad, he experimented extensively with color film stocks to overcome the color-balance-shift problems. Ray's producer/partner Charles H. Schneer coined the word Dynamation as a "merchandising term" (modifying it to "SuperDynaMation" and then "Dynarama" for some subsequent films).

Harryhausen was always heavily involved in the pre-production conceptualizing of each film's story, script development, art-direction, design, storyboards, and general tone of his films, as much as any auteur director would have on any other film, which any "director" of Harryhausen's films had to understand and agree to work under. Only the complexities of the Directors Guild of America's rules in Hollywood prevented Harryhausen from being credited as the director of his films, resulting in the more modest credits he had in most of his films.

Throughout most of his career, Harryhausen's work was a sort of family affair. His father did the machining of the metal armatures (based on his son's designs) that were the skeletons for the models and allowed them to keep their position, while his mother assisted with some miniature costumes. After Harryhausen's father died in 1973, Harryhausen contracted his armature work out to another machinist. An occasional assistant, George Lofgren, a taxidermist, assisted Harryhausen with the creation of furred creatures. Another associate, Willis Cook, built some of Harryhausen's miniature sets. Other than that, Harryhausen worked generally alone to produce almost all of the animation for his films.

The same year that Beast was released, 1953, fledgling film producer Irwin Allen released a live action documentary about life in the oceans titled The Sea Around Us, which won an Oscar for best documentary feature film of that year. Allen's and Harryhausen's paths would cross three years later, on Allen's sequel to this film.

Harryhausen soon met and began a fruitful partnership with producer Charles H. Schneer, who was working with the Sam Katzman B-picture unit of Columbia Pictures. Their first tandem project was It Came from Beneath the Sea (a.k.a. Monster from Beneath the Sea, 1955), about a giant octopus attacking San Francisco. It was a box-office success, quickly followed by Earth vs. the Flying Saucers (1956), set in Washington D.C. – one of the best of the alien invasion films of the 1950s, and also a box office hit.

In 1954, Irwin Allen had started work on a second feature-length documentary film, this one about animal life on land called The Animal World (completed in 1956). Needing an opening sequence about dinosaurs, Allen hired premier model animator Willis O'Brien to animate the dinosaurs, but then gave him an impossibly short production schedule. O'Brien again hired Harryhausen to help with animation to complete the eight-minute sequence. It was Harryhausen's and O'Brien's first and only professional full-color work. Most viewers agree that the dinosaur sequence of Animal World was the best part of the entire movie (Animal World is available on the DVD release of O'Brien's 1957 film The Black Scorpion).

Harryhausen then returned to Columbia and Charles Schneer to make 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957), about an American spaceship returning from Venus. The spaceship crashes into the sea near Sicily, releasing an on-board alien egg specimen which washes up on shore. The egg soon hatches a creature that, in Earth's atmosphere, rapidly grows to gigantic size and terrifies the citizens of Rome. Harryhausen refined and improved his already-considerable ability at establishing emotional characterizations in the face of his Venusian Ymir model, creating yet another international box office hit.

Schneer was eager to graduate to full-color films. Reluctant at first, Harryhausen managed to develop the systems necessary to maintain proper color balances for his DynaMation process, resulting in his biggest hit of the 1950s, The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958). The top-grossing film of that summer, and one of the top-grossing films of that year, Schneer and Harryhausen signed another deal with Columbia for four more color films.

1960s

After The 3 Worlds of Gulliver (1960) and Mysterious Island (1961), both great artistic and technical successes, and successful at the box office, according to Harryhausen, who stated in the DVD and Blu-ray featurette about the making of Mysterious Island: "Mysterious Island was one of the most successful films that we made and I am glad people are still enjoying it today". And Gulliver " Made its' profits" as Ray is quoted in Jeff Rovin's bio-book From The Land Beyond Beyond: The Making of the Movie Monsters You've Known and Loved - The Films of Willis O'Brien and Ray Harryhausen.His next film is considered by film historians and fans as Harryhausen's masterwork, Jason and the Argonauts (1963). Among the film's several celebrated animation sequences is an extended fight between three actors and seven living skeletons, a considerable advance on the single-skeleton fight scene in Sinbad. This stop-motion sequence took over four months to complete.

Harryhausen next made First Men in the Moon (1964), his only film made in the 2.35:1 widescreen (a.k.a. "CinemaScope") format, based on the novel by H. G. Wells. Jason, and First Men in the Moon were box office disappointments at the time of their original theatrical release. That, plus changes of management at Columbia Pictures, resulted in his contract with Columbia Picture not being renewed. Also, as the 1960s counter-culture came to influence more and more and younger filmmakers, and failing studios struggled to find material that was popular with the new "Boomer-generation" audience, Harryhausen's love of the past, setting his stories in ancient fantasy worlds or previous centuries, kept him from keeping pace with changing tastes in the 1960s. Only a handful of Harryhausen's features have been set in then-present time, and none in the future. As this revolution in the traditional Hollywood movie studio system, and the influx of a new generation of film makers sorted itself out, Harryhausen became a free agent.

Harryhausen was then hired by Hammer Films to animate the dinosaurs for One Million Years B.C. (1966).It was a success at the box office, helped in part by the presence of Raquel Welch in her second film. Harryhausen next went on to make another dinosaur film, The Valley of Gwangi with Schneer. The project had been developed for Columbia, who declined. Schneer then made a deal with Warner Brothers instead. It was a personal project to Harryhausen, which he had wanted to do for many years, as it was storyboarded by his original mentor, Willis O'Brien for a 1939 film, Gwangi, that was never completed. Set in Mexico, The Valley of Gwangi is a parallel Kong story—cowboys capture a living Allosaurus and bring him to the nearest Mexican city for exhibition. Sabotage releases the creature, and it wreaks havoc on the town. The film features a roping scene reminiscent of 1949's Mighty Joe Young (which was itself recycled from the old Gwangi storyboards), and a spectacular fire and animation sequence inside a cathedral toward the end of the film.

1970s–1990s

After a few lean years, Harryhausen and Schneer talked Columbia Pictures into reviving the Sinbad character, resulting in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, often remembered for the sword fight involving a statue of the six-armed goddess Kali. It was first released in Los Angeles in the Christmas season of 1973, but garnered its main audience in the spring and summer of 1974. It was followed by Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger (1977), which disappointed some fans because of its tongue-in-cheek approach. Both films were, however, box office successes.

Schneer and Harryhausen finally were allowed by MGM to produce a big budget film with name actors and an expanded effects budget. The film started out smaller but then MGM increased the budget to hire stars such as Laurence Olivier. It became the last feature film to showcase his effects work, Clash of the Titans (1981), for which he was nominated for a Saturn Award for Best Special Effects. For this film, he hired protégé model animators Steve Archer and two-time Oscar-nominated Jim Danforth to assist with major animation sequences. Harryhausen fans will readily discern that the armed-and-finned kraken (a name borrowed from medieval Scandinavian folklore) he invented for Clash of the Titans has similar facial qualities to the Venusian Ymir he created twenty-five years earlier for 20 Million Miles to Earth.

Perhaps because of his hermetic production style and the fact that he produced half of his films outside of Hollywood (living in London since 1960), reducing his day-to-day kinship with other more traditional, but still influential Hollywood effects artists, none of Harryhausen's films were nominated for a special effects Oscar. Harryhausen himself says the reason was that he worked in Europe, but this oversight by the AMPAS visual-effects committee also occurred throughout the 1950s when Harryhausen lived in Los Angeles.

In spite of the very successful box office returns of Clash of the Titans, more sophisticated computer-assisted technology developed by ILM and others began to eclipse Harryhausen's production techniques, and so MGM and other studios passed on funding his planned sequel, Force of the Trojans, causing Harryhausen and Schneer to retire from active filmmaking.

In the early 1970s, Harryhausen had also concentrated his efforts on authoring a book, Film Fantasy Scrapbook (produced in three editions as his last three films were released) and supervising the restoration and release of (eventually all) his films to video, laserdisc, DVD, and currently Blu-ray disc. A second book followed, Ray Harryhausen: An Animated Life, written with author and friend Tony Dalton, which details his techniques and history. This was then followed in 2005 by The Art of Ray Harryhausen, featuring sketches and drawings for his many projects, some of them unrealized. In 2008, Harryhausen and Dalton published a history of stop-motion model animation, A Century of Model Animation, and, to celebrate Harryhausen's 90th birthday, the Ray & Diana Harryhausen Foundation published Ray Harryhausen – A Life in Pictures. In 2011, the last volume, called Ray Harryhausen's Fantasy Scrapbook, was also published.

Harryhausen continued his lifelong friendship with Ray Bradbury until Bradbury's death in 2012. Another long-time close friend was Famous Monsters of Filmland magazine editor, book writer, and sci-fi collector Forrest J Ackerman, who loaned Harryhausen his photos of King Kong in 1933, right after Harryhausen had seen the film for the first time. Harryhausen also maintained his friendships with his long-time producer, Charles H. Schneer, who lived next door to him in a suburb of London until Schneer moved full-time to the U.S. (a few years later, in early 2009, Schneer died at 88 in Boca Raton, Florida); and with model animation protégé, Jim Danforth, still living in the Los Angeles area.

Harryhausen and Terry Moore appeared in small comedic cameo roles in the 1998 remake of Mighty Joe Young, and he has also provided the voice of a polar bear cub in the Will Ferrell film Elf. He also appears as a bar patron in Beverly Hills Cop III, and as a doctor in the John Landis film Spies Like Us. In 2010, Harryhausen had a brief cameo in Burke & Hare, a British film also directed by Landis.

In 1986, Harryhausen formed the Ray & Diana Harryhausen Foundation, a registered charity in the U.K. and U.S., which preserves all of his collection and promotes the art of stop-motion animation and Harryhausen's contribution to the genre.

2000s–2010s

In 2002, young animators Seamus Walsh and Mark Caballero helped Harryhausen complete The Story of the Tortoise and the Hare. This was the sixth and final installment of the Harryhausen fairy tales. The film was started in 1952 and completed in 2002, 50 years later. Caballero and Walsh refurbished the original puppets and, under Harryhausen's direction and guidance, completed the film. The film went on to win the 2003 Annie award for best short film and gained worldwide attention. Walsh and Caballero have since moved on to form their own stop-motion company, Screen Novelties, which is based in Los Angeles, California.

TidalWave Productions' Ray Harryhausen Signature Series produced authorized comic book adaptions of some of Harryhausen's unrealized projects from 2007 on.

In 2009, he released self-colorized versions on Blu-Ray video of three of his classic black and white Columbia films: 20 Million Miles to Earth, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, and It Came from Beneath the Sea. He also personally supervised the colorization of three films, two of them in partial tribute to their producer Merian C. Cooper, who had supervised King Kong, the film that inspired him as a young man: The Most Dangerous Game (1932), She (1935), and the non-Cooper film Things to Come (1936).

Ray Harryhausen was given a special tribute, for his 90th birthday, at the BFI Southbank theater in London, where he had lived since the 1960s, which was attended by all the top visual effects directors and technicians and was hosted by director John Landis. At this event he was presented by Peter Jackson with a special BAFTA award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

In June 2010, it was announced that the Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation had agreed to deposit the animator's complete collection of some 50,000 pieces with the National Media Museum in Bradford, England.

Harryhausen married Diana Livingstone Bruce in October, 1962. The couple had a daughter, Vanessa. The family announced Harryhausen's death via Twitter and Facebook on May 7, 2013. Diana survived her husband by five months.

The Daily Mirror quoted Harryhausen's website, saying his "influence on today's film makers was enormous, with luminaries; Steven Spielberg, James Cameron, Peter Jackson, George Lucas, John Landis and the U.K.'s own Nick Park have cited Harryhausen as being the man whose work inspired their own creations." Harryhausen himself drew a distinction between films that combine special effects animation with live action, and films that are completely animated, such as the films of Nick Park, Henry Selick, Ivo Caprino, Ladislav Starevich and many others (including his own fairy tale shorts) which he saw as pure "puppet films", and which are more accurately (and traditionally) called "puppet animation".

The BBC quoted Peter Lord of Aardman Animations, who wrote on Twitter that Harryhausen was "a one-man industry and a one-man genre". The BBC also quoted Shaun of the Dead director Edgar Wright: "I loved every single frame of Ray Harryhausen's work ... He was the man who made me believe in monsters." In a full statement released by the family, George Lucas said, "Without Ray Harryhausen, there would likely have been no Star Wars". Terry Gilliam said, "What we do now digitally with computers, Ray did digitally long before but without computers. Only with his digits." James Cameron also paid tribute by saying, "I think all of us who are practitioners in the arts of science fiction and fantasy movies now all feel that we're standing on the shoulders of a giant. If not for Ray's contribution to the collective dreamscape, we wouldn't be who we are."

John Walsh, author of Harryhausen: The Lost Movies, describes Harryhausen as "the most influential stop-motion animator and special-effects wizard in cinema history."

Harryhausen left his collection, which includes all of his film-related artifacts, to the Ray & Diana Harryhausen Foundation, which he set up in 1986 to look after his extensive collection, to protect his name and to further the art of model stop-motion animation. The trustees are his daughter Vanessa Harryhausen, Simon Mackintosh, actress Caroline Munro, who appeared in The Golden Voyage of Sinbad [1] and film maker John Walsh, [2], who first met with Ray Harryhausen in 1988 as a film student of the London Film School and made a documentary entitled Ray Harryhausen: Movement Into Life, narrated by Doctor Who actor Tom Baker. The Foundation's website charts progress on the restoration of the collection and future plans for Harryhausen's legacy.

In 2013, the RH foundation and Arrow Films released a feature-length biography of Harryhausen and his films called Ray Harryhausen - Special Effects Titan on Blu-Ray.Featuring photos, artifacts, and film clips culled directly Harryhausen's estate and never before seen by the public, the film was initially released only in the U.K., but was finally released on Blu-Ray in the U.S. in 2016.

Some of Ray Harryhausen's most iconic models and artworks were showcased as part of the Barbican Centre's 'Into the Unknown' exhibition from June 3 to September 1, 2017. The exhibition program showcased an all-encompassing exploration of science fiction, from its roots in classic literature, through to modern day cinema blockbusters, allowing visitors to view Ray's creative output within the wider context of the genre. To mark Ray's 97th birthday on July 29, 2017, the Barbican posted a guest blog by the Foundation's Collections Manager Connor Heaney, highlighting the animator's lasting influence on science fiction.

On June 5, 2017, it was announced that a major exhibition of Ray Harryhausen's models was to take place at the Science Museum Oklahoma. John Walsh was quoted as saying "The collection held at The Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation is not just artifacts of historical and cinematic importance, but is also a window into the science of photo chemical film making". Entitled "Ray Harryhausen - Mythical Menagerie" the exhibition will open to the public from July 29. USA Today named it as "one of best museum exhibits in the U.S. this fall"In 2018 the exhibition was nominated for a Rondo Hatton Award for "Best Live Event"

An exhibition at Tate Britain from June 26 to November 19, 2017 features work from the Harryhausen collection and short film made by John Walsh on the restoration of a painting owned by Harryhausen which influenced his work.

In a podcast interview with BritFlicks, Walsh discusses his plans to develop lost Ray Harryhausen film projects.

An exhibition opened showing items from the Harryhausen collection at the Valence House Museum on March 14, 2018. The exhibition was inspired by local man Alan Friswell, who worked with Ray Harryhausen on the creatures' restorations. It was funded Barking and Dagenham London Borough Council. In an interview, Foundation Trustee John Walsh said: "The exhibition brings Hollywood to Dagenham. Alan Friswell went to see films of Harryhausen and now he is bringing his skillsets to the borough. We have over 50,000 individual items which is the largest outside of Walt Disney and this is just the tip of the iceberg. We are ready to come back with more models in the future."In the Barking & Dagenham Yellow Advertiser Walsh said ""The models look fantastic in the intimate setting of Valence House and they are the original creatures that have been used in some of the biggest Hollywood films. This is a great opportunity for people to see them."

In July 2018, it was announced that the largest ever exhibition of Ray Harryhausen's models and artwork would take place at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh, to mark his centenary in the summer of 2020.

In February 2016, a podcast was devised by John Walsh and is co-hosted by him and Collections Manager Connor Heaney.

During the 1980s and early 1990s, those of Harryhausen's growing legion of fans who had graduated into the professional film industry started lobbying The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to acknowledge Harryhausen's contribution to the film industry, and so, in 1992 the Academy finally awarded him the Gordon E. Sawyer Award (effectively a lifetime achievement "Oscar") for "technological contributions [which] have brought credit to the industry", with actor Tom Hanks as the Master of Ceremonies, and Ray Bradbury (a friend from when they were both just out of high school) presenting the award to him. After the presentation to Harryhausen, actor Tom Hanks told the audience, "Some people say Casablanca or Citizen Kane...I say Jason and the Argonauts is the greatest film ever made!" A long series of appearances at film festivals, colleges, and film seminars around the world soon followed as Harryhausen met many of the millions of people who had grown up enjoying his work.

• The work of Ray Harryhausen was celebrated in an exhibition at London's Museum of the Moving Image (MOMI) in 1990.
• In 2010 the main screening theater at Sony Pictures Digital Productions was named in honor of Harryhausen.
• The Science Fiction Hall of Fame inducted Harryhausen in 2005, the first year it honored non-literary contributors. He received the annual British Fantasy Society Wagner Award in 2008 for his lifetime contribution to the genre.
• On June 10, 2003, Harryhausen was honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
• Ray received an honorary BAFTA in June 2010 at a ceremony at the British Film Institute. His mask award was presented to him by filmmaker Peter Jackson.

The Academy Film Archive has preserved a number of Ray Harryhausen's films, including Guadalcanal, How to Bridge a Gorge, and The Story of Hansel and Gretel.

Fan and filmmaker tributes to Harryhausen abound in many forms.

• In the video game Killer Instinct, three characters are Harryhausen-inspired, specifically Spinal, Eyedol, and Gargos.
• The Mythos Games/Virgin Interactive Entertainment computer game Magic and Mayhem (1999) features over 25 stop-motion mythological creatures that were inspired by Harryhausen's work. Constructed by special effects expert and stop-motion animator Alan Friswell, the various characters include a dragon, a centaur, a griffin and a fighting skeleton. For the griffin's wing animation, Friswell studied the griffin from The Golden Voyage of Sinbad (1974). Friswell subsequently worked for the Ray and Diana Harryhausen Foundation, restoring many of the original animation models used in Harryhausen's films. Friswell still holds the position of official restorer for the Foundation.
• The 1992 comedy-horror film Army of Darkness features the titular army resembling the army of skeletons from Jason and the Argonauts.
• The 2001 Pixar film Monsters, Inc. pays homage to Harryhausen in a scene where characters Mike Wazowski and Celia Mae visit a sushi restaurant named "Harryhausen's".
• Tim Burton considers his satiric science fiction movie Mars Attacks! (1996) to be a tribute to Harryhausen, especially in a scene in which one of the hostile Martians' flying saucers chops down the Washington Monument by crashing into it, just as Harryhausen had done in his movie Earth vs. the Flying Saucers in 1956.
• In 2007, fantasy comic book author/illustrator Stephen D. Sullivan dedicated his novel Warrior's Bones to Harryhausen and comic book creator Stan Lee. "For stoking the fires of my imagination." In the book, which is part of the Dragonlance: The New Adventures series, the heroine must battle a rampaging clockwork giant.
• The Gravity Falls episode, "Little Gift Shop of Horrors" (specifically the "Clay Day" segment), has several references to Ray Harryhausen and his work.
• In the 2005 film Corpse Bride, while Victor is at Victoria's house, he plays the piano, which is labelled as a "Harryhausen".
• The 2007 song Worried About Ray, by London pop rock band The Hoosiers, is inspired by and is about Harryhausen.
• A short clay-animation film, "Martian Peen Worm" (here abridged from a much longer title) made in the 1970s in Texas by Ivan Stang of Church of the SubGenius fame, refers to the worm at one stage of its growth-development as a "Nesuahyrrah" (Harryhausen spelled backwards).
• Another 17-minute short film made in 2005, "Southwestern Orange County vs. the Flying Saucers", uses identical saucer models to Harryhausen's similarly-titled 1956 alien invasion movie.
• In The Venture Bros. Season 4 Episode 5 "The Revenge Society", Red Mantle sarcastically compares Phantom Limb to Ray Harryhausen.
• Harryhausen was the subject of the song Monster, the title track of former Stranglers singer Hugh Cornwell's 2018 solo album.

In March 1983, Harryhausen participated in a special one-day event at Mann's Chinese Theater celebrating the 50th anniversary of premier screening of the 1933 King Kong in the same theater. Visual effects technicians from several film-effects facilities recreated the life-sized bust of Kong as it appeared in the theater's outer lobby area 50 years earlier. The August 1983 issue of American Cinematographer features three articles about the event.

• The Jupiter Project (1937): A Flash Gordon–like adventure in which a spaceship lands on Jupiter and encounters a multi-armed creature
• Evolution of the World (also known as Evolution) (1940)
• War of the Worlds (1949)
• Food of the Gods (1949): Based on a story by H. G. Wells
• The Valley of the Mist (1950): An unrealized Willis O'Brien project about the discovery of an Allosaurus in a lost valley.The concept later became the basis for Harryhausen's 1969 film The Valley of Gwangi.
• Baron Munchausen (1950)
• The Elementals (1952): Harryhausen wrote the original outline story about bat creatures that nest in the Eiffel Tower and terrorize Paris, France; he sold the idea for development to Jack Dietz in 1953, but the project, after several scripts—including one by Ray Bradbury—languished. A test sequence was nonetheless filmed showing Harryhausen battling one of the bat creatures on a hill.
• The Tortoise and the Hare (1953): Only partially filmed, the shelved project was resumed a half-century later and completed in 2002 by Harryhausen, in collaboration with animators Seamus Walsh and Mark Caballero (who had offered Harryhausen, long-retired since 1981, their services to help him finish the film).
• Tarzan and the Ant Men (1960): Dropped due to difficulties in obtaining rights to the Tarzan franchise
• Food of the Gods (1961)
• Skin and Bones (1963): Based on the novel by Thorne Smith about a scientist whose skin dissapears every time he ingests alcohol.
• Sinbad and the 7 Wonders of the World (1981)
• Sinbad Goes to Mars (also known as Sinbad on Mars and Sinbad's Voyage to Mars) (1981)
• Sinbad in the Age of Muses (1960): Title given to Harryhausen's earliest work, which then evolved into Jason and the Argonauts
• Sinbad and the Valley of Dinosaurs (1966): Harryhausen considered making a Sinbad film involving dinosaurs; however, it met little interest. He instead co-produced The Valley of Gwangi.
• People of the Mist (1983): Based on an H. Rider Haggard story; planned for British director Michael Winner; dropped by Harryhausen due to Winner's insistence on radically changing the story
• Force of the Trojans (1984): A version, with mythological creatures, of Aeneas and his journey after the fall of Troy; a sequel to Clash of the Titans
• The Story of Odysseus (1996–1998): Harryhausen was consultant on story development and character design for Carrington & Cosgrove Hall Productions

In an interview with Dalya Alberge for The Observer, John Walsh said about his book Harryhausen: The Lost Movies, “he was taken aback by the scale of unrealised artwork that reveals new worlds, epic tales and fearsome creatures." Walsh describes Harryhausen, who died in 2013 aged 92, as the most influential stop-motion animator and special-effects wizard in cinema history. Such is the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s enduring influence that, at his death in 2013, George Lucas said that “there would likely have been no Star Wars without Ray Harryhausen”.

In July 2019, John Walsh, author of Harryhausen: The Lost Movies, said he was shocked by the amount of artwork created by Harryhausen for projects that were never produced. In particular, he is developing Force of the Trojans, a film originally written by Beverly Cross, using Harryhausen's concept art.