I wanted to make a film of it for many years but every time I mention it to (producer) Charles Schneer he would always bring up the argument, and rightly so, that there was not enough variety in it as it stood for a feature production. Harryhausen stated in his Film Fantasy Scrapbook, “The Wells novel had always been a favourite of mine. He is, of course, Bedford, and as he tells his story, the film proper begins in flashback. Back on Earth, a very old man in a rest home tells reporters that he put the Union Jack on the moon in 1899. The film’s main twist was a contemporary prologue and epilogue: In the prologue we see a United Nations spaceship land on the moon and when the astronauts emerge they are amazed to find a British flag waiting for them. Arnold and Kate finally escape back to Earth in the anti-gravity sphere but Professor Cavor stays behind to see if he can establish friendly relations with the lunar inhabitants. With him go Arnold Bedford ( Edward Judd) and his fiancee Kate ( Martha Hyer) and, once on the moon, they encounter the insect-like Selenites who prove to be none-too-friendly. Lionel Jeffries camps it up as Professor Cavor, the inventor who creates an anti-gravity material that enables him to fly to the moon in a spherical spaceship. Despite being based on a HG Wells novel and a screenplay co-written by Nigel Kneale (creator of the Quatermass series), it was played strictly for laughs and obviously aimed at the juvenile market. Movies about space travel were not exactly in fashion during the early sixties, but one notable exception was First Men In The Moon (1964) which, unfortunately, hasn’t much to recommend it apart from Harryhausen’s amazing special effects.
His extensive career also includes The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms (1953), The Three Worlds Of Gulliver (1960), One Million Years BC (1967), and Clash Of The Titans (1981).
Despite all the advancements made by modern computer and digital technology, Harryhausen’s effects still impress us, largely because they were always based on a resolutely human scale and were, as such, always believable. Harryhausen animated the skeletons with his own variation on the stop-motion technique – Dynamation – with which he recreated scenes that a child of the fifties or sixties might well have been able to imagine (thanks to comics) but would have never dreamed of actually seeing such scenes re-enacted on the big silvery screen. Special effects artist Ray Harryhausen will be forever remembered for the magical fighting skeletons seen in both Nathan Juran‘s inspired fantasy The 7th Voyage Of Sinbad (1958) and in Don Chaffey‘s Jason And The Argonauts (1963). Taking Arnold and accidentally taking Katherine they fly to the moon where, to their total amazement, they discover a bee-like insect population who take an unhealthy interest in their Earthly visitors.” (courtesy IMDB) Cavor has invented Cavorite, a paste that will allow anything to deflect gravity and he created a sphere that will actually take them to the moon. On Earth, an investigation team finds the last of the Victorian crew, a now-aged Arnold Bedford and he tells them the story of how he and his girlfriend, Katherine Callender, meet up with an inventor, Joseph Cavor, in 1899. But the delight turns to shock when the astronauts discover an old British flag and a document declaring that the moon is taken for Queen Victoria proving that the astronauts were not the first men on the moon. The world is delighted when a space craft containing a crew made up of the world’s astronauts lands on the moon, they think for the first time.
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