5 Comments

• 

  Comment by Allen P. Williams — May 14, 2016 @ 7:44 pm

  The first movie that really blew me away with special effects was definitely Terminator 2. That was the first time I was like “What!? They can do that?! Holy shit!” Amazing.

• 

  Comment by JOHN BRAGG — May 17, 2016 @ 7:48 am

  Definitely Back To The Future.

• 

  Comment by Todd Mason — May 22, 2016 @ 1:15 am

  Bat Boy was completely a creature of WEEKLY WORLD NEWS, which was meant from its beginning to be the completely batshit silly companion to its sibling tabloids, the others still mixing paparazzi bits and checkbook gossip journalism bits with nonsense…I saw, since I had friends addicted to WWN from jump, where they felt they might’ve gone too far, with an “advice column” titled “Ask Babs” where Babs advised slapping around one’s kids, not too far from the “real” advice offered by James Dobson and his sort of freak to asinine parents…but WWN dropped “Ask Babs” in favor of another sort of parody advice column almost immediately afterward. The company that published WWN some years later that bought MAD-imitator CRACKED magazine from it former publisher, and so for a year or so WWN and CRACKED were stablemates…this somewhat before the current CRACKED website was up and running.

  If THE ONION had a single most important ancestor, it was probably Paul Krassner’s THE REALIST, which also anticipated Andy Kaufman and similar folks (including Pat Paulsen, who also was doing what we can call Extreme Deadpan at least at times before Kaufman–Paulsen did his repeatedly failed “attempts” at levitation bit on a very early LATE NIGHT WITH DAVID LETTERMAN, a number of years after his presidential runs beginning in ’68)…THE REALIST first got a Lot of attention with its intentionally grotesque “The Parts Left Out of the Warren Report”…which entirely too many gullible sorts took to be true reportage.

  First film where I was impressed by special effects…the original KING KONG. I am just the right age to have seen that one endlessly repeated on tv when I was a Very young child, and it was sold outright to stations to run as many times as they wanted…not quite a public domain deal, but close enough. The first recurring nightmare I remember was inspired by the movie, and the first time I learned I could consciously (or semi-consciously!) control my own nightmares to a certain extent followed on that.

• 

  Comment by Todd Mason — May 23, 2016 @ 6:30 pm

  Took till now for me to note that Vanessa’s hair in the photo is somewhat similarly-styled to Joanne Whalley’s on the box art for WILLOW…

• 

  Comment by FellHarbor — July 20, 2016 @ 11:41 am

  I’ve always been mesmerized by puppetry, so I’m going to have to say The Dark Crystal was the first movie that astounded me. Just the scope of everything – an entire world of locations and creatures, all physically existing! As for CG work, it was definitely Jurassic Park. Amazing work visually, but the audio is just as awesome.

RSS feed for comments on this post.

Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.