A lot of people talk about how when they were kids they watched King Kong and Godzilla. I did, too, but the two movies that really hit me hard were Dragonslayer and “Clash of the Titans.” (Tron came out a year later.) I can’t deny that, until I moved to Astoria, most of what I knew about Greek culture was derived from this film. Some of the remarkable things about the film (other than that they got Laurence Olivier to play Zeus) is the rather frank way they don’t pull their punches that much for a kiddie film. You want mythology, well, here’s your violence, depravity, catty fighting, adultery, beheadings, genocides. . .all is glorious color stop motion! Also: some quick glimpses of real nudity. Like, more than Janet Jackson on the Super Bowl (“Dragonslayer,” if you watch it on frame-by-frame, even has a flash of bush!) 1981! What a time!! Anyway, the scene in Medusa’s palace — I musta watched this 900 times as a kid — seeing it again I was amazed at just how many of the shots were burned in my memory. Good fun. And the Bobo, the little Robot Owl, got Goober interested in the movie, too.
