You know, If anyone is in the Los Angeles area, there's a free screening (in 35mm) of BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN at the UCLA Billy Wilder Theater this Monday, September 27. There's more information to be found here. The only one of these old Universal films that I've seen since I was old enough to remember is, weirdly, SPANISH DRACULA. It was the bottom half of a long double bill when I saw it, though, so I was pretty tired and unenthusiastic by the end. I definitely saw FRANKENSTEIN as a kid, but I can't remember a thing about it.
I have fond memories of the seventies tv-miniseries, FRANKENSTEIN: THE TRUE STORY, but haven't seen it in decades. Believe it or not, a young Jane Seymour played the Bride!
When I was looking up Frankenstein to order it I found that Frankenstein: The True Story is available on dvd. I'm considering it.
I love those old movies, they are great. I haven't watched them since I was a kid, but I do have to admit they are not easy to watch sometimes. They are clasic for a reason, but I prefer my blood and guts movies. I grew up with Jason; Freddy and Mike, but I have a ton of respect for those older movies. It's not their fault visual effects sucked back then.
Ironically, her real name is Joyce Penelope Wilhelmina Frankenberg, and she adopted the "Jane Seymour" stage name (after the third wife of Henry VIII, I assume) because she thought Frankenberg sounded too much like Frankenstein. And then, five years later, she was acting in a Frankenstein story!
Actually, Spider-Man was done once before. The '70s version with Nicholas Hammond. And it proves your point pretty well.
Twice, actually. Around the same time, there was a live-action Japanese Spider-Man series (or Supaidaaman) from Toei. It had nothing in common with the original aside from the costume and some of the powers; Japanese Spidey got his powers from aliens from Planet Spider, and he used a giant robot to battle an invading alien army. But it handled the action better than the American show. The shots of Spidey climbing walls were better, using split-screen effects to hide the wires and winches that were sometimes obvious in the US show. The stunts and fights were much better because of the Japanese experience with martial-arts films and shows; Japanese Spidey used a form that I suppose could be called a kind of spider kung-fu, actually moving in a fairly arachnid-like way, and his fights involved a lot of leaping and climbing. In that respect, the Japanese version was a more convincing and authentic Spider-Man than the US version, even if everything else about the show was something totally different.
Standards were no different back then; only technology was different (and styles, of course, but style is style-- neither superior nor inferior). In fact, since the lack of technology required that more effort be put into artistry, an argument could be made that movies of that era are superior to what we have now. I have those sets, too. I love them. Visual effects did not suck back then. As I mentioned above, the artistry was amazing. Frankenstein does not suffer for lack of CGI any more than van Gogh suffered for lack of Photoshop.
Believe it or not I'd be inclined to say that about quite a few older films. What gets me about the 1933 King Kong isn't the f/x limitations, but rather the ideas behind them, what they were trying to convey. Ditto with something like Forbidden Planet and the 1968 Planet Of The Apes. Then you get to 2001 which effectively says, "screw cgi---lookee what we can do." I have is the 75th anniversary edition of Frankenstein which includes a number of documentaries. One looks at the emergence and evolution of those early films. It's remarked upon that it's curious these films came out and became popular when they did. It's possible that in some respect they were a distraction from the real trails and horrors many people were dealing with at the time. It's also speculated that in a way these films were a subconscious expression of the horrors faced by survivors of WW1, where thousands of soldiers who would have died of their injuries before now survived but with terrible disfigurations.
OT, I've started collecting everything that I can get that David Manners appeared in. When we moved to Nova Scotia we found out he spent his summers in the house across the road from ours and our house appears in his novel Convenient Season. If nothing else it makes a neat display in the library and there's some fun flicks there too.
Only it's not her you see swimming nekkid -- she was doubled by Olympic swimming champion Josephine McKim.
I think the special effects in those movies are way, way cooler than the overdone CGI we have these days in movies like "Gi Joe: The Rise of Cobra" and "Star Wars Episode III - Revenge of the Sith". When I watch special effects in newer movies like those, I just feel like I'm looking at a computer game. With those older flicks, the animation and handcrafted puppets/props and screen work may not have been photo realistic, but they had an otherworldly quality that made them mesmerizing and charming. Another good example is the Ray Harryhausen stop motion stuff which was just brilliantly surreal. I have a lot more appreciation for creatures and surroundings rendered through camera tricks and meticulous puppeteer work than some of the slick, modern computer generated stuff. I get bored when everything I'm looking at just looks like state-of-the-art computer graphics. They may look 'fake', but the made-up creatures and surroundings in movies like the 30s Kong and 2001 sure feel a lot more real and have a physicality that overblown CGI creations can't come close to matching.
I can appreciate well crafted CGI. Still, sometimes I really miss good model work. In terms of science fiction in film to my eye nothing has ever equaled the awe I felt seeing the Enterprise depicted in ST-TMP.