20 Million Miles to Earth

Worth this DVD's price of purchase is a 60-minute documentary that charts the career of legendary special effects wizard Ray Harryhausen, the master of stop-motion animation, perhaps best known for that army of skeletons in Jason and the Argonauts. In addition to awe-inspiring film clips, this program, written by esteemed film critic Richard Schickel and narrated by Leonard Nimoy, includes interviews with such admirers as George Lucas and Henry Selick (The Nightmare Before Christmas). And the movie? 20 Million Miles to Earth is a 1957 fish-out-of-water thriller, featuring a green alien monster fresh from Venus, who runs amuck when provoked. Harryhausen nicely pays homage to King Kong with the climactic showdown that places the beast atop the Colosseum in Rome. Recommended. (K. Lee Benson)[DVD Review—Aug. 7, 2007—Sony, 2 discs, 165 min., not rated, $24.98—Making its second appearance on DVD, 1957's 20 Million Miles to Earth (50th Anniversary Edition) boasts a solid transfer and DVD extras including both the original black-and-white and colorized versions of the film (along with a Chromachoice option to toggle between the two), audio commentary (by visual effects icon Ray Harryhausen and visual effects artists Dennis Muren, Phil Tippet, and Arnold Kunert), 35 minutes of “Video Photo Galleries” (including ad art, production stills, portraits, and artwork), the 27-minute interview segment “Tim Burton Sits Down with Ray Harryhausen,” a 27-minute retrospective featurette, the 23-minute featurette “David Schechter on Film Music's Unsung Hero” on conductor Mischa Bakaleinikoff, an 18-minute “Original Ad Artwork” montage, an interview with costar Joan Taylor (18 min.), an 11-minute featurette on “The Colorization Process,” stills from the “20 Million Miles More” comic book, and trailers. Bottom line: although this is an excellent extras package, what's missing from the first release is the fine documentary “The Harryhausen Chronicles”—but since that piece is also available on several other Harryhausen films (including First Men on the Moon, Mysterious Island, and The 3 Worlds of Gulliver), you may already own it. In any case, this fine two-disc homage to a minor sci-fi classic is recommended.]