I remember, at the age of 11 or 12, my art teacher obsessing about the skeletal warriors of 'Jason and the Argonauts', rhetorically asking us, his class, how 'death' could possibly be, be made to appear, so alive.

(In a way, this perplexed Harryhausen himself — as recounted in his excellent autobiography 'An Animated Life', he couldn't devise a way for Jason to kill that what was already dead, so had to settle for pushing them into the Mediterranean!)

It was around this time too that my late father took me to see the original 'Clash of the Titans', the last film for which Harryhausen provided major SFX work. No masterpiece, but I'd still rather sit through the mechanical Bubo than Sam Worthington's postconverted-3D buzzcut.