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Messengers from the Stars: On Science Fiction and Fantasy
No. 2 - 2017
Editorial Board | Adelaide Serras
Ana Daniela Coelho
Ana Rita Martins
Angélica Varandas
João Félix
José Duarte
Advisory Board | Adam Roberts (Royal Holloway, Univ. of London, UK)
David Roas (Univ. Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain)
Flávio García (Univ. do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
Henrique Leitão (Fac. de Ciências, Univ. de Lisboa, Portugal)
Jonathan Gayles (Georgia State University, USA)
Katherine Fowkes (High Point University, USA)
Ljubica Matek (University of Osijek, Croatia)
Mª Cristina Batalha (Univ. do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
Susana Oliveira (Fac. de Arquitectura, Univ. de Lisboa,
Portugal)
Teresa Lopez-Pellisa (Univ. Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain)
Copy Editors | Ana Rita Martins || Igor Furão || João Félix || José Duarte
Book Review | Diana Marques || Igor Furão || Mónica Paiva
Editors
Translator | Diogo Almeida
Photography | Rodrigo Tavarela Peixoto
Site | http://messengersfromthestars.letras.ulisboa.pt/journal/
Contact | mfts.journal@gmail.com
ISSN | 2183-7465
Editor | Centro de Estudos Anglísticos da Universidade de Lisboa |
University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies
Alameda da Universidade - Faculdade de Letras
1600-214 Lisboa - Portugal
“Vaguely Disreputable”: Ray Harryhausen and the “Kidult” Film
Noel Brown
Liverpool Hope University
Abstract | This article explores the role of film producer and special effects pioneer
Ray Harryhausen in the development of the so-called “kidult” film. It examines the
origins and the significations of the word “kidult”, which was seen to refer both to a
specific type of film and to the audiences it mobilises. It denoted appeal to child and
adult audiences, while asserting a distinction, a breaking away from parallel
conceptions of the “family film” and “family audiences”, which had held sway in
Hollywood’s industry and promotional discourses since the early 1930s. Harryhausen
claimed to have invented the word and his film 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) was
explicitly promoted as a “kidult” film on initial release. Through close analysis of
Harryhausen’s fantasy films, this article argues that these productions adopted many
of the essential narrative and representational elements of the 1950s Hollywood teen
film, while still recognisably residing within a broader definition of Hollywood
family entertainment. It contends that Harryhausen’s films were precursors to the
contemporary Hollywood fantasy blockbuster in their address to the conceptual
22
“kidult” consumer, their fast-paced, action-adventure narratives, and their emphasis
on spectacle.
Keywords | Hollywood; “kidult”; family film; 1950s; Harryhausen.
Resumo | O presente artigo visa explorar o papel de Ray Harryhausen, produtor de
filmes e pioneiro no campo de efeitos especiais, no desenvolvimento do género
“kidult”. Pretende-se examinar as origens e significados do termo “kidult”, cujo uso
tinha sido aplicado tanto para designar um tipo de filme específico, como o público
que este mobiliza. É sabido que o termo sugere um apelo ao público adulto e infantil
ao mesmo tempo que reafirma uma distinção ou distanciamento de concepções
paralelas sobre o conceito de “filmes para a família” e um “público composto por
famílias” que tinham dominado a indústria de Hollywood assim como os discursos
promocionais desde o início dos anos 1930. Harryhausen alega ter inventado a palavra
e aquando do lançamento o filme 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) foi explicitamente
promovido como “kidult”. Através da análise dos filmes de Fantasia realizados por
Harryhausen, o presente estudo argumenta que estas produções adoptaram vários
elementos essenciais à narrativa de filmes para adolescentes produzidos por
Hollywood durante os anos 50, enquadrando-se ao mesmo tempo na definição mais
abrangente de entretenimento Hollywoodiano para a família. Os filmes de
Harryhausen foram ainda precursores dos blockbusters de fantasia contemporâneos de
Hollywood no que diz respeito ao modo como se dirigem ao consumidor de filmes
“kidult”, nas narrativas rápidas e repletas de aventura e acção, e na enfâse dada ao
espetáculo.
Palavras-Chave | Hollywood; “kidult”; filmes para famílias; anos 50; Harryhausen.
The studios left us alone, as long as we didn’t run over budget...They
thought these genres – sci-fi, fantasy – were vaguely disreputable, B-movie
kids’ stuff. In fact, we coined a new term, ‘kidult’, to describe the kinds of
audiences attracted. – Ray Harryhausen.1
The quotation above identifies three key elements constitutive of Ray
Harryhausen’s relationship with the Hollywood mainstream of the 1950s: i) his
incongruity with the dominant aesthetic style and the industry’s conception of mass
audiences; ii) the air of disreputability that surrounded his primarily youth-orientated
films, and iii) newness – implicit in the new word, and the new concept, of the
1 Harryhausen’s quotation was in an article published in 1995, long after his career in Hollywood had come to an
end. See Stuart Husband, “It Came from Los Angeles”.
23
“kidult”. This word was used by studio Columbia to promote Harryhausen’s fantasy
extravaganza, 7th Voyage of Sinbad (Nathan Juran 1958); the marketing strategy was
intended, in the words of trade paper Boxoffice, “to convey the intelligence that here
is a parcel of escapist entertainment that will assert a strong appeal to both kids and
adults” (Harryhausen and Dalton 121). As we can see from the two quotations above,
“kidult” was seen to refer both to a specific type of film and to the audiences it
mobilises. It denoted appeal to child and adult audiences, while asserting a distinction,
a breaking away from parallel conceptions of the “family film” and “family
audiences”, which had held sway in Hollywood’s industry and promotional discourses
since the early 1930s.2 While notions of a “family audience” imply a differentiated
movie experience, with distinct, programmed pleasures for each member of the
family, the neologistic mash-up “kidult” suggests, rather, a hybridisation of child and
adult tastes.
Today, in the post-Lucas and Spielberg epoch, this model of popular culture
seems distinctly non-radical. However, in the context of 1950s America, it was
anything but. In this essay, I will explore Harryhausen’s role in the ongoing
development of “kidult” cinema, with reference to contemporary discourses, and
carry out a close textual analysis of several of his films produced between the late
1950s and early 1980s. His role, I would argue, is threefold. Firstly, 7th Voyage of
Sinbad, Harryhausen’s breakthrough film, was the first Hollywood release marketed
towards the “kidult”. Secondly, his two most important films, 7th Voyage and Jason
and the Argonauts (Don Chaffey, 1963), are clear precursors to the Hollywood-
produced, kidult-orientated blockbusters that now dominate global box office charts –
a group of films and franchises that includes Star Wars (1977–), Superman (1978–87;
2013–), Indiana Jones (1981–2008), Harry Potter (2001–11), Transformers (2007–),
and many others. Thirdly, the cultural reception of Harryhausen’s fantasy films spans
the three commercial stages of kidult entertainment: resistance, ambivalence and
finally mass acceptance. Harryhausen, now widely seen as the “true author” of the
films to which he contributed his 3-D stop-motion animation, has been cited as a key
influence by such major figures in the “New Hollywood” as George Lucas, Peter
Jackson, Tim Burton, James Cameron, Henry Selick and Denis Muran. Before
proceeding further, it is worth noting that several of the above individuals have been
2 On the beginnings of the “family film” in Hollywood, see Noel Brown, “‘A New Movie-Going Public’: 1930s
Hollywood and the Emergence of the ‘Family’ Film”.
24
identified as exponents of “kidult” entertainment, and/or as “kidults” themselves.3 Yet
while Spielberg and Lucas undoubtedly popularised the kidult film, Harryhausen, as I
will argue, can be regarded as one of the most important figures – a “missing link”, if
you will – in its formation.
The Beginnings of the “Kidult”
Although commonly presumed to be a recent coinage, the word “kidult”
actually dates back to the 1950s. However, Harryhausen’s later claim to have
concocted it himself is suspect: the earliest reference I have found is an article in the
North American trade paper Variety (24 November 1954) that announces a coming
“kidult kick”: “the berthing of talent and shows in slots that are conventionally for
kids on the time element but, in addition, lure many an adult viewer” (23). In fact, the
term appears to have been the invention of TV marketers, with early instances
generally alluding to a concrete “kidult slot”; a later Variety article (3 January 1962)
points to CBS’ broadcasting of Lassie (1954–74) and Dennis the Menace (1959–63)
during the late-afternoon/early-evening period as constituting “a strong 90-minute
kidult family bloc” (21). What does appear to be true is that the term was unknown, or
at least unused, in the Hollywood film industry when it was appropriated by
Harryhausen and Columbia’s marketing team to promote 7th Voyage of Sinbad in
1958. All of the references in Variety during the 1950s relate to television rather than
cinema. Aside from Harryhausen’s use of the word, this remained the case throughout
the 1960s and 1970s. During the 1980s, the term moved beyond industry discourse
into popular/journalistic usage, and attained its denigrating latter-day meaning of an
individual suffering (to borrow the title of a bestselling pop psychology book from
1982) from “The Peter Pan Syndrome.”
It is highly improbable that a film would explicitly be marketed for the
“kidult” audience today as usage of the term has become almost exclusively derisory.
This trend possibly began with New York Times film critic Vincent Canby’s dismayed
response to the Bruce Willis action vehicle, Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988), which
he claimed was made:
3 Spielberg and Lucas, in particular, have both been identified as quintessential “kidults”; see Noel Brown,
“Spielberg and the Kidult”.
25
for that new, true-blue American of the electronic age, the kidult, who may
be 8, 18, 38 or 80... In the past, our most popular movies have been those
that somehow have managed to appeal to both children and adults, though
not necessarily for the same reasons or with the same degree of
intensity...The [Steven] Spielberg films have always been made on the
assumption that there exists a common ground where the interests of
children and adults overlap, even though there are vast differences between
children and adults in their experience, education and capacity to
understand. Today’s hip film makers now realise that’s baloney... No
longer is there a necessity to find areas in which the interests of the child
and the adult overlap. They are the same. (19)
Subsequent references in the popular press (in America and Britain alike) have largely
been scornful. British journalist Mark Lawson calls kidulthood a “denial of ageing”
and “a comfort blanket hunger for lost innocence” (24); David Aaronovitch claims
that “this kidulthood is a way of avoiding reality rather than of understanding it” and
that “Kidulthood wishes to escape the world rather than to engage with it” (5); the
Washington Post seemingly spoke for the majority with its succinct evaluation of the
“kidult” as “that most unlovable of modern phenomena” (n. pag.).
The “Family”/“Kidult” Dichotomy
We need to divorce ourselves from such value judgements, and instead
examine what is really meant by “kidult”. My own understanding of it, following that
of Harryhausen and the marketing men who coined the term, is that of a form of
entertainment that symbolically constructs pluralistic mass audiences as a single entity
motivated by common desires. This notion need not be profane or subversive. Classic
children’s novels such as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Peter Pan
(1911) have long attracted a substantial adult readership, and “crossover fiction” – a
term applied to works which appeal dually to child and adult readerships – is a widely
understood phenomenon in children’s literary studies. However, to judge from the
denigrating descriptions of “kidulthood” above, even now there is lingering suspicion
in some quarters that individuals partaking of such cultural forms are failing to “leave
behind childish things”, transgressing the boundaries between Shakespeare’s Seven
Ages of Man, and re(embracing) tastes, pleasures and preoccupations supposedly ill
befitting a mature, reasoning, responsible adult (a position forcefully propounded by
cultural critic Benjamin Barber). For these reasons, perhaps, the 1930s concept of
26
“family films” addressing “family audiences” continues to hold sway in the United
States to this day, despite audience research by the Hollywood studios’ own trade
organisation (“Theatrical Market Statistics” 8) showing that the majority of theatrical
audiences are teenagers and childless people in their twenties, and four decades since
Spielberg’s and Lucas’ “kidult”-orientated films decisively displaced the old, staid
middlebrow family movie of Hollywood’s classical era.
Concepts of the “kidult” and “kidult entertainment” have been defined largely
in terms of a series of oppositions with the parallel concepts of the “family”, and of
“family entertainment”. It is these oppositions that must be explored in order to
approach a fuller understanding of the phenomenon. The first major distinction, I
would suggest, is that whereas “family” entertainment implies a mass audience
comprising adults and children as separate entities, “kidult” entertainment implies no
such audience differentiation; a “kidult” may inhabit any age, so long as s/he enjoys
such entertainment. This emphasis on aesthetic appeal removes the need for many of
the traditional narrative strategies employed by classical Hollywood family films such
as Meet Me in St. Louis (Vincente Minnelli, 1944) or Mary Poppins (Robert
Stevenson, 1964) to appeal to the tastes and requirements of children, on the one
hand, and those of adults, on the other. In the classical-era family film, these
strategies include: i) different on-screen identification figures (Jane and Michael
Banks in Mary Poppins for the children; Mary Poppins, Bert, and Mr. and Mrs. Banks
for the adults); ii) parallel plotlines (Mr. and Mrs. Smith’s emphatically “adult”
arguing about whether to move to New York in Meet Me in St. Louis, and their
daughters’ various youthful misadventures surrounding Halloween and the State
Fair); iii) the use of adult jokes that children may not understand, and/or childish
slapstick that adults may not appreciate.
Essentially, the family film posits a compromise, a state of equilibrium,
between the perceived needs of different audience sections. The parallel targeting of
child and adult demographics is known as “dual address”; it offers mass audiences
multiple avenues of access, or points of entry.4 Most Hollywood family-orientated
productions dating from the period at which the classical family film was at its height
(c. 1930–70) embody the essential characteristics outlined above. Examples of such
films include Tom Sawyer (John Cromwell, 1930), Little Women (George Cukor,
4 See Adrian Schober, “‘Why Can’t They Make Kids’ Flicks Anymore?’: Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory
and the Dual-Addressed Family Film”.
27
1933), Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (David Hand et al., 1937), The Wizard of Oz
(Victor Fleming, 1939), Fantasia (Ben Sharpsteen et al., 1940) Lassie Come Home
(Fred M. Wilcox, 1943), Meet Me in St. Louis, The Yearling (Clarence Brown, 1946),
On Moonlight Bay (Roy Del Ruth, 1951), 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea (Richard
Fleischer, 1954), Old Yeller (Robert Stevenson, 1957), tom thumb (George Pal, 1958),
Pollyanna (David Swift, 1960), Mary Poppins, and The Sound of Music (Robert
Wise, 1965). All of these films were major productions and were designed as
spectacles as well as parables. However, with only a couple of exceptions, spectacle
plays a subordinate role to core values of social and familial unity and collective
morality. These productions tend to uphold established structures of society, attempt
to impart moral lessons, and serve the ritual imperative of bringing families together
through a shared viewing experience. The Walt Disney Company, and independent
filmmakers such as Robert B. Radnitz and Joe Camp, continued making “traditional”
family films of this ilk into the 1970s, but with diminishing returns, other Hollywood
majors had largely abandoned the dual-addressed family film by the late 1960s.5
By contrast, “kidult” material pursues a less differentiated mode of audience
address, operating more on what might be called an “appeal of the senses”. Key
elements include a fast-paced and “transparent” narrative, visceral thrills and
excitement, and impressive visual spectacle (often drawing on the technological
potentialities of computer graphics, 3-D, and other aesthetic attractions). In practice,
the purely “kidult” film remains a hypothetical category: Harryhausen’s productions,
Star Wars, and the many films that have followed in their path, are more aptly
regarded as family/“kidult” hybrids. That is to say, they combine aspects of the “dual
address” that characterises the classical-era family film, and the “undifferentiated
address” that, in extremis, demarcates the “kidult” film. 6 Several of the most
important structural and ideological constitutive elements of the family film dating
back to the 1930s remain apparent, to varying degrees, in the more “kidult”-
orientated, post-1970s productions. They include: i) reaffirmations of family,
friendship and community; ii) the defeat or exclusion of disruptive (social) elements;
iii) the minimisation of “adult” themes, such as sexuality, strong violence, cruelty,
5 On the development of the family film in Hollywood during the 1960s and 1970s, see Noel Brown, The
Hollywood Family Film: A History, from Shirley Temple to Harry Potter (London and New York: I.B. Tauris,
2012), chapters 6 and 7.
6 For a further elaboration of “undifferentiated address”, see Noel Brown and Bruce Babington, “Introduction:
Children’s Films and Family Films.” Family Films in Global Cinema: The World Beyond Disney. Eds. Brown and
Babington.
28
poverty, gore and so on; and iv) their underpinning by a story which, while it may
acknowledge the possibility of an unpleasant, undesirable outcome, ultimately is
upbeat, morally and emotionally straightforward, and supportive of the status quo.
Crudely speaking, the “kidult” aspects provide excitement, thrill, and spectacle:
aspects that play equally well to adults and children because they do not require a
high degree of cognitive processing, and are pleasurable on a basic and innate level.
Producers of blockbuster films often compare their products to “rollercoaster rides”,
which implies a desire to evoke a satisfyingly diverse combination of cognitive and
pre-cognitive responses. The “family” aspects provide moral and ideological
grounding, and represent civilisation’s claim to thought, knowledge, and education;
they also underpin and uphold differences in experience, competency and outlook
among children and adults.
It is easy to fall into the trap of over-generalising regarding the decline of
dual-addressed family films and the emergence of “kidult”-orientated films. Although
there has been a progressive liberalising trend in Hollywood representations of sex,
violence, and other “mature content”, the fact that family films continue to eschew
Die Hard levels of violence confirms that moral suitability is still an important
constituent in contemporary manifestations of the genre.7 As Canby intuited, children
and adults alike may respond favourably to the adult elements in Die Hard or the
James Bond films, but such productions are not widely regarded as “family
entertainment” because of long-held standards of acceptability governing children’s
consumption of such products – standards that Harryhausen, as well as Lucas and
Spielberg, implicitly endorse(d). Furthermore, and notwithstanding the inevitable
hybridism between “family” and “kidult” characteristics noted above, there was never
a decisive paradigm shift at which point the “family” film transformed into the
“kidult” film. Rather, it was a long transition period marked by a series of smaller
turning points. Harryhausen’s significance was in mining the middle ground between
the emerging teen market and the established family market, as did Lucas and
Spielberg. But post-1970s Hollywood family films such as Annie (John Huston,
1982), Home Alone (Chris Columbus, 1990), Cheaper by the Dozen (Shawn Levy,
2003), and contemporary animated films produced by studios such as Pixar, all hark
7 See Dean Keith Simonton, Lauren Elizabeth Skidmore and James C. Kaufman, “Mature Cinematic Content for
Immature Minds: ‘Pushing the Envelope’ vs. ‘Toning it Down’ in Family Films”, for an analysis of suitability in
contemporary Hollywood films.
29
back to the older strategies of dual address. Disney’s Joe Roth explicitly identified the
Spielberg-Lucas collaboration Raiders of the Lost Ark (Spielberg, 1981), the first in
the Indiana Jones series (1981–2008), as “the beginning and the end of family films
in America” (Weinraub B1).
Other Hollywood executives place the mid-1990s as the major turning point.
In a 1996 Los Angeles Times article, a high-level Sony executive announced,
portentously: “the death of the family movie – that is the footnote for summer 1996”
(Brennan F1), while Twentieth Century-Fox executive Bill Mechanic explained, “We
made a strategic move to get out of the kid business, as we’ve known it, a year ago.
Kid-oriented movies have been in trouble. [The] Nutty Professor and Independence
Day have become the kid movies, the new family films” (Brennan F1). Opinions
clearly differ on when and how this shift occurred, but there is broad consensus
among scholars that there have been radical developments in the Hollywood family
film.8 Changes in the family film reflect different conceptualisations of movie-going
audiences. Adult and child spectators are now differentiated to a much lesser degree.
For most contemporary Hollywood “family films”, the implied audience – that is, the
imagined or presumed audience that all films implicitly construct – is no longer a
nuclear family comprising individuals that hold different needs and desires. Rather,
following Harryhausen and the network TV marketing men of the 1950s, it is an
amalgamated child-adult: a “kidult”. Admittedly, this is truer of live-action than of
animated films like Toy Story (John Lasseter, 1995) and Frozen (Chris Buck and
Jennifer Lee, 2013), where adult jokes and intertextual allusions play a greater part,
but even these films appeal greatly to the senses, and seek to recuperate idealised
values of childlike wonder, imagination, innocence, goodness, freedom, and play
within an easily grasped narrative framework.
Harryhausen’s Early Career
It is not merely that Harryhausen’s films possess many of the elements that
would come to define contemporary Hollywood “kidult”-inflected entertainment that
make them ripe for analysis. It is that they were made in a period in which North
8 See, for instance, Brown, The Hollywood Family Film: A History, from Shirley Temple to Harry Potter; Peter
Krämer, “‘The Best Disney Film Disney Never Made’: Children’s Films and The Family Audience in American
Cinema since the 1960s”; Schober, “‘Why Can’t They Make Kids’ Flicks Anymore?’: Willy Wonka and the
Chocolate Factory and the Dual-Addressed Family Film”.
30
America was beginning the transition from a predominantly adult-orientated to a
predominantly youth-orientated cultural model. As such, they reflect many of the
tensions arising from this transition. Harryhausen’s medium was stop-motion
animation, a special-effects technique in which three-dimensional models are
animated frame-by-frame to provide an illusion of movement. Its usage has mainly
been confined, in Hollywood cinema, to fantastic subjects, as with Willis O’Brien’s
pioneering work on The Lost World (Harry O. Hoyt, 1925) and King Kong (Merian C.
Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933). O’Brien, one of the very few special effects
technicians in Hollywood to specialise in stop-motion, was a towering influence on
Harryhausen’s art. Harryhausen’s significance derives partially from his extraordinary
skill as a stop-motion animator. Even more importantly, his early films appeared on
the market at precisely the time at which a new consumer group was emerging: the
teenager.
During the early 1950s, Harryhausen was one of many independent producers
in Hollywood selling escapist fantasy films to the incipient “teen” market. This was a
period in which family entertainment was strongly characterised by didactic
principles and an emphasis on “wholesomeness”. In spite of overwhelming evidence
that domestic audiences were dominated by young people (Handel 1950; Lazarsfeld
1947), there was a deep-seated resistance amongst the old-school Hollywood moguls
to youth culture. Furthermore, according to an industry maxim dating back to the
1930s (Harmetz 19), fantasy films were box office poison due to the failure of several
high-profile films, such as The Wizard of Oz, The Blue Bird (Walter Lang, 1940) and
Mighty Joe Young (Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1949). The twin turning points occurred
during the early-to-mid 1950s: the popularisation of television, and the surge in
independent production. With television’s emergence demanding changes in the
production strategies of the major studios, a new generation of independent producers
came to the fore.9 These filmmakers, energised by the development of teenage and
youth culture, brought new methods and ideas to Hollywood cinema.
Harryhausen’s breakthrough in mainstream Hollywood owed much to his
initial success in teen exploitation filmmaking. Awareness of the emergence of the
teenage consumer created a virtual industry in teen exploitation. One of the major
sub-genres was the monster-on-the-rampage film, or “creature feature” – a form that
9 On the rise of the teen film, particularly in the independent sector, see Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics:
The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s.
31
lent itself particularly to Harryhausen’s realm of expertise. By the early 1950s, his
services were much in demand after his successful contributions to The Beast from
20,000 Fathoms (Eugene Lourie, 1953). Harryhausen’s work caught the eye of
independent producer Charles H. Schneer, who was working at Sam Katzman’s
production unit at Columbia, which specialised in schlock sci-fi. Intrigued by the
visual potentialities of stop-motion, Schneer conceived the idea of a giant killer
octopus loose in San Francisco, and Harryhausen was contracted to provide the visual
effects. The resulting film, It Came from Beneath the Sea (Robert Gordon, 1955),
pleased Katzman, and Schneer and Harryhausen collaborated again on Earth vs. the
Flying Saucers (Fred F. Sears, 1956), cementing a partnership that endured
throughout the remainder of Harryhausen’s career. Soon after, Schneer formed his
own company, Morningside Productions, whilst retaining his partnership with
Harryhausen and association with Columbia as financial backer and distributor. Their
next film, 20 Million Miles to Earth (Nathan Juran, 1957) was a watershed: it was
their last “creature feature”, and also their last film aimed primarily at teenage
audiences. From then on, they focused their attentions on addressing the “kidult”
audience.
Schneer later claimed to have been motivated by “visuals and locations that
had not been photographed” (The Harryhausen Chronicles). Like Katzman, he
possessed a sharp eye for subjects that were topical and easily and cheaply
exploitable. Harryhausen, meanwhile, was actively seeking to expand the narrative
and technical potentialities of stop-motion animation (Harryhausen and Dalton 103).
He felt that an action-adventure fantasy based around the character of Sinbad – whom
he regarded as the “personification of adventure” – would manoeuvre them into the
Hollywood mainstream (Harryhausen and Dalton 103). However, the production
personnel and the aggressive, jargonistic marketing strategy used to sell the film
revealed its origins in teen exploitation. Schneer and Harryhausen conjured the term
“Dynamation” to describe Harryhausen’s methods of three-dimension stop-motion,
and used it endlessly to promote their films (sometimes with variations such as
“Superdynamation” and “Dynarama”). Equally, Columbia’s press department
marketed 7th Voyage of Sinbad as a “kidult” film. The thrust of this marketing strategy
was to position it between the emergent “teen” and the established – but increasingly
dusty – “family” markets. Because the “kidult” trend really started with 7th Voyage of
Sinbad, it can be seen, in retrospect, as the most important family film of the 1950s.
32
The film’s plot is deliberately straightforward. Sinbad (Kerwin Matthews) and
his men, lost at sea, chance upon the uncharted island of Colossa, which is home to an
assortment of fearsome, exotic creatures. They encounter a magician, Sokurah (Torin
Thatcher), fleeing from a giant Cyclops. Sokurah uses his magic lamp to keep the
monster at bay, and they hurriedly escape back to the ship. In the confusion, the lamp
is thrown overboard, and is washed up on the shore. Sokurah demands that they return
for the lamp, but Sinbad refuses, setting sail for Baghdad, where he is to be married to
the princess Parisa (Kathryn Grant). Upon their arrival, Sokurah requests that the
Caliph (Alec Mango) grant him a ship and crew to return to Colossa and retrieve the
lamp, but on Sinbad’s advice, the Caliph refuses. Enraged, Sokurah miniaturises
Parisa, and then informs the distraught Sinbad that the only way to restore her to
normal size is by obtaining a fragment of the eggshell of a giant bird native only to
Colossa. Still unsuspecting, Sinbad, Parisa and a mutinous crew return to Colossa.
Sinbad manages to retrieve the lamp and return it to Sokurah, who restores Parisa to
normal. Although Sokurah treacherously animates a sword-wielding skeleton in an
attempt to kill them both, Sinbad and Parisa manage to overcome various dangers,
and Sokurah is killed when his mortally-wounded pet dragon accidentally crushes
him.
The Arabian Nights milieu in which 7th Voyage operates contributes to its
escapist functions. Eastern narratives, even within the Hollywood firmament,
frequently operate within a more fantastic milieu. In Tony Curtis’ early-1950s star
vehicles The Prince Who Was a Thief (Rudolph Maté, 1951) and Son of Ali Baba
(Kurt Neumann, 1952), for instance, the setting not only provides an attractive
backdrop but, within its narrative conventions, signals escapist adventure. Audiences
responded strongly to 7th Voyage: the film grossed over $6 million from a budget of
$650,000. Critical opinion was more ambivalent. Variety (26 November 1958)
adjudged the film to be “primarily entertainment for the eye” with Harryhausen “the
hero of the piece” (“7th Voyage of Sinbad” 8), and Film Daily (25 November 1958)
deemed it to be “a spectacular presentation of the Sinbad story” (“7th Voyage of
Sinbad” 6). Other responses were less favourable. The Hollywood Reporter (25
November 1958) wrongly believed that the stop-motion effects were achieved
electronically, and The Christian Science Monitor (18 December 1958) regarded it as
“largely an excuse for Hollywood to toy with its latest technical process,
‘Dynamation’” (Maddocks 7). These responses suggest that 7th Voyage of Sinbad was
33
not really regarded as a family film, a genre that, at this point, was still viewed
primarily in social terms. It was seen as entertainment in the service of the family,
which operated as a socialising apparatus, an agent of social stability, and a
microcosm of society-at-large. In contrast, 7th Voyage of Sinbad was predicated on
spectacle and adventure, with few obvious morals to impart, beyond its basic good vs.
evil thematic.
Almost all mass-appeal productions depend for their success on some
combination of characteristic “family” and “kidult” modes of appeal. In 7th Voyage of
Sinbad, there are several textual strategies designed to engage teenage and adult
audiences on their own presumed level. The casting of attractive male and female
leads in Kerwin Matthews and Kathryn Grant, and the associated romance, is a
notable example. All of Harryhausen’s films include a romantic subplot, reflecting a
presumption shared by Harryhausen/Schneer and Columbia that representations of
courtship and romantic fulfilment were necessary to appeal to mainstream (“general”)
audiences. This is certainly a convention common to the vast majority of Hollywood
films from the period, even those putatively aimed at juvenile audiences, such as the
serials produced by so-called Poverty Row studios such as Monogram and Republic.
However, the presence of the romantic subplot in Harryhausen’s films – particularly
the post-1960s films, long after the broader convention ceased to apply – perhaps
suggests some measure of uncertainty that they are capable of attracting adults
without additional layers of attraction. Ironically, in each case, the romance is so
anaemic, so perfunctory as to be almost irrelevant to the overall movie experience.
Harryhausen’s endings announce another important departure from the
classical Hollywood family film norm. In each of his productions, a spectacular
adventure set piece serves as dramatic climax. These resolutions are largely functional
and instrumental, rather than emotive and uplifting in the vein of The Wizard of Oz
and most other mainstream family films. They are built around impressive spectacle,
with the action and music (in many cases composed by Bernard Hermann) building to
a thrilling crescendo. But whilst these fantastic spectacles elicit excitement,
fundamentally they are not emotional experiences (unless we count vicarious feelings
of triumph and catharsis). In The Wizard of Oz, the final moments capture Dorothy’s
happiness at her return home to Kansas, surrounded by love in the presence of family
and friends, and bursting with newfound appreciation in the manifold pleasures of
everyday life. In Harryhausen’s oeuvre, dramatic efficiency replaces such familiar
34
“family” patterns of emotional fulfilment and moral or spiritual revelation. His films
revel in economy of storytelling – an operational hold-over from the teen exploitation
school of filmmaking where narratives had to be tight, functional, and free from
excess. Emotive or didactic codas (such as those that characterised MGM’s Andy
Hardy series of the 1930s and 1940s) had little place in the 1950s teen film from
which Harryhausen and Schneer took their cue.
Rather, the climactic set pieces in Harryhausen’s films underscore the fact that
story exists to frame the special-effects sequences at the heart of their appeal. In Jason
and the Argonauts, the ostensible purpose of Jason’s (Todd Armstrong) voyage to the
distant land of Colchis in search of the Golden Fleece is to give him the means of
reclaiming his kingdom by overthrowing the tyrannical King Pelias (Douglas
Wilmer), who had seized his crown by force-of-arms when Jason was a child. In
practice, this plotline offers little more than basic heroic motivation. The substance of
the movie experience lies within the various (stop-motion animated) dangers met by
Jason and his crew during their voyage, where they encounter and defeat the
enormous bronze statue Talos, overcome a group of harpies who are tormenting a
blind seer (Patrick Troughton), pass through the lethal Clashing Rocks, and battle a
multi-headed Hydra for possession of the Fleece. The centrepiece of the movie – and
probably the most iconic sequence in Harryhausen’s oeuvre – occurs at the very end,
where the vengeful ruler of Colchis, King Aeetes (Jack Gwillim), in retribution for the
theft of the Fleece, animates seven sword-wielding skeletons to do battle with Jason
and his followers. When Jason succeeds in ‘killing’ them (after a titanic struggle) by
jumping from a cliff-top into the ocean below, he swims back to the Argo. At this
point, the film abruptly ends. What follows is left to the audience’s imagination. The
viewer is simply left to assume that Jason returns to his homeland and reclaims his
throne. The film ends at a dramatic high-point, therefore, but fails to resolve its own
storyline.
This is an important point. Such tension between story and spectacle rarely
arises. Jason and the Argonauts is an extreme example because of its structure, which
effectively demands two forms of closure: a spectacular special-effects finale for
possession of the Fleece, and the logical battle between Jason and Pelias for the
throne (the film’s “MacGuffin”). However, if we view the film as spectacle, as
contemporary audiences surely did, the fact that it does not resolve the Pelias story –
and complete Jason’s internal voyage from symbolic boyhood to symbolic manhood –
35
is less important. While the film received predictably mixed reviews upon initial
release in the US, the ending itself appears to have passed without comment.
Presumably, it was simply viewed within the broader context of the film itself: an
enjoyable, but ultimately disposable, piece of screen entertainment undeserving of
serious critical analysis. Although Variety (5 June 1963) praised this “choice hot
weather attraction for the family trade – a sure delight for the kiddies and a diverting
spectacle for adults with a taste for fantasy and adventure” (“Jason and the
Argonauts” 5), the New York Times (8 August 1963) dismissed it as “absurd” and “no
worse, but certainly no better, than most of its kind” (Thompson 1). These reviews
were written in a period in which poor plotting and characterisation were seen as
standard weaknesses in fantasy films. The assumption seemed to have been that
juvenile and adolescent audiences had yet to graduate to a higher plane of cultural
awareness, borne through interpretative skills acquired in adulthood.
It is hardly surprising, then, that Jason and the Argonauts, like 7th Voyage of
Sinbad, was overlooked for Academy Award recognition for its special effects, nor
that the comparatively staid historical epic, Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963)
won the Visual Effects Oscar. Indeed, this lack of recognition is indicative of a wider
industry disregard for Harryhausen, who was always forced to struggle for studio
backing, and had to work with extremely small budgets. Jason and the Argonauts was
not a commercial hit. Its reception effectively ended Harryhausen and Schneer’s
flirtation with the Hollywood mainstream. Their next “Dynamation” film, First Men
in the Moon (Nathan Juran, 1964) – adapted from H. G. Wells’ novel by respected
British sci-fi writer Nigel Kneale – was one of their most intelligent productions, but
it, too, was a flop. Harryhausen then made a profitable but critically derided film for
British studio Hammer, One Million Years B.C. (Don Chaffey, 1966), while The
Valley of Gwangi (Jim O’Connolly, 1969) languished in obscurity.
“Kidult”-orientated films were rarities in 1960s Hollywood. Although
independent producers George Pal and Irwin Allen were also concerned with
spectacle, Pal’s focus was more moralistic, and the visual impact of Allen’s
productions was often undermined by execrable production values. It was network
television that pointed the way to the future, with youth-appeal, action-adventure
franchises as Batman (1966–68), Star Trek (1966–69) and Mission Impossible (1966–
73). In comparison, Disney’s output during this period was unremittingly saccharine
and didactic, while the other major studios channelled their energies into hugely
36
inflated, middlebrow family blockbusters such as My Fair Lady (George Cukor,
1964) and The Sound of Music. While The Sound of Music was a huge hit –
Hollywood’s most profitable film of the decade, no less – attempts to replicate its
success with similar productions, such as Doctor Dolittle (Richard Flesicher, 1967),
Star! (Robert Wise, 1968) and Hello, Dolly! (Gene Kelly, 1969), resulted in
spectacular losses. Family-adventure films such as Fantastic Voyage (Richard
Fleischer, 1966) and Batman (Leslie H. Martinson, 1966) also underperformed. North
America had entered a period of counter-cultural fervour. By 1968, Hollywood had
replaced its restrictive Production Code (established in 1930, formalised in 1934) with
a far more liberal ratings system. Over the next few years, mainstream cinema veered
toward such hard-edged independent fare as Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969) and
Woodstock (Michael Wadleigh, 1970). Revealingly, when Disney re-released
Fantasia in 1970, Variety (13 November) reported that one theatre chain chose not to
target “families” in its publicity drive, but rather teenage potheads in search of a
psychedelic, substance-enhanced trip (“Disney’s Fantasia Going To Pot?!?! That’s
How Natl Gen. Sells The Reissue”).
Harryhausen’s Late Period
In Harryhausen’s post-1970s films, a curious dialectic asserts itself between
his characteristically “kidult” modes of spectacle and wholesome adventure, and a
new emphasis on more “adult” pleasures. This manifests itself in the various scenes of
mild nudity, profanity, and violence scattered amongst his late-period films, The
Golden Voyage of Sinbad (Gordon Hessler, 1974), Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger
(Sam Wanamaker, 1977), and Clash of the Titans (Desmond Davis, 1981). By the
early 1970s, it should be noted, the traditional “family” film was in decline. All the
major studios had abandoned the dual-addressed movie, with the exception of Disney,
which was struggling to make much money on its theatrical products (Krämer 188).
Public demands for an increase in “family” fare to counter-balance the new “adult”
films reaching the screens were ignored (Krämer 268–71). Disney aside, only
independents operating low-investment/low-returns strategies – such as Robert B.
37
Radnitz and Joe Camp – saw dual-appeal family films as profitable enterprises.10
Instead, the major studios re-orientated towards the youth market with ever edgier
fare, while a new breed of film school-educated directors influenced by European art
cinema, such as Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese, pursued the kinds of
explicitly adult-orientated films that, collectively, signalled the end of the 1930s
concept of the “family audience” as Hollywood’s backbone.
In this context, it is perhaps easier to see why Harryhausen and Schneer – and
their distributors – might have felt that a change in style was necessary to adapt to
new market conditions. With The Golden Voyage of Sinbad, Harryhausen and
Schneer regrouped after several years in the cinematic wilderness and returned to the
source of their greatest commercial success. However, in accordance with the
cinematic conventions of the period, what emerged was notably darker in tone and
appearance than its predecessors: more dialogue-orientated, with a corresponding
reduction in the action-adventure quotient, and a more sophisticated, allusive slant to
the humour. Furthermore, it is interesting that Sinbad, portrayed here by John Phillip
Law, conspicuously possesses an Arabian accent. Sinbad may, as Harryhausen has
always claimed, be an archetypal adventure hero, but there seems to have been a
conscious decision – whether for artistic or commercial purposes – to de-emphasise
his “Americanness”. The 1970s, Harryhausen later remarked, was the age of the anti-
hero, and the classically clean-cut, square-jawed American hero portrayed by Kerwin
Matthews in 7th Voyage of Sinbad was perhaps felt to be ill-suited to this new epoch.
However, Sinbad’s “otherness” here may have constrained the film’s commercial
prospects in the notoriously nationalistic US domestic market. While certain aspects
of the Sinbad character (his bravery, charm, masculinity) are typical heroic attributes,
others (his tanned skin and colourful clothes) bespeak attractive exoticism; this more
alien figure might have been a step too far. Hindered by Columbia’s lukewarm
promotion, The Golden Voyage of Sinbad was, nonetheless, a solid box office hit,
although scarcely rivalling Disney’s more traditional family movie, Herbie Rides
Again (Robert Stevenson, 1974).
By the mid-1970s, the major studios had been focusing their attentions on
harder-edged material for several years. Suddenly, this was to change. The
10 On the trajectory of the classical-era Hollywood family film during the 1960s and 1970s, see Noel Brown, “‘The
Apostle of Family Films’: Robert B. Radnitz, Children’s Cinema and Anti-Disney Discourse in the 1960s and
1970s”.
38
development of the multiplex cinema in the early 1970s created the necessary
theatrical conditions for the saturation-release blockbuster, which itself invited
spectacular presentation and films which pursued as wide an audience as possible.
The first “multiplex blockbuster”, Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975), was too violent for
“family” suitability, but its modes of appeal were palpably “regressive”, tapping basic
fear (as well as pleasure) responses.11 Promoted heavily via the “rival” medium of
television, and shown on an unprecedented number of multiplex screens nationwide,
Jaws recouped well over $150 million from an initial $9 million outlay. Its success
confirmed that mass audiences were still attainable given a comprehensive marketing
strategy, and the right film. Yet its violence and gore automatically precluded status
as family viewing. It was Star Wars that ultimately redefined the family movie by
fusing undifferentiated-appeal “kidult” aesthetic elements with the broad moral
suitability of the classical family film. In a period in which North America was
suffering a “crisis of confidence” – one that was all-too-clearly reflected in such
downbeat Hollywood fare as Night Moves (Arthur Penn, 1975) and All the President’s
Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976) – Star Wars offered uncomplicated escapism, facile
optimism and dazzling spectacle. It was comfortably the top-grossing film of the
decade, but evidence that it was not merely a random “runaway” hit was provided by
Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Warner’s Superman
franchise, which also yielded enormous returns by tapping the amorphous
family/“kidult” audience.
Ironically, at precisely the point at which “kidult”-inflected films were finally
gaining mass commercial and critical acceptance, Harryhausen and Schneer found it
increasingly difficult to sell their projects to studios. Furthermore, interference from
executives, who misguidedly believed that a harder edge was necessary to appeal to
older audiences, led to a shift away from the wholesomely escapist elements that had
characterised the early films. Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger was Harryhausen’s first
production to contain nudity. The scene in question sees young stars Jane Seymour
and Taryn Power swimming naked in a river. The nudity is brief and inexplicit,
mostly filmed in long-shot or from the rear. There was, as Harryhausen admits, “a
gradual realisation that these films needed more adult interest.”12 But this perception
surely misunderstands their essential appeal to older audiences. Inexplicit nudity may
11 On the film’s regressive appeal, see Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan... And Beyond. 145.
12 Correspondence between the author and Tony Dalton and Ray Harryhausen, 9 February 2011.
39
have served as minor erotic titillation for young spectators on the verge of
adolescence, but was neither strong enough nor sufficiently contextualised to attract
the paying custom of older demographics in an age where censorious pleasures,
previously off-limits, now freely circulated in the cultural mainstream. It may be
recalled that Deep Throat (Jerry Gerard, 1972), the first hardcore pornographic film to
receive wide release in America’s theatres, and which drew at least $50 million in box
office receipts, pre-dated Harryhausen’s 1970s Sinbad films.
Moreover, it was abundantly clear that Harryhausen and Schneer did not
possess sufficient resources to compete with Star Wars, which pioneered several
special effects processes at great expense. In fact, the release of Star Wars marked a
watershed in Harryhausen’s career, and, indeed, in the ongoing development of the
family movie. For the first time, Harryhausen’s approach appeared passé and out-of-
step with the cultural climate. Moreover, Lucas and Spielberg (and their followers)
had hit upon a style of filmmaking, which not only combined the most appealing
elements of earlier “family” and “kidult” films, but also possessed considerable
franchise and merchandising potential. Lucas cannily realised that spectacle and
escapism, in isolation, were insufficient. It is fitting that Lucas, fearing audience
apathy in the weeks before release, lamented that he had made “a Walt Disney movie”
that would struggle to break $10 million at the box office, for Star Wars owes as
much to the emotive and didactic elements widely associated with Disney’s films as
to the “kidult” aesthetic that Harryhausen popularised (Krämer 190). Lucas’ and
Spielberg’s films not only served as artistic templates for subsequent Hollywood
family films and franchises, but signalled a new period in which creative and
industrial strategies would be founded upon appeals to the conceptual “kidult”.
Harryhausen’s final movie, Clash of the Titans, was released during the
summer of 1981. Following the critical and commercial failure of Sinbad and the Eye
of the Tiger, Harryhausen and Schneer – realising that they did not have resources to
adapt their filmmaking style to match current market trends – returned to classical
mythology, namely the story of Perseus. Hollywood studio MGM was attempting to
re-establish its credentials as a Hollywood major, and showed interest in the idea,
which embodied the kind of “good, exciting family entertainment” it was eager to
produce (Harryhausen and Dalton 262). The film was given a budget of $16 million,
which exceeded that of all the producers’ previous productions combined. In the
event, the film was a modest box office hit. However, Variety’s (10 June 1981) not-
40
atypical assessment of it as “an unbearable bore” (“Clash of the Titans for the Young
in Heart Only” 18) surely reflected the fact that mainstream Hollywood films with
“kidult” appeal were now operating under new economies of pleasure. Show-stopping
spectacle need not be confined to a series of intermittent special-effects interludes, as
with Harryhausen’s films. Rather, with the massively increased resources and
technological potentialities of the “New Hollywood” cinema, spectacular sensorial
appeal – wedded to the fast-paced and “transparent” narratives of old – could be
sustained over the entire course of a film.
Clash of the Titans is probably the least “kidult”-orientated of Harryhausen’s
films, instead falling back on classical family movie tropes. The courtship between
the romantic leads is far more central than the wholly gratuitous romantic subplots in
previous Harryhausen films, but remains perfunctory. The film attempts to draw older
spectators with the lure of established screen performers, but the supposedly-starry
cast in reality comprises an assortment of unknown youngsters (Harry Hamlin and
Judi Bowker as Perseus and Andromeda) and aging character actors (Laurence Olivier
as Zeus; Maggie Smith as Thetis; Ursula Andress as Aphrodite; Burgess Meredith as
Ammon), most of whom would be identifiable only to film- and television-literate
viewers. The most blatant incongruities are the two scenes containing brief nudity, as
well as a sequence in which a man is burned at the stake, which ensured that the film
received an “A” rating in the UK, thus preventing children under the age of 14 from
attending without adult supervision. Harryhausen told me in personal correspondence
that the inclusion of these elements was at the insistence of MGM, which –
unaccountably, given the film’s supposed status as “family entertainment” – “wanted
[the film] to have some adult content to appeal to a wider audience.”13 Ironically, as
the enormous popularity of Star Wars, Close Encounters, Superman and E.T. The
Extra-Terrestrial demonstrates, “adult” content had become unappealing to many
adults spectators. Allegedly, E.T.’s main consumer-base was “childless couples in
their twenties and thirties”, not young children (Morris 85). It seems reasonable to
assume that older viewers attended such films not to be reminded of the social and
interpretative constraints of adulthood, but rather to escape them, at least temporarily.
13 Correspondence between the author and Tony Dalton and Ray Harryhausen, 9 February 2011.
41
Conclusion
North America – and, indeed, late-modern Western society in general –
continues to embrace the “kidult”. Evidence that the recreational requirements of
adults and children were moving into alignment as early as the 1950s can be seen not
only in responses to 7th Voyage of Sinbad, but also in the fact that Disneyland’s
customer composition was weighted 4-to-1 in favour of adults (Merlock Jackson 94).
During the 1990s, several of the major Hollywood studios created specialised “Family
Film” production divisions, gearing their industrial operations towards “kidult”-
orientated franchises with international appeal, and which could be realised across
multiple media platforms.14 At the time of writing, the list of the top-grossing 20 films
of all time includes such putatively child-orientated releases as Frozen with $1.2
billion, Minions (Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda, 2015) with $1.5 billion, Toy Story 3
(Lee Unkrich, 2010) with $1 billion, and Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993) with
$1 billion. According to statistics released by the Motion Picture Association of
America (MPAA), children aged 2–11 made up only 12 per cent of ‘frequent movie-
goers’ in North America in 2012; this figure fell to 7 per cent in 2013 (2014: 12;
2015: 12). However, 41 of the top 50 highest-grossing films at the North American
box office in 2012 and 2013 were deemed suitable for “family audiences” (this
includes films rated “G”, “PG” or “PG-13”), with only nine films rated “R” (adults
only).
Given the relatively lowly proportion of children under the age of 12 in the US
theatrical audience, non-child audiences must play a major role in sustaining
Hollywood’s industry of “children’s films”. Harryhausen, then, was part of a much
broader cultural movement which, over the course of the last 60 years, has seen the
“kidult” – both as a cultural form and a consumer group – move to the forefront of
Western popular culture. I do not wish to oversimplify this complex socio-historical
process. Harryhausen was no monolithic instigator of “kidult” entertainment; he, too,
was inspired by a multitude of artists – from painters (Gustave Doré, Charles Knight,
John Martin) and animators (O’Brien) to producers (Merriam C. Cooper, Alexander
Korda, George Pal, and even Walt Disney) – who shared a similar fantastic vision.
14 These developments are recorded in numerous editions of Variety: “New plan to put Warners in Family way”;
Christian Moerk, “Family Volume at WB”; Kathleen O’Steen, “Matoian Makes Fox His Family”; “Sony in Family
Way”; “Paramount, Producer in a Family Way”.
42
But where Harryhausen departs from Disney (and from classic children’s literature
conventions) is in his films’ emphasis on escapism, rather than didacticism. This
concentration on pleasures equally accessible to child and adult audiences defines
“kidult” entertainment. It also explains the enduring popularity of Harryhausen’s
films, which lack the overt moralism of the classical-era family movie. The
filmmaker’s high current standing also reflects the growing legitimacy of purely
escapist family entertainments that, as recently as the 1970s, were dismissed as
shallow, infantile, and unworthy of preservation or serious discussion.
I would like to finish with a few words on the current status of the “kidult”.
Beyond the comparatively hermetic world of industry jargon where the word is still in
wide currency15 – a reflection of its utility as signifying something other than “family-
orientated” – the usual response appears to be one of scorn, amusement or revulsion.
It is one thing, perhaps, to consume such entertainment; it is quite another to self-
consciously interrogate the implications of the act of consumption in relation to self
and to society. Ironically, this ambivalence is sustained by a mainstream media that
holds “kidult” entertainment – not just films but television, books, video games and
all manner of consumer products – as the pinnacle of popular entertainment in all but
name, yet insists on deferring to the evidently reassuring “family” label. Like
Harryhausen prior to his recent critical reassessment, the “kidult” remains “vaguely
disreputable”.
Acknowledgements | Belated appreciation to the late Ray Harryhausen, who very
graciously agreed to the email interview on which this article draws; also to Tony
Dalton, who helped arrange the interview.
15 A few examples, among many: In 1988, John Cassaday, president of Campbell Soup, Ltd., told a marketing
seminar in Toronto that “kidults” – “a new name for children and adults” – would be a vital consumer group of the
future (Marina Strauss, “‘Kidults’ Tapped as Hot New Market”); in 1996, television network Nickelodeon,
described one of its marketing campaigns as “kidult” (Stuart Elliott, “Trying to Lure Media Buyers, Nickelodeon
Asks a Multiple-Choice Question with Only One Answer”); at the recent Hong Kong Toys and Game Fair, there
was a category of exhibits called “Kidult World” (“‘Kidult World’: Still Small but with Huge Potential”); and,
lastly, there is a British-based fashion company called “Kidult Clothing”.
43
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