A ferocious dinosaur lays siege to a roller coaster on Coney Island. The fearsome kraken rises from the sea to claim its latest victim. A hapless sailor and his crew battle sword-wielding skeletons.

These movie moments captivated me as a child. Each time a Ray Harryhausen monster took center stage, I would move the rabbit-ear antenna on the old TV in the basement to improve the picture. Even through a haze of static and commercial interruptions, the illusion held sway. I believed.

Harryhausen, the special-effects maestro who died earlier this month at the age of 92, breathed life into all of the above and many more, a pantheon of monsters hatched from mythology and his own fervid imagination.

Without a doubt, Harryhausen’s special effects were the best part of many films with which he was involved. “Jason and the Argonauts,” for example, is a largely tepid affair, a paint-by-numbers, sword-and-sandal epic about the legendary titular explorer’s attempts to find the Golden Fleece and become king of Thessaly. The acting is wooden and the plot virtually nonexistent.

But every 20 minutes or so, the movie blazes to life when a Harryhausen creation saunters into frame: Talos, the bronze giant, voted the second greatest movie monster of all time (behind King Kong); the Hydra, fierce creature with the head of seven snakes; and, of course, a battalion of skeletons, bones clicking and clacking as they attack Jason and his men.

Harryhausen’s effects are cinematic magic at its finest. Using miniature models, he would shoot one frame of film, stop the camera, move the model infinitesimally, and then shoot the next frame, laboriously building the illusion of movement.

Considering that one second of film contains 24 frames, it would take days to yield only a few seconds of usable film, painstaking labor that would be combined later with live-action footage using reverse projection and other techniques. Working within constraints of time and money (there was never enough of either), the man created marvels.

Harryhausen’s biggest influence was the aforementioned “King Kong,” a movie that both he and fantasy author Ray Bradbury (who died last year) saw at impressionable ages. In the book “Kong Unbound,” Harryhausen dubbed it “the greatest fantasy film ever made.” He later would learn its secrets at the feet of stop-motion pioneer Willis O’Brien, the man who animated “Kong.” Harryhausen worked with O’Brien on the original “Mighty Joe Young,” another movie about a large ape whisked away to civilization.

Harryhausen went on to create special effects for many Hollywood productions, including “20 Million Miles to Earth,” “It Came from Beneath the Sea,” “Earth vs. the Flying Saucers” and “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.” “The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms,” which climaxes with the monster stomping Coney Island, was based on a story by Bradbury and pays homage to the two men’s love of giant monsters.

Harryhausen’s last hurrah was 1981’s “Clash of the Titans,” another romp through mythology. By then, the heyday of stop-motion animation had passed, replaced by a variation called “go motion” that relied on a computer to move the scale models.

“Go motion” itself would have a short shelf life, supplanted by full computer animation 10 years later in “Jurassic Park.” Today, stop-motion, when it is used at all, is done to invoke nostalgia.

Yet there is still much to recommend the earlier method. The herky-jerky look of stop-motion — with puppets manipulated by hand, inflating and deflating bladders hidden inside to simulate breathing — infuses a sense of personality in the finished effect that is sometimes lacking in more seamless computer animation.

Just as King Kong reflects the scrappy nature of O’Brien, the many creatures animated by Harryhausen reflect what I imagine to be his ferocious desire to overwhelm the audience, to make them gasp or smile or shriek.

And, above all, to make them believe.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Originally published May 16, 2013, in The Alliance Review.

This is Teacher Appreciation Week, so I’m doing exactly that — remembering educators who enlightened and inspired me.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the late Melva Jean Watson, second-grade teacher at Washington Elementary, who read aloud from Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books. Studies prove the benefits of reading to children, and I benefited both from the content of those books and the time spent listening to a capable reader weave words into a literary web.

Reading aloud was a big part of Judy Vien’s classroom circa 1980 at Marlington Middle School. One book in particular cast a potent spell: Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” read by Mrs. Vien in her soft Southern accent, so similar to how I imagined Scout, Atticus, Jem and Dill would sound.

I respected her for sharing a book that some find controversial, especially for sixth-grade students, and for not sugarcoating the expletives. Instead, she explained the racial overtones of the times; that mistreating people because of skin color, education or economic attainment is wrong; and that we were mature enough to know that saying certain words was not the same as endorsing them.

A few years later, Andrea Ogline and Nancy Schwan — my freshman and sophomore English teachers, respectively, at Marlington High School — encouraged my love of writing, each in her own way.

Mrs. Ogline, poor thing, waded through page after page of my journal entries, filled with dreary imitations of stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard and gallons of imaginary blood. Yet she was always enthusiastic in her comments, even when she would have preferred a nice Bronte pastiche to another psychopathic killer inspired by my fetish for horror films.

Mrs. Schwan submitted one of my stories to a regional contest. It didn’t win, but for the first time I thought about making a living with words and saw how revision improved my writing. She took the work so seriously that she once called me at home to address a plot flaw, just like a real editor. I am thankful for that, and how she never assumed that because my character committed suicide, the story was a cry for help. (It wasn’t.)

At Mount Union College, David Ragosin and John Bienz left their marks. The former introduced me to William Zinsser’s “On Writing Well,” one of a handful of books I regularly return to for inspiration, and he once told me I had the makings of a good college professor. My career didn’t go in that direction, but the words did — and do — mean a lot.

Dr. Bienz had such a quiet and unprepossessing manner that he put students, many of whom were secretly terrified of literature at the collegiate level, at ease. While he delivered effective lectures, he was a master of eliciting responses, both in class and on the printed page. I especially remember his Shakespeare class, where instead of a final paper, we performed “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” for elementary students. I was the fairy Puck, likely because of my long hair and effeminate build. (Both are victims of my forties.)

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I flattered the heck out of Dr. Bienz my first few years as a teacher, modeling my delivery on his. These days, I’ve found my own voice, but am still largely influenced by his technique.

Like most people, I am the sum total of the efforts of dozens of professionals, from Ms. Meese, the kindergarten teacher who introduced me to the Letter People, through Penny Arnold, an Ashland University professor who made me re-examine my grading methods as a practicing educator.

Even teachers whose subjects aren’t of great interest or whose styles are not inspirational make an impression. When they are passionate about their subjects, it leaves a mark. When they are not, that too speaks volumes.

If our lives are books, teachers occupy a large chunk of the acknowledgments, along with the standard tagline that while they provide a wealth of insight and information, we ourselves are responsible for any errors in fact.

“I am a part of all that I have met,” says Ulysses in Tennyson’s poem of the same name. This is especially true of teachers, whose impact lasts far beyond the final school bell and, indeed, tolls throughout our lives.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Originally published May 9, 2013, in The Alliance Review.

If there were lyrics to “Pomp and Circumstance” for parents of the college graduate set, they might go something like this:

You’re moving your stuff home,

Bringing all that junk back,

Load up that old futon

Get ready to pack.

Or maybe, depending on how the sheepskin was financed, parents could sing:

Your degree cost me thousands

In tuition and fees,

Now you will have no job

With a degree in art history.

No education, of course, is ever wasted, especially when acquiring it involves four years of late-night bull sessions, greasy pizza and liquid calories, at least if what we see in “Animal House” is true. And, of course, Hollywood is always scrupulous in its accurate portrayal of university life, just as it is with police work and domestic issues.

Higher education has been uppermost in my mind recently because my daughter graduated Sunday. I enjoyed the ceremony and her success, yet my back kept twinging. Maybe it was because of three hours spent in bleacher seats, but more likely it was due to all the boxes and furniture I hauled up and down stairs a few days before.

My wife says I have no reason to complain. After all, she took two days off work to help pack and unpack. All I did was show up two afternoons to serve as cart horse for larger items.

Once upon a time, going to college involved just a few milk cartons — borrowed from behind your favorite grocery store, despite the stenciled warning “Thou Shalt Not Steal” — filled with books, sweatshirts and jeans, plus a halfway decent stereo system. You’d live in a dorm room about the size of a closet, with all the aesthetic appeal of a stairwell — cinder blocks, a small window that would be the envy of only the Prisoner of Zenda, and a shower shared by dozens of people, at least one of whom had ringworm.

Today, young adults live better in many college dorms than they will in the first few years after college (unless they move back home and wait five to 10 years for the economy to improve), when those initial apartments look more the way dorms did a few decades ago. Colleges and universities now build student housing to resemble Soho studio lofts, and students enthusiastically cart in enough junk to fill the extra space.

And if a student (like my daughter) moves off campus into a situation that offers even more livable space (she and three friends shared a house), plan on those two milk cartons to morph into 50 or 100, enough to turn a misdemeanor into grand larceny.

Bringing my daughter home was akin to moving a Romanian princess back from exile and involved five car loads and one pickup truck, all filled to bursting. We carried boxes of books, lamps, two TVs, a computer, Ramen noodles, a desk, two chairs, a bed, a dresser, bagels, a Keurig, clothes, shoes, cleaning supplies, cosmetics, clothes, shoes, GRE flashcards, curtains, shoes, potato chips, clothes, rice mixes, over-the-counter medications, pots, pans, clothes and shoes.

Oh, and some clothes and shoes. (Imelda Marcos, eat your heart out.)

And as if further proof is needed that nature abhors a vacuum (although I hear it tolerates a Dyson), most of these collected treasures found a home in my newly cleaned garage, which — for two nights only — was capable of containing a car.

Today, the garage looks like the aftermath of a tornado at a flea market and will remain that way until we trek off with all these treasures again for graduate school in a few months.

In the meantime, though, let us raise our glasses to members of the Class of 2013, who face an exciting future secure in the knowledge that they have already contributed to a financial boom in two key growth areas: construction and medicine.

Self-storage rentals and Doan’s pills sales are through the roof.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Prevailing wisdom among people who study pre-teen reading habits is that girls will read books about boys, but boys are less likely to read books about girls.

Maybe this is changing because of the success of “The Hunger Games,” with a strong female lead whose exploits in three bestselling books are a hit with not only the YA crowd, but adults as well.

I’ve always been an exception to the boys-not-reading-about-girls rule, myself. One of my earliest literary adventures was “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” with spunky Dorothy traveling down “the road of yellow brick,” encountering eccentric companions and showing off her silver slippers to good effect. (Her route became “the yellow brick road” and her footwear turned ruby only in the MGM movie.) I’ve read the book more than a dozen times, and Judy Garland was one of my first big-screen crushes, even if she was too old to play Dorothy.

Recently, I had a chance to revisit another childhood favorite with a female protagonist: Laura Ingalls Wilder’s “Little House” books, newly reprinted in two handsome hardbacks by the Library of America.

These books hold a special place in my heart. When I was a new student at Washington Elementary School in 1976, my second-grade teacher, Melva Jean Watson, read aloud from “Little House on the Prairie” almost every day. Something about the Ingalls family leaving Wisconsin and heading West in a covered wagon struck a chord with me, even if my own migration from Middlebranch to Washington Township in the backseat of a car wasn’t much by comparison.

I am still impressed by the family’s moxy. Laura’s father, referred to mostly as Pa, decides the woods of Wisconsin — immortalized in the first book of the series, “Little House in the Big Woods” — are becoming too crowded. “Quite often Laura heard the ringing thud of an ax which was not Pa’s ax, or the echo of a shot that did not come from his gun,” writes Wilder, who refers to herself in the third person. “The path that went by the little house had become a road.”

Those all sound like good reasons to stay in Wisconsin, not leave it, but nobody has ever accused me of having an overabundance of pioneer spirit.

In the books, little Laura and her sisters often take a backseat to the story of their parents, and Laura’s main occupation is to observe the ways of pioneer families. Not surprisingly for people who lived for — and by — the harvest, the books are filled with food, much more than I remember from age 8. (Maybe Mrs. Watson omitted some parts.)

The Ingalls’ attic in Wisconsin is a veritable produce stand: “The large, round, colored pumpkins made beautiful chairs and tables. The red peppers and the onions dangled overhead. The hams and the venison hung in their paper wrappings, and all the bunches of dried herbs, the spicy herbs for cooking and the bitter herbs for medicine, gave the place a dusty-spicy smell.”

In “Farmer Boy,” which tells the boyhood story of Ingall’s husband, Almanzo Wilder, in New York, mealtime is almost sensuous. “Almanzo ate the sweet, mellow baked beans. He ate the bit of salt pork that melted like cream in his mouth. He ate mealy boiled potatoes, with brown ham-gravy. He ate the ham. He bit deep into velvety bread spread with sleek butter, and he ate the crisp golden crust. He demolished a tall heap of pale mashed turnips, and a hill of stewed yellow pumpkin. Then he sighed …”

All that’s missing is a cigarette afterward.

Nearly every page of the Little House books is filled with industrious people planting, nurturing, harvesting, storing, slaughtering and building for winter. It’s impressive, especially to a reader whose winter preparations involve nothing more than covering the air-conditioning unit with a tarp and buying a new ice scraper for the car.

Wilder’s characters have fun too, going to the occasional dance and inviting extended family to visit at the holidays, but mostly they work.

One of my favorite sequences in the books, however, has nothing to do with harvests or dances. Later in “Farmer Boy,” Almanzo’s teacher drives a group of disruptive students out of his classroom using an ox-whip. Taking the biblical injunction to spare the rod and spoil the child almost literally, the teacher thrashes the students, jerking them off their feet, tearing their clothes and bloodying their bodies.

Maybe it was my imagination, but I always thought Mrs. Watson read that section with even more vim and vigor than the other chapters.

It’s always nice to revisit old friends, and even nicer to find out that they are more companionable than you remember. So it is with the Little House books. While these new editions omit the classic illustrations by Garth Williams, they are hardly missed. Laura Ingalls Wilder still holds me in thrall with stories of pioneer pluck and an almost-vanished lifestyle that appeal to either gender and all ages.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

Originally published April 25, 2013, in The Alliance Review.

By the time you read this, Mount Union Theatre will almost certainly be history.

The digital reader board was the first to go, scooped out of the original marquee and relocated to West State Street, where it still provides news about speakers and events on campus. Next was the box office, removed to parts unknown. When I drove by last week, the front doors were gone and a dump truck had been backed inside the front lobby.

I almost parked and made an illegal sortie inside to take one more look at the building and try to catch a faint whiff of buttery popcorn or an echo of Clark Gable telling Vivien Leigh that frankly, my dear, he didn’t give a damn. Maybe tomorrow, I thought, but the next day a fence had been erected — probably because a lot of other drivers had the same attack of nostalgia — and that was that.

Like many people in Alliance, I have fond memories of Mount Union Theatre. I first saw “Star Wars” there back in the 1970s, igniting a passion that still burns to this day. It’s the theater where I watched my first R-rated film, “Dracula” starring Frank Langella, a concession by my parents because of my love of monster movies and vampires.

When the theater reopened in the early ’80s after a few years of dormancy, I was a freshman in high school, and my Friday- and Saturday-night dance card was filled with revivals of “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” “Altered States,” “A Man for All Seasons,” one or more of the “Rocky” films, and many more.

In those days, at the cusp of the home video era, the theater was a buzzing, vibrant destination, an inexpensive way to enjoyably fill a few hours. Movies there were second-run, but still new enough that they hadn’t been released onto VHS, so demand was high.

Mount Union Theatre was the place where I almost took my first date, except I was too afraid to ask her and ended up going with a friend instead. It’s the place where my daughter saw her first movie, “The Wizard of Oz,” and where we would take her to see many more, including practically the entire Disney animated catalog. It’s the place where my wife and I both fell asleep during the first Harry Potter film, when we realized the franchise was not for us.

The venue itself, to be honest, was no great shakes. The seats were uncomfortable, the screen was small in comparison to modern movie houses, and the sound system left something to be desired. When I was a kid, I remember the Powers That Be announcing the closing of the snack bar in the second half of the movie, blaring out a last call for popcorn and sodas right overtop the film.

But there was something about Mount Union Theatre that transcended its flaws. Maybe it was the well-chosen Pink Panther and Bugs Bunny shorts before the main feature, or the text-heavy descriptions of each movie in the newspaper ads that gave it a more historic slant, or the fact that you could — and did — run into friends and neighbors willing to share a common experience for a few hours in the same dark room.

By the early 2000s, attendance on Friday and Saturday nights had slowed to a trickle — too many other entertainment options and a much smaller window between theatrical and home video release took a toll on ticket sales.

The last movie I saw there was, appropriately enough, “King Kong,” my all-time favorite, in July 2004. Only a few dozen people were in attendance. Two years later, college brass brought the curtain down on weekend movies, and since then the building has been used only occasionally. My last visit, although I didn’t know it at the time, was to hear One Book One Community author Chitra Divakaruni speak about her novel, “One Amazing Thing,” last year. The theater looked pretty shabby then, a poor cousin to the more opulent Palace in downtown Canton. If Mount Union had more aesthetic appeal than a saltine cracker box, maybe more people would have campaigned to keep it.

But let’s face it: Nostalgia, however enjoyable, isn’t a viable long-term financial strategy, for a university or for individuals. The college and the community will be better served by a new science facility than by another vacant building, no matter how beloved.

Meanwhile, the one part of the theater that will survive the wrecking ball (besides the digital marquee) are the memories of so many evenings spent in the dark, staring at the silver screen and willingly surrendering their troubles for a few hours.

Like Bogie told Bergman, we’ll always have Paris. And Alliance-area movie fans will always have memories of Mount Union Theatre, even after the building itself has faded to black.

chris.schillig@yahoo.com

@cschillig on Twitter

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