Release the Kraken!

Tuscon’s Museum of Miniatures features hundreds of exhibits like this one.

People have been making these for hundreds of years, but in recent decades practioners have become more precise about measurement and scale. Many of the exhibits use a 1:12 (inch:foot) ratio.

The fine detail is mind boggling. See that page on the desk above? You can actually read it.

There are rooms full of these installations, many of which date from the 1980s and 1990s when an American community of practice coalesced around the style.

I would guess that the whole collection representions millions of hours of effort. It’s almost overwhelming to contemplate.

This guy, Salavat Fidai, sculpts pencil tips. His medium is not quite as insane as that of Willard Wigan, whose work I saw at The Museum of Jurassic Technology. But it pushes the envelope.

As amazing as these miniatures are, I might not have made the visit just to see them. The tractor beam that pulled me in was the special exhibit of Ray Harryhausen’s orginal animatronic models and drawings. Here’s the Kraken from Clash of the Titans.

According to the Harryhausen Foundation’s podcast, he took creative liberties when bringing the legends to life. For example, this scene is a mashup of Jason and the Argonauts and the Labors of Hercules. It was actually Hercules who fought the Hydra. This bothered some classicists but Harryhausen was a pragmatist: “We have to manipulate certain aspects in order to make a movie that will flow.”

Who doesn’t love Bubo the mechanical owl?

American censors, however, did not love bare-breasted Medusa, though they were perfectly fine with her violent and bloody decapitation. Europeans, unsurprisingly, had the inverse reaction.

The skeletons from the iconic swordfighting scene were smaller than I imagined.

This model is from a film I never heard of.

The sign says:

The Story of the Tortoise and the Hare

Ray Harryhausen

c. 1952

This is the original model, rediscovered in 2008. An identical replica was made in 2002 to complete this unfinished film, 50 years later.

In 2002, Seamus Walsh and Mark Caballero of Screen Novelties, the award-winning American stop-motion animation studio, worked with Ray Harryhausen to complete his final fairy tale film, The Story of the Tortoise and the Hare, which Ray began in 1953 and never finished. Ray was delighted and grateful for their assistance and greatly admired how Mark and Seamus were able to seamlessly blend the new and original footage.

You can see the remarkable collection of miniatures anytime. But the Harryhausen exhibit, which arrived in Tuscon in September and leaves next May, is a rare U.S. appearance of artifacts that normally reside in Scotland. (Why? Ray’s wife, Diana, had very strong links to Scotland, being the great-great granddaughter of explorer David Livingstone.) So visit soon if you can!