Friday, March 4, 2011

20000 Leagues : Rare pictures of the Giant Squid scene



After the LIFE Magazine underwater pictures posted last week, we'll go today over the water for rare and beautiful B&W pictures of the giant squid attack in Disney's 20000 Leagues under the sea.

As you probably know, a big part of 20000 Leagues under the sea was shot in a huge studio filled with water, as you can see on the picture below.



Then arrived the moment to film the giant squid scene. I mean, that squid:



In the movie, the giant squid attack sequence happen during a storm and generally the color images that we have in mind looks like this one...



But the pictures that you will see below are rare and beautiful B&W pics with, on most of them, James Mason as Captain Nemo fighting the squid.





The above and below pictures were shot during the first shooting with a sunset sky. But Walt Disney and Richard Fleischer thought that it was not good enough, that the cables which animated the giant squid tentacles were too visible, and decided to re-shoot the whole scene with a night sky and a storm effect to hide the cables. If you look well at some the pictures you will see the cables.







A last B&W picture, not from the same series - but coming from a theatre still.



All pictures: copyright Disney

2 comments:

Marco Antonio Garcia said...

Beautiful pictures, thanks for posting them!

By the way, I love this movie, and really hope to see the Disney Nautilus in another one... Let's hope!

DisWedWay said...

Great to see a close up of the Nautilus hull plating and see that it is very uniform and not patched together as some models have suggested, from pieces of wrecked sunken ships. Harper and Tom are smiling on you this day. PD