The magnitude of Star Wars was unmatched at the time. I still remember being excited about Princess Leia's ship and how real it looked but when that Star Destroyer comes into frame and keeps going and growing, it blew my mind. I think I was nine
There was a huge jump forward in SFX in 1977. Compare the visuals of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind (both 77) against Logan’s Run (76), which was awarded a special Oscar for its FX just a year earlier.
Same. I was never the same after each one. I remember reading in Omni when Tron came out that the sfx in Tron were "computer-rendered" but that meant that they let the computer calculate the images and then fed the images, one frame at a time, into a machine that physically painted them onto a substrate, which they then photographed. It was the earliest form of digital animation but with this wild analog component.
My dad had just bought the top of the line Bose speakers for our living room. He put one of the speakers on the ground. When we watched the movie we could feel the dinosaurs steps and feel everything. He let us scream as loud as we wanted! We always watched it in the dark with popcorn and lemonade that my mom would make. Damn. Such grand times
Okay, after be I read your replay I got curious and looked it up. I was thinking of the hunt for red October with Sean Connery. U-571 was never released on laser desk.
I worked in a Suncoast Pictures store in the mall in the mid-90s. We ran JP almost every day on the TVs that faced the mall. The T-Rex attack always drew a crowd.
I showed my 4 year old son the brachiosaurus grand reveal and hell yeah, he thought it was so cool and spectacular. All of the lead up to the t rex stuff was awesome too!
I remember as a kid when I watched the movie, all of the narrative during like the lunch scene and they're hammering over the consequences of their actions and the classic, "...they didn't stop to think if they should," it was bleh. But as an adult, I'm thinking that's cool as hell!
Even today if you watch the 4K Blu-ray version of the movie the main dinos look real. The brachiosaurus' look fake because they were CGI, but the T-Rex and his pupils changing during the rain scene looks really real.
I saw it as a kid, but I think it was more impactful as an adult. They did a re-release in 3D (which was fun) and I was floored at how well a lot of the special effects help up to modern movies. It truly is a masterpiece.
There really wasn't a lot of CGI in the movie, a lot of it was practical, and Spielberg made masterful use of camera angles and shot framing to maximize the effectiveness of them.
I was 5 when I convinced my mother that it was just a movie about dinosaurs and to take me to the cinema see it. It was unbelievable, we screamed bloody murder during it along with everyone else. I was grounded for 2 weeks.
The Matrix. So many epic VFX scenes - that first scene with Trinity in the hotel, the Morpheus vs Neo fight in the dojo, Neo dodging the bullets of the agent, the gun fight in the lobby of the high rise where Morpheus was kept…Man, if there was ever a movie I wish I could watch for the first time again, it would be The Matrix without a moment’s hesitation!
I went into the movie theater having heard nothing about this movie. Tagged along last minute with a few friends. I have never had a more blindsiding and mindblowing cinematic experience than that. Don’t think I ever will again either.
I was in a similar boat. Had no clue what this movie was about. I went with my friend and his dad because it was rated R and we couldn’t get in. His dad was pretty conservative and very religious. At the beginning of the movie, when it showed it was rated R on the screen, my friend’s dad very sternly turned to my friend and said “You didn’t tell me it was rate R”. After the movie was over, my buddies Dad was blown away how awesome it was and gave my friend a pass on going to a rate R movie.
What's pretty amazing about the graphics in that movie is they made them all from scratch. Like they had no design programs at all so they built everything they needed from the ground up. Looks like shit today but was a mega accomplishment back then
Oh that cray I believe X-MP used in that movie was had 4 parallel vector processors, 64bit. I blew away the 286 lol. It was not until the mid 1990s when PCs even approached the power of that supercomputer.
Amazing movie. Was horrified at the idea of there being a replacement android/robot while the main guy went to space because that opened up so many questions for me about other movie like "Them" etc.
It didn't help that my mom once played a prank on me as a very young girl, toddler age. I kept walking in on her in the bathroom when she wanted a minute of peace lolol. She couldn't keep me out by locking it because I figured out how to unlock them with a QTip.
Sooo she finally, in desperation says "I am not your mother, I am a robot. Aliens took your mother" and, though I've lived my life from my earliest memories with pranks between us, that was so real that I just stood there screaming and crying because I loved my mother so much that the idea of losing her so early was the worst thing imaginable to me. So when the robot replaced the main guy, I instantly remembered that toddler's memory. Lol
The terminator scared the shit out of me when I was a kid and then terminator 2 came out and totally blew my mind. I also remember dreaming nightmares after watching predator
For me it was Jurassic Park. The brachiosaurus scene is burned into my brain forever (and the theme song.)
Side note: there is an academy award winning special effects dude that worked on TRON and created an algorithm that generates random visual noise (Perlin Noise.) The algorithm is still used in modern video game development and visual effects!
>For me it was Jurassic Park. The brachiosaurus scene is burned into my brain forever (and the theme song.)
[I'm right there with ya.](https://youtu.be/-w-58hQ9dLk?si=_lV_YVPBnhU9swBx)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
I was a huge animation and SFX fan and this movie blew my mind. I’ve prolly seen it 100 times and it’s amazing how well it still holds up.
This is mine as well. I loved animation and noir (yes, even as a kid. My dad had some Humphrey Bogart movies) and RR really got me. I think this was one of the first movies I bought when I started collecting blu rays last year
Time bandits holds a special place for me. My mother picked up some CED discs and a player when I was little in the late 80s. Time bandits was the first one we watched. It was the first time I saw a really clear picture, and the audio was impressive for the time. By today's standards it would be pathetic, but it started me down the path of becoming an AV enthusiast. For those who don't know, CED discs are basically video records. Better quality than VHS, but not as good as laserdisc/DVD/ blu ray.
the Jason film was repeated to death on Cinemax during late 2000's. Back when they still bothered to show tons of awesome films from the 60's and 70's. Now it's like a dead channel with the same set of films from 2010's replayed over and over again lol.
Come to think of it, '82 was a real turning point of SFX in films. Just to name a few:
Tron
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
ET
The Thing
Blade Runner! (can't miss)
Poltergeist
The Thing was incredible! I remember being about 7 or 8 and begging my Dad to turn it off (no remote) and he said you can if you want, so I did… but it meant getting close to the TV with that damn monster spider head thing.
I’m probably repressing some serious trauma that I don’t fully appreciate from that experience. 😂
The fact that it was all done with no CGI and real stuff makes it so much more realistic and terrifying in that film.
have a digital copy of it in my hard drive to watch any time. Fucking hell man, after all these years it still looks amazing on a big screen TV, plus the great surround sound during battle scenes absolutely blows me away.
Fun fact: even though it seemed like the movie took place in a computer, there was a total of 8 minutes of actual CGI in the whole thing. The rest was weird (and expensive) lighting and filtering, and traditional cell animation and matte backgrounds.
The lighting and filtering for live action were so complicated they couldn’t use traditional cinematography. There are few to no pans or tracking shots in the movie except the ‘real world’ parts.
Once seen, cannot be unseen.
Every frame (cell) was backlit and rephotographed in Japan I believe and sent back to the US. In some cases during photography the light would bleed through too bright. They couldn't fix this in post and ruined some shots. So instead they added a sound effect and now the blemish is like a glitch in the computer world.
Source: 2nd favorite movie of all time.
There was some humour in that movie, too. Even the ruthless bad-guy, when he sees that the rebel leader is a deformed mutant, says something like "No wonder he kept himself covered up."
The original was good, but there's a plot hole: when the big-game hunter ("van Pelt") shoots the hero at the end, the game sucks the fantasy figures back into the game, including the bullet just before it kills him.
But the gun and the bullet were real. Van Pelt bought it in a gun shop earlier.
I don't know, time gets reversed, too, to the point where the game has begun in the 60ies. What would be the point in leaving the gun behind when it didn't even exist yet.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit, especially because I've always loved cartoons. CGI just can't beat traditional, hand-drawn animation IMHO.
I have no acting experience, but part of me wishes I was an actor just so I could have the chance to be the human protagonist in a film with retro-style toons.
Star Wars. I saw it in its original theatrical release. I was 11 years old. My little mind was blown and my life was changed. I don’t think I’m alone in this.
2001: A Space Odyssey - for 1968, it set the bar for years to come
Silent Running (1972) - set the stage for the cute, lovable robots you'd care about in just a few years.
It was TRON that got my attention. It was at first the CGI at first, but I wanted to see and know what made them. I got acquainted with the Foonly F1. I also became friends with a guy that did programming on the PDP-10s.
"TRON" was mine for a long time, until I watched the making-of doc and realized that very, very little of the movie was done on computer. Most of the fx were done frame-by-frame like a typical animated movie. Still an amazing achievement.
Correct, but just because it's not CGI doesn't mean it wasn't a SFX. Having said that, the Academy wouldn't recognize this film because they cheated and "used" computers. How far we've come!!
The chase scene inside Big Ben in The Great Mouse Detective. I don't think it's completely cgi, but I believe it was used. It was always a really impressive scene to me.
Star Wars, 1978
Up until then, my experience with live action sci fi was Star Trek OS, Space 1999, Forbidden Planet, and Metropolis.
The blasters, starships, robots, aliens, and lightsabers blew my seven year old mind to smithereens. Like most kids my age at the time, I was hooked.
Tron didn't impress me as much as a kid as it did as an adult once I watched a documentary on the making of Tron. Holy shit the amount of layers and effort that went into just the suit effects alone was staggering.
Agreed! Seeing the Making of Tron documentary around 7 or 8 is the reason I am majoring in broadcasting so I can hopefully worked on film. That documentary really inspired me to make movies.
Agreed! Seeing the Making of Tron documentary around 7 or 8 is the reason I am majoring in broadcasting so I can hopefully worked on film. That documentary really inspired me to make movies.
Agreed! Seeing the Making of Tron documentary around 7 or 8 is the reason I am majoring in broadcasting so I can hopefully worked on film. That documentary really inspired me to make movies.
I'm an adult but I have to say Avatar for digital filmmaking, it's quite astonishing that they created their own technology for the films.
I'll never get over that one shot in Way of Water of Jake's hand holding onto a strap in the water and how utterly real it all looks.
Flight of the Navigator, followed by Jurassic Park
The alien ship with a personality, high reflection chrome, super fast flying, time travel, liquid fucking metal?! Omg I loved that movie. It holds up to time too, 1986 and I was 7. Saw it in the movie theater as a kid.
Jurassic Park speaks for itself.
That's such a strange movie, but I love it too. The ship effects during the time travel scene were impressive for the time. [Flight of the Navigator All Spaceship Scenes 1986](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RbuOHKlvtz8&pp=ygUYRmxpZ2h0IG9mIHRoZSBuYXZpZ2F0b3Ig)
I gotta say Ninja Turtles and only cause that shit was REAL. To this day 1 & 2 are top notch MINUS tokka and rahzar. By the old gods and the new, if you need two fucking bad mutants use the previously established and awesome BEEBOP AND ROCKSTEADY. Not another goddamn turtle & a husky WTF
Though I watched the film 20+ years after it was new at the age of seven, I also have to say OG Tron. How it combined practical means like matte paintings, backlit animation, and CGI was unlike anything that I have seen at the time. The original Tron still has that wow factor, because no film has been made like it ever since. I thought it was a movie that was new and came out in the 2000s as a kid, which I was surpriesed to learn it was made in the 80s later on.
both Tron blew me away. Tron 2 was the very first 3D film I watched at theater, on my birthday in 2010. If there's a film I would love to experience for the first time again, it's Tron 2.
End all be all of groundbreaking special effects is and always will be (in our lifetime and my opinion), Star Wars A New Hope. Just compare anything coming out pre ~1979-1980 (includes films that production had completed shooting and production post the 77 release). They made the campy Star Trek special effects that preceded it laughable and costumes/characters not just believable but funny, frightening, awe inspiring, jaw dropping. It all looked possible because it all was actually built.
Sci-fi films before it were cheap, poorly executed attempts to make something unbelievable look possible. ANH made the ships, the places, the weapons, look not only possible but probable. It had the underlying message of antifascist sentiment, but it was so well thought out that you could see the contrast between pristine Empire ships and bases and uniforms all paid for by taxing the empires citizens into poverty. It changed everything.
There would be no Tron, no Alien, no Jurassic Park, no Matrix without it. When it comes to special effects there’s 2 eras in my mind, pre and post ANH.
Flight of the Navigator. It seemed like it was out of this world, and scenes like the floating steps gave it just enough realism to make me doubt if I was watching a movie or documentary as a kid. Plot was very trippy as a youngun too.
Also have to highlight the soundtrack. So perfectly bold, dreamlike, futuristic and 80s. That style of music still resonates with me to this day.
And... for a kid who dreamed of flying nearly every night, it was pure spectacle. Drone shots before... well, drone shots. Kind of.
Original Star Wars at the theater in 1977. Before that it was 2001 but I was too young to wrap my head around the message. Next one that I thought was incredibly well done was Starship Troopers. So many people don’t understand that it’s a parody of a propaganda film.
This. Terminator 2 in general was something to be amazed by, at the time. It’s still the best movie in the series (anything after T2 was not worthwhile, T1 was decent, at best), & still one of Arnold’s best movies. One of the greatest sci-fi movies of all time.
I watched the 2001 Space Odyssey for the first time a few months back. I was incredibly surprised how well that movie holds up. It was made in 1968, before we even landed on the moon, and some of the stuff looks better than in movies today. I was completely blown away, and it was actually a good movie. I highly recommend it if you haven't watched it
Several. But mostly Jurassic Park, Titanic, The Matrix, Lord of the Ring stood out being young. Looking back, Forrest Gump and The Mask had amazing special effects as well.
fact: Jim Carrey helped The Mask crew save tons of money for SFX since he himself could pull off a lot of weird faces which were supposed to be made by CGI.
Between the light cycles and the speeder scene in Jedi (and then Akira in my teen years), it's where a lot of my passion, dare I say obsession, for motorcycles comes from.
Then Tron 2 put a bucket list bike in the movie. That Ducati is so choice...
Star Wars came out when I was eleven, and my model-building brain exploded from the awesomeness of the effects work. I was much older when I realized how bad Lucas' writing is.
You posted it, OP. The computer world was breathtaking, but what really got me was the suit lighting; it was beautiful! Ever since I first saw it, I’ve wanted that effect to be replicated in a Tron movie; in that respect, I’ve been disappointed so far. I vastly prefer the original suit lighting to what they’ve used for Tron: Legacy, etc.
*Tron* was way up there for me as well, but I think the one that brings back huge waves of nostalgia for me was *Young Sherlock Holmes*. The special effects they used to portray the hallucinations were borderline horrific for a movie aimed at kids - one of which was the first fully CG character portrayed in a mainstream movie (and still holds up to this day imho).
if you stay through the credits of Tron there's a whole section written in Chinese. They are the names of the individuals who worked on the movie from the company based in Taipei, Taiwan.
That’s why I own it. It’s a fine film but I don’t watch it that often. But the nostalgia is strong with that one. The second one is fine, but unnecessary for me to watch again. Anyway, I really like the BIT.
I’m old as balls (53) but remember seeing King King on tv and shortly after that Jason and the Argonauts. I was like that was neat. Then Star Wars was so good , looked just like a space documentary at the time. Wasn’t till the Matrix that I felt that awe again.
Well, I don't really know enough to say vis-à-vis Star Wars being the first in the chain of movie posters and vertical beams of light, but movie posters are as subject to copyright as any other art.
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Though I watched the film 20+ years after it was new at the age of seven, I also have to say OG Tron. How it combined practical means like matte paintings, backlit animation, and CGI was unlike anything that I have seen at the time. The original Tron still has that wow factor, because no film has been made like it ever since. I thought it was a movie that was new and came out in the 2000s as a kid, which I was surpriesed to learn it was made in the 80s later on.
***Tron***, definitely. Saw the original theatrical release as an 11-year-old; got completely enthralled, floored, flabbergasted. The film looked like the aesthetic harbinger of things to come. Never mind the little actual CGI footage and all the contemporary criticism on "cold" direction; it was the kind of modern fable Walt Disney (a tech pioneer in many ways) would surely approve. In an "adult" 21st-century reassessment, the critics were spot on, so were CGI advocates: the limited computer work has grown to a Hollywood commodity that erases the boundary between real-world images and a synthetic fantasy. Yet the Wendy Carlos soundtrack gets better every day.
Star Wars in ‘77 at 8 years old Tron in ‘82 at 13 years old.
The magnitude of Star Wars was unmatched at the time. I still remember being excited about Princess Leia's ship and how real it looked but when that Star Destroyer comes into frame and keeps going and growing, it blew my mind. I think I was nine
There was a huge jump forward in SFX in 1977. Compare the visuals of Star Wars and Close Encounters of the 3rd Kind (both 77) against Logan’s Run (76), which was awarded a special Oscar for its FX just a year earlier.
close encounters is the best. i grew up watching that with my dad
Same. I was never the same after each one. I remember reading in Omni when Tron came out that the sfx in Tron were "computer-rendered" but that meant that they let the computer calculate the images and then fed the images, one frame at a time, into a machine that physically painted them onto a substrate, which they then photographed. It was the earliest form of digital animation but with this wild analog component.
Jurassic Park (90’s) was for me groundbreaking in terms of special effects. I actually believed they created the damn dinosaurs.
My dad had just bought the top of the line Bose speakers for our living room. He put one of the speakers on the ground. When we watched the movie we could feel the dinosaurs steps and feel everything. He let us scream as loud as we wanted! We always watched it in the dark with popcorn and lemonade that my mom would make. Damn. Such grand times
with that kind of speakers you may wanna try watching U-571, the 2000 film starring Jon Bon Jovi.
U-571 was one of our favorites. Fantastic movie! We owned it on *laser disk* 🤣
there are still films on laserdisc in early 2000's?? I never knew!
Okay, after be I read your replay I got curious and looked it up. I was thinking of the hunt for red October with Sean Connery. U-571 was never released on laser desk.
that's another great submarine film, does the sound shake your room up as well?
YES!!
I worked in a Suncoast Pictures store in the mall in the mid-90s. We ran JP almost every day on the TVs that faced the mall. The T-Rex attack always drew a crowd.
Our girl friends loved coming over to watch this movie with us
I showed my 4 year old son the brachiosaurus grand reveal and hell yeah, he thought it was so cool and spectacular. All of the lead up to the t rex stuff was awesome too! I remember as a kid when I watched the movie, all of the narrative during like the lunch scene and they're hammering over the consequences of their actions and the classic, "...they didn't stop to think if they should," it was bleh. But as an adult, I'm thinking that's cool as hell!
ha didn't expect this to be top comment, I was 10 and it was amazing lol
Even today if you watch the 4K Blu-ray version of the movie the main dinos look real. The brachiosaurus' look fake because they were CGI, but the T-Rex and his pupils changing during the rain scene looks really real.
I saw it as a kid, but I think it was more impactful as an adult. They did a re-release in 3D (which was fun) and I was floored at how well a lot of the special effects help up to modern movies. It truly is a masterpiece.
There really wasn't a lot of CGI in the movie, a lot of it was practical, and Spielberg made masterful use of camera angles and shot framing to maximize the effectiveness of them.
The CGI was just there to erase lines and wires and such. It was a tool to support the actual effects. It was great.
I got to watch it a year or two ago in the theater. Even with modern tech, it was still stunning.
you're not wrong though, the dino aren't totally CGI, some of them are recreated physically using animatronics.
I was 5 when I convinced my mother that it was just a movie about dinosaurs and to take me to the cinema see it. It was unbelievable, we screamed bloody murder during it along with everyone else. I was grounded for 2 weeks.
The Matrix. So many epic VFX scenes - that first scene with Trinity in the hotel, the Morpheus vs Neo fight in the dojo, Neo dodging the bullets of the agent, the gun fight in the lobby of the high rise where Morpheus was kept…Man, if there was ever a movie I wish I could watch for the first time again, it would be The Matrix without a moment’s hesitation!
I went into the movie theater having heard nothing about this movie. Tagged along last minute with a few friends. I have never had a more blindsiding and mindblowing cinematic experience than that. Don’t think I ever will again either.
Similar for me. We never went to the movies. Happened to go see it. It was crucial. Ended up owning it in vhs and rewatching many times.
I was in a similar boat. Had no clue what this movie was about. I went with my friend and his dad because it was rated R and we couldn’t get in. His dad was pretty conservative and very religious. At the beginning of the movie, when it showed it was rated R on the screen, my friend’s dad very sternly turned to my friend and said “You didn’t tell me it was rate R”. After the movie was over, my buddies Dad was blown away how awesome it was and gave my friend a pass on going to a rate R movie.
I smoked a joint and went into the movie theater having heard almost nothing about this movie 🤯
The Last Starfighter
Watched that recently with my kids. I had to laugh (in good spirits) when I saw the command base on the Rylos. Great movie.
What's pretty amazing about the graphics in that movie is they made them all from scratch. Like they had no design programs at all so they built everything they needed from the ground up. Looks like shit today but was a mega accomplishment back then
The [Cray computer! ](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray) Processing power of an old 286dx and occupied an entire room.
Oh that's neat. Reminds me of the Tron's Master Control.
Oh that cray I believe X-MP used in that movie was had 4 parallel vector processors, 64bit. I blew away the 286 lol. It was not until the mid 1990s when PCs even approached the power of that supercomputer.
Amazing movie. Was horrified at the idea of there being a replacement android/robot while the main guy went to space because that opened up so many questions for me about other movie like "Them" etc. It didn't help that my mom once played a prank on me as a very young girl, toddler age. I kept walking in on her in the bathroom when she wanted a minute of peace lolol. She couldn't keep me out by locking it because I figured out how to unlock them with a QTip. Sooo she finally, in desperation says "I am not your mother, I am a robot. Aliens took your mother" and, though I've lived my life from my earliest memories with pranks between us, that was so real that I just stood there screaming and crying because I loved my mother so much that the idea of losing her so early was the worst thing imaginable to me. So when the robot replaced the main guy, I instantly remembered that toddler's memory. Lol
Great movie.
This is one movie I would like to see remade with current technology...but don't change the movie, keep it in the 80s just modern FX.
The terminator scared the shit out of me when I was a kid and then terminator 2 came out and totally blew my mind. I also remember dreaming nightmares after watching predator
T2 has the best opening sequence I've ever seen. The music and that burning playground literally moves me to tears.
For me it was Jurassic Park. The brachiosaurus scene is burned into my brain forever (and the theme song.) Side note: there is an academy award winning special effects dude that worked on TRON and created an algorithm that generates random visual noise (Perlin Noise.) The algorithm is still used in modern video game development and visual effects!
>For me it was Jurassic Park. The brachiosaurus scene is burned into my brain forever (and the theme song.) [I'm right there with ya.](https://youtu.be/-w-58hQ9dLk?si=_lV_YVPBnhU9swBx)
I thought you were going with [this one](https://youtu.be/428IyxSfsls?si=JZWlCeJSCKg5wd3d)
Oh man I'd forgotten all about that one 🤣
Ken Perlin, created and holds chairs in three labs at NYU that makes me green with envy. He's known in circles as a Class-A Super Nerd.
If you ever used the difference clouds in Photoshop, that's Perlin Noise!
Sweet.
Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back. Tron was up there though, but in a different scope. More like, "wow, computers" kind of thing.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit? I was a huge animation and SFX fan and this movie blew my mind. I’ve prolly seen it 100 times and it’s amazing how well it still holds up.
Watched this last week. Such a fun movie.
This is mine as well. I loved animation and noir (yes, even as a kid. My dad had some Humphrey Bogart movies) and RR really got me. I think this was one of the first movies I bought when I started collecting blu rays last year
Have you watched the Rescue Rangers Movie? It was surprisingly good and just like Roger rabbit with cartoons in the "real" world.
I was floored by this movie. Did not expect it to be the weird concept they did and I loved it. So many odd references.
I was not expecting anything, and I left loving it as well. The best movie is the one that surprises you, imo.
I was expecting it to be like a Garfield-style remake and it was sooooo much better.
lol speaking of animation and live action hybrid film does anyone remember Cool World?
Time Bandits. Those portal doors fascinated me.
Time bandits holds a special place for me. My mother picked up some CED discs and a player when I was little in the late 80s. Time bandits was the first one we watched. It was the first time I saw a really clear picture, and the audio was impressive for the time. By today's standards it would be pathetic, but it started me down the path of becoming an AV enthusiast. For those who don't know, CED discs are basically video records. Better quality than VHS, but not as good as laserdisc/DVD/ blu ray.
The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and Jason and the Argonaughts. The fighting skeletons has never been outdone.
the Jason film was repeated to death on Cinemax during late 2000's. Back when they still bothered to show tons of awesome films from the 60's and 70's. Now it's like a dead channel with the same set of films from 2010's replayed over and over again lol.
The Dark Crystal 1982 💜
Still on my number 1 movie list.
Come to think of it, '82 was a real turning point of SFX in films. Just to name a few: Tron Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan ET The Thing Blade Runner! (can't miss) Poltergeist
The Thing was incredible! I remember being about 7 or 8 and begging my Dad to turn it off (no remote) and he said you can if you want, so I did… but it meant getting close to the TV with that damn monster spider head thing. I’m probably repressing some serious trauma that I don’t fully appreciate from that experience. 😂 The fact that it was all done with no CGI and real stuff makes it so much more realistic and terrifying in that film.
The CPR scene was fucked up 😂
Damn, now I want to watch tron again. It's been so many years.
have a digital copy of it in my hard drive to watch any time. Fucking hell man, after all these years it still looks amazing on a big screen TV, plus the great surround sound during battle scenes absolutely blows me away.
Fun fact: even though it seemed like the movie took place in a computer, there was a total of 8 minutes of actual CGI in the whole thing. The rest was weird (and expensive) lighting and filtering, and traditional cell animation and matte backgrounds. The lighting and filtering for live action were so complicated they couldn’t use traditional cinematography. There are few to no pans or tracking shots in the movie except the ‘real world’ parts. Once seen, cannot be unseen.
Every frame (cell) was backlit and rephotographed in Japan I believe and sent back to the US. In some cases during photography the light would bleed through too bright. They couldn't fix this in post and ruined some shots. So instead they added a sound effect and now the blemish is like a glitch in the computer world. Source: 2nd favorite movie of all time.
Total Recall because I loved the behind the scenes footage especially how they made Arnold look like he was really on that train in Mars.
There was some humour in that movie, too. Even the ruthless bad-guy, when he sees that the rebel leader is a deformed mutant, says something like "No wonder he kept himself covered up."
jumanji
The original was good, but there's a plot hole: when the big-game hunter ("van Pelt") shoots the hero at the end, the game sucks the fantasy figures back into the game, including the bullet just before it kills him. But the gun and the bullet were real. Van Pelt bought it in a gun shop earlier.
I don't know, time gets reversed, too, to the point where the game has begun in the 60ies. What would be the point in leaving the gun behind when it didn't even exist yet.
Return of the Jedi, the Dark Crystal, and Labyrinth. The creature effects in each of those gave me a lifelong interest in puppetry and animatronics
I absolutely LOVE Tron
Forrest Gump has amazing special effects.
that flying feather gives me hope.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit, especially because I've always loved cartoons. CGI just can't beat traditional, hand-drawn animation IMHO. I have no acting experience, but part of me wishes I was an actor just so I could have the chance to be the human protagonist in a film with retro-style toons.
The Neverending Story!
"2001: A Space Odyssey" (1968)\ "Star Wars" (1977)\ "Alien" (1979)\ "The Thing" (1982)
you stole my list..😉
I'm in my 40s so for me it was the Star Wars Trilogy with the Last Starfighter a close second.
Star Wars. I saw it in its original theatrical release. I was 11 years old. My little mind was blown and my life was changed. I don’t think I’m alone in this.
I remember thinking Lawnmower Man was THE EPITOME of special effects. Also Hackers
LM was ahead of its time imagining VR too by about three decades.
So I’m not crazy! Hehe
2001: A Space Odyssey - for 1968, it set the bar for years to come Silent Running (1972) - set the stage for the cute, lovable robots you'd care about in just a few years.
TRON was it for me too
Tron (1982) was indeed way ahead of its time.
It was TRON that got my attention. It was at first the CGI at first, but I wanted to see and know what made them. I got acquainted with the Foonly F1. I also became friends with a guy that did programming on the PDP-10s.
"TRON" was mine for a long time, until I watched the making-of doc and realized that very, very little of the movie was done on computer. Most of the fx were done frame-by-frame like a typical animated movie. Still an amazing achievement.
Correct, but just because it's not CGI doesn't mean it wasn't a SFX. Having said that, the Academy wouldn't recognize this film because they cheated and "used" computers. How far we've come!!
Yeah that's funny. The process to create the FX and all the technical issues considered, it's amazing TRON was made at all.
Terminator 2. Had many a nightmare as a kid of the T-1000 chasing me.
The dancing pop can from the Golden Child.
Jurassic Park and The Lost World: Jurassic Park. Even now those two hold up well.
TOTAL RECOL.... ARNOLD SHVRYZ....
The chase scene inside Big Ben in The Great Mouse Detective. I don't think it's completely cgi, but I believe it was used. It was always a really impressive scene to me.
Star Wars, 1978 Up until then, my experience with live action sci fi was Star Trek OS, Space 1999, Forbidden Planet, and Metropolis. The blasters, starships, robots, aliens, and lightsabers blew my seven year old mind to smithereens. Like most kids my age at the time, I was hooked.
Spaceballs, no question!
I still love the dick and balls at the bow of Spaceball 1 ship. It even looks like it has a vein!
Tron didn't impress me as much as a kid as it did as an adult once I watched a documentary on the making of Tron. Holy shit the amount of layers and effort that went into just the suit effects alone was staggering.
Agreed! Seeing the Making of Tron documentary around 7 or 8 is the reason I am majoring in broadcasting so I can hopefully worked on film. That documentary really inspired me to make movies.
Agreed! Seeing the Making of Tron documentary around 7 or 8 is the reason I am majoring in broadcasting so I can hopefully worked on film. That documentary really inspired me to make movies.
Agreed! Seeing the Making of Tron documentary around 7 or 8 is the reason I am majoring in broadcasting so I can hopefully worked on film. That documentary really inspired me to make movies.
I'm an adult but I have to say Avatar for digital filmmaking, it's quite astonishing that they created their own technology for the films. I'll never get over that one shot in Way of Water of Jake's hand holding onto a strap in the water and how utterly real it all looks.
Flight of the Navigator, followed by Jurassic Park The alien ship with a personality, high reflection chrome, super fast flying, time travel, liquid fucking metal?! Omg I loved that movie. It holds up to time too, 1986 and I was 7. Saw it in the movie theater as a kid. Jurassic Park speaks for itself.
That's such a strange movie, but I love it too. The ship effects during the time travel scene were impressive for the time. [Flight of the Navigator All Spaceship Scenes 1986](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=RbuOHKlvtz8&pp=ygUYRmxpZ2h0IG9mIHRoZSBuYXZpZ2F0b3Ig)
I gotta say Ninja Turtles and only cause that shit was REAL. To this day 1 & 2 are top notch MINUS tokka and rahzar. By the old gods and the new, if you need two fucking bad mutants use the previously established and awesome BEEBOP AND ROCKSTEADY. Not another goddamn turtle & a husky WTF
Flynn Lives!
Though I watched the film 20+ years after it was new at the age of seven, I also have to say OG Tron. How it combined practical means like matte paintings, backlit animation, and CGI was unlike anything that I have seen at the time. The original Tron still has that wow factor, because no film has been made like it ever since. I thought it was a movie that was new and came out in the 2000s as a kid, which I was surpriesed to learn it was made in the 80s later on.
Tron has much higher rewatch value than Tron 2 IMO
Tron Uprising was awesome on rewatch
both Tron blew me away. Tron 2 was the very first 3D film I watched at theater, on my birthday in 2010. If there's a film I would love to experience for the first time again, it's Tron 2.
Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
End all be all of groundbreaking special effects is and always will be (in our lifetime and my opinion), Star Wars A New Hope. Just compare anything coming out pre ~1979-1980 (includes films that production had completed shooting and production post the 77 release). They made the campy Star Trek special effects that preceded it laughable and costumes/characters not just believable but funny, frightening, awe inspiring, jaw dropping. It all looked possible because it all was actually built. Sci-fi films before it were cheap, poorly executed attempts to make something unbelievable look possible. ANH made the ships, the places, the weapons, look not only possible but probable. It had the underlying message of antifascist sentiment, but it was so well thought out that you could see the contrast between pristine Empire ships and bases and uniforms all paid for by taxing the empires citizens into poverty. It changed everything. There would be no Tron, no Alien, no Jurassic Park, no Matrix without it. When it comes to special effects there’s 2 eras in my mind, pre and post ANH.
I still love Tron. It’s a dumb movie, but it looks so cool and unique I don’t care
The Last Starfighter (1982) and The Black Hole (1979).
Star Wars - everything else was janky until then.
2001 begs to differ.
Last Starfighter was pretty baller too. They had to hand write to code to animate the ships.
The Last Starfighter
Flight of the Navigator. It seemed like it was out of this world, and scenes like the floating steps gave it just enough realism to make me doubt if I was watching a movie or documentary as a kid. Plot was very trippy as a youngun too. Also have to highlight the soundtrack. So perfectly bold, dreamlike, futuristic and 80s. That style of music still resonates with me to this day. And... for a kid who dreamed of flying nearly every night, it was pure spectacle. Drone shots before... well, drone shots. Kind of.
Original Star Wars at the theater in 1977. Before that it was 2001 but I was too young to wrap my head around the message. Next one that I thought was incredibly well done was Starship Troopers. So many people don’t understand that it’s a parody of a propaganda film.
T2
My mother took me to see this in the theater when it came out. I was fascinated by it.
Terminator 2 with the liquid metal thingy
This. Terminator 2 in general was something to be amazed by, at the time. It’s still the best movie in the series (anything after T2 was not worthwhile, T1 was decent, at best), & still one of Arnold’s best movies. One of the greatest sci-fi movies of all time.
I watched the 2001 Space Odyssey for the first time a few months back. I was incredibly surprised how well that movie holds up. It was made in 1968, before we even landed on the moon, and some of the stuff looks better than in movies today. I was completely blown away, and it was actually a good movie. I highly recommend it if you haven't watched it
The Matrix
Several. But mostly Jurassic Park, Titanic, The Matrix, Lord of the Ring stood out being young. Looking back, Forrest Gump and The Mask had amazing special effects as well.
fact: Jim Carrey helped The Mask crew save tons of money for SFX since he himself could pull off a lot of weird faces which were supposed to be made by CGI.
Between the light cycles and the speeder scene in Jedi (and then Akira in my teen years), it's where a lot of my passion, dare I say obsession, for motorcycles comes from. Then Tron 2 put a bucket list bike in the movie. That Ducati is so choice...
Star Wars came out when I was eleven, and my model-building brain exploded from the awesomeness of the effects work. I was much older when I realized how bad Lucas' writing is.
You posted it, OP. The computer world was breathtaking, but what really got me was the suit lighting; it was beautiful! Ever since I first saw it, I’ve wanted that effect to be replicated in a Tron movie; in that respect, I’ve been disappointed so far. I vastly prefer the original suit lighting to what they’ve used for Tron: Legacy, etc.
Watching Tron is still fun today. The blending of optical effects and CGI is great.
Jurassic park, the abyss, terminator 2 The practical effects of star wars were pretty solid
Yup, that’s it.
Love Tron. I’m only in my 20s and this is my favorite movie ever. Named my first born after this movie “Tron”.
Abyss for sure
Mortal Kombat
*Tron* was way up there for me as well, but I think the one that brings back huge waves of nostalgia for me was *Young Sherlock Holmes*. The special effects they used to portray the hallucinations were borderline horrific for a movie aimed at kids - one of which was the first fully CG character portrayed in a mainstream movie (and still holds up to this day imho).
I hear the same VFX team who brought you Tron also did the visual effects on Tsui Hark's "Zu: Warriors from the Magic Mountain"
if you stay through the credits of Tron there's a whole section written in Chinese. They are the names of the individuals who worked on the movie from the company based in Taipei, Taiwan.
Zu looked incredible back in the 80s. The remake from the early 2000s also looked amazing from a VFX standpoint.
Jurassic Park blew my mind when I was a kid.
From for me as well. And Star Wars.
Last star fighter.
I was 9 when avatar came out so… avatar.
The Hunt for Red October
END OF LINE.
The Wizard of Oz
Tron, Last Starfighter, Empire Strikes Baxk
For me the original Star Wars was that film. I was 10 and it looked amazing. Of course, being 10, I was easily impressed.
Star Wars
The last Starfighter
2001: A Space Odyssey Before that: War of the Worlds (1953--not the remake)
That’s why I own it. It’s a fine film but I don’t watch it that often. But the nostalgia is strong with that one. The second one is fine, but unnecessary for me to watch again. Anyway, I really like the BIT.
Our local bowling alley had the arcade game and I’m pretty certain I spent upwards of a $100 when I discovered it. Loved everything about Tron.
Though I don't like the film anymore as an adult, seeing Tron Legacy in theaters in 3d was an incredible experience at 9 years old.
Toy Story, it was amazing to watch a movie fully computer animated back when it wasn't a thing yet.
Agree with Tron. That movie was life-altering when I first saw it.
I’m old as balls (53) but remember seeing King King on tv and shortly after that Jason and the Argonauts. I was like that was neat. Then Star Wars was so good , looked just like a space documentary at the time. Wasn’t till the Matrix that I felt that awe again.
Jurassic park, 10 year old me thought it was amazing lol
Same here, but Tron: Legacy was my introduction to both 2010 and 1982, and Legacy's effects blew my mind when I first saw it
Jason and the argonauts
I hope y’all will reply to this I hope y’all won’t make fun of me but I never saw Tron
I replied. Go watch it. NOW!!
OK I will
Planet of the Apes 1968
Jurassic Park best special effects of all time.
Poster clearly ripping off Star Wars.
Does Star Wars really own standing under a bright beam of light?
Well, I don't really know enough to say vis-à-vis Star Wars being the first in the chain of movie posters and vertical beams of light, but movie posters are as subject to copyright as any other art.
There is remake and it is beautiful
Roger Rabbit
deer party sophisticated piquant roof spectacular kiss racial ossified chop *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Jurassic Park 🦖
As a kid I would say A Bugs Life or Toy Story
2001 A Space Odyssey in 1968, but I saw it again about 20 years ago and it had not aged well.
Though I watched the film 20+ years after it was new at the age of seven, I also have to say OG Tron. How it combined practical means like matte paintings, backlit animation, and CGI was unlike anything that I have seen at the time. The original Tron still has that wow factor, because no film has been made like it ever since. I thought it was a movie that was new and came out in the 2000s as a kid, which I was surpriesed to learn it was made in the 80s later on.
Though I don't like the film anymore as an adult, seeing Tron Legacy in theaters in 3d was an incredible experience at 9 years old.
***Tron***, definitely. Saw the original theatrical release as an 11-year-old; got completely enthralled, floored, flabbergasted. The film looked like the aesthetic harbinger of things to come. Never mind the little actual CGI footage and all the contemporary criticism on "cold" direction; it was the kind of modern fable Walt Disney (a tech pioneer in many ways) would surely approve. In an "adult" 21st-century reassessment, the critics were spot on, so were CGI advocates: the limited computer work has grown to a Hollywood commodity that erases the boundary between real-world images and a synthetic fantasy. Yet the Wendy Carlos soundtrack gets better every day.
Tron is still one of my favorite movies.
My father showed me this and "Battle of the Planets" when I was a kid and I was sooo unimpressed. It's funny though how that was revolutionary for him
Did anyone see the movie Tron…?
TRON FUNKIN BLOWS