Forbidden Planet (1956)

One of the landmark science-fiction films of the 50s was this classic space adventure film from director Fred Wilcox - an adaptation of Shakespeare's The Tempest. It was the first science-fiction film in color and CinemaScope. Its Oscar-nominated Special Effects included miniatures (e.g., the spaceship), innovative set and art decoration (with soundstage scenic paintings), and matte paintings to create the alien environment of Altair IV.

It also included the famed friendly servant prop (probably the most expensive, intricately-wired film prop ever constructed at the time (at $125,000)) -- Robby the Robot, also used as a prop in MGM's The Invisible Boy (1957) a year later. The film also featured an all-electronic music score.

One of the best remembered segments was the 'animated' night attack (using hand-drawn cel animation) of the ID monster on the flying saucer spaceship - in actuality, it was displaying Dr. Morbius' (Walter Pidgeon as Prospero) face-to-face encounter with his own projected sub-conscious, incestuous feelings for his lovely young daughter Altaira (Anne Francis).

The Girl Can't Help It (1956)

Director Frank Tashlin, a former cartoonist, created a satirical mid-50s film that was most memorable for the role played by buxom blonde bombshell Jayne Mansfield, with a shapely hourglass figure.

However, it was also known for its unique opening or preamble, in which one of the film's stars, a bow-tied Tom Ewell, opened the film by walking out onto a open stage to speak to the camera (and break the fourth wall) and to introduce the feature. The background was an abstract landscape with musical instruments floating in space.

Annoyed with the small sized B/W picture, he astonished audiences by literally stretching the black edges of the boxy black and white picture - opening the viewable picture up into the wider, rectangular Cinemascope aspect ratio. And then he commanded that the picture change from B/W to Technicolor - "gorgeous life-like color by DeLuxe." [Note: The same joke to open up the screen (for Odorama) was used in John Waters' Polyester (1981) - in homage to this film.]

The film ended with a similar cartoonish bit by the other major male star, Edmond O'Brien, who like the cartoon Porky Pig ("That's all folks!") stepped through the enclosing frame of the final shot, walked forward through the black, now-empty space behind him to directly address the audience.

The Ten Commandments (1956)

The film won the Best Achievement in Special Effects Academy Award. It was Cecil B. DeMille's remake of his own 1923 silent film, with one of the most miraculous visual effects scenes in film history (and the most expensive special effects to date) -- the parting of the Red Sea. The scene, prefaced by Moses' (Charlton Heston) statement: "The Lord of Hosts will do battle for us. Behold his mighty hand," involved the use of miniatures, pyrotechnics, traveling matte paintings, rear-projection, and a 32-foot high dam or water tank churning out the waterfall. Other special effects scenes included the various plagues, the Burning Bush, etc.; in the massive Exodus sequence, compositing was used to multiply the number of extras in the crowd.

Darby O'Gill and the Little People (1959)

In-camera effects in this live-action fantasy, a Walt Disney production directed by Robert Stevenson, included the 'trick' of forced perspective depth effects. This was at a time in cinematic history when Disney Studios maintained its own in-house special effects department.

Full-sized Darby O'Gill (Albert Sharpe) appeared to be walking and conversing with live leprechauns (two feet high), although in actuality, it was a magical movie-camera trick. Darby was positioned closer to the camera in the foreground, to make him appear larger, while the 'little people' were placed at a distance in relation to him, to appear smaller. This special-effects technique required an increased depth of field, and intense lighting to be effective. The effect eliminated post-production optical patching, and grainy images and matte lines were not evident as well. The most spectacular scene was one in which hundreds of leprechauns danced and raced on white ponies around Darby. Also notable were the scenes of the banshee (a ghostly luminous figure) and the death coach with the headless horseman.

The same perspective depth technique was used in The NeverEnding Story (1984) in the scene of young Atreyu (Noah Hathaway) with two gnome characters (Sydney Bromley as Engywook, and Patricia Hayes as wife Urgl).

The Birds (1963)

Alfred Hitchcock's most expensive film to date featured a stylized sound track - composed from a constant interplay of natural sounds and computer-generated bird noises. The stark film about an unexplained and seemingly-organized bird attack also played without background music.

Ub Iwerks was nominated for an Oscar for Best Achievement in Special Effects, but lost to Cleopatra (1963). Real birds and animatronic birds were used throughout the film.

One of the film's most famous scenes was the one of dozens of birds slowly gathering on playground equipment - a complex special-effects shot that optically combined over two dozen separate elements.

Shortly later during the scene of the bird-attack at the school, special effects combined the shot of the schoolhouse in the background with kids running on a treadmill in the foreground.

Advanced rotoscoping and male/female traveling mattes were used in the 20-second scene of hundreds of birds flying over an aerial view of the town - a combination of real live-action footage with hand-drawn matte paintings.

Jason and the Argonauts (1963)

This Ray Harryhausen-created scene deserved special mention -- the spectacular stop-motion dueling-skeletons scene between Jason (Todd Armstrong) and sword-wielding attackers, in which life-like puppets-models were manipulated and shot one frame at a time.

The film was also noted for its other amazing creatures, including the gigantic moving (and creaking) bronze statue Talos, the 7-headed Hydra, and two half-human, half-bird Harpies.

Mary Poppins (1964)

This film was the first winner of the newly-named Academy Award for FX - Best Achievement in Special Visual Effects. (After 1963, the category was split into two: Best Special Visual Effects and Best Sound Effects.) The musical fantasy blended live-action with animation, such as the sequence in which Julie Andrews and Dick Van Dyke frolicked with cartoon penguins, sheep and carousel ponies; the special effects technique used in the scene to combine live-action with animated characters and backgrounds was called sodium-screen (or sodium vapor) compositing - a new dual film traveling matte system similar to the blue-screen process, but using different tools.

Fantastic Voyage (1966)

This science-fiction classic film - the winner of the year's Academy Award for Best Achievement in Special Visual Effects, told of an expedition by miniaturized human beings into the bloodstream of a human body, within a high-tech military submarine (full-sized in actuality) that was shrunk to microbial dimensions. The interior of the scientist's body was created by using large, highly-detailed sets of various body parts (i.e., the brain, the heart). Through various techniques, the explorers were seen swimming through the body (the actors were suspended on wires).

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

The Star Gate and Star Child sequence and other special effects helped this revolutionary and pioneering film win the Academy Award for Best Achievement in Special Visual Effects. Stanley Kubrick's film featured the most realistic footage of space ever created - and it's still not dated by the passage of time. Miniature models of spacecraft, timer or manually-guided pre-motion control cameras, rear-projection (for the film's many video displays and computer monitors), full-sized props or models (such as the 30-ton rotating "ferris wheel" set of the spaceship), and other early techniques (such as a primitive type of "Go-Motion") were used.

In the film's opening "Dawn of Man" sequence of prehistoric apes learning to use tools on the African savannah, retroreflective matting (front projection) was used to display second-unit background scenic shots projected from the front onto a reflective surface combined with soundstage photography of actors in the foreground - a technique now replaced by computer-processed blue-screen techniques.

Near the film's end in the Star Gate sequence, astronaut David Bowman (Keir Dullea) traveled through the stargate corridor in a dazzling sequence (using a slit-scan photographic technique) - a sound and light hallucinatory journey or whirling lights and colors in which he was hurled through and into another dimension - where he died and was reborn as a Star Child.

Other effects were achieved by applying different colored filters to aerial landscape footage and a close-up of an eye, and filming interacting chemicals.

The Yellow Submarine (1968)

Animation and live-action mixed in a fanciful musical adventure with Beatles music and cartoon Beatle characters.

Tiger Child (1970)

The IMAX system premiered with the showing of the first IMAX film - the 17-minute Tiger Child - at EXPO '70 Osaka, Japan.

The Andromeda Strain (1971)

This science-fiction techno-thriller classic was another early feature film, possibly the first, to use advanced computerized (or optical) photographic visual effects for its time, with work by Douglas Trumbull ( 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Silent Running (1971)), James Shourt, and Albert Whitlock (The Birds (1963)). $250,000 of the film's budget of $6.5 million was reportedly used to create the special effects.

This film contained possibly the first use of computer rendering (in the view of the rotating 2-D structure of the massive, hi-tech, top secret 5-story, cylindrical underground laboratory in the Nevada desert named Wildfire). Biologist Dr. Jeremy Stone (Arthur Hill) turned on the 'animated' computer simulation of the "electronic diagram which rotates to afford an overall view, or it can be stopped at any section. Detailed plans of the various levels and labs are also stored in the system...."

A Clockwork Orange (1971)

Kubrick's film was the first to use Dolby technology for recording sound - the first film to be mastered with Dolby noise reduction.