One film critic back in the early days said "It's a pity Mr. Harryhausen didn't animated the actors, too."

Many people are under the delusion that I'm just a special-effects man, but I've worn many different hats in my day. On every film I've been involved in, I worked with the writer and producer. We really formulated those scripts. We tried to make films that were logical but still had the fantasy feel of it. I enjoy Aardman Animation's films with Wallace and Gromit, but they're obvious puppet films, whereas we tried to disguise it and make our effects characters in the films rather than obvious puppets.

Animation had been used only for things like King Kong and the destruction of cities, which was very popular in the 1950s. I got tired of destroying cities. I destroyed New York, I destroyed San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge, Rome, and Washington. I was looking for a new outlet, and I came across the Sinbad legends.

There’s a strange quality in stop-motion photography, like in King Kong, that adds to the fantasy. If you make things too real, sometimes you bring it down to the mundane.

With all the hype that computer graphics has been getting, everybody thinks there's nothing better than CGI, but I do get a lot of fan mail saying they prefer our films to anything with CGI in it. I'm grateful for that, and we made them on tight budgets, so they were considered B-pictures because of that. And, now here we are, and they've outlasted many so-called A-pictures.

One film critic back in the early days said "It's a pity Mr. Harryhausen didn't animated the actors, too."

You could believe that Sinbad could fight a skeleton because that's from a period in the past, a magical period. But if you had James Bond fighting a skeleton, it'd be almost comical.