Brash, fast-paced, and hysterically funny, the Warner Brothers cartoons rank among the undisputed treasures of American animation and American comedy. This second collection, a follow-up to Looney Tunes: Golden Collection, includes such gems as "Porky in Wackyland," "A Bear for Punishment," "Gee Whiz-z-z," The Great Piggy Bank Robbery," and "I Love to Singa." A short documentary about directo…
Every larger-than-life creature feature, from King Kong to Godzilla to Jurassic Park, owes a debt to the original Lost World, the granddaddy of giant monster movies. Based on an adventure fantasy by Arthur Conan Doyle, it's the story of a maverick scientist (Wallace Beery, under a bushy beard) who finds a land that time forgot on a plateau deep within the South American jungles and comes b…
Jules Verne's classic adventure is perfectly matched with Ray Harryhausen's timeless movie magic in Mysterious Island. Based on Verne's sequel to 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, this rousing Civil War-era fantasy begins when a band of Union war prisoners (and one Confederate straggler) escape in a hot-air balloon, which crash-lands on the titular island of mystery. Verne's novel doesn't include a…
A skeleton grabs a sword and slashes viciously at Sinbad. A 9-foot-tall Neanderthal man fights to the death with a saber-toothed tiger. All the while, the boys and girls in the fourth row forget about their popcorn and are hypnotized by the images on the screen. It's hard to believe so many years have passed since the last Sinbad movie held kids spellbound at Saturday matinees. The movies were …
After scoring popular hits with When Worlds Collide and The War of the Worlds, special-effects pioneer George Pal returned to the visionary fiction of H.G. Wells to produce and direct this science-fiction classic from 1960. Wells's imaginative tale of time travel was published in 1895 and the movie is set in approximately the same period with Rod Taylor as a scientist whose magnificent time mac…
The surprising truth about Disney's 1982 computer-game fantasy is that it's still visually impressive (though technologically quaint by later high-definition standards) and a lot of fun. It's about a computer wizard named Flynn (Jeff Bridges) who is digitally broken down into a data stream by a villainous software pirate (David Warner) and reconstituted into the internal, 3-D graphical world of…
After the success of 1950's Destination Moon and 1951's When Worlds Collide, visionary producer George Pal brought the classic H.G. Wells story of a Martian invasion to the big screen, and it instantly became a science fiction classic and winner of the 1953 Academy Award for Best Special Effects. It's a work of frightening imagination, with its manta-ray spaceships armed with cobra-like probes …