Dragonslayer (1981) on Netflix
PG19811h 49mActionAdventureFantasy
King Casiodorus keeps the dragon Vermithrax from Urland by offering it a virgin girl chosen by lottery each equinox. Galen, apprentice to the last sorcerer, sets out to end the pact.
- Netflix3.5/5
- IMDb6.6/1020,928 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes85%
Trailer
Plot summary
Urland, a kingdom on the River Ur in the years after Roman rule, lives under the threat of the dragon Vermithrax Pejorative. King Casiodorus keeps the dragon away by handing over a virgin girl chosen by lottery at each equinox. A delegation from the kingdom, among them Valerian of Swanscombe, travels to Cragganmore to ask the sorcerer Ulrich for aid. Tyrian, captain of the king's guard, doubts the old man's power and challenges him to prove it, and Ulrich dies in the test. His servant Hodge burns the body and collects the ashes in a leather pouch. Ulrich's apprentice, Galen Bradwarden, is chosen by the sorcerer's amulet as its next owner and rides with the delegation toward Urland.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Dragonslayer (1981)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Phil Tippett did not want standard stop motion for the dragon's walking scenes: his team built a model that moved during each exposure rather than in between. The process, which he named go motion, used a motorized rod puppet with a computer program recording the creature's movements, which added motion blur and removed the jerkiness of prior stop-motion films.
- Real World War II-era flamethrowers were used for the dragon's fire-breathing effects, and the animals used for its vocalizations included lions, tigers, leopards, jaguars, alligators, pigs, camels and elephants.
- MacNicol got the lead by chance. While in Brown's office he heard the loud voices of actors coming from her audition room and asked whether anything right for him was in the project; she smiled, "Well...actually, there is", and an hour later he was the front runner for the role of Galen.
- MacNicol had grown up riding horses, but because he would have to ride on camera during action sequences his riding skills had to be stress-tested: his stirrups and reins were taken away, the horse was whipped, he was told to windmill his arms and turn a complete circle in the saddle, and then the saddle was taken away.
- North had six weeks to compose the score, which features music rejected from his score for Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. The opening reworks his music for 2001's "Dawn of Man" sequence, and the waltz for the dragon in flight was a variation of a cue that Kubrick replaced with "The Blue Danube".
- The special effects were created at Industrial Light and Magic, and this was the first use of ILM outside of a Lucasfilm production.
- The film was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects but lost to Raiders of the Lost Ark, the only other visual effects nominee that year, whose special effects were also provided by ILM.
- About 25% of the film's budget went into the dragon's special effects. Graphic artist David Bunnett was assigned to design its look, was fed ideas on the movement mechanics, and then rendered the concepts on paper.
