The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958) on Netflix
G19581h 28mActionAdventureFamily
Sinbad sails to Baghdad with Princess Parisa for their wedding, but the magician Sokurah shrinks her. Sinbad must return to the island of Colossa for the eggshell of a Roc.
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Trailer
Plot summary
Sinbad, heir to the Caliph of Baghdad, sails home from Chandra with Princess Parisa, whose marriage to him is meant to keep peace between her father's sultanate and Baghdad. At the island of Colossa the ship stops for supplies, and the crew rescues the magician Sokurah from a Cyclops. The beast sinks their boat and keeps the magic lamp Sokurah lost in the escape. Sokurah asks Sinbad to sail back to Colossa for the lamp; Sinbad refuses and continues to Baghdad, where the Caliph denies Sokurah a ship. During the wedding festivities Sokurah turns Parisa's handmaiden Sadi into a snake-like dancer, then prophesies war and is banished. He steals into Parisa's chamber and shrinks her. Her father, the Sultan, vows war on Baghdad. Sokurah tells Sinbad that only a Roc's eggshell from Colossa can restore her.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The sword fight between Sinbad and the skeleton proved so popular that Ray Harryhausen recreated and expanded it years later, with seven armed skeletons attacking the Greek hero Jason and his men in Jason and the Argonauts (1963).
- Ray Harryhausen based the cyclops, horned, goat-legged, with cloven hooves, on the Greek god Pan, lifting the torso, chest, arms and style of movement of Ymir from 20 Million Miles to Earth (1957) and reusing the same armature.
SPOILER
The original script's climax, two cyclops fighting, was replaced by a cyclops facing a dragon, a sequence that took Ray Harryhausen nearly three weeks to animate.- Because having the dragon breathe fire throughout was judged too expensive, Ray Harryhausen filmed flamethrower flames 30 to 40 feet against a night sky and superimposed them near the dragon's mouth.
- Ray Harryhausen's personal favorite creature was the serpent woman belly dancer that Sokurah creates for the Caliph and the Sultan, a four-armed figure with a cobra's tail; he watched a dancer in Beirut, Lebanon, as reference.
- In 2008 the Library of Congress selected The 7th Voyage of Sinbad for preservation in the United States National Film Registry as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
