Harryhausen works on Little Red Riding Hood, which was brought back to its original Kodachrome glory in the new DVD collection. © Sparkhill, Llc.

Over the years, clips from Harryhausen’s early tests have surfaced in a variety of documentaries. Now they’re being presented unexpurgated for the first time. There are Ray’s very first experimental animations with cave bears and dinosaurs, done in a post-King Kong burst of enthusiasm using a camera without single-frame advance, which sometimes captured one, two, or three frames with each push of the button. Also present is Evolution, a never-completed epic featuring battling dinosaurs; The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, a short test featuring the Baron being interrogated by a rear-projected Giant whose face fills the screen; and The Elementals, an unproduced feature idea about winged beasts, for which Ray shot and edited a test film where he got carried away in the clutches of his own bat creature’s talons.

There are voluminous extras, no surprise since the disc’s creators, Sparkhill Entertainment, earn their bread producing DVD bonus material for the major studios. Included in the Disc Two supplement is Harryhausen’s dedication ceremony at the Hollywood Walk of Fame; a short documentary about his statue of explorer David Livingstone; a reunion between Harryhausen, Ray Bradbury, and Forrest Ackerman; the Academy’s “Evening With” tribute to Harryhausen; a survey of his bronze sculptures; a feature on the restoration process; and a trip to the Filmmuseum Berlin where many of Harryhausen’s most famous creatures are on display.

One of Harryhausen’s unfinished projects from 1953 was The Story of the Tortoise and the Hare, of which he completed only three minutes. It was finally completed in 2002 by Seamus Walsh and Mark Caballero, and the finished short is included here, along with an audio commentary and “making of” featurette. Walsh and Caballero did a superb job finishing the short in Harryhausen’s style, matching not only the tone of Harryhausen’s original fairy tales but also the grain and color palette of the surviving three minutes. The animators of Graveyard Jamboree with Mysterious Mose had just the sense of humor and technical prowess for the job, and Ray himself stepped in front of the camera to animate one scene.

Preservationist Mark Toscano sits for an interview on Disc Two, and his excitement continues today. “The thing I was shocked by, before I even looked at the films, was the idea that these were films that Ray made utterly by himself,” Toscano says. “He had help from his parents in some cases, but the stuff later on, Beast and Argonauts, those are collaborations with a bunch of different people. With these films, I thought, Jeez, these are going to be the films that he did utterly by himself. Ray made these in his twenties, and he was inexperienced, but he was incredibly ambitious and incredibly resourceful. With the equipment he had, he was able to do something really great.”

That quality is most apparent in Little Red Riding Hood, a one-reel fairy tale Harryhausen produced in 1950, which bursts through the TV screen like it was made last week. “Red Riding Hood is the only one that was able to come back from the Kodachrome original,” says Scott MacQueen, “and it looks absolutely breathtaking. No grain, sharp and clean — it’s just remarkable.”

“That Kodachrome is such a beautiful stock,” says Toscano. “It tended to have somewhat hyperactive colors sometimes.” Indeed, the giddy color saturation of Red Riding Hood is almost psychedelic. If you dream in color, this is what your dreams should look like. But beyond the hyper-detailed set dressing and believable acting and weight-shifting of his characters, the scope of the camerawork is the short’s most impressive aspect.

“Like I said, this guy was in his 20s, still a novice,” Toscano says. “He had only made a few films. And he’s trying a lot of bold experiments with the camera, like when the wolf goes up the stairs and the camera rises up. I mean, a moving camera incorporated into stop-motion animation? It’s quite incredible.”

Ray Harryhausen: The Early Years Collection is the first standalone DVD from Sparkhill Productions, formerly known for their home video supplements for the likes of Disney and New Line. “They wanted to shoot some interstitials,” says executive producer Eric Young, “and just as a pro bono thing, I said ‘Come on over to our place, and we’ll do it for you,’ because Ray is one of my lifelong icons. So we started out helping him out, and the deeper we got into it, we thought, gee, maybe we’ll just put it out ourselves.”

That respect is evident in the final product, which is tightly edited, elegantly packaged and well organized. “It was a labor of love,” Young says. “Everybody that worked on it just wanted to see it done right. And Ray had a very concrete idea about how he wanted everything presented, and how he would do the intros and so forth. It’s a wonderful archival record.”