Sinbad and the Harryhausen Monsters

This came in today:


I have been silently (ok, maybe also aloud) squealing in excitement since. I LOVE HARRYHAUSEN!
I grew up loving The Clash of the Titans (which I also own) and Jason and the Argonauts--not surprisingly because of my deep love for Greek mythology--and I have always loved the Harryhausen monsters from the Sinbad films. There's something so beautiful about these creatures; I am partial to Medusa, but the scene that never fails to excite me is the skeleton fight at the end of Jason and the Argonauts.



While reading the description of the films on each DVD, I got stuck on the theme/character of Sinbad. I get stuck easily, I know, but when there's a fire in my eyes I gotta add fuel, ya know?
Sinbad. What kind of name is that?
Sinbad the Sailor. What is his origin? What was his original story? How many films were made? How have the tales of Sinbad into the present deviated from his origins? 

Thankfully, Wikipedia wikipedia'd good. Wikipedia sez: fictional sailor from Basrah, living during the Abbasid Caliphate, who "During his voyages throughout the seas east of Africa and south of Asia, he has fantastic adventures going to magical places, meeting monsters, and encountering supernatural phenomena." Richard Burton included the cycle of Sinbad's tales in his translation of 1001 Nights, and so then did other Western authors; however, says Wikipedia, the origin of Sinbad's adventures seem to have an independent source than from the 1001 Nights. (Luckily for me, the version/volumes of The Arabian Nights that I own includes the tales of Sindbad the Sailor, and it is my next task to read them. I got the volumes for additional research on my previous project involving Islamic science, which is a theme in the story of Aladdin.)

My favorite discovery from the Wikipedia page is that Edgar Allan Poe wrote on Sinbad himself, in "The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade", which can be read, or listened to, in its entirety here.

A gazillion films have been made about Sinbad. I saw a recent take, and I was disappointed that it was an updated version and so guns--which.. well, it's not really Sinbad the Sailor, anymore, is it? 

 from


"Shahrazad said: 'The story of Hasib Karim al-Din is not more remarkable than that of Sinbad.' 'How's that?' said the king, and she continued: 'In the time of the caliph Harun al-Rashid, the Commander of the Faithful, there was in the city of Baghdad a man called Sindbad the porter, a poor fellow who earned his living by carrying goods on his head. On one particularly hot day he was tired, sweating and feeling the heat with a heavy load, when he passed by the door of a merchant's house. The ground in front of it had been swept and sprinkled with water and a temperate breeze was blowing. As there was a wide bench at the side of the house, he set down his bundle in order to rest there and to sniff the breeze.'" 
-page 453, vol.2 of The Arabian Nights as translated by Malcolm C. Lyons, linked here

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