When Dice Were Made of Flint #16

I had already seen 1975’s Monty Python and the Holy Grail before I discovered fantasy games, but the later ’70s and early ’80s saw a slew of fantasy films that, to my eyes at least, seemed to have been rushed out specifically to capitalize on the new interest in fantasy sparked by Dungeons & Dragons. Mostly, they left me cold, although these days some of them bring back a small glow of nostalgia.

I enjoyed the Ray Harryhausen Sinbad films well enough, although nothing could surpass Jason and the Argonauts in my estimation. Clash of the Titans was okay, though I didn’t care for their interpretation of the Kraken. But these were mythology. Pure fantasy movies were another matter.

The first I was aware of was Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards, with its stoner vibe and adult humor. I wasn’t a stoner and I was barely an adult (thought I would have disputed that at the time), but today it’s a pretty good representative of 1970s fantasy, with its roots in counterculture and prog rock. 1981’s Heavy Metal left a very similar impression on me.

Next came Hawk the Slayer. I read the novelization before I saw the film. The effects were creaky, even for 1980, and the presence of a lot of Carry On regulars in the cast was rather distracting. The plot involved a lot of accidentally running into new characters who happened to be old friends of the hero, if memory serves, and the party composition made me think someone had skimmed a D&D book but never actually played the game. There was a party, but only one actual protagonist, leaving the rest as highly dispensable sidekicks.

Dragonslayer was forgettable – at least, I’ve forgotten everything about it except the name of the dragon – and I thought The Beastmaster was ridiculous, even though it spawned a TV spin-off. In retrospect, I think I was jealous of the basic idea, but indignant that it had not been handled exactly as I would have handled it myself at the time – not that I can remember how that was.

The two biggies came in 1982: Arnold Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian and the Jim Henson masterpiece The Dark Crystal. The former captured the spirit of Robert E. Howard’s barbarian nicely, I thought, although there were some annoying departures from Conan canon as I understood it at the time. The most egregious, to my eyes, was having Thulsa Doom from the King Kull stories as the villain rather than Conan’s own Thoth-Ammon. I have never understood that choice.

The Dark Crystal was a visual feast, but it was not the kind of heroic fantasy that could inspire a D&D game. Like many others, I cringed at the shameless deus ex machina-ness of the exchange: “I don’t have wings!” “Of course not – you’re a boy!” But even that could not take away from the richness of the world that was created for the film.

These two films are perfect examples of the two distinct approaches to fantasy in the cinema of the 1970s and 1980s: muscular barbarians on the one hand and dreamlike worlds on the other. Thanks to the VHS video rental stores that were spreading at the time, there was plenty of bad in the former category, with exposed, oiled skin standing in for plot, character, direction, and acting, but as the 80s progressed there were also classics like Willow, Labyrinth, The Princess Bride, and The Neverending Story.

Like the fantasy games from which they took their inspiration, fantasy films started out as sporadic and uneven in quality, but found their way in time.