Tag: Ray Harryhausen

It was 137 years ago that Jules Verne first took his readers to the strange South Pacific environs of “The Mysterious Island” but the bookshelf sensation still clearly casts a spell in Hollywood – just consider the upcoming “Journey 2: The Mysterious Island,” a liberal updating of the classic tale packaged as a sequel to the 2008 film “Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D,” which also mined Verne for adventure concepts. Verne’s imagination has launched plenty of Hollywood projects — “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” “Journey to the Moon” and “Around the World in 80 Days” spring to mind — and “The Mysterious Island” has been visited often by studios in search of screen spectacle. Sometimes the actual novel itself doesn’t survive the trip to the screen — a 1929 part-talkie/part-silent film adaptation with Lionel Barrymore had almost had nothing to do with the original ...