War Eagles: Ray Harryhausen meets Carl Macek

[robotech_master]

I happened to stumble across this story while doing some Robotech-related news searching.

Ray Harryhausen is putting his name on a series of novels. (Because, you know, printed words on a page are the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the name Harryhausen.) The first of these novels is based on a movie that Harryhausen's mentor Merian C. Cooper was planning to make, before World War II got in the way.

In 1933 Merian C. Cooper, the legendary film producer, brought the motion picture King Kong to the screen. The movie was an instant classic. In the late 1930s, Cooper hoped to give filmgoers an even more ambitious adventure story in a project entitled War Eagles. Pre-production had begun on this epic project with special effects wizard Willis O’Brien, but fate intervened — in the form of World War II — and the production was put on hold. After the war, Cooper returned to Hollywood, but the project was never brought back to life.

[…]

The novel’s plot revolves around the exploits of a publicly-humiliated Army Air Corps test pilot, court-martialed and discharged from the service for an unauthorized flight that ultimately endangered the life of President Roosevelt. The pilot takes the only job he can get – flying an experimental airplane around the world from pole to pole. When his plane is unexpectedly attacked and crashes on an uncharted island above the Arctic Circle, the pilot discovers a strange land inhabited by a lost tribe of Norsemen who ride giant eagles and, in a surprising turn of events, become America’s only hope against a devastating sneak attack by the Nazis and their powerful new electromagnetic weapon.

And who is writing this novel? None other than Carl Macek, of Robotech fame. So far as I know, he hasn't written any other novels—he got Brian Daley and James Luceno to novelize Robotech for him. Is he any good at it? I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Comments

[foomf.livejournal.com]

So, Harryhausen is still alive? I thought he'd died some years ago.


I sometimes wonder if I've slipped into a parallel universe where things are just weird. Then I stop and realize that yes, of course, several times.