15 Facts About Jim Danforth

Jim Danforth later went on to work with Ray Harryhausen on the film Clash of the Titans to mainly do the animation of the winged horse Pegasus.

Jim Danforth has been nominated two times for an Academy Award for Visual Effects for George Pal's 7 Faces of Dr Lao, and for When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth.

Jim Danforth was hired by the special effects company Project Unlimited and assisted a team of effects technicians on George Pal's celebrated 1960 feature-length science-fiction film, The Time Machine, which won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects for that year.

Jim Danforth continued working at Project Unlimited to animate the dragon in The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm.

In 1963, Danforth was hired by movie special effects pioneer Linwood G Dunn to animate miniature versions of the comedians in the finale-sequence of Stanley Kramer's all-star comedy, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

Jim Danforth received his first Oscar nomination for his work animating the shape-shifting Loch Ness Monster in the film, but lost to Disney's Mary Poppins.

Jim Danforth refined the ability of his dinosaur models to realistically convey emotions, and developed the first use of motion-blurring for the animation of the models by using thin wires to move parts of them during the exposure of each frame.

Not comfortable with the film being a semi-porn comedy, Jim Danforth requested that his name not be included in the credits, but the film's producer, Howard Ziehm, included his name anyway, as "Mij Htrofnad".

In 1975, due to his dislike of the screenplay, Jim Danforth rejected a personal carte-blanche offer from Dino De Laurentiis to create a stop-motion sequence for the De Laurentiis remake of King Kong, but accepted a contract with Universal to design creatures and animation for its competing film project The Legend of King Kong.

In 1979, Jim Danforth was hired, along with Rick Baker, to design effects for Edward Pressman's proposed production Conan, which evolved into Conan the Barbarian, with neither Jim Danforth or Baker were involved with.

Jim Danforth executed a matte painting for the penultimate shot of the film, showing Conan and the princess walking down toward a painting of a landscape valley.

Jim Danforth provided a matte painting for the little-known film, The Day Time Ended.

Jim Danforth was hired to create the visual effects for the prehistoric spoof comedy Caveman starring ex-Beatle Ringo Starr.

Jim Danforth designed the dinosaurs and directed the live-action scenes in which the dinosaurs would appear, but the hands-on animation was done by David Allen, Randy Cook and Pete Kleinow.

Jim Danforth is featured in the documentary film The Fantasy Film Worlds of George Pal, produced and directed by Arnold Leibovit.