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Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of IHeart Radio.

Hi, my name is Robert Lamb, and this is The Monster Fact, a short form series from Stuff to Blow Your Mind focusing in on mythical creatures, ideas, and monsters in time.

Our recent Weird House Cinema episode on the 1981 film Dragon Slayer got me thinking once more about Dragon Flight. In this film, noted for its superb dragon effects, we get to see Vermetrax pejorative

soarifyingly across the sky like a fighter jet, as well as swooped down from craggy peaks,

but we don't see the creature engage in vertical takeoff. In the special features for the

excellent 2023 remastered Blu-ray release, the effects team indicated that they intentionally

avoided depicting the dragon taken to flight in order to avoid challenges in making

the feat seem believable.

Because of course dragons, while creatures of fantasy, should feel believable on the screen,

and that may often mean choosing what to depict and what to leave to the audience's imagination.

But in raising the specter of believable dragon flight, I was reminded of an older episode of Weird House cinema

in which I discussed the 1982 animated film, The Flight of Dragons, with Seth

Nicholas Johnson. The film from Rankin and Bass was based on the 1979 book by Peter

...