I had the great honor of meeting Stan Winston in the summer of 2001.
It was my first Comic-Convention, Wizard World Chicago, and Stan Winston was there to celebrate the impending launch of a new line of Stan Winston comics, and then action figures based on those comics.
Though the Stan Winston comics failed to take off, it might be one of the only things Stan was in that did.
Stan Winston created my childhood.
The Aliens of Aliens, the Predator of Predator, the Terminator of Terminator... The triptych of my youth when it came to movies and movie "monsters".
And then Stan lent his immeasurable talents to create the dinosaurs on Jurassic Park, my all-time favorite movie adapted from my all-time favorite book.
To say I was into dinosaurs as a child is to say that Bugs Bunny liked carrots. I grew up wanting to be a paleontologist, and even started college thinking that's what I'd do.
So to see every dream I ever had, ever fantasy, every nightmare brought to life by Stan's skills in Jurassic Park...
And almost a decade after he did that, I met him. I had been nervous about talking to him. Chicago was a small show (compared to San Diego Comic-Con), and Stan would just hang around his booth talking to fans.
Finally, I went up to him. We talked. He autographed my DVD copies of Jurassic Park, The Lost World and Pumpkinhead, which Stan himself directed.
I can't recall the exact words or conversation we had, and I saw him several times over the three days of the show. But I remember him being considerably nice, humble, and full of magic. He crafted conversations and thanks to fans the same way he crafted the stuff our dreams are made of.
To think of a world without Stan Winston is to think of a world without creativity, imagination, and, ultimately, without life itself. Stan created life out of the extraordinary. He made fake things real, he made imagination reality.
It's not a sadder world without Stan Winston, it's also one that's a little less creative, imaginative, and a little less real.
Because to live in Stan's world was to live in, yes, a scarier world, but a world more fanciful, more lucid, and ultimately more enjoyable than to live in reality.
1 comment:
I have to say that what Aliens has done for military - action - sci-fi movies, and even horror has never again been achieved in any other film. I salute everyone who was a part of that movie. Those warrior aliens were amazing, they way they exploded when they were shot, the way they moved, crawled across the ceiling, used their tails as weapons. I think it's difficult to create something that is so completely alien, and that they accomplished this with a basis on reality is exactly what you were talking about. Liklihood.
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