![]() ![]() Not until King Kong climbed the Empire State Building with Fay Wray screaming in his hairy hand did anything even approach the impact of The Lost World, starring Wallace Beery as Doyle’s short-tempered academic adventurer, Professor George Edward Challenger…Īlthough Doyle had ambivalent feelings, at best, towards his most famous creation, Sherlock Holmes, he made no secret of his affection for his irascible scientist, ‘G.E.C.’, a man with so many honours and letters after his name that they ‘overtax the capacity’ of his calling card. The movie was an international hit and a sensation. When the film was released three years later, with a prologue in which Doyle himself introduced the picture, audiences had never seen anything like it. The footage was so impressive that some of the viewers left convinced it had been real. These were special effects rushes compiled by the stop-motion animator Willis O’Brien from the ongoing Hollywood adaptation of Doyle’s novel The Lost World. The famous author proceeded to astound his hosts with a film of apparently living dinosaurs. ![]() On the evening of June 2, 1922, at an American Society of Magicians dinner at the Hotel McAlpine, New York, after the whiskey and cigars, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, there as a guest of Harry Houdini, was given leave to set up a screen and projector. Dinosaurs, Disintegration Machines and Talking to the Dead: The Wild World of Professor Challenger. ![]()
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