> Ray Harryhausen and his producer Charles H. Schneer decided to prepare for an adventure film based on Greek Mythology as early as the late 1950s. They read all of the legends they could and settled on "Jason" because the "quest" story afforded plenty of opportunity for adventures along the journey. Many aspects of the original Greek legend were retained, but often altered in ways both subtle and extreme.

> Talos appeared in the Greek story, but he was encountered by the Argonauts on their return trip after they had acquired the Golden Fleece. Also, in the legend Talos was seven or eight feet tall and when approached by strangers, he would heat his body into flames and embrace the victims, burning them to death. The filmmakers avoided this grisly trait and instead Harryhausen borrowed the concept of the Colossus of Rhodes, a real-life 7th Wonder of the World--an enormous statue that once straddled the harbor of ancient Rhodes.

> The Harpies in the film were bat-like humanoids as designed by Harryhausen. In the "Jason" legend, however, the Harpies were described as having the face of a woman and the body of a vulture. They were not caught or netted in the legend, but merely chased away by Calais and Zetes.

> In the original Greek legend, the guardian of the Golden Fleece is a dragon that never sleeps. Harryhausen later said that "...dragons were seen as medieval beasts, so, for our version, I searched through the Greek legends and came up with the seven-headed Hydra, which Hercules slays as one of his labors." The dragon of the original legend was dispatched in a typically grisly way: Jason stabs it numerous times and his friend Iolaus applies a burning iron to the wounds. The gore was toned down in the film as Jason has but to stab the Hydra through the heart to kill it.

> As with the other creatures, the "children of the Hydra's teeth" were altered to avoid censorship of the film due to gory scenes. In the original legend, rotting corpses spring from the ground to confront Jason and his men. The filmmakers wisely substitute relatively clean skeletons for the scene. In the legend, the Argonauts do not directly battle the undead creatures; instead, Jason tricks them into fighting amongst themselves and destroying each other.

By John M. Miller