I have very fond memories from my childhood of a wonderful movie called Dragonslayer. In a very brave move, I added the movie to my Netflix queue to see if it really was a good movie. I watched the movie this past week and discovered several things.

  1. The movie is a Disney movie, at least in part. The Disney company was a producer in the making of the movie. I didn’t remember that.
  2. The part of Galen (our hero) was played by none other than a very young Peter MacNicol. For those of you who don’t know who he is, do you remember the quirky lawyer named John Cage with the curly hair on Allie McBeal? Well, that’s him! Very odd.
  3. The best part was that it really is a good movie. I was most surprised about this.

So, it was a good movie. Oh, to be sure, there was plenty of bad acting and it wasmade in 1981 so you can’t totally get away from the slight stench of that decade but all in all it really was a well done movie. The thing that impressed me the most was the special effects. For a movie made in 1981, the dragon looked really good. Especially when it was in flight, you could really see the dragon. There were a few places where it was obviously a construct but overall it looked really good.

Anyway, if you have good memories of Dragonslayer from your youth, you might pick up a copy to view it again. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at how well it has aged.