From a reader re my earlier post:
It was Orthrus who Hamlin slew in the first movie!
Get with the Myths, Jonah!
jeeez…
Forgive me while I geek out for a moment, but I say to the reader: You could not be more wrong!*
True story: I saw Clash of the Titans, as a kid, at a preview in NYC when it came out in the theater. My Dad somehow got tickets for me as a present because I was a mythology dork.
At the end of the movie, a guy who worked on CotT asked me what I thought. I said that I thought it was pretty cool, but I didn’t understand why Cerberus only had two heads. He said that it was too hard to animate a three-headed dog, which sounded awfully lame to me.
Anyway, I wasn’t going to go on that flimsy memory from my youth. So I looked up CotT on IMDB to see if Cerberus was mentioned in the credits somehow. And, lo and behold, it says in the Trivia section: “According to mythology there was Cerberus, the THREE-headed dog but no Dioskilos[†] with two. They asked Ray Harryhausen why he didn’t use a three-headed dog, and he said it takes too much time to animate the extra head.”
* Okay, technically, the reader could be much more wrong. In fact, his guess is entirely plausible. A far more wrong guess would be, say, “it was a genetically mutated Snoopy.” But in such situations it is pro-forma to say “You could not be more wrong,” even when you are very, very, close to exactly right.
† For those interested, here’s the 411 on Dioskilos.