Here Be Dragons

"And he laid hold of the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil, and Satan, and bound him for a thousand years."
- Revelation 20:2, King James Version


In the bestiary of fanatastical fauna, no other mythical creature is so globally widespread and so universally revered, awed, and feared by diverse cultures, on either side of the equator, as the dragon. Why is that?

Beyond the two essentially cultural traditions of dragondom - European dragons were based on folk traditions that depicted the beast as a reptilian sexruped (four legs + a pair of wings) with animal-level intelligence, while Chinese dragons were intelligent symbols of power and strength, visualized as four-legged, wingless portents of good luck - not to mention Wyverns, two-legged, winged dragons associated with wintry climes that possessed a poisonous bite in lieu of fiery breath, dragons have been represented in seemingly every independent cultures on all, except one, continents.

Ancient Egyptians had their Apep, an ageless deity represented as a dragon or serpent that embodied chaos and opposed order, light, and truth.

Apep was eventually slain by the sun god Ra, in the form of Great Cat.

The myths of the Ancient Greeks abound with tales of heroes vanquishing one dragon after another. The splendidly handsome god Apollo defeated the dragon Python of Delphi with his peerless bowmanship.

Peter Paul Rubens painted "Apollo and the Python" 1636-1637.

Before he founded Thebes to become its first king, Cadmus, a Phoenician prince, had to slay a man-eating dragon.

"Cadmus slays the dragon" was painted circa 1573 by Hendrik Goltzius.

As one of his legendary 12 Labors, Heracles handily throttled and cudgeled the dragon Ladon that guarded the golden apples in the Garden of the Hesperides (pictured below).

One of the first written accounts of a dragon can be found in "Argonautica," an epic poem written in the 3rd century B.C. by Apollonius of Rhodes, who described the dragon that protected the Golden Fleece and the teeth from which were sown like seed to grow an army of men after it was slain by Jason.

The dragon guarding the Golden Fleece was called the Hydra and was given
seven heads by stop-motion animation virtuoso Ray Harryhausen in the wondrous
1963 film "Jason and the Argonauts."

Likely transcribed in the late 1st century A.D., the Book of Revelation repeatedly refers to Satan as a dragon.

The legend of George and the dragon, the earliest surviving text of which dates from the 11th century, was brought back to England by Crusaders. According to the legend, a dragon made its nest at a spring near a city in what is now modern Libya or Syria. To lure the dragon from its lair to draw water, villagers would offer up a sheep. If no sheep could be found, a virgin maiden was substituted. When the victim, chosen by lottery, turned out to be the king's daughter, George just happened to be passing by in his travels. He protected himself with the sign of the cross and slew the dragon. The townspeople abandoned their pagan ways and converted to Christianity.

Renaissance artist Raphael painted "St. George and the
Dragon" between 1504 and 1506.

Historically, Saint George, born to a Christian noble family in Syria, was an officer in the Roman Guard of Emperor Diocletian in the 3rd century A.D. Despite his status as a trusted tribune and confidante of the Emperor, George refused to recant his Christian faith and was arrested, tortured, and executed. Somehow, George got himself declared the patron saint of England and protector of the royal family.

The legend of Saint George and the Dragon inspired Bert I. Gordon, a director known for making super-sized creature features on cut-rate budgets ("The Amazing Colossal Man," "The Food of the Gods," "Empire of the Ants"), to crank out "The Magic Sword" in 1962. The undeniably cheesy but charmingly fanciful adventure, intended mainly for children, starred Gary Lockwood (best known as the ill-fated Dr. Poole in "2001: A Space Odyssey") as Sir George, with Basil Rathbone as an evil wizard and Estelle Winwood as a befuddled sorceress. The film's practical effects included puppetry for the two-headed dragon (pictured below).

In the Middle Ages, "Beowulf," the oldest surviving epic poem in the English language, written between the 8th and 11th centuries, mentioned an unnamed dragon killed by Beowulf and his Swedish cousin, Wiglaf, but not before mortally wounding the Geatish hero (pictured below).

In the 2007 3-D computer-animated motion-capture action film "Beowulf," directed by Robert Zemeckis and featuring Ray Winstone in the title role, with Angelina Jolie as Grendel's Mother, Anthony Hopkins as King Hrothgar, and Brendan Gleeson as Wiglaf, the dragon (pictured below) was somehow explained as the monstrous offspring between Beowulf and Grendel's Mother.

By all definitions, the beast in Lewis Carroll's classic nonsense poem "Jabberwocky" that was featured in his 1871 book Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There was a dragon ("the jaws that bite, the claws that catch"), indelibly illustrated by John Tenniel.

"One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back."

On his own for the first time from the Monty Python troupe, animator-filmmaker Terry Gilliam, inspired by Carroll's poem, directed "Jabberwocky"in 1977, an often grim fairy tale plopped smack dab in the mud and blood of a warts-and-all depiction of the Middle Ages (pictured below). Fellow Python Michael Palin starred as an oafish peasant believed to be the kingdom's only hope to defeat a monster ravaging the countryside. Terry Jones had a cameo in the movie, while John Cleese turned down a role.

The venerable actor Christopher Lee had only two lines as the voice of the Jabberwock in director Tim Burton's 2010 muck-up of Lewis Carroll, "Alice in Wonderland" (pictured below). Jettisoning the original author's marvelous sense of nonsense, screenwriter Linda Woolverton instead turned the story into a pathetic plea for female empowerment.

In the early 20th century, American children's author L. Frank Baum included dragons in Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, Tik-Tok of Oz, and The Tin Woodman of Oz.

Prolific Oz book illustrator John R. Neill depicted Quox the dragon for Tik-Tok
of Oz, described by L. Frank Baum as a large blue dragon with silver scales.

In the 1930s and '40s, British author J.R.R. Tolkien populated his Middle-earth with several dragons, notably the "most specially greedy, strong and wicked worm" called Smaug.

J.R.R. Tolkien himself illustrated the treasure-hoarding Smaug.

For the 1977 animated version of The Hobbit as a musical television special, Rankin/Bass, the studio known for several holiday specials, including "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," "Here Comes Peter Cottontail," and "The Year Without a Santa Claus," departed from Tolkien's description of Smaug by giving it a distinctly feline face and fur (pictured below). In a cast featuring Orson Bean (as Bilbo), John Huston (as Gandalf), and Otto Preminger (as the Elvenking), veteran movie heavy Richard Boone provided the raspy voice of Smaug.

Both "The Hobbit" and the 1980 Rankin/Bass follow-up, "The Return of the King,"
featured a soundtrack of syrupy ballads performed by folk singer Glenn Yarbrough,
mercilessly lampooned in the gerbilling adventures of Lemmiwinks in "South Park."

In director Peter Jackson's three-part adaptation of The Hobbit, beginning with "An Unexpected Journey" in 2012 and concluding in 2014 with "The Battle of the Five Armies," Smaug was voiced by and physically interpreted via performance capture by British actor Benedict Cumberbatch, who was nominated for a Best Actor Oscar for his role as Alan Turing in "The Imitation Game."

"On a carpeted floor, in a place that looks a little bit like a mundane government
building," is how Benedict Cumberbatch recollected his motion capture experience
as Smaug. "It was just me...with four static cameras and all the sensors."

In the 1952 novel The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Christian apologist C.S. Lewis' third entry in his The Chronicles of Narnia series of books, the arrogant, self-centered Eustace Scrubb is transformed by his "greedy, dragonish thoughts" into the creature itself, depicted below by Sussex-born illustrator Pauline Baynes, who also drew maps of Middle-earth for Tolkien.

Not for the first time do we ask, what's up with all the dragons?

Emperors of China traditionally used a dragon as a symbol of their imperial authority. It was believed that after the creation of humankind, dragons existed alongside us as beneficent companions.

In Mesoamerican mytholgy, Quetzalcoatl was a feathered, snakelike dragon, mainly worshipped by the 15th century Aztec Empire as a god of wind and wisdom, represented in sculpture below.

In 1982, Larry Cohen, an independent auteur of low-budget horror, fantasy, and exploitation pictures ("Hell Up in Harlem," "It's Alive," "A Return to Salem's Lot," "Original Gangstas") who gravitated to writing such mainstream movies as "Phone Booth" and "Cellular," put a contemporary spin on the lore of  Quetzalcoatl when the titular creature of "Q - The Winged Serpent" takes refuge in the spire of New York City's Chrysler Building (pictured below), where a crazed priest offers it human sacrifices. Quirky actor Michael Moriarty (a favorite of director Cohen's) played a third-rate crook and aspiring jazz pianist who discovers the creature's hideout, while cops David Carradine and Richard Roundtree investigate the bloody mess.

Piasa, or Piasa Bird, is a Native North American dragon represented in an ancient mural first discovered on limestone bluffs above the Mississippi River in present-day Madison County, Illinois. The original painting, "discovered" and described in 1673 by Father Jacques Marquette, no longer exists, but a 20th century version, based on 19th century sketches and lithographs, was duplicated on a bluff several hundred yards upstream from the original site, with the addition of wings not mentioned by Marquette (pictured below).

Even further North, in colder climes, Inuits had a dragon of their own (pictured below), even though the indigenous people had never before seen a reptile, since frigid environments are unsuitable for cold-blooded creatures.

The dawn of humans occurred one to two million years ago, some 63 million years after the last dinosaur's footfalls, and yet ancient cave paintings as geographically disparate as Kuwait (pictured below, top panel) and North America's Great Lakes (pictured below, bottom panel) have been found that seemingly depict either dinosaurs (raising the question of how prehistoric peoples could possibly know what a dinosaur was) or dragons.

Dragon tales permeate every civilization's lore, disregarding separation by geography, time, religion, language. The discovery of skeletons of whales and other large mammals, as well as dinosaur fossils, may have inspired beliefs in, if not dragons, giant serpents and sea monsters. Several medieval  maps warned seafarers of uncharted seas with the ominous inscription, "Here Be Dragons."

Some anthropologists have suggested that humans have an innate fear of birds of prey (raptors), great cats, and pythons, all of which possess traits common to popular notions of dragons. Such instinctive fears - not to mention a natural fear of fire - might explain why dragons have been described with uncanny similarity worldwide, except, of course, for Antarctica (unless penguins know more than they are letting onto). The legend on medieval maps might as well have read, "Here, There, Everywhere Be Dragons."

It would be difficult, then, to deny the universal appeal of Disney's "re-imagination" of the 1977 live-action - animation combination "Pete's Dragon" as a live-action fantasy for discerning moviegoers of 2016.

Disney's "The Reluctant Dragon" featured Robert Benchley, a noted columnist and
 humorist. Benchley's son, author Nathaniel Benchley, wrote the Oscar-nominated
screenplay for "The Russians Are Coming, the Russians Are Coming," based on his
novel The Off-Islanders, while grandson Peter Benchley wrote such best-selling
books as Jaws, The Deep, and Beast.

Truth be told, Disney, almost as much as Ancient Greek mythmakers, loved its dragons, beginning with the 1941 short "The Reluctant Dragon" (pictured above), which ostensibly offered a behind-the-scenes glimpse of various departments at Walt Disney Studios, framing the animated title tale, which was based on the 1898 book by Kenneth Grahame (best known for the children's classic The Wind in the Willows).

The Reluctant Dragon was illustrated by E.H. Shepard, an English artist
whose imagination brought Kenneth Grahame's countryside critters in
The Wind in the Willows to life. When it came to his iconic illustrations
for A.A. Milne's "Winnie-the-Pooh" stories, however, Shepard grew to
resent "that silly old bear."

In Disney's "Sleeping Beauty" (1959), the aptly named Maleficent, an evil fairy snubbed at the christening of the infant Princess Aurora, transformed herself into a gigantic dragon (pictured below).

"Sleeping Beauty" spoiler alert: Oh, never mind, you looked.

Likewise, in "The Sword in the Stone" (1963), a spirited retelling of King Arthur's boyhood, Merlin and the evil Madame Mim faced off in a climactic duel of wizardry during which the sorceress changed into a dragon (pictured below).

Disney animators for 1998's "Mulan" gave the title character (voiced by American actress Ming-Na Wen, with the singing voice of Lea Salonga) an undersized guardian dragon called Mushu (pictured below), wise-cracking in a voice provided by Eddie Murphy before he got locked into the cartoon role of an ogre's jackass sidekick in the "Shrek" pictures as Donkey.

In his review of the 2016 version of "Pete's Dragon," New York magazine's David Edelstein called the original 1977 film "a full-blown musical" that was "God-f***in'-awful." He surmised, "I bet even the cartoon dragon is embarrassed, looking back."

Old-time comedian Charlie Callas provides the voice for Elliott in "Pete's
Dragon" in a live-action cast that includes  Helen Reddy, Mickey Rooney,
Red Buttons, Shelley Winters, and Jim Backus.

According to the Rotten Tomatoes website's critical consensus, 2016's "Pete's Dragon" "continues Disney's current live-action winning streak with an update that gives the original a visual overhaul without overwhelming its sweet, soulful charm." The New Yorker's Richard Brody said the "update" "is filled with quiet joy and simple wonder." He remarked, "The movie is a fantasy about the friendship, in the wild, of a boy and a dragon...and the duo's unexpected confrontation with ordinary human company..."

Director David Lowery wanted Elliott to be furry, preferring "the kind of dragon
you really want to give a hug to" over a "cool, but scary and cold" "Game of
Thrones" type dragon.

"It's not about anything," critic Richard Brody summed "Pete's Dragon" up, "it simply is, and is-ness is among the rarest qualities in a studio movie," establishing a rare "claim on attention - the emotional and spiritual power of sheer and mere seeing."

The "vocal effects" for the 2016 Elliott in "Pete's Dragon" were performed by
John Kassir, a voice actor best known as the Crypt Keeper on HBO's
"Tales from the Crypt."

In the words of David Edelstein, "It conjures up 'Puff, the Magic Dragon' and its little Jackie Paper, who gets too old to frolic in the autumn mist of Honnah Lee..."

"Puff, the Magic Dragon," the 1963 hit song for the venerable folk trio Peter, Paul and Mary, was written by Peter Yarrow, based on a poem by Lenny Lipton, a 19-year-old physics major at Cornell University.  Lipton, who later became a renowned independent filmmaker, based his poem on Ogden Nash's "Custard the Dragon,"' a 1959 poem about a "realio, trulio little pet dragon," regarded as Nash's most famous poem for children.

As early as 1964, stoked by an article in Newsweek magazine, speculations arose that the song contained not-so-veiled references to smoking marijuana, beginning with the words in the title "puff" and "dragon," as in "draggin'." The name Paper suggested rolling papers, while "mist" could have referred to pot smoke. The "land called Honnah Lee" sounded a lot like Hanalei, the Hawaiian town allegedly renowned for its marijuana plants. The song's writers and performers repeatedly denied such allegations, insisting the harmless ditty was about the hardships of growing up and the loss of childhood innocence.                                                                                                                              

Besides the movies mentioned from the Disney Studios, there have been numerous films about dragons. Overlooking the countless dragons found in Japanese monster movies, Italian sword-and-sandal epics, and SyFy Channel fodder (including "Age of the Dragons," a 2011 retooling of Herman Melville's classic novel Moby Dick, starring Danny Glover as a Captain Ahab obsessed with slaying the Great White Dragon), the Moviehouse proudly presents some of our favorite depictions of our fire-and-brimstone friends.

One of the screen's first dragons was featured in the 1924 silent picture "Die Nibelungen: Siegfried," based on the epic 13th-century poem "The Song of the Nibelungs." After killing a dragon in the magical Wood of Woden, the legendary hero Siegfried is touched by the creature's blood and suddenly understands the language of birds, one of which instructs him to bathe in the blood to become invincible. He misses one spot on his shoulder blade, covered by a falling leaf, and if you're familiar with the myth of Achilles' heel, you know his fate is sealed.

Venerated director Fritz Lang (pictured above, with actor Paul Richter, as Siegfried)
eschewed filming a miniature for the dragon in "Die Nibelungen," insisting on the
use of a full-scale, 60-foot long "puppet."

Before working his magic on the previously mentioned "Jason and the Argonauts," Ray Harryhausen, the master of stop-motion animation, conjured up two cyclops, a dancing, four-armed snake woman, a gigantic, two-headed bird and its equally sizable, two-headed hatchling, a sword-fighting skeleton, and a dragon (pictured below) for 1958's "The 7th Voyage of Sinbad."

George Pal, another accomplished artist in the arena of stop-motion animation, directed the marvelous fairy tale sequences in the 1962 family fantasy "The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm," including the segment titled "The Singing Bone," which featured Terry-Thomas as a scoundrel of a knight, Buddy Hackett as his bumbling squire, and a jeweled dragon.

(Note the miniature model of Buddy Hackett astride the dragon's neck.) In the
Brothers Grimm's original tale, the quarry was a boring wild boar - George Pal
knew what his audiences wanted.

Possibly the best dragon film ever made, "Dragonslayer" was a 1981 co-production between Paramount Pictures and - you guessed it - Walt Disney Productions, which is somewhat surprising, considering the relentlessly grim presentation of Dark Ages environs, flashes of male and female nudity, grisly violence, and the depiction of one of the most frightening, gawd-awful, bone-chilling dragons in motion picture history.

"Dragonslayer" was the first time Industrial Light and Magic's special effects services were utilized by a movie other than a Lucasfilm Ltd. production. It was also the first film to use go-motion, a variation on stop-motion incorporating a motion blur into each frame which makes the animation more convincing. The dragon was dubbed Vermithrax Pejorative, which roughly translates from Latin as the "worm from Thrace that makes things worse." George R.R. Martin, author of the fantasy novels upon which the HBO series "Game of Thrones" is based, called Vermithrax Pejorative "the best dragon ever shown on film."

"Dragonslayer" gave Sir Ralph Richardson one of his last screen roles, as the
wily wizard Ulrich. As his apprentice, Peter MacNicol (forever endeared to
fans of the "Ghostbusters" films as the batsh*t-crazy Dr. Janosz Poha) grew
to be so embarrassed by this movie that he omitted it from his resume.

Matthew Robbins, the director and co-writer of "Dragonslayer," subsequently collaborated with visionary filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (best known for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar-nominated "Pan's Labyrinth") on the screenplays for 1997's "Mimic" and 2015's "Crimson Peak," both directed by del Toro, and 2010's "Don't Be Afraid of the Dark," directed by Canadian comic book artist Troy Nixey. On the back burner are scripts Robbins and del Toro wrote for "Pinocchio" and a long-anticipated  adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's novella At the Mountains of Madness.

From the acme to the nadir, 2002's "Reign of Fire" wobbles alone as the worst dragon film ever made. In a mind-boggling mishmash that preposterously posits a post-apocalyptic future in which winged, fire-spewing dragons have supplanted people as the planet's dominant species, Matthew McConaughey and Christian Bale portrayed rival militants who must either join forces to combat the airborne menace or just see who can out-brood the other.

"GoldenEye" Bond Girl Izabella Scorupco broods between Matthew McConaghey
and Christian Bale in "Reign of Fire."

A stupefied Roger Ebert wondered "why, if civilization has been destroyed, do they have electricity and fuel?"

The method dragons expelled flames in "Reign of Fire" was allegedly inspired
by the physiology of spitting cobras and bombardier beetles.

Ebert stated, "We cannot believe what happens in the movie, and we cannot believe that the movie was made." One kept hoping for Monty Python's Graham Chapman to interrupt the picture...

"Stop that - it's silly!"

Between the best and the worst, 1984 gave us Falcor, the gentle, lop-eared oversized puppy doglike Luck Dragon (pictured below) in "The NeverEnding Story," writer-director Wolfgang Petersen's charming adaptation of German author Michael Ende's fantasy novel...

...and 1996 brought us Draco, the world's last living dragon who sounded just like Sean Connery in "DragonHeart" (pictured below), featuring Dennis Quaid in an embarrassing medieval mullet as the last dragon slayer who sets up a running con game with Draco to defraud villagers with staged dragon slayings. On the one hand, Roger Ebert called the movie, directed by Rob Cohen (who initiated the "Fast & Furious" franchise in 2001), "one of the most sublimely silly movies I have ever seen," while admitting that "it recalls the days when movies were content to be fun."

In 2000, a direct-to-video sequel, "DragonHeart: A New Beginning," featured Robby Benson (the Beast in Disney's animated hit film "Beauty and the Beast") as the voice of the dragon, called Drake. A direct-to-video prequel, 2015's "DragonHeart 3: The Sorcerer's Curse," cast Academy Award winner Ben Kingsley as the voice of the dragon, now named Drago.

In 2006, Stefan Fangmeier (a fitting name for a guy directing dragons), a visual effects supervisor on numerous major motion pictures, including "Terminator 2: Judgment Day," "Jurassic Park," "Twister," "Saving Private Ryan," and "The Perfect Storm," directed his first and, to date, only feature film, "Eragon," starring Ed Speleers (Jimmy Kent on "Downton Abbey") as a dragon-riding hero. Rachel Weisz supplied the voice of Saphira the blue dragon in a cast that featured Jeremy Irons and John Malkovich. Based on a book written by a 19-year-old correspondence school graduate, the movie, slammed as a rip-off of "The Lord of the Rings" and "Star Wars," was one of the worst reviewed films of 2006. Fangmeier himself upset fans of the book by removing crucial characters and rearranging plot lines.

Reviewing "Eragon" in The New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis noted, "The film's
few moments of hilarity are no less welcome for being completely unintended...
though 'Into the sky, to win or die!' doesn't have quite the mythic flair as
'One Ring to Rule Them All.'"

The hit 2010 computer-animated fantasy "How to Train Your Dragon" from DreamWorks Pictures was loosely based on a series of children's books by English author Cressida Cowell. Set in a fanciful Viking hamlet where the villagers inexplicably speak with Scottish accents, the film, featuring the voices of Jay Baruchel, Gerard Butler, Craig Ferguson, America Ferrera,  Jonah Hill, and Kristen Wiig, was scripted and directed by Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, a pair of Disney refugees who wrote and directed 2002's "Lilo & Stitch."

Roger Ebert said "How to Train Your Dragon" is "bright, good-looking and has
high energy. Kids above the early scared age will probably like the movie the
younger they are."

Dean DeBlois winged it solo as the writer-director of 2014's "How to Train Your Dragon 2" (pictured below), which added the voice of Cate Blanchett to the aforementioned talents of Baruchel, Butler, Ferguson, Ferrera, Hill, and Wiig in a production that was equally as much of a critical and commercial success as the original.

Dragons have long held a fascination with children. Maybe it's the perennial boyhood passion for all things dinosaur, with the added sweeteners of flight and fire. In the early kidvid programming of 1950s TV, "Kukla, Fran and Ollie," the latter puppet's full name was Oliver J. Dragon (pictured below).

Four decades later, another dragon puppet, Scorch, was a popular "celebrity" on game shows like the revamped '90s "Match Game," hosted by pet store manager-turned standup comic-turned motivational speaker Ross Shafer. "Scorch," voiced by ventriloquist Ronn Lucas (pictured below), landed its own short-lived sitcom in 1992.

Naturally, a dragon appeared on "Sesame Street," with Elmo and Adam Sandler (pictured below).

 

And who knew that H.R. Pufnstuf (pictured below) was supposed to be a dragon?

Produced by Joe Connelly and Bob Mosher, the creators of the endearing family situation comedy "Leave It to Beaver," "The Munsters," a TV family of a completely different kind, featured a fire-breathing pet named Spot that resided beneath the mansion's grand staircase (pictured below).

The boys in Termite Terrace at Warner Bros. Cartoons pitted Bugs Bunny against dragons in two Merrie Melodies/Looney Tunes shorts. In "Knight-mare Hare" (1955), a take-off on Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court directed by Chuck Jones, Bugs is reading a book about the Knights of the Round Table under a hairdryer when a falling apple conks him on the head, and he finds himself transported to the time of King Arthur, where he extinguishes a dragon's fiery breath with a bottle of seltzer water (pictured below).

Friz Freleng directed "Knighty Knight Bugs" (1958), which finds Bugs Bunny as King Arthur's court jester inadvertently tasked with retrieving the legendary Singing Sword stolen by Yosemite Sam (in the guise of the Black Knight. Instead of a trusty steed, the Black Knight straddles a fire-breathing dragon with a sneezing problem (pictured below). "Knighty Knight Bugs" is the only Bugs Bunny cartoon to win the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film.

Over at rival cartoon studio Hanna-Barbera, "The Huckleberry Hound Show" aired an episode titled "Dragon-Slayer Huck" (1958), featuring the inimitable voice talents of Daws Butler and Don Messick.

Returning to the realm of grown-ups, in the 2008 TV series "Merlin" that initially aired on BBC for five seasons, Kilgharrah, also called The Great Dragon (pictured below), was imprisoned in a cave beneath Camelot by Arthur's father, King Uther Pendragon. Said to be a thousand years old, Kilgharrah serves as Merlin's friend, mentor, and spiritual brother.

"I'm not a horse, Merlin." - Kilgharrah, as voiced by esteemed actor John Hurt,
when asked by the wizard to be borne through the air across the kingdom.

On HBO's "Game of Thrones," the character Daenerys Targaryen, played for six seasons (and counting) by Emilia Clarke (who stated she did the funky chicken and the robot dance for her audition and who apparently likes to get naked on-camera a lot), helped hatch three dragon eggs - Drogon (pictured below), Rhaegel, and Viserion - all of which regard her, albeit volatilely, as their mother.

Some nitpickers have been quick to maintain that the dragons in "Game of Thrones"
are actually two-legged wyverns. You say wyvern, I say dragon. Let's call the whole
thing off.

No doubt the most unexpected sight to behold in the new "Pete's Dragon" is the presence of Robert Redford as a dragon-whisperer, if you will, who claims to have seen Elliott himself in his younger years. What attracted the Sundance, Utah Kid to the project was that it was very different from anything he had ever done.

"And there was the idea of going back to my own childhood, which was based on storytelling" he said in a roundtable interview. "I grew up...in a very lower working class neighborhood where there's not much to do, so storytelling become something to keep you alive. Storytelling was a way to see the world bigger than the one you were looking at, and that had great appeal to me. I think that since that was part of my upbringing, it became part of me, and I wanted to pass it along to my kids and grandkids. I thought, 'If you could ever do a project that really has magic in it, and justifiable magic, you should do it.'" He concluded, "To me, it was brand new."