Steven Jay Rubin remember Derek Meddings on his birthday
Website last updated: 10-8-2024

Steven Jay Rubin remember Derek Meddings on his birthday

By: Steven Jay Rubin
Published:
2021-01-15
Derek Meddings Special Effects Maestro
The James Bond Movie Encyclopedia presents This Day in James Bond Movie History - remembering ace special effects supervisor Derek Meddings on the anniversary of his birth in 1931.

Derek Meddings (1931-1995) was a miniatures expert – and thus a throwback to the pre-digital effects age – a time when exquisite detail, and amazing cinematography turned tiny facsimiles of real places and equipment into the real deal. Nothing demonstrates that more than his yeoman work on The Spy Who Loved Me (1977), where Meddings was tasked to bringing Karl Stromberg’s (Curt Jurgens) Liparus supertanker to life. Some of the shots, filmed from an abandoned Nassau hotel tower were truly amazing – as the Liparus swallowed its nuclear submarine lunch. Stromberg’s Atlantis base was also a terrific Meddings miniature.

It was Meddings who joined the Bond team on Live and Let Die (1973), building Kananga’s poppy field in miniature and then blasting it to fiery smithereens. Later, he blew up the giant satellite dish in GoldenEye (1995).

Everything Meddings fashioned became an integral part of a film’s success. I have fond memories of his splendidly created giant crystal spider in the 1983 fantasy film Krull.


So let’s hoist one to another Bond genius – one who created in miniature but whose achievement was truly outsized. We miss you, Derek.

the-miniature-effects-of-derek-meddings-book.jpg
Book cver for The Miniature Effects of Derek Meddings. Copyright © 2008 Shubrook Brothers. All rights reserved.

Photo on top
Derek Meddings at Pinewood Studios. Copyright © 1994 Graham Rye - www.007magazine.com. All rights reserved.

All text. Copyright © 2021 Steven Jay Rubin. All rights reserved.

Tags:

#birthdays
#in_memoriam
#steven_jay_rubin

Tag Cloud

Bond 25 Bond girls Bond villains Britt Ekland Daniel Craig Dolph Lundgren George Lazenby Izabella Scorupco James Bond museum Kristina Wayborn Mary Stavin Maud Adams No Time To Die Ola Rapace Pierce Brosnan Roger Moore Sean Connery Spectre Timothy Dalton
 

All information, text and graphics (unless otherwise stated) on this website are protected by copyright law. Please contact us to use anything.

This website is not in any way endorsed by EON Productions Ltd, Danjaq, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Sony Pictures, United Artists, Ian Fleming Publications, or any other James Bond copyright holders. It is an independently run non-profit website from a personal basis in spare time.

James Bond film images © 1962 - 2024 EON Productions Ltd, Danjaq LLC, MGM Inc. and United Artists Cooperation.

James Bond book covers © 1953 - 2024 Ian Fleming Publications and Glidrose Productions Ltd.

Founder & Managing Editor: Anders Frejdh