20 Jaw-Dropping Special Effects from the pre-CGI Era

One can really not stress enough the radical transformation that CGI has meant for special effects. No longer do we live in the days when you had to use horses to show cows on film or just tie a bunch of cats together if you needed something that looks like a horse. No, now we live in the future – and so contemporary filmmakers can just say out loud “uhm, computer?”, give their order, and boom, new blockbuster with hyper-real, photorealistic images to desensitize us from anything real. Or at least that’s how we think modern special effects work, we don’t know, we haven’t caught up on our Movie Magic in years. The point is: special effects have friggin’ evolved.

Indeed, at the end of the day we can almost divide the history of special effects into pre-Jurassic Park and post-Jurassic Park (“Young Sherlock Holmes? Sure, great CGI for a movie that came out in the year 8 BJP”). As it is known, even George Lucas started conceiving of Episode I after witnessing Spielberg’s lifelike dinosaurs. So the question appears clearly: How did they manage to do special effects before CGI? In this Pictofact, we offer several approaches to this question through 20 amazing, flawless, sleek-looking, jaw-dropping examples of pre-CGI effects built just on human ingenuity. Well, ingenuity, but also condoms and lube. Be on the lookout for the condoms and lube. In general, you know, as life advice, but also and specifically in this list.