The cinema of Ray Harryhausen, the only special-effects wizard of whom it may be said that a cinema – an unmatched body of work – exists, is a tribute to obsession: his and ours, at least those of us whose adolescence he marked. At my age – I shall ne’er see 14 again – I confess a vague guilt in accounting the hours spent watching his movies on screen, videotape, laser disc, and now a new set of DVDs. They do not improve over time; the dismal acting and gauche scripts aren’t reckless enough to qualify as camp, and the main appeal, stop-time animation, is as dated as Ben Turpin’s eyes. On the other hand, Turpin is still pretty funny and Harryhausen’s creatures continue to evoke a sense of the marvelous. If the fish faced Venutian, cyclopean centaur, homunculus, seven-headed hydra, swooping harpies, sword-fighting skeletons, massive bees, dancing kali, giant crab, and seductive tentacles are no longer frightening, they have taken on a creaky mythological familiarity that transcends childhood nostalgia.

In this, I suspect Harryhausen has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams: Surely, mythmaking was his ultimate goal. To those of us who grew up with his pictures in the 1950s, 1960s, or 1970s, they shepherded us through three stages, from “wow!” to “how did they do that?” to “oh, that’s how it’s done.” The payoff is that the third stage is the most profound; somehow, seeing the tricks underscores their fascination. The incredible manual labor involved in making tiny sculptures with copious armature sockets come to life, a frame at a time, and then projecting them in such a way as to allow them to interact with flesh-and-blood actors, imbues them with a strangely tactile humanity beyond the capability of computer generated images.

The best special effects don’t require special pleading. The most tiresome moment in “Jurassic Park” comes before the introduction of the dinosaurs, when the camera focuses on actors with glazed eyes and dropped jaws. With that kind of setup, whatever they are looking at better impress us as well. Instead, we see computer-drawn dinosaurs, and there is nothing wonderful about them. Harryhausen never treated his audience cheaply, never told us how to respond; he sprang his creatures on you, trusting the audience’s eyes and jaws to register wonder – as Buster Keaton did in the best special-effects film ever made, “Sherlock Jr.” (1924); after 70 years, its trickery provokes simultaneous laughter and incomprehension.

For Harryhausen, the transforming film was “King Kong” (1933), which he saw at 13 and determined to ape in the family garage. After years of experimentation and work on George Pal’s Puppetoon shorts, he made his feature debut alongside the stop-motion pioneer who animated Kong, Willis O’Brien, on the dreadful “Mighty Joe Young” (1949), in which an oversized gorilla in trouble with the New York police redeems itself by saving orphans from a fire to the strains of “Beautiful Dreamer.” Harryhausen avoided sentimentality after that – no easy feat, as he was forced to tailor most of his work to children. Indeed, for all his devotion to Kong, he never animated creatures that were as wholly sympathetic or anthropomorphic as Kong.

That might have manifested a failing, especially as so many of his actors are less anthropomorphic than his sculptures, but I think the sobriety of his imagination redounds as a plus. The absence of emotional empathy (do we really give a damn about any of the three wooden Sinbads?) underscores the schematic precision of his best work: “Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers,” “Mysterious Island,” “The Golden Voyage of Sinbad,” and his one undeniable masterpiece, “Jason and the Argonauts,” in which the effects are ingeniously woven into an exceptionally smart script (far more Homeric in its integration of men and Gods than the unspeakable “Troy”) enlivened by a largely excellent cast.

Most Harryhausen films have the structural logic of MGM musicals or pornography: long bouts of trite dialogue interrupted by “big numbers”; instead of tapping feet or sexual hydraulics, these consist of animation scenes often cut so deftly that every glimpse of a particularly ingenious creation – the homunculus, the leering skeletons – has a visual frisson. The fact that Harryhausen is the focus of these DVDs, implying his authorial control, indicates the upside and downside of his role. For the most part, the films were shot on European locations with actors staring at or fighting ghosts. When live shooting was completed, Harryhausen went to work, animating his sculptures and inserting them into the live-action footage. He was master of his domain, but the rest of the picture was still in the hands of second raters and a loyal but frugal producer, Charles H. Schneer, determined to remember his adolescent base.

As a result, we get tiresome leads (William Hopper in “20 Million Miles to Earth” wins the cake), stock military figures (the ubiquitous Thomas Brown Henry, the spit and image of Major Hoople), Aryan Arabs, and curvaceous, doe-eyed femmes. We get Richard Eyre as a chubby boy genie in need of Ritalin, in “Seventh Voyage of Sinbad,” living in a lamp unfurnished but for a bucket of dry ice. We get Arabian Nights dialogue lacking contractions and stiffer than steel: “Perhaps hunger has crazed his mind”; “The wind screams like 10,000 fiends.” We get “First Men in the Moon” as a Victorian flubber comedy with little dramatic relief, though Lionel Jeffries tries to save it – his rendering of the line “Hello moon” is almost worth the trip. We get Gulliver, in “The 3 Worlds of Gulliver, “as a nice guy, while the Brobdingnagian king (who, according to Swift, creams Gulliver in a “Crossfire”-like debate over Parliamentary rule) emerges as a dolt under the influence of a malefic magician. We get much repetition: All the Sinbad films, of which the last, “Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger” may be avoided, have the same plot (sorcerer up to no good, Sinbad sails to remote island to undo his evil). What’s the easiest way to defeat a Harryhausen monster? Get it to a high place and push it over.

Stop-motion photography was only part of Harryhausen’s art; he also mastered rear-view and foreground projection to heighten the illusion of seamless interaction. The seamlessness was never completely successful, however, because of the graininess of the rearview mattes, more evident than ever on DVD: As soon as the color turns slightly gray and soft, you know that a Harryhausen toy is about to race out of a cave or descend from the sky. Still, he kept testing himself with the kind of technician’s wit that translates into turning the screw one notch after another. In “The Golden Voyage of Sinbad,” he shows an ailing homunculus with two humans, switching angles to heighten the illusion of their being in the same scene, though the actors were on a screen and the homunculus in Harryhausen’s lab. Then he has the human and homunculus touch. Then the human carries the homunculus on his arm (a solid sculpture with fluttery wings). Then the homunculus flies out the window, at which point the sorcerer, played to the gills by Tom Baker, says, “Magic purges the soul, Achmed.” Right-o, Ray.

Four of these films have achieved additional immortality thanks to the participation of another obsessive, composer Bernard Herrmann, whose work was so little noted at the time (despite the contemporaneous Hitchcock films) that his name did not appear in the ads and does not appear on the DVD boxes. His combination of horse-galloping triplets and three Rachmaninoff chords drives the balloon sequence in “Mysterious Island,” and his bam! bam! Bam! d’deedle deedle dum opens the sesame of “The Seventh Voyage.” His score for “Jason,” a film that is also superbly directed (by Don Chafee – including a great opening shot), ranks with his work on “Vertigo” and “Psycho.”

Music and effects aside, subtexts are worth contemplating – for example, the unrequited sexuality in the early pictures (“You’re starting something you won’t be able to finish,” the scientist’s wife warns just before the flying saucers attack, and those tentacles in “It Came from Beneath the Sea” are after more than food) and the vicious colonialist undercurrent of “First Men in the Moon.” But they are sidebars, intrusions of reality in worlds of fantasy. A more unwarranted intrusion is the sloppy job Columbia has done with this series, which is available boxed and separately. The same extras are repeated on most of the discs, and though these include the excellent Richard Schickel documentary “The Harryhausen Chronicles,” there are no commentaries. The prints are uneven, and some are matted in the wrong aspect ratio – most egregiously, “The 3 Worlds of Gulliver” and “The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.” These films deserve better. Considering their longevity, they will probably get it.