Sunday, March 6, 2016

Spider-Man: The Dragon's Challenge - Nicholas Hammond (1979) - Jardine House, Central

The finale of the film takes place on what would have been the territory's highest structure at the time, the Connaught Centre, now renamed Jardine House. We get some great views from the top looking down onto the neighbouring roads, as well as a rather impressive shot or two of some intrepid (and sadly anonymous) stuntman crawling up the side of the building.

But first some establishing shots showing the area around the building including the various piers we saw in earlier posts.

Vehicular ferry pier bottom left
Blake Pier
Blake Pier and the later version of the General Post Office. Star Ferry at the back
The GPO and Jardine House next door.

Can you see the small dot on the side of the building? It's our intrepid stuntman, attached by wires to a cradle at the top of the building. We get a close up as well which reveals the concrete finish on the building before it was clad with aluminium tiles.

Definitely not Nichloas Hammond!

Once at the top, Spidey uses his radio transceiver to try and locate his buddy. Cue some rather spectacular views from the top of Jardine House.

4 comments:

Sgt Yard said...

The intrepid stuntman was the legendary Fred Waugh. A very brave man, the one thing he wouldn't do was the fall from the Jumbo Restaurant into the Aberdeen Harbour - so a local HK stuntman took over for that bit!

Phil said...

great stuff, many thanks for that. Of course, now I am finding Fred Waugh/Spiderman stuff popping up all over the internet - I should have taken more time to research.

http://randar.com/post/113929320705/boomerstarkiller67-before-cgi-stuntman-fred

To be honest, I don't blame him for not doing the Aberdeen fall - there was still a significant amount of boat people living there in the late 70's and the water was (as you can imagine) much dirtier. These days it's a little clearer, but not necessarily clear enough to tempt you to take a dip ;-)

Anonymous said...

When I first saw The Chinese Web, I thought Spider-Man was awesome.

The costume, stunts, and fight scenes look dated, but no CGI was required.

Phil said...

to be honest CGI is great and so many things can be done now. But for the Sam Raimi reboot I thought there was an over reliance on CGI and many of the movements Spiderman does just look unconvincing.

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