As a kid my hands down favorite show on the Discovery Channel was Movie Magic. This was way before DVDs and the Internet, and it was pretty much the only way I learned about how visual effects on TV and film were accomplished. Granted there were some of the genre magazines in the mid 1990’s, but when I had no sustainable income, basic cable was the way for me to go.

Movie Magic ran for five seasons between 1994-1997 and featured a lot of heavy hitters in the realm of VFX/SFX: James Cameron, Stan Winston, Rick Baker, and Dennis Muren. I found of my favorite episodes from the series on YouTube and embedded it below. As a kid who loved building Star Trek models, there was nothing cooler than seeing how the professionals built, lit, and filmed their large scale models.

I ate this stuff up, and would gladly buy this entire series if it ever came to existence on DVD. I will still watch the episode where they built Yoshi for the Super Mario Brothers Movie. I’ll even be enthralled when they film the plane crash sequence in The Net. But for every one or two shitty mid 90’s movies, we got glimpses into the awesomeness that was The Rocketeer, The Abyss, and Jurassic Park.