Early in the film you can see a magic missile in action - the first time I've ever seen what is obviously a DYD-style magic missile happening in a non-D&D media source.
I've heard it said that Gygax was a fan of this movie, and you can see its application to D&D once you watch it. I also recently watched the 1963 film 'The Raven' (see ) which is a hokey sorcerer film that is very clearly the origin of several D&D spells. Here's a post from Tavis's blog on the displacer beast and rust monster, which seems to have originated in some very non-D&D places: I thought it might be interesting to start a thread about other literary/cultural sources that seem to be the origin of Gygax and Arneson's original ideas. It's a good book in its own right but also interesting from a 'D&D history' perspective because it seems to be the origin of the D&D shadow rules. I'm reading Merritt's 'Creep, Shadow, Creep' from Appendix N right now.
