This post is brought to you by the Swords of Fire anthology series, with the fourth book due in 2026. Like the three previous collections, this one will feature four longer Sword & Sorcery adventures with one being a Sirtago & Poet tale set in a country much like Japan. This is by Jack Mackenzie, of course. There is also the next adventure of Bradik the Slayer by M. D. Jackson. One of the other two tales is a new Arthan the Bear Man story featuring an army of mercenaries versus giant spiders. For the previous anthologies, go here.
Nothing is more more iconic in the Fantasy genre than a human being fighting a dragon. The image goes back into the distant past, at least as far back as Beowulf in the 6th Century (and farther). Later artists would turn the fight between St. George and his scaly opponent into Christian symbolism while newer authors into an anti-war message. (Kenneth Grahame is too often underrated.) Others say it symbolizes human courage to face the harsh realities of Nature, the tornado and the flood. But every fanboy can tell you it is the big boss fight, the most nasty bad guy verses the bestest good guy. (Elmore Leonard once described his Western fiction that way.) Christopher Booker in The Seven Basic Plots (2004) calls it “Overcoming the Monster” and the dragon is the ultimate monster. I know this is a very Western culture version of the dragon, but what is more Western culture than the hero tale sung by a scop in the beer hall of a great Anglo-Saxon king?
Disney Gets Us Started
The movies know that dragon fights are instant gold. The first are either pretty lame by modern standards or animated. Disney’s first dragon was The Reluctant Dragon (1941) but not really much of a fight scene there. It’s a big cloud and a fake too. The better example is Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty (1959) which has a great fight for its finale. This film is also fun because it uses the scraps of an abandoned Hobbit film. So in a sense, here is the first version of old Smaug.
The Sword in the Stone (1963) Disney’s adaptation of T. H. White only had a dragon in one scene, the wizard’s duel where Merlin’s opponent turns herself into a dragon.
Early Films
Fairy tales and The Arabian Nights have been fodder for films since the silent pictures. Here’s two that show just how good Ray Harryhausen was. The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad (1958) started off the Sinbad franchise with a dragon, of course. Jack the Giant Killer (1962) is just that awful next to Ray.
Cartoons Return!
The 1970s saw a new interest in dragons. I don’t mean Pete’s Dragon (1977) either. That live-action-animation mix is rather awful. No, I mean The Hobbit (1977) by Rankin-Bass, which offered us a rather cat-like Smaug. The cartoon down-played the violence but Smaug still seems fierce, voiced by Richard Boone.
The Flight of Dragons (1982) served up some Tolkien-y goodness from a cross between Peter Dickinson’s book (1979) and Gordon R. Dickson’s The Dragon and the George (1976).
Tiamat the dragon was a regular in Dungeons & Dragons (1983-1985) the SatAm cartoon. The wanderers really never fought Tiamat because they would have lost pretty fast.
The Black Cauldron (1985) was a Disney flop based on the wonderful novel by Lloyd Alexander. It did have a dragon at the end.
1980s Films
Special effects steadily improved into the 1970s and 1980s. Dragonslayer (1981), while not perfect, does feature a very convincing drake even today. In my mind, it is the beginning of the modern era of dragon effects until CGI takes over.
Willow (1988) addressed a problem film producers struggle with. Every time a film has a dragon, it must look significantly different from what came before to avoid legal issues. How many different ways can you design a dragon and still call it a dragon? George Lucas skirted the issue by having Moebius, the comic legend, design a weird dragon like no other. It may not be your idea of what a dragon looks like, but it is distinctive, grown from a dead troll.
Video Games
Video games have a parallel history to films. From these Don Bluth’s Dragon’s Lair offers one dragon. World of Warcraft, God War and Skyrim have them too. I am sure this is only the tip of the dragonberg.
CGI Dragons
The 1990s made the dragon into the hero with the Dragonheart (1996) series. Sean Connery did the voice for original Draco but not the direct-to-video cash-ins afterwards. The CGI dragon has arrived. If you are like me, your eye for CG improves all the time, making older shows harder to watch.
A much better classic of CGI dragon shows up in 2002’s Reign of Fire. While the plot is completely ridicule, the film has plenty of dragon action and you basically don’t care. A guilty pleasure I can watch over and over.
We had to wait a little while for the next truly stunning dragon fight but Harry Potter delivered in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005). Later movies would have dragons but this first one was the show-stopper.
Eragon (2006) was nowhere as good but you can really see how they designed that dragon to look unique.
One I liked even less was 2007’s Beowulf. (It’s not because of the dragon though.)
The Lord of the Rings films by Peter Jackson didn’t feature dragons. Ancalagon is from an earlier time. But 2012 saw the first of three Hobbit flicks, two of which have Smaug in them. Jackson rendered this most famous dragons with a voice by Benedict Cumberbatch.
47 Ronin (2013) puts Keanu Reeves up against a snaky opponent. This one looks like a bad-ass version of the luck dragon in The Neverending Story.
Seventh Son (2014) worked with fairy tale motifs and a dragon.
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) gives us our only other Eastern dragon as well as comic book heroes. This dragon behaves in a rather hostile way.
Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) has two dragons in it. I mean it’s right there in the name, right?
Damsel (2024) takes the knight in shining armor out of the scenario. The damsel can do her own dragon-slaying.
Television
Game of Thrones exploded on the smalls screen in 2011 largely because, as Penny says on The Big Bang Theory: “dragons and coitus”. This is true if you are patient. The dragons in Season One don’t show up until the final scene. (You think that’s bad, you’ll have wait many more seasons to see a White Walker!) As the seasons progressed the dragons became more and more important (and larger and nastier).
2022 gave us the prequel to Game of Thrones, House of the Dragon. We travel back to the time of the Targaryen reign and, of course, their dragons. Here we have dragon-riders fighting against each other. A slow first season but getting better all the time. More dragons!
Cartoons Return Again!
1992 saw Saturday Morning with Conan the Adventurer. Other than the title “The Hour of the Dragon” there aren’t very many dragons in Conan. There is a dinosaur-like one in “Red Nails” but that’s about it for the originals. Still, the cartoon found a way.
The Legend of Vox Machina (2022) offers an animated fight harkening back to Sleeping Beauty, sixty-three years ago.
“The Old Knight” (2024), a short film does a new version of an old story.
The DreamWorks cartoon How to Train Your Dragon (2010) got a live-action version in 2025, giving us all that dragony goodness in CGI.
How to Train Your Dragon (cartoon)
Conclusion
I know I haven’t included every dragon ever. (Like the terrible CGI dragon in Earthsea.) There are so many. What I’d rather do there is talk about is great dragons who have yet to get a film or TV spot. I think of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Chrystophylax from “Farmer Giles of Ham”. What a great character! Way more fun than Smaug, because you can actually like Chrys. He shares some of Smaug’s tactics, using his breath to create steam to hide in before popping out to attack some knights on a bridge. Smaug is simply evil and mean-hearted, taking out his vengeance on Bilbo by attacking the town. He has to be a villain so Bard can be the hero who kills him with the black arrow. Chrystophylax would be closer to Draco in Dragonheart, being a partner to a human. I’m sure you can think of a few other dragons who need a good adaptation. Feel free to tell which ones.
Sword & Sorcery from RAGE machine Books
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