And... the image-heavy
Space: 1970 posts continue! This rare bit of advertising campaign art from the original 1977 theatrical release of
Star Wars was painted by movie poster veteran
Daniel Goozee (
Moonraker, Octopussy, Clash of the Titans, Superman IV).
The swashbuckling image appeared in at least one newspaper ad, but was not widely seen; in fact, apparently the artist himself was unaware that it had actually been used in the advertising at all, since it was just one of many pieces commissioned from various artists by Fox's publicity machine back in the 70s.
Goozee is a former Walt Disney "Imagineer" and
fine artist who also painted a handful of sci-fi "originals" that were marketed as posters in the back of
Famous Monsters and other Warren magazines during the height of the post-
Star Wars sci-fi mania. Several of these cool poster images can be seen on
THIS collector's page (I really wish I had some!).
Awesome! I remember both of those pieces very well (as well as the poster ad on the collector's page you linked to) but never knew the artist's name. I haven't seen this stuff in years. The '70s were really a wonderful time for this sort of commercial illustration. Nothing coming out today is nearly as exciting or aesthetically pleasing, IMHO.
ReplyDeleteI really love how there used to be so many different takes on the material in those days, and really hate how boring and standardized all advertising images have become today. There's nothing exciting about seeing the exact same approved publicity images on every single spinoff product out there for a movie. I wish they'd go back to this type of thing, not to mention use painted art once in a while.
ReplyDeleteI totally agreee and also miss the days when different territories had different and unique ad campaigns for films, resulting in a wide and interesting variety of artistic styles. While I can appreciate that George Lucas still employs someone like Drew Struzan to create the poster art for his films using old-fashioned illustration, seeing the same images used over and over again (not to mention that the posters for all the Star Wars Special Editions and prequels look exactly alike) is extremely dissapointing.
ReplyDelete