Dan Goozee was a popular movie poster artist in the late 70s and 80s, and starting with 1979's
Moonraker (through
A View To A Kill) was United Artists' go-to guy for the James Bond movie posters. Goozee usually designed a few alternate versions for each entry, and here are a selection of his spacey illustrations for the franchise's answer to
Star Wars, which sent 007 (in the form of
Roger Moore) into orbit and climaxed with a zero-G laser battle. Watching
Moonraker now, as an adult James Bond fan, I'm appropriately appalled... but as an unrepentant Star Kid, I'm always utterly enthralled.
Apart from studio movie posters (including art for the original
Clash of the Titans and
Superman IV), Goozee also did some production designs for the original
Battlestar Galactica and painted a handful of very cool sci-fi originals that were sold as posters through Captain Company ads in the back of
Famous Monsters and other Warren magazines in the late 70s. If anyone has good scans of those posters, let me know - I've wanted to feature them here on the blog for a while.
Any resemblance of James Bond in that single shot of him poster and a sperm swimming toward an egg is purely coincidental. :)
ReplyDeleteI'm still a Moonraker fan, even after all these years. The plot is a bit thin (and is more than an echo of The Spy Who Loved Me), but I think Drax is one of the great Bond villains. He has great one-liners ("Look after Mr. Bond. See that some harm comes to him."), and that superb speech on the space station ("First, there was a dream. Now there is reality...") gives his plot an actual reason for existing, compared to Stromberg, who seems to want to destroy the world for the sake of doing so.
ReplyDeleteI grew up in a fairly strict (but loving) home and wasn't allowed to watch James Bond movies growing up. By the time I was allowed I no longer cared to watch them. However, I'm not kind of embarrassed at my lack of Bond experience. If you, or your readers, could pick one Bond movie to start with (I know they vary wildly in tone/quality) where you start?
ReplyDeleteI rate Spy Who loved Me as the best Bond, and Moonraker almost matches it. Drax and henchmen are top notch, and that scene where the dogs run down the woman who gave info to Bond is impressive. Poster #2 was the cover for the Novelization, the first Bond book I read.
ReplyDeleteAm I the only Star Kid whose sole grumble with 'Moonraker' was that Bond didn't wear that silver spacesuit with a tux beneath it?
ReplyDeleteHey adam. I would suggest just starting at the beginning with DR. NO and go from there.
ReplyDeleteThanks JIm .... makes the most sense!
DeleteI also loved Moonraker growing up. My number one Bond movie is "The Spy who loved Me" but Moonraker is a close second. Other than that, I am not much of a Bond fan. I was9 years old in 1977 (when Star wars came out), so this was in my SCi Fi window. When i was a kid I ate up anything sci-fi i could find. Love the site.
ReplyDeleteTexas Ranger
Fantastic poster art. Always loved the Moonraker posters. I remember when ABC first ran this, and I ended up staying waaay past my bedtime to see the end. I still enjoy Moonraker. It has a bad reputation but I think it's a lot of fun. Of course I can understand how die-hard 007 fans have issues with it. It looks amazing on blu-ray by the way - I highly recommend it to all Moonraker fans. I wish I had seen this in the theatre but I was too young, and my small-town theatre probably didn't even get it (though it's hard to imagine any theatre not getting a Bond film).
ReplyDeleteI think it's still a pretty good movie. Perhaps the weakest part of the plot is the beginning, but at the time Space Shuttles were thought to be a lot more capable than they actually were in practice.
ReplyDeleteLove the Gondola chase scene.
The special effects of the space battle could be better, but it's perhaps the earliest depiction of what would become a trope - space marines. I actually can't think of any other movie where you see them fighting in space like that. Not even many video games, usually space marines fight on the ground, not in space...
Easily my least favorite Bond film, but since it's Bond there's still some positives to it. Just a bit too silly and flat in many places. I have always loved the art work. I was 9 when it came out so of course my parents weren't taking me to see it. I remember seeing the Price in right back then and a contestant had a chance to win a Moonraker pinball machine. Back then it looked like the coolest thing ever made because of the artwork and because of how great I imagined James Bond was even though I had yet to see a Bond film.
ReplyDeletehttp://scifihorrorfantasy.wordpress.com/
I think this is the only Bond movie I ever watched in entirety-the space theme drew me in here. The scenes that always comes to mind were the ones with "Jaws" and his nerdette girlfriend Dolly (Richard Kiel and Blanche Ravalec). Ravalec stood out as the nerdette - not the usual Bond babefest type.
ReplyDeleteSorry, James, but super-agent Derek Flint beat you into space by many years. He went into orbit to avert a world take-over in 1967.
ReplyDelete