Once upon a time I used to smuggle STARBURST magazine to school to show off the cool pictures from ALIEN and ZOMBIE FLESH EATERS. Huddled in the corner of the playground with a pile of copies, holding court among my 10 year old mates, we were jumped by a prying PE teacher expecting to find us leering over a load of Razzles. It’s just as good now and I’ve written this month’s cover story on LEGO BATMAN. Make that two covers, the standard and collector’s edition. Nothing about Jason King or the Bee Gees though. You can’t have it all.
Few images sum up the dashing Jason King, as played by actor Peter Wyngarde in the television series Department S (1968-69) and Jason King (1971-72) more than the sight of a stocky, jowly bloke with an afro in a pin striped suit flying through the air, fists-flying. Oh yes, The Professionals had nothing on Jason “the bruiser” King…
Except perhaps the tiny but insurmountable detail that the above image, used on the cover of a Dutch TV Comic book, is completely at odds with the way the character was portrayed on TV. But then you already knew that. But that doesn’t make it any the less charming in its absurdity. The past is a foreign country, of course, but twice as foreign when it comes to translating a TV series concept for local merchandising. Which is why I’m not going to even attempt an article on the dark corners of warped reinvention where the likes of Jason King, UFO and The Persuaders found themselves when European merchandising companies got their clammy hands upon them.
A far less absurd but just as exuberant way of selling Jason King was the lightweight celebrity photo-spread, and no magazine of the early 70s seemed to be more accomplished at this that German TV listings journal Bravo. I say thus with utterly false authority by the way. It could feasibly be the case that Australia, with its legions of Wyngarde fanatics, did just as good a job of covering the King phenomenon. But let us forget Australia for now (see, easy wasn’t it?) and revel in the truly exceptional coverage Bravo gave to both Department S and Jason King on first transmission in a series of snippets recently unearthed by researcher and archivist Bernard Dunne, a man for whom the phrase “no stone un-turned” certainly applies. Next stop for him: Australia. He just doesn’t know it yet.
Anyway, here’s a gallery of Bravo’s bravura spreadage:
Peter Wyngarde’s favourite things!“How can I find Jason King?” Bravo to the rescue…
Reflections…
Meet the houndSensational stylingsNo translation required (er, can anyone translate this?)
There really is no accounting for taste. Where TV21 was the gold-standard of Gerry Anderson publishing, TV2000, the Dutch offshoot, was a pale imitation, devoid of the elan that made the original so memorable and enduring. Most of what was great was messed up. The covers were badly reproduced rehashes of the original. Design, such as it was, lacked the quirky futuristic innovation we had come to expect. The paper quality and reproduction was plan awful. Hell, they couldn’t even set it in the right Century. But strangest of all these shoddy faux pas was the re-colouring scheme which took the original epic artwork of TV 21 and did things like…well like this…
Note the way Thunderbird 3 changes colour from red to blue within the same story. This is very much the way of things with foreign representations of Anderson brands around this time (see ‘Carlo DiFonzio: The Fotobusta King’ for more of the same).
Here’s another choice example:
Now this one I quite like. A red Thunderbird 2 would have looked pretty good on-screen. People (well, nerds) are wasting their lives away in 2016 building customised versions of these famous TV craft as though red TB2s are some kind of new thing but no; there it was, loud and proud flying around the childhood bedrooms of Holland circa 1967. Maybe Dinky should also have done a red version? Wouldn’t have put it past them.
TV2000 also gave us their own take on collector cards which, for my money, are somewhat more interesting than the comic itself. Note how uncomfortable Virgil Tracy appears here:
He must have seen his craft’s the colour scheme beforehand.
And when our Dutch compadres weren’t ripping off the original UK comics, they wee ripping off the original annuals…
Lazy, edam-eating twerps
Many years ago I stopped by Amsterdam with a hobbledihoy and telefantasy researcher of my long acquaintance. While I perused the excellent art galleries and waterways of that fine city, I couldn’t help but notice he was constantly slipping off down neon-lit alleyways and returning lighter of wallet, his eyes slightly glazed. I have to say the experience changed him rather fundamentally. I never saw him again after this excursion although I did hear that he got a job working for Gerry Anderson only to lose this coveted position when he was caught attempting sexual congress with a puppet-sized model of Supercar.
John Tracy of International Rescue stands in his famous red uniform at the control console of Thunderbird 5 in its traditional location in a cave next door to the distinctive super-craft, Thunderbird 1. Which is also red.
Welcome to the uniquely strange world of Carlo DiFonzio, the man who – for nearly 20 years – came to define the world of Italian cinema promotional material. Through literally thousands of distinctive portrait-sized “locandinas” and more traditionally landscaped “fotobustas”, DiFonzio consistently mis-represented, mis-interpreted and just-plain missed the filmed image in favor of something far more interesting – a garish alt-universe of his own creation. In recent years, art lovers the world over have rediscovered DiFonzio’s hand-tinted oeuvre, with posters changing hands for hundreds, sometimes thousands of dollars. But who was Carlo DiFonzio, why did he create such unusual imagery and what is his true legacy today?
“My father was a great man, but…he had his problems” It’s noon at a pavement cafe in the quiet central square of the the tiny Italian village of Salviatini, just north of Milan. I’m here to speak to and, as it turns out, enjoy a few drinks with DiFonzio’s son Dino, now a craggy 58, the oldest of 12 children. Its fair to say his memories of his father are conflicted: “He would paint or do his photo montages for the film posters all day and in the evening he would go out and meet with these crazy people, these other artists. They would drive up to the mountain behind the village here, you see the one? They’d go up there and smoke the ayahuaska , you know? That’s the real strong shit! When he’d come back the next morning he’d start work again and none of the colors made any fucking sense…” His voice trails off as he stares into his large whisky. A vivid image of his father, crazed with the insanity of a night at high altitude on mind-bending ayahuasca, is forming in my mind. Suddenly, to my amazement Dino reaches into his trousers and produces a photograph that actually shows his father in the midst of a 1970s drug trip…
“This is one of the few images I have of him” Dino sadly relates “He hated being photographed but this one was taken by a guy who was making a documentary about the origin of locandinas and fotobustas in this region. He waited in the bushes until my father was completely fucked out of his head and took this image of him and his friend Sergio in the full grasp of the drug trip” It certainly is an enduring image, one that goes some way to understanding the bizarrely ersatz versions of familiar film and television properties that DiFonzio reveled in.
Yours for £1,375,000
In October of this year, a mint-condition copy of DiFonzio’s most famous image, the legendary ‘Red John’ fotobusta for the film Thunderbirds Are Go! (1966) sold at Sotherby’s in London to a private collector for an astonishing £1,375,000. It was the largest single price ever paid for a movie poster. Does Dino wish he’d kept any of his father’s original works? “I did! They’re all over my wall at home, but back to front! I plastered them up face down to make a white background to paint on because at the time I couldn’t afford any fucking wallpaper!” And what does he think of the people who now pay more that the price of a large Italian villa for a single mint condition DiFonzio locandina? “What do I think?!” With this he staggers to his feet, nearly spilling our beers, unzips his fly and does something both hilarious and grotesque with his penis “THIS is what I think! These stupid fucking asshats who pay all this money can have THIS!”
Another splash of red from the Maestro…
The ‘Red John’ was followed by a string of similarly bizarre, drug-influenced creations. Almost as strange, and recently acquired by George Clooney for £968,000, is the ‘Red 4’, DiFonzio’s unhinged depiction of Thunderbird 4 and the Tracy Island Roundhouse from the same 1966 Gerry Anderson film.
“It’s like something took over his mind to make everything red” muses Dino, calmer now and drawing heavily on a fresh, high-strength cigarette, “He had a thing about red, for sure, but he also had a thing about green. And blue, he also had a thing about blue as well…” Indeed, the cornucopia of rainbow expressionism that flowed from DiFonzio’s tinting studio located in a converted toilet cubicle in a narrow corridor above a bar a few doors down from where Dina and I now sit, seemingly held no bounds. His contract with Italian distribution king Luigi Tagliatelle gave him first choice on any Italian film releases…”And what did he choose to do?” an increasingly emotional Dino splutters as a another round of San Miguels appears at our table, courtesy of Traci, our comely waitress “He chose shit! These fucking English TV episodes all joined up into these shitty movies that weren’t proper movies. He could have done the Fellini posters, the Antonioni’s, but no!” he flings his arms up in he air in a way only an Italian man at the end of his tether can do. “I was at home with him and my poor old Moma in her worn out knickers the night he got a call from the studio to offer him the poster for 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). He says down the phone ‘OK maybe, but what else you got Luigi?’ They tell him they got some fucking compilations of The Saint, you know, Roger Moore? That cunt?” Dino’s eye’s are now bulging with anger “You know how much he would have gotten paid for the Kubrick movie poster job? Ten times as much! I wanted to go to college! Jesus…Anyway, lets have another pint of this, yes?”
Although its seems an inopportune time to mention it to Dino, the irony today is that the two Saint posters his father produced that year, both featuring his now trademark “red man”, now change hands for many thousands of dollars more than the original Italian 2001 poster.
But its not quite true to say that DiFonzio never worked on any major Hollywood films, in fact he even invested some of his earnings in a film he had high hopes for, as Dino recalls.. “There was a Disney film he had some money invested in, he really thought it was going to be a big success, it was called Monkey’s Go Home! He did the poster and fucked up all the colours and everything but it was a turkey. I don’t know why but they never show it it on TV. But he would jump up and down with excitement whenever he heard the name”.
Monkey Go Home!…gone!
But there would be one other, incredible, brush with big-time Hollywood movies and it all came about through a mis-understanding, as Dino recalled to me over another brace of foaming Miguels…”By the late 1970s my father was spending most of his time fucked out of head on drugs and doing posters for just a few things he liked. He liked The Persuaders, he liked Space: 1999, he really – I mean REALLY liked that show with the girls with the tits and the purple wigs (Gerry Anderson’s UFO) but that was all he’d do, you know? Just TV shit that got shown out here in the provinces. People out here will watch any old shit! Anyway, one day in 1977 he agreed to do the poster for what he thought was a new Gerry Anderson movie compilation. That’s what the studio had told him. But it was a trick to get him to do the poster for Star Wars!”
Replete with his trademark tinted weirdness, it would prove the final work of DiFonzio’s career. Not that the story ends there…
“My father disappeared with his friends from the mountain camp, the drug people. They all took off and we never heard from him again.We heard about him sometimes, but never from him. I’m not sad though. My father, you know…” For a moment, as Dino stares down into his seventh San Miguel, I see the little boy DiFonzio left behind “…was an idioti, a fool. He was a….a loser. But he was still my father”
In a quiet square in a small village near Milan, a very drunk man begins to cry.
Of all he great artists of the late 20th Century, Carlo DiFonzio is perhaps the most enigmatic. With just one confirmed sighting since 1977, we can only guess at the lifestyle he now leads. But in that single 2006 image of DiFonzio doing his shopping in Ealing, West London, we can still see something in his eyes.. the artist, the fool, the man who saw in red…the King of the Fotobustas, walking tall.
“Of course, Lucy that sounds great! I’ll be round at five-ish so give me a call before hand.”
“Ok, see you th-”
*BEEP BEEP BEEP. I looked around the room in hurry of what I was going to wear. You see, I’m going round Kelly’s in half an hour and I’m still still in my thick, cosy dressing gown with unbrushed hair and no make up on. I wish I was like Kelly, she’s all organised and has everything planned 2 weeks before it actually going to happen, with her 2016 diary and calender ready in October. That’s why I like her. She’s like a full time alarm clock, calendar and diary all in one! I get up and have yawn with my eyes all watery as I have just got up. I rushed over to my wardrobe and saw a pair of skinny jeans and my crop top that’s…
Cinema can be such a drag . It says something for how cold-turkey I’ve gone on CGi/bluecreen/mo-cap/ziggazagga bollocks that going to the last Hobbit film felt like a yearly trip to the anal probist . Andy Serkis, that leotard covered in little green balls makes you look like an utter prong, mate. Just stop it.
What’s going on when a mess like The Avengers: Age of Ultron is hailed as some kind of masterpiece by grown men who went to school and know about books and stuff? Is it me or is Joss Whedon’s press tour really just a very slow, public meltdown? An admission of defeat to the franchise monster? Because its certainly defeated me – and I usually enjoy the MCU movies. And of course I must be wrong because as I came out of it with my kids they and everyone else seemed so happy, whereas I just felt a bit beaten up. It was just too much; not in a Michael Bay-I’m-just-sexist-assole-with-a-$200-million-sack-of-fuck all-to-offer, but alarmingly close. Which is a bit worrying.
But there have been better days, days when I’ve come raging out of the cinema foyer having seen a film that genuinely knew what it was doing and hit all the right notes. Bounding out with the 007 tune or a Jerry Goldsmith or John Williams score zinging through my mind, a nonchalant sprint in my step (bare with me, nearly offloaded); days when I’ve almost been able to climb walls like Spider-Man (even the Nicholas Hammond version); days when I really did believe a man could fly; days like…
Superman II. The single best trip to the flicks of my life. Went with my mate Martin Valentine. He modeled school-wear with his sister for the Co-Op department store in Colchester where his mum worked. We sat there, 12 years old, utterly enthralled by a sequel that DELIVERED with capital D. Fucking WHAM, BOOM, WOW set-pieces, fantastic villainy from Stamp and Hackman and the greatest of all superhero turns from Christoper Reeve, all wrapped up a a story-line that thrilled us with gut-punching action and progressive twists and turns that built superbly from Part 1. Not to mentions the score, or Derek Meddings’ miniature destruction of Metropolis or Non. Non! Apparently the Richard Donner cut is superior. It isn’t.
We repeated the outing 3 years later for Superman 3. It was like returning to a boudoir and finding it had been converted into a abattoir. By blind people. On acid. I truly knew disappointment that day and the Salkind’s hadn’t even sold their option to Cannon.
Christ,I love this movie
The Empire Strikes Back. Saw it twice and only passed on a third opportunity to check out The Black Hole in screen 2. Bizarrely, and rather wonderfully, we all purchased the thick Marvel Comics foretelling of the film on sale in the foyer and pretty much spoiled the entire movie for ourselves by speed-reading it before it started. Except when we were watching (“The”) Black Angel…Wow, Black Angel, the supporting feature that probably killed supporting features for evermore in the UK. It was so odd and strange with its mix of moody Nolan-esaue Scottish landscapes and enigmatic haunted horseman, I’d rather put it down as half-remembered bad dream that, you know, a few million Star Wars fans shared in 1980. But then again, maybe it was a bad dream for the poor eastward who made it because the camera negative got lost shortly afterwards and only turned up a couple of years ago in a right old state behind some bins. Probably been kept there all that time by the Babadook. Or the Silence.
Just to get you in the mood…
Spider-Man 2. Saw it with a bunch of mates in a packed West End screening ; brilliant atmosphere, if its going to be busy, may as well be packed, right? Probably, no, make that ACTUALLY better than any MCU movie including The Avengers and Winter Soldier. Even Iron Man dammit, and I’ve got a lot of time for Iron Man. Sony may have messed up with the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man movies (which I quite liked even though their very existence screamed WRONG) but this was superb – the perfect mix. Just as with Superman II – everything better than before. You get the sense with scenes like the runaway subway train where Spidey’s identity is shown to the passengers (and you just know they’ll keep his secret) and the finale in Doc Ock’s warehouse (where Spidey’s identity is revealed in a second, even more effective way), that an absolute high of superhero films has been reached. For this series, alas, the only way was down, but it matters not; most franchises would fry their own testes in garlic butter to achieve this level of perfection.
Irresversible. Another West End screening but of a very different kind. The 8-quid slice of carrot cake, cappuccino and CGI erection kind. That’s right folks, to the Curzon Soho we now go, where you can watch real penetration wrought upon French waifs, plus savage rapes (rapia?) and forced abortions (abortia?) after sitting on low leather couches pretending to read New Scientist for 45 minutes beforehand.
Shit…
I’d heard about this movie and its certifiable director Gaspar Noe and so knew it might just be a tough watch. Thing was, it was another night down the Curzon; once you’ve had a tall Peroni and a couple of vegan cookies you’re ready for anything down there. I’d previously snored and fidgeted through every art-house excuse for sex and savagery the late 1990s/early 2000s could throw at me and been non-plussed by the likes of Baise Moi and Romance on the Curzon’s subterranean screens. All those look-at-me-I’m-taboo-busting-with-a-britpop-soundtrack asswipe movies did nothing for me at all. I never believed the beard-stroking column inches they always got from the Guardian Guide and Time Out. And then I saw Irreverbible and everything changed. Not like John Barrowman standing on a ledge in Cardiff changed, but still quite a significant sort of change by my standards. The same bunch of Friday Night Film Club mates who came to Spider-Man 2 were there that night, same couple of pints beforehand, but oh boy, not the same outcome. It was, of course, the rape scene that caused Ben Petzold to walk out, although to be fair he could – maybe should – have bailed during the head-caved-in-by-a-fire-extinguisher scene. The 10-minute rape of Monica Belluci was about 4 minutes in when I heard Ben growl: “NO! I’m not watching THIS! I’m leaving!..!” And out he barreled, the theatrical fuckwit. And it was a thrill to witness, because he was right in a way, its a tough movie – finally! A TOUGH MOVIE!! But also because he was such a wrong’en, Ben. Never saw him again.
Gravity. You have those days at work sometimes when you’d rather be anywhere else. If you’re lucky, you can slink away and ACTUALLY be somewhere else. Like in the cinema down the road. Sometimes this may result in seeing some seriously strange crappola a (hello Young Adam and Ewan McGragor’s constant cock and dangling ball-sack). On the other hand, you may get lucky and find yourself sitting front and center in an empty cinema with a pair of 3-D glasses (that you normally hate wearing) watching a good old-fashioned space movie that visually blows your mind out of both ears. Just don’t remind me about the dead daughter bit because that was stupid, unnecessary and crass. I did day “visually”.
Enter the Void. Second best cinema trip ever and Gaspar Noe again, the crazy French-Argentinian fruitcake. Duke of Yorks in Brighton, midnight screening, with my two best mates in he whole world. Known each other since we were knee-high to another set of knees. We had a mind to see this one, being pre-doctrinated into Noe’s ouvre. We looked at the listings and there it was, just sort of waiting for us up the road, like alchemy. We prepared very diligently for this with various pre-screening inducements and sat ourselves frontrow centre among a throng of pissed up hipster fuckflaps (Brighton, remember) who sniggered and sniped when we a yelped and clapped. At the end – sometime around 2am – my friend Jason White jumped to his feet an applauded. Everyone else just stared at him in bemusement. Cuntbubbles, the lot of them.
Which brings me to yesterday’s trip to Cineword for a nut-money matinee of Mad Max: Fury Road. I sat down in my pre-allocated seat in a 3/4 empty screen. The next thing I know a a huge fat geezer comes and slobbers down next to me with his mumbling wife in tow. You get a lot of that sort of thing in Ipswich. Bye Bye fuckos! What better excuse – and what better movie – to take myself to that good old front row center seat where no one ever sits because they think its too close to the screen. And they’re right, because for all those Jennifer Aniston vs Adam Sandler movies they go to, a front and center viewpoint would be tantamount to the Ludovico technique. Even for them. But sometimes – Enter The Void, Gravity, this – there’s really no better place to be. I’m a bit confused though because when I was watching Fury Road, when its minimalist events unfurled in a linear, beat-perfect progression, when its characters were right and sound to me, when its absolutely batshit-crazy action stunt scenes appeared to be largely real and dirty and dangerous to all involved – it felt was like I was having to re-learn a long-forgotten language that I used to know but had somehow got lost, like that negative of Black Angel. I watched Fury Road like I watched Superman II and Aliens and Empire – enthralled. Because as good as The Avengers: Age of Ultron is in many ways, it failed me: it didn’t send me out into the foyer with that tell-tale fireball in my gut that tells me I’ve been knocked for six. How could it ever do that with all that fucking continuity and all those loose ends and all those characters and all that FUCKING CGI? Fury Road is the anti-Avengers. It didn’t need to be, but it is. I’d have been happy with the real stunts and a decent story but I got a lot more out of than that and so, it appears, are many others. Max won’t turn the tide of CGI shit on his own but it does feel like some kind of watershed moment.
They didn’t sell me a comic-book version in the foyer though.
When I was at school in 1975 there was a little bully troll called Colin who was so jealous of my Dinky Space:1999 Eagle Transporter he mugged me on the way home and tried to take it from me.
In the ensuing grab-match, this remarkably addictive die-cast toy flew out of my hands and smashed into the pavement, causing its futuristic “beak” to sheer off quite cleanly, roll over the kerb and plop down the drain. Satisfied he’d ruined my day, Colin left me there in the rain, looking sadly down at my broken toy. He sneered off forever into a life of miserable self-abasement (he became a wife-beating Estate Agent with a tankard over the bar at the last pub in town).
I, on the other hand, now work 5 days a week shuttling atomic waste canisters on Moonbase Alpha and write for the glorious Andersonic Fanzine – latest issue now in print! Buy it here:www.andersonic.co.uk
“The one whose already had his big weepy goodbye scene with me?”
Er, yes, I’m phoning from Trenzalore…it hasn’t happened for me yet”
“Oh yes it has pal, it seriously already has”
“Are you with him…the new me…?”
“Well what the fuck’s it got to do with you?”
“Because he’ll need your help, Clara…is he old…don’t tell me I got old…”
“Oh for crying out loud, you narcissistic, floppy haired plonker, yes he’s older than you, so fucking what? Don’t you remember what it was like being most your earlier selves?”
“Please help him, Clara”
“What, because he’s got grey hair? Shall I help him get some hair dye? He can fucking WALK you know, he’s not in a fucking WHEELCHAIR! He can jump about actually, ride a horse, all kinds of shit, just like used to do you patronising little twerp”
“You need to hold his poor old hand and…er, eh?”
“He’s fine, he’s great, he’s standing here now looking embarrassed because he’s just realised making this call back in the past was a seriously stupid idea”
“But I thought…”
“Yeah, YOU thought, YOU decided, its all about YOU really isn’t it?”
“Oh dear, this wasn’t such a good idea, was it?”
“Nope”
“Shall I ring off then?”
“Yep”
“Goodbye Clara, I…
“Look, just fuck off!”
“Shit…”
“Yes, really shit idea of yours, bye!”
(she hangs up)
“Christ, I’m glad you’ve stopped being such a prick”
Through the portal of murky remembrance I call “the past”, the business of exploiting and otherwise publicising movies and TV shows was a whole lot more fun that it is today and a whole lot stranger. Forget spending 65% of your total budget on advertising, just get some lurid photo-montaging up and running in that smoke-filled little studio round the corner and slap them slicks all over the front of the local fleapits. It you happened to be in Italy in the 1970s, this style of promotion may well have kept you gainfully employed 24/7 because the industry for hand-tinted “Fotobusta” front of house posters was a lurid pleasure to be found on frontages across the land.
These delightedly odd posters have become highly collectible if the eBay prices are any guide (and they are) and I can see why. They represent an alt-universe of creative marketing that makes the best use it can of limited, studio-provided source material to promise something often only tangentially related to the actual product.
The Gerry and Sylvia Anderson series UFO was re-cut into a series of (largely incomprehensible) “movies” that played to packed houses of excited Italians in the early-mid 1970s and the Fotobusta marketeers wasted no time in promoting these sort-of films with every permutation of ersatz billing.
Because different episodes of the series had a variety of guest stars, these one-off appearance chaps and chappesses were ceased upon and emblazoned across the posters to help differentiate each from the other. Hence the likes of hardly-really-starring Barnaby Shaw and was-he-in-it? Patrick Mower got their own prominent billings for the UFO compilation movies in which they appear.
The look of the Fotobustas is deeply lovely. The source photographs are, by and large, black and white stills that have been either left alone (see Gabrielle Drake’s decidedly non-purple wig above) or rather wonderfully hand-tinted to look almost nothing like the actual series looked, but maybe should have looked…
Here, for example, we see Ed Bishop, Gabrielle Drake and some other geezer hand tinted all to hell and looking all the gloriously colorfully better for it. We also see Michael Billington looking very suave in black and white offset with a sky blue wash and some kind of action scene so drenched in blood-red it’s almost indecent. This, in essence, is the Fotobusta receipe – a smeer of blood red here, some stark noir and great drench of Emrald City Technicolor. Spash it all over, Luigi.
Of course it wasn’t just UFO that got this treatment, the formula was applied to whatever came our cheery Italian creatives’ way. But having established a template based on “Unidentified Flying Objects”, they seemed loath not to give every damned movie the same treatment. Or it could just be me.
Nope, its not me. The above poster for a 1970s re-release of seminal Toho monster-thon The Mysterians uses some key UFO typography as does this odd little number below…
…which is a movie apparently called UFO that I’ve never even heard of (answers on a postcard). But I’m seriously thinking the Italians changed the title of whatever this was originally called so they could slap all the Gerry Anderson gubbins on the poster an get some more of that rabid SHADO crowd in (SHADhounds?)
Then there’s The Persuaders. When Roger Morgue was announced as James Bond, it was like manna from heaven to the Fotobusta people – “Eh! Luigi!! We can re-market all the Saint and Persuaders stitch-togethers as fake 007 films”
And so it came to pass…
Gotta love that Maurice Binder graphic; not so much stolen from one of the Bond posters as, er stolen from one of the Bond posters….but who was really fooled? And it wasnt’ t just Rog whose past career got a Bondian makeover courtesy of Fotobustas…
I mean, I’m not saying current posters and promos aren’t cool in their own way, but the sheer cheek, not to say gigantic balls of the Italian funsters behind Fotobustas will never be rivaled.
…bastard of a thing that Rik Mayall has died today. One of my true heroes, an absolute legend to the kids of the 1980s.
If it’s any measure how important he was to my teenage years, I remember literally trying to be him; snarling and posturing around after each episode of The Young Ones. School the next day was a virtual re-run of the show, as we all competed to perform back the best lines. If we were smart we got up early to re-watch last night’s show on the video (yes! we had a bloody video!!) to memorise the best bits. Actually we’d memorise all of it. I have to say no one wanted to be Mike, Neil was fun and easy to do, Vyv was better and full of anger but Rik was the one was all wanted to be. Of course he was – he was the mad focus of the show, the one we liked the best. Even though the character he played (and continued to play for the rest of his life in one way or another) was a “complete and utter bastard”.
It was our show. it was visceral, it was subversive, it was talking to our generation in a way stuffy old Monty Python simply didn’t – and God knows we needed something to take their place. But most of all it was funny – just hold your guts and roll on the floor hilariously funny.
And now, like Cliff Richard, he’s gone over the cliff himself. Too soon, too young. The bastard.
The Man in the Elegant Room 