By
Todd Garbarini
I
have loved movies pretty much all my life. One of the most integral aspects in
my overall enjoyment of a film is my impression of it through the film's
advertising campaign, usually through the coming attractions trailer but mostly
through the advertising artwork, primarily the movie poster. Growing up in the 1970s,
I had no way of knowing anything about a film other than what was written about
it in Time or Newsweek or newspapers. The movie poster art, referred to as key
art in the industry, was really all I had to go on in terms of getting a feel
for what the movie would be like. Each week I would eagerly await Friday’s
newspaper as it showcased the advertising artwork of the new releases just
coming out in a much more overt fashion that it did from Monday to Thursday. In
those days, the advertising artwork was just that: it was artwork, designed, conceived and actually painted by an artist. This appears to be something that has gone by
the wayside as a result of the new tools that are available to studios, such as
computers and software programs like Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator, which
make it very easy for just about anyone to slap together homogenized key art
for DVD and Blu-ray covers. This new
type of advertising art appears to have been sapped of the most important
ingredient: originality.
The
first two movies that I ever owned on home video were Star Wars (1977) and Poltergeist
(1982). I bought these on the long defunct Capacitance Electronic Disc system (CED)
which was designed and manufactured by RCA and sold from 1981 to 1986. The
artwork to these two films in particular made an enormous impression on me as
the oversized, LP-like format lent itself perfectly to the display of these
images. Some of my all-time favorite movies, which I first saw between 1983 and
1984, sported some of the most beautiful artwork I've ever seen: Phantasm (1979), Deadly Blessing (1981), Scanners
(1981)…just about anything horror-film related. With CED, you felt like you actually owned
the movie and that it was yours. It was tangible and you could hold it and
look at it.
The
first video cassette that I ever rented was Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), which I watched on Independence
Day in 1985, because it was not available on CED. I had seen the film
theatrically upon its initial release, but there was something about being able
to watch it on video that was enormously appealing to me. From that point on,
the artwork that I saw on the cover of VHS cassettes, in particular horror
movies, left me salivating in the video store aisles. After getting my driver’s
license, my friends and I made innumerable trips to local and independently
owned video stores to both rent movies and gaze at and admire the cover artwork
of all the boxes on display. This was my generation's equivalent of going to
the local drive-in and, just like the local drive-in, the independent video
store, in the year 2015, is nearly extinct.
A
long overdue and beautifully illustrated new coffee table book, appropriately
titled VHS Video Cover Art, is now
available from Schiffer Publishing. Compiled
by Tom “The Dude Designs†Hodge, it showcases nearly 300 pages worth of VHS
sleeve artwork from movies made in the 1980s and 1990s. The covers are derived
from the British VHS releases of these films and are broken into six genres: action,
comedy, horror, kids, sci-fi, and thriller. Being an admirer of these types of films, which are both cult movies and
forgettable flops (of the “so bad it’s good!†variety), what is truly amazing
to me is the number of films presented that I personally still have never even
heard of. A lot of the titles included have artwork that is very different from
the American VHS releases. Case in point: Searchers
of the Voodoo Mountain (1985), which is better known in the States as Warriors of the Apocalypse. Like a lot
of the schlock movie posters of films of the 1950s and 1960s, these colorful
cover art were sometimes better than the actual movie they were designed to
advertise. Fifty years ago, a movie poster was drawn up and the film was made
on the basis of the title and the poster. I’m sure the same held true for some of these VHS titles as the
availability of home video created a perfect opportunity for studios to make
movies that were released directly to VHS, completely bypassing cinemas
altogether.