Classic Doctor Who Film Posters

Here's a final selection of Doctor Who cinema posters created during lockdown. No logic to the choice of titles. I just had an idea and went with it. 

Particularly pleased with the one for The Daleks - so pleased I used Japanese text on it. The upper line is the title of the series - taken from the official logo - whilst the lower line is the title taken from the Japanese printing of the novelisation which is loosely translated as "Space-Time great Blood War" or something like that.

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Three Blu-ray Collector's Edition Things...

I had to leave this post for a few days whilst I did another cover. I like things in threes - so I needed a further cover to add to the two I had planned for this post.

But what to do? 

I seem to have done everything I wanted to do with these designs. Then I thought, how about a steelbook Blu-ray for something that is missing from the archives that isn't Doctor Who? So I set to work on creating a quick and dirty design for Nigel Kneale's long lost teleplay The Creature from 1955. It tends to get forgotten about what with being surrounded by Quatermass serials and Nineteen Eighty-four. But it did have the honour of a Hammer movie version (which is actually superior and better known that that awful film of Nineteen Eighty-four starring Edmond O'Brien.).

I might do a steelbook cover for Nigel Kneale's Nineteen Eighty-four at some point. Though I'd better hurry as 2021 marks the year that Orwell's works enter the public domain and we stand a chance of having the play finally released on DVD/Blu-ray. 



Anyhow, here's some Blu-ray covers what I did over the course of a few weeks. 

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Green Death Stamps...

No idea where this one came from. 

I actually own a semi-completed book of Green Shield stamps. It's somewhere in the flat - possibly in a file box somewhere in the attic along with the other tat I've collected over the years. (A WHSmith paper bag from the 70s, the receipt for the VHS of 'Revenge of the Cybermen', a 'Dalek Death Ray' wrapper and jar of Schwartz mixed herbs with a 'use by' date sometime in 1987.) 

Maybe I should've put the book in the knife drawer in the kitchen. That's where my mum kept ours back in the day... 

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And don't forget to get help. 

Retro Active in SFX

For the past six months or so, SFX has been publishing some of my odd pieces of cult film and TV merchandise. When Darren the editor approached me to do something for SFX, I was a bit lost for words. I wasn't too sure I could come up with new stuff on a regular basis. Doing it for an irregularly updated blog on an ad-hoc basis is a different kettle of ball games to producing content to a regular deadline. I said 'yes' with much trepidation - only on condition that I do them in batches of three just to give me time to think about them in sets of three. And also to give SFX some in hand in case I have 'designer's block'. The first three were duly thought-up, constructed and sent off.

I kept a bit quiet about Andydrewz's publishing debut. The depressive in me is always cautious about nice things as they have a habit of slapping you in the face when you become complacent over them. 

Flash-forward and today is now and I've just dispatched a third set of three pieces for Retro Active (as SFX has called my er... column(?) ) They seem to be going down okay. At least, I've not had any bad notices passed back to me.

Here are the first two designs that made it into the magazine - The Fantastic Journey board game and a Tomorrow People jaunting belt.

The board game is a simple reworking of TV's The Fantastic Journey into the Denys Fisher/Parker Bros licenced board games of the 1970s. A few things to note: I included the flying saucer from 'The Invaders' on one of the action cards. The show used stock footage of it in one of the episodes to represent a time machine from the future. Although, the board is divided up into zones, it wasn't until I'd finished that I realised it resembled The Crystal Maze. I found that amusing.

The Tomorrow People jaunting belt is a bit more overtly absurd and more typical of the way I tend to put the jokes in the details. The merchandise should LOOK authentic... only until you take the time to read the text, however small. Hence the inclusion of a pen-knife and working junior taser. 

With thanks to Darren Scott at SFX Magazine.

SFX magazine is available from all good newsagents, comic shops and supermarkets. Or you can subscribe to it here.

Countdown for TVAction 2020

You'd never get a comic like Countdown or TVAction today - at least not with the same licenced comic strip content. Yes, TV's Dr Who was a children's/family programme but what about the other strips?  You can hardly say that Cannon, The Protectors and the often grim Hawaii-Five-0 were child friendly. That was the way things were back then. With so little targeted programming (at least compared to 21st century television) of a certain quality, the kids of yesteryear found their favourite programmes to be the adult fare offered to their parents. (The late Trevor Preston pointed this out in his 1969 pitch document for Ace of Wands.)

Flash forward to 2020... Children's television is now more targeted towards them with specific channels whilst family drama/adventure shows on the main channels are virtually non-existent (save for TV's Dr Who, of course!) In spite of this, let's have a look at modern schedules and see what choice TV shows would fit inside a Countdown or TVAction published today...

Elsewhere on this blog are some modernised versions of the comic which have given their pages over to the current TV scene. This is the link to them. 

Here are some additional variants based on the covers of the three Countdown and TVAction annuals published in the early seventies... along with an annual based around The Persuaders! they also released. (I really scraped the barrel coming up with a TV show that fitted into the design of that one!!!)

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Unofficial Official Health & Safety Posters For These Worrying Times...

I did a handful of warning posters during Lockdown. 

The germ of the idea came from some fiddling around in Photoshop over the Easter holiday. For some reason, I'd photoshopped a rabbit's head onto a Judoon soldier... just because I could. It looked quite disturbing and after getting off the phone to my therapist, I decided to put the now cursed image to good use as a warning poster. I hope it did its job. 

After I'd tweeted two further ones, Jamie Anderson asked me to do a Supermarionation-themed one. I did a Captain Scarlet one and, as with the series itself, it was a bit dark. A BIT DARK!  Most people found it amusing but one person didn't get the subtle humour behind it and felt it in poor taste. 

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Doctor Who Lockdown Cinema Posters - part two

Here's the rest of the retro cinema posters I did for the Doctor Who Lockdown tweet-a-longs. 

As before, most of them are based on actual posters. You're welcome to guess which films are the inspiration in each case. I tended to go with designs that fitted the episodes rather than the original films themselves. 

The Fires of Pompeii appeared on the back cover of issue 507 of the DWAS's Celestial Toyroom in an anglicised form. The original Italian version is here along with the textless art.

Click here for part one.

I also did a few random original series ones and I'll upload them as a separate post.

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Thunderbirds - The Motion Pictures!

As you can tell from an earlier post, I spent a lot of the first few weeks of lockdown creating cinema posters for the Doctor Who episodes that had been picked out for the mass tweet-a-longs. Haven't check the exact number but I did quite a few - including some classic series ones.

During that time, I felt I needed a break from Doctor Who. Yes, the creative juices were still flowing but I just needed to do something a bit different.

I'd just acquired the blu-ray of the original Thunderbirds TV series and was cherry-picking my favourite episodes. One of the many comments levelled at the show was how much like mini-movies each of fifty minute productions were. Indeed, there are some that even have very similar plots to later movies. So I started doing period film posters for some of them. 

Here they are:

Trapped in the Sky

The poster is based on one for Airport 1975 - the second film in the Airport series. The Fireflash that replaces the jumbo jet of the original is actually some cut-out and flipped artwork from an old Japanese model kit box. I had to 'reverse' the lettering on the side of the fuselage. It wasn't until I'd posted it on Twitter that I realised that the Fireflash lettering wasn't actually on the original aircraft. 

Operation Crashdive

This one is based on the poster for Airport 1977 - the third film in the increasingly desperate Airport series. In that film, a jumbo jet crash-lands in the sea (in the Bermuda Triangle of all places) and sinks to the bottom. The crew and passengers survive as the plane remains airtight. It's almost the same scenario as the episode 'Operation Crashdive'. So the choice of film/poster was a no-brainer. The artwork on the original is iconic and I had fun recreating it in photoshop. In this case, finding an image of Fireflash that was the same angle as the original sunken aircraft was difficult. There are very few promo images of it from the original series and I couldn't screengrab an image of it from the blu-ray as I didn't own a blu-ray drive. Instead I found a photo of the original Japanese Fireflash model kit. A few tweaks here and there and it looked okay - especially darkened and tinted blue/green. I think this is probably my favourite of the four posters.


City of Fire

This one was another obvious choice. No prizes for spotting the iconic poster for The Towering Inferno. I needed an image of the burning Thompson Towers (no relation). Again there were no suitable production stills so I had to create it in Photoshop. Luckily, the building is a simple skyscraper and building it in PS was comparatively straightforward. I distorted it and surrounded it with plenty of fire and smoke. It surprised me that it looked pretty authentic looking if a little stylised. The head shots of the family are simple pics taken off the telly and filtered to look more like artwork. I had a bit of fun with the words on this one. I can't help doing that. Please forgive me! 




The Perils of Penelope

I couldn't get the idea of doing a very sixties one for this Lady Penelope-centric episode. Barbarella was a no-no so I went for the much-maligned 1966 movie Modesty Blaise - a European film based on a British newspaper comic strip about a freelance lady spy. The poster is very sixties and is an art-based collage of images of Blaise - so it was a straight-forward task to create a similar design using Lady P - made all the more easier thanks to the fact she wore so many colourful dresses and that there are a lot more production stills of her than there are of Fireflash. I like the look of this one. Very sixties. And it's set off by having an off-white background instead of just plain white. 




Here's some of the textless artwork from the above designs.

And here are the originals:

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Two Mandrel Annuals and a Giant Robot One...

I did a cover for a Mandrel annual some time ago. It was based on the 1979 Dalek annual but replacing the Daleks in the original artwork with Mandrels. When I retweeted it as a "Goodbye Twitter" tweet, I received a lot of positive comments about it including suggestions that I add it to the designs for journals that I have on RedBubble. (Here's the link)

I'll admit that the whole concept it amusing but I wasn't too happy with it as it used a lot of the artwork from the genuine cover. I'm never happy when I'm bastardising other artist's work - however old. Despite, I decided to follow the suggestions and add it to the RedBubble portfolio. 

Alas, I discovered that the original PS files for it had gone the way of several months worth of work when my PC died in late 2019. I should've left it at that but I decided to redo it anyway. I also did a version of the original annual's back cover too. Earlier RedBubble journal designs feature a textless version of the cover art on the back. In my silly head, I thought the extra effort would redeem my use of the original artwork on the cover. 

So taken with the design, I decided to do another couple of annual covers - another Mandrel one (based on the 1976 Dalek annual) and a K-1 - Giant Robot annual (based on the 1983 K-9 annual). Although copies of the original designs, these are original photo-montages and don't use any of the originals' artwork. I even did another back cover for the K-1 annual. 

K1 Annual 1983

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