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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