POP-CULTURE COLUMN: Welcome To The Zany World Of 1970s Sci-Fi Art
By Dan Brown I lived through the 1970s so you don’t have to, kids! But seriously. Regardless of how old you are, you should check out the art book Worlds Beyond Time: Sci-Fi Art of the 1970s, which was published this summer. It will have special resonance if you are a Gen Xer like me who remembers the paperback and magazine covers of old. If you were a fan of writers Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Anne McCaffrey, or Michael Moorcock, you’ll grok this hefty collection of paintings. But even if you have no memories of the Me Decade, you can still learn a lot about today’s science-fiction aesthetic because many of these images still linger in the public imagination. Keep in mind this was a time when painters and illustrators had to summon depictions of spaceships, astronauts and aliens largely from whole cloth i.e. their minds. The artists represented here did have the benefit of the work done in the early decades of the century, but the genre wasn’t as ubiquitous then as it is today. There was no internet repository they could summon with a few taps on the keyboard. Nor flashy video games And yes, I got this book because it has huge nostalgia appeal for me. Born in the 1960s, I grew up in the 1970s. It was a magic time because that’s when I got my first taste of sci-fi literature. Editor Adam Rowe wisely divides the artistic output from the decade into understandable sections like spaceships, alien life, and landscapes. He then subdivides each of these broad categories into themes that recurred throughout the decade – UFOs, space cats, robots, et cetera. Individual artists – think John Berkey, Angus McKie, Boris Vallejo, and others – likewise get their own spotlight page or two. This allows Rowe to present a 222-page showcase that gives even newbie readers an accurate feel for the times. You might be wondering about movie posters, since this was the decade that saw Star Wars create an overnight explosion in interest for space fantasy. One subsection, titled Star Wars before Star Wars, collects the works that presaged George Lucas’ saga, including hairy creatures that look an awful lot like wookies and four-legged walking tanks originated by Syd Mead. There’s also strong representation of paintings originally done as covers for such Warren publications as Creepy. In short, this is a delightful volume. It provides a look at the body of work that serves as a bridge between the art of old and the art of today. It all went down in the 1970s. I can only hope it finds an audience among younger readers who haven’t been exposed to these pictures before, and provides compelling evidence that no one requires AI help to dream up lively visions of days to come. It’s also a nice companion piece for the art books that reproduce early Dungeons & Dragons art from roughly the same period. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.
POP CULTURE: The Oscars Recognize Drew Struzan
By Dan Brown Drew Struzan’s name cropped up at the Oscars on Sunday. He’s a guy who never got a nomination in his 78 years, but surely deserved an award for his lifetime of service to Hollywood. Struzan – who was mentioned during the ever-expanding In Memoriam segment – defined movie imagery for a generation of film fans like me, even though he never made or appeared in a motion picture himself. He died last October in Pasadena. We may never see another cinema artist who has as vast an influence as Struzan did. If you grew up geeky in the 1970s or 1980s, you knew his work — even if you had never met him or didn’t know what he looked like. He was billed at the Academy Awards telecast as a poster artist, which doesn’t sit well with diehard movie enthusiasts who considered him a visionary genius. As a kid, I thought the right word to describe his work was “photorealistic,” but his trademark style was actually the result of airbrushing, which was much in vogue in the 1970s. Especially if you owned a Chevy van. Perhaps the first work of his I came across wasn’t on a poster, but the cover of a paperback edition of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The publisher took Struzan art from Blade Runner and used it as the front, since the Dick novel was the source material for Ridley Scott’s 1982 sci-fi feature. I remember looking at that cover, eyeing the likeness of Harrison Ford closely, and thinking, “This can’t be a drawing or a painting, it’s too detailed. This must be a photo.” That was my first awareness of Drew Struzan. I was 13 years old. I was already in love with movies, and movie posters. Struzan began his career with one-sheets for such drive-in fare as Empire of the Ants and Food of the Gods, then caught a lucky break helping a fellow artist with a poster to announce the re-release in 1978 of Star Wars. The result of their collaboration was a meta-poster: The painted composition looks like an old circus poster plastered on the plywood fence around a construction site. It was also the beginning of his long partnership with George Lucas. Even after Struzan ended his career, he would come out of retirement to help the Star Wars creator with art for such movies as The Phantom Menace. His other posters included E.T.: The Extraterrestrial, Back to the Future, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, Risky Business, Coming to America, the Goonies and the Muppet Movie. He could produce intricately crafted images, and he could so on a tight deadline: He painted the poster for John Carpenter’s The Thing remake literally overnight. For a generation of geeks like yours truly, Struzan’s posters defined the look of motion pictures. He brought aliens, adventurers, weirdos, muppets and Tom Cruise to life when young people weren’t sitting in a theatre. To understand his influence, you have to remember the context he was working in: VCRs were scarce back then, so you could see movies only in theatres, or occasionally on network TV. Posters were the main representation in the public’s mind of any given film because trailers weren’t as omnipresent as they are now. We had no YouTube to watch them on. Believe it or not, there was a time when people decided to see one film over another based solely on the posters outside the theatre, and Struzan deserves a golden statuette simply for the fact he sold countless movie tickets in his decades-long career. (For all I know, the Oscar folks may have tried to give him an honorary Oscar, but his family turned them down; Struzan suffered from Alzheimer’s in his later years.) Drew Struzan was one of the all-time greats, and is a personal favourite of mine, along with Nick Cardy. We may never see Struzan’s like again. All these decades later, I’m amazed Hollywood is still using movie posters to advertise their products. The artistry of posters persists, but this form of art could be living on borrowed time, along with movie houses themselves. We can only hope future generations of film fans recognize the artistry that’s involved, and keep demanding posters rendered exclusively by human hands. Our responsibility is to help educate those future geeks, making sure the names of creators like Drew Struzan don’t pass entirely from the collective memory. Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly graphic-novel group.
