Surveying the Gen X landscape and the origins of geek
Are you not entertained?
(Images via Szmytke, Sara, Etsy, Etsy, Filmscore, Sam Howzit, Sam Howzit, Cheesebrush, and Rebel Scum Forums)
Vymura was a British product developed by Imperial Chemical Industries in the early 1960s (see an ad here). The vinyl wallpaper was extremely popular throughout the decade because it was durable and washable, unlike standard wallpaper.
The ad is 18″ x 23″, and the wall vinyl is actually a mural (something like 4′ x 6′). Vymura also released Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back wallpaper that I’ll post later. Both featured beautiful original designs.
There were a number of interviews with the special effects crew of The Empire Strikes Back in Fantastic Films #17. Here’s the first. It gets pretty technical, because that’s Edlund’s field, but anyone can appreciate what he says about the now famous asteroid chase sequence:
There’s a star background, a far background, and an asteroid background, plus individual asteroid foreground elements. Individual rocks get photographed separately as do belt layers. So all that adds up to about 20 stage elements. A shot like that requires about 100 separate pieces of film…
Notice that Edlund says “he became a hippie” during his early career. Some of the album covers he photographed and designed can be seen at Discogs. A couple of the psychedelic 7 UP commercials he worked on for visual effects pioneer Robert Abel are here and here. A shot of Edlund working on Star Wars is here.
Edlund went on to do visual effects for films like Raiders of the Lost Ark, Poltergeist, Ghostbusters, Fright Night, Big Trouble in Little China, Die Hard, and, of course, Return of the Jedi.
I mentioned the Star Wars Celica last year on Facebook. No one knows what happened to it, although urban legend dictates that the airbrushed beauty collects dust in a garage somewhere, waiting for the day when one special nerd will start her up with a special key (passed down through the nerd’s family for generations) and launch her into the stars to face yet another catastrophically engineered Death Star.
In the promotional art, Chewie appears on the hood, but the final version is a riff on the Star Wars poster by the Brothers Hildebrandt.
The photo below, taken on the 20th Century Fox lot, is a detail from the cover of the October 1977 issue of Toyota Today. The poster in the background is the billboard version illustrated by Tom Jung.
More background and photos at the Star Wars Collectors Archive.
George Lucas/was blinded by ego and fame and greed/on his giant ranch in Marin County/where all the people who don’t vaccinate their kids live/when he sold Star Wars to Disney/who hired Sith Lord J.J. Abrams to reboot yet another beloved franchise based on explosions and CGI/where sad farewells were said.
Wayne Douglas Barlowe wrote and illustrated the influential Barlowe’s Guide to Extraterrestrials (1979), which lots of you remember and probably still have.
Such a great gimmick. If only we’d had some removable guts.
The queue outside the Vogue Theatre in Vancouver for the first screening of Star Wars on June 24, 1977. (Photo: Glenn Baglo/Vancouver Sun)
Some seriously wide-bottomed pants were present at the event.
(Via the Ottawa Citizen)
The photos are from Martin Kennedy’s exquisite Sci-fi Art Tumblr. More at the link, and good luck getting any work done ever again.
You see, from top to bottom, Richard Edlund filming Death Star explosions, Dennis Muren setting up X-Wing and Tie Fighter shots, and Joe Viskocil with the Blockade Runner. All of the guys were hand-picked by John Dykstra for Industrial Light & Magic, a little visual effects company founded by some guy named George Lucas in 1975.
2 Warps to Neptune 