Monday 13 July 2020

Nostalgic For My Childhood - Poster Magazines part 2

Last year, I blogged about "poster magazines" I remembered from the 70s and 80s (you can read the post here).  It seemed to touch a chord but I was just as surprised to find people my age who'd never heard of them, so I thought I'd show a few more.

Poster magazines were essentially A4 glossy colour magazines which folded out into a (large) A1-sized sheet.  One side would be the magazine (with articles and plenty of photographs) while the reverse would be a giant poster and, depending on what you’d bought, the image might be a person, an action scene or the film poster.  I had several and most kids I knew had at least one huge poster on their wall.
A selfie (with my disc camera) from 1986, featuring the
For Your Eyes Only poster
The possibilities were endless.  Dez Skinn (before he created Starburst magazine) produced Monster Mag which featured gory movie stills from the likes of Hammer Films and Amicus.  Music was a big draw (singers and bands alike, as well as musical styles - my friend, the writer Mark Morris, remembers having punk ones on his wall).  You could pick up magazines devoted to TV series like Star Trek (a whole run of them), The Six Million Dollar ManDoctor WhoSpace: 1999The ProfessionalsThe HulkBattlestar Galactica and Planet of the Apes.  Film tie-in's were especially popular - if it was a blockbuster (and the 70s and 80s were full of them), there'd be a poster magazine on the newsagents shelves sooner rather than later (featuring the likes of Star WarsSuperman and James Bond).

spacemonstersmag reckons the magazines died out in the 1990's, which is a shame.  I still have a few in my collection (though not on the walls of my study) and think they’re great fun, another nostalgic item for film and TV fans of a certain age.

Did you have any?  Which ones were on your wall?
1975
I think I might have mentioned before that I was a huge fan of The Six Million Dollar Man.
1976
1977
1977
1980
I reckon the first thing that went through your head when you saw this was either "Flash, ah-ah..." or "Gordon's alive?"
1980
1981
1981
As you can see from the picture above, I had this on my wall for quite a few years.  I wrote a retrospective on the film, which you can read here.
1982
One of the first "properly scary" horror films I saw on video, which I wrote about here.
1982
1983
As well as the posters, this also included 50 behind the scenes nuggets (with pictures) - I was in my element!  I previously wrote about Return Of The Jedi here.


you can read the previous poster magazine post here

2 comments:

  1. I've still got my Superman II poster mag, which I think I got in Portsmouth in 1981. However, jumping back to 1978, I remember seeing a poster advertising the upcoming For Your Eyes Only movie in the Salon Cinema (now gone) in Southsea. There were some slight differences compared to the finished poster in your first photo. (The woman's legs and posterior were redone for the finished version if I recall correctly.)

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    1. Thanks for commenting Kid - I wish I'd kept more of mine.

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