Pressbooks (Horror, Sci Fi, Fantasy)

Here’s another rare pressbook: Tower of London with Boris Karloff and Basil Rathbone. A wild and wonderful 17.5 x 23 inches when opened to read. I’m not sure if any pages are missing as I found this one in loose sheets. But what’s here is still stellar. Aside from the auctions selling the covers alone, this original release pressbook has not been shown before. You lucky devils. Universal really overdid themselves with this one. The Showmanship page lists really cool theater lobby promos. You will need a big screen to view this beauty in all its glory.

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Tower of London (1939) PressbookRead More »

Here's a nifty giveaway for Blood Orgy of the She-Devils: the hypnotic eye psychometry test. It's very simple. What do you do to drum up interest in a no-budget horror by Ted V. Mikels? Why, just add orgy and blood in the movie's title and hand out cool stuff like this at the theater. Of course, that would entice me for sure, so I may be biased here. The double-sided card is 4 x 6 inches and I'd die to have a stack of these to hand out as tricks for Halloween. I can see those smiling faces on the kids' parents as I think of it.

While the non-American pressbooks can be short on pages and promotional and commercial tie-ins, the artwork and printing layout can be quite creative. Here's the French pressbook for Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy.

See Mary Poppins pressbook Part One.

In this second part of the Mary Poppins pressbook is the incredible merchandising. My favorite is the Louis Marx wind-up, but you will find Gold Key comics, Whitman books, records, puzzles, her carpet bag, Golden Books, clothes, and more. Toy merchandising on a grand scale may have started with the Star Wars franchise, but Disney was years ahead in tying loads of merchandise to its movies.

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Mary Poppins (1964) Pressbook
Part TwoRead More »

At 44 pages, the pressbook for Mary Poppins is supercalifragilisticexpialidocious, indeed. Every Disney pressbook I’ve seen has an incredible amount of merchandising and promotion packed into it. While the sequel, Mary Poppins Returns was enjoyable, there’s magic to be found in the original that cannot be repeated. The Sherman Brothers music score is emotionally compelling and the talent-filled chemistry between Dick Van Dyke and Julie Andrews certainly does make you want to dance. Using the Edwardian period was a smart move, too. P. L. Travers, Mary Poppins author, may have hated the movie, but boy was she wrong. Everything, from the casting to the set designs, and even the animation, created a wonderful film. Well, maybe except for Dick Van Dyke’s cockney accent, perhaps, which he did own up to and apologize for (his voice coach couldn’t do one either). But as a kid, I hardly noticed, good or bad. Now that I think of it, it does remind me of when I visited London in 1982 with my father, who couldn’t stop himself from using a really bad cockney accent everywhere we went. If looks could kill, we would have been dead for sure. Had I a magic umbrella and a strong wind to carry me away, I’d have left him toot sweet.

ComicRack reader version: Download Mary Poppins Pressbook (this is a big file at 115MB!) See Mary Poppins pressbook part two.

You don’t need to wait until the wind changes direction to see more pressbooks from Zombos’ Closet!

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Mary Poppins (1964) Pressbook
Part OneRead More »

The Living Dead, also known as The Scotland Yard Mystery, has another mad scientist somnambulizing people (yes, I think I just made this word up!) into a zombie-ish trance to do his criminal bidding. Since my favorite color is purple I couldn’t pass up this pressbook. That poster art is pretty cool too.

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The Living Dead (1934) PressbookRead More »

Had Mighty Joe Young sold well at the box office, the sequel would have been Joe Meets Tarzan. Sorry to not see that movie get made. Do not hate me, but I tend to enjoy Joe more than King Kong. Both are great movies, but I like the happier ending in this one. Although Ray Harryhausen began stop-motion animation with Puppetoons, this is his first major movie animation that would lead to more fantasy and monster films. I had the pleasure of meeting Terry Moore at a Monster Bash some years ago.

ComicRack reader version: Download Mighty Joe Young Pressbook

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Mighty Joe Young (1949)
British PressbookRead More »

Bruce Eder sums up this movie quite well. As Eder points out, elements of The Invisible Boy, like the super computer that wants to take over the world, would be seen in later movies, like Colossus: The Forbin Project. And the fact that Robby the Robot (from Forbidden Planet) time travels back to 1957 is so understated, and the scientists and boy’s family so unimpressed by Robby, and the boy’s smarts in putting him back together, it’s kind of funny and sad and intuitive as to 1950s sentiments on child-rearing and American atomic age insouciance and superciliousness rolled into one. At the heart of the story is a boy who just wants to be able to play and have fun. Given that MGM wanted a movie vehicle to re-use Robby, since he cost so much to build, may have rushed the script into less-than-polished as it should have been; but Cyril Hume and Edmund Cooper manage to add some food for thought while keeping it at a juvenile level for the matinee kids.

ComicRack reader version: Download Invisible Boy Pressbook

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The Invisible Boy (1957) PressbookRead More »

As Christopher Lee said, the first one should have been the last one. The Castle of Fu Manchu is the worst of the lot, but the first two are good, if questionable today. The first movie in the series is made better by Nigel Green as Nayland Smith. Here is the British pressbook. One thing, the pressbook states that the saying “one picture is worth a thousand words” is a Chinese proverb. Nope. Not even close. Fred R. Barnard is credited with saying it in 1921, although he did pretend it was a Chinese proverb.

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The Face of Fu Manchu (1965) PressbookRead More »

One of my guilty pleasures, Target Earth lacks an army of robots (they made only one), lacks a good budget to sell the invasion angle, but does provide drama between the players who must survive the (did I mention only one) robot’s deadly intentions as well as those of the psychopath in their midst. Later movies, from zombies to aliens, would play up on the dealing-with-the-threat-from-without-and-within theme. While the robot isn’t designed all that well by today’s standards, it does create menace and has that 1940s/50s esthetic that I do find endearing. The pressbook is a tidy little number with enough articles, promotion, and poster art to help sell the movie. And, repeat after me, “beaverboard.” The pressbook mentions taking the 6-sheet poster, mounting it on beaverboard, and placing a flashing red light where the robot’s eye-panel is.  Whew. That would have been killer in the theater lobby.

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Target Earth (1954) PressbookRead More »

If it wasn’t Mars blasting the earth’s atmosphere with deadly rays it was an undersea or other hidden kingdom threatening doom with a disintegrator ray. Ah, the good old days when global warming wasn’t a problem; just evil minions and their maniacal leaders who apparently had little else to do but make trouble for everyone on earth. Mystery Science Theater 3000 can mock this movie all they want, but it’s still a wild ride with its mishmash of whatever costuming was available from the wardrobe department, and creative model work, and the volkites (tin can robots), all done  on a shoestring budget. As for scientific gadgets, the Reflector plate is very interesting mostly because the concept was used again in Star Trek’s Mirror Mirror episode with its Tantalus Field: a device that could see and hear anyone at any time, with a handy press-here-to-disintegrate button. There’s also the Invisible Wall of Atom Rays that acts a lot like the Enterprise’s shields. So make fun all you want: a fair amount of later science fiction staples came from this and other serials. This pressbook is huge at 13 x 20 inches and contains a lot of promotional material to get the kids into the theater.

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Undersea Kingdom (1936) PressbookRead More »

With an amazingly low budget of anywhere from 200,000 to 500,000 dollars, of course they would come up with some gimmick to help cut corners. Enter cinemagic, a way to tint scenes of Mars a strong saturated red, thereby hiding the cheap budget by lessening details you would not see anyway. The rat-bat creature stalking the astronauts (well, more or less, given the budget), was a pretty good and effective design; enough so that Cloverfield‘s (2008) New York invading alien would have similar attributes. Carnivorous plants, a one-eyed amoeba (I always smile, because it makes me think of Zacherle the Cool Ghoul) , the rat-bat creature, and an unfriendly three-eyed Martian (just pops up now and then), provide the action as cinemagic does its best to provide the red colorization (though the process was more involved because it used solarization).

Here is the pressbook. It focuses on poster art to sell the movie as well as TV and radio ads. And, of course, it touts the CineMagic gimmick.

You don’t need to travel to Mars to see more pressbooks from Zombos’ Closet.

ComicRack reader version: Download Angry Red Planet Pressbook

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The Angry Red Planet (1959) PressbookRead More »