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Star Wars Posters of Soviet Europe

Markozen.com Art, Science Fiction

Behind the Iron Curtain, artists created strikingly trippy ads for the saga, writes Christian Blauvelt.

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Hungarian Star Wars poster by Tibor Helényi

Star Wars was released in Hungary for the first time in 1980, three years after it came out in the US. Helényi brought his own vision to the saga with a striking palette of blue, orange and red and some features that fans would decry as certainly not being ‘canon’: Darth Vader’s helmet suddenly has a mouth like the grill of a vintage Cadillac; the Death Star is destroyed via a blast out of the side; and then there’s some scaly lizard creature on the left with a flailing tongue and ganglia and an impressively alien-looking scimitar. No such creature exists in any Star Wars film, but Helényi’s approach is to suggest that such an alien could exist in the world Lucas created. Call it ‘added value’! Or perhaps it’s a reference to how Lucas originally envisioned Han Solo as a lizard creature, before going the more conventional route of casting Harrison Ford to play the character as a human. (Credit: Tibor Helényi).

 

Hungarian Star Wars poster by András Felvidéki

Felvidéki liked to wed old-fashioned engraving and etching techniques with trippy, avant-garde content, and the result for Star Wars looks like an illustration that could have been part of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Under the Moons of Mars serial in 1912. A steampunk-looking starship of a design never seen in the films shines a light on Chewbacca, whose tongue action is most disturbing. The bantha on the left is infinitely more fearsome than anything seen in the film, and C-3PO suddenly looks like he’s swapped parts with The Wizard of Oz’s Tin Man.

 

Russian Star Wars poster by Yuri Bokser and Alexander Chantsev (Credit: Credit: Yuri Bokser and Alexander Chantsev)

Russian Star Wars poster by Yuri Bokser and Alexander Chantsev

 

Russian Star Wars poster by Yuri Bokser and Alexander Chantsev (Credit: Credit: Yuri Bokser and Alexander Chantsev)

Russian Star Wars poster by Yuri Bokser and Alexander Chantsev

Where to begin? The odd hieroglyphs around the border? That Vader now has a helmet resembling the face of a jaguar? That he bears a crown of multi-coloured lightsabers? Obviously, nothing here has any relationship to the films – except for that last feature. Before this poster none of the Star Wars films had featured lightsabers of any colour other than blue, green and red. After this poster, the Star Wars prequels and animated TV programmes would introduce lightsabers of different colours, such as Mace Windu’s purple saber. Did this poster have any influence on Lucasfilm’s decision to expand their lightsaber colour palette? Almost assuredly not. But it was an unwitting glimpse of things to come. (Credit: Yuri Bokser and Alexander Chantsev)

 

Polish Empire Strikes Back poster by Jakub Erol

Would you know this poster was for The Empire Strikes Back, if the actors’ names weren’t listed at the bottom? Jakub Erol’s take on Star Wars’s first sequel evokes Constructivism – a graphic style preferred by early Soviet propagandists anyone in the Eastern Bloc would have associated with authoritarianism. Erol was a prolific poster designer in Poland, and he gravitated to simple, stark images that instantly communicate a powerful idea: his poster for the Czech drama Days of Betrayal, about the rise of Nazism and the appeasement efforts of Neville Chamberlain.

 

Polish Empire Strikes Back poster by Miroslaw Lakomski (Credit: Credit: Miroslaw Lakomski)

Polish Empire Strikes Back poster by Miroslaw Lakomski

Lakomski opted for a more direct approach to the film than Erol. With colourful circles recalling Piet Mondrian and Saul Bass, this poster presents The Empire Strikes Back’s AT-AT walkers and Yoda. But look closer at Yoda: most of his facial features are rendered in black and white, his expression neutral, his gaze off-centre as if he’s looking to the horizon. It’s a classic pose for a heroic sage, but it also looks strikingly similar to Jim Fitzpatrick’s iconic poster of Che Guevara from 1968. A figure from an American film series rendered like a hero of global socialist revolution? A suggestion that aligning with US-backed, capitalist culture was the new rebellion. (Credit: Miroslaw Lakomski)

 

Hungarian Empire Strikes Back poster by Tibor Helényi (Credit: Credit: Tibor Helényi)

Hungarian Empire Strikes Back poster by Tibor Helényi

Tibor Helényi returned to create a poster for The Empire Strikes Back. No addition of a strange lizard creature here. Instead we get an incredibly detailed Imperial Star Destroyer in the upper left corner, and a strikingly stylised Vader on the lower right. He appears to have a coterie of similarly mechanized henchmen alongside him – if Episode IX should finally reveal the Knights of Ren, let us hope they are half as cool as these baddies. Completing the dynamic, diagonal composition is a Goth AT-AT lurching forward into the frame like an unstoppable steampunk force of nature. Helényi’s work here seems to anticipate the underrated brooding aesthetic artist Cam Kennedy deployed for the Dark Empire graphic novel in 1993, which imagined the resurrection of Emperor Palpatine in a fresh clone body and Luke’s attempts to learn more about the Jedi. (Credit: Tibor Helényi)

 

some of his other movie posters, as well. His poster for Ben-Hur depicts the famed chariot race and Christ’s crucifixion by way of Dali’s Hallucinogenic Toreador, while his art for Akira Kurosawa’s Kagemusha imagines a medieval European jouster in place of the film’s story about feudal Japan. (Credit: Tibor Helényi)” data-caption-title=”Hungarian Return of the Jedi poster by Tibor Helényi”.

 

Russian Return of the Jedi poster by Yuri Bokser and Alexander Chantsev (Credit: Credit: Yuri Bokser and Alexander Chantsev)

Russian Return of the Jedi poster by Yuri Bokser and Alexander Chantsev

Jabba the Hutt’s monumental head is one of the twin poles of Bokser and Chantsev’s poster commemorating the conclusion of the original trilogy – the other is, of course, the Death Star, with star streaks like those seen when the Millennium Falcon jumps to lightspeed in the middle. It’s a fascinating juxtaposition: do the two orbs, one of a moon-sized weapon, the other of a gangster’s head, suggest that authoritarianism enables Hutt-like corruption? A lot to ponder here. (Credit: Yuri Bokser and Alexander Chantsev).

 

Polish Return of the Jedi poster by Witold Dybowski (Credit: Credit: Witold Dybowski)

Polish Return of the Jedi poster by Witold Dybowski

The destruction of Vader’s helmet here is certainly a spoiler for the end of Return of the Jedi – but it also suggests the destroyed version of Vader’s helmet that we wouldn’t see until The Force Awakens 31 years after Polish artist Dybowski created this image in 1984. Look closer, though, and you’ll see that various cogs and spools that make up a film camera are incorporated into the design of the helmet. Is this a subtle commentary that Star Wars had obliterated cinema and that the global film industry would never be the same? Or is it suggesting that cinema itself is a kind of Vader figure – it can be a force for good or a force for harm, depending upon the intent of the film-maker. (Credit: Witold Dybowski)

 

 

 

 

Star Wars versus Aliens

Markozen.com Science Fiction

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Guillem H. Pongiluppi is a thirty-something Spanish artist with a whole bunch of colorful talents to his palette. He’s a painter, illustrator, a matte and concept artist who’s worked on best-selling games, films and TV shows—from David Jones’ Warcraft to international productions for National Geographic and the BBC. He’s a cool guy.

He is also a fan of the movies Star Wars and Aliens. And what better way to share your love of something great than to create a series of fantastic fan art paintings that mash these two movies up into a series called Star Wars vs. Aliens.

 

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Very Early, and Very Bad Movie Special Effects

Markozen.com Movies, Science Fiction

Turner Classic Movies had a run of 1950’s and 1960’s science fiction movies. I took a look at Cosmic Monsters, The Green Slime and Queen of Outer Space. They fit into a capital B category for B-movies. Even though the special effects are primitive, in relation to today’s standards, and funny, we have to give the film makers credit for trying. The Green Slime effects are actually pretty good.

Image below is unrelated. But it is so cool.

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What will humans look like in 100,000 years?

Markozen.com Science Fiction

Mother Nature Network

The future is always unknown, especially the distant future, but that shouldn’t stop us from making educated guesses. That’s exactly what artist and researcher Nickolay Lamm did with help from Dr. Alan Kwan, who has a doctorate in computational genomics from Washington University. Their starting point was the question: “What do you think the human face might look like in 100,000 years and why?”

From there, they reasoned out how humanity with advanced genetic engineeringtechnology might reshape itself over time, taking over the role played by natural selection so far. Lamm then created a series of images of what he thinks the human face might look like 20,000 years, 60,000 years and 100,000 years in the future (Note: He said that we shouldn’t read too much into the fact that the man and woman are Caucasian because those were just the best models he could find).

Image: Today

The first image is an unmodified photo of a man and woman from the present. Nothing special.

Image: 20,000 years

This one shows some changes, but they are not too major yet. Heads are a bit bigger to accommodate larger brains, and those yellow rings that you see in the models’ eyes are special lenses that act kind of like Google Glass does today, but in a much more powerful way.

Image: 60,000 years

In the 60,000 years image, we’re starting to see some major changes. Heads are even larger, but the eyes have grown too. Lamm speculates that this would be a result of human colonization of the solar system, with people living farther away from the sun where there is less light. Skin pigmentation would change and our eyelids would become thicker to offer more protection against UV rays for those living outside of the Earth’s protective ozone layer.

Image: 100,000 years

human faces 100,000 years in the future

100,000 years! Here Lamm predicts big changes, the most notable of which is the big Japanese Manga-style eyes that may feature “eye-shine enhance low-light vision and even a sideways blink from re-constituted plica semilunaris” to offer extra protection against cosmic rays. These futuristic faces follow the golden ratio proportions and are perfectly symmetrical from left to right, and have larger nostrils to make breathing in off-planet environments easier, as well as denser hair to contain heat loss from their even larger heads. Various implants might allow the man and woman of the future to always be connected, but these would be subtle and almost invisible.

Now remember, Nickolay Lamm and Dr. Kwan stress that this is not a prediction, but rather speculation (“one possible timeline”), and that it is impossible to know for sure what the future holds. This is just their answer to the question “What do you think the human face might look like in 100,000 years and why?” There are, without a doubt, many other answers, some of which might seem more plausible. But it’s interesting food for thought.

Personally, if I had to criticize this project, I would say that the timeline is probably too long. We’re already starting to have the ability to modify ourselves, so if we ever decide to do so (it’s probably a question of “when” rather than “if”), it probably won’t take thousands of years. Just in the past 100 years, we’ve gone from barely having mastered powered flight with the Wright Brothers to landing space probes on almost all planets and moons of the solar system, from Morse code telegraphs to a worldwide communication network made up of billions of electronic devices, each of which is more powerful than the supercomputers of a few decades ago. So technological and scientific progress is really fast and it’s accelerating. The human race’s capabilities in 50 years should be even more impressive to us today than today’s tech would be for someone from 50 years ago — and that’s saying something.

My own speculation on how humans might modify themselves over time would probably go into a different direction than Lamm’s — and  wouldn’t result in very striking images because I think most changes wouldn’t be visible. For example, if we successfully cure the diseases of aging (the SENS Research Foundation is working on this, for example), we would look the same, except that people would keep their young adult bodies, and you might not be able to superficially tell the difference between someone who is 30 and someone who is 60 years old. Maybe we’ll upgrade the human eye to give ourselves piercing hawk-like vision and awesome low-light capabilities, but that eye 2.0 might not look different from the outside. Same if we improve our red blood cells so they can carry 10 times more oxygen, our livers to better eliminate toxins or our metabolisms to maintain a healthy weight whatever we do. All these changes would be huge for humanity, yet they might not be visible in a photograph.

But all that is just speculation, one of many possible futures. The bottom line is we can all have an impact on how the future turns out, so let’s make it a good one.

Hope the heck we don’t turn out to look something like this:

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