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Mad Max (1979)

 
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The Spike
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PostPosted: Mon Dec 29, 2014 8:40 pm    Post subject: Mad Max (1979) Reply with quote



Low budget classic that is now a genre landmark.

Set somewhere in the future, we are privy to a world where the roads are ruled by maniac gangs with souped-up cars and bikers that literally could come from hell.

Trying to stop these marauding loons is the overstretched police force, who themselves ride in exceptionally fast cars.

At the front of this story is Max Rockatansky — a good honest cop trying to hold his own against the chaotic world that is forming around him.

After his best friend is burned and left for dead, he decides "enough is enough", and thinks about retiring from the service. But while on a vacation with his wife and child, things go decidedly bad, and Max becomes an avenging force of fury . . . with devastating affects!

When evaluating this film, I feel it really needs to be put into perspective concerning just how brilliant a job director George Miller did with next to no cash to work with. In fact, Miller edited the film in his own bedroom just to emphasise the low-fi nature of the beast.

The costumes are excellent, the cast are terrific, and Mel Gibson as Max particularly impressive, Here we have villains to truly fit the word "villainous".

But it's the stunts and chase sequences that makes this film a rich rewarding experience. The opening ten minutes alone are pure adrenaline-pumping genius.

But the film as a whole delivers a crash-bang-wallop punch that has often been imitated since its release. . . but rarely bettered. And although the heart of the film is a simple revenge story, it grabs your attention and delivers right to the corking finale, 8/10.

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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Sat Feb 20, 2016 3:58 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

__________________________________

Love that Frazetta poster. There's something different about it, compared to Frazetta's other pieces. Maybe it's the black leather. Unusual for a Frazetta figure, somehow.
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Rocky Jones
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 21, 2016 12:42 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

It is unusual for a Frazetta, but the flying vulture instantly signaled to me it was a Frazetta. I'd never noticed he did this poster, either. Here's a link to a nice digitized version of the whole poster with the credits:

http://geekynerfherder.blogspot.com/2015/07/frazettafriday-mad-max-by-frank-frazetta.html
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Sun Feb 21, 2016 3:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

_____________________________________

Confession: I had a little fun altering the poster shown at the top of this thread.

I did that because I wondered if the actual painting included more on each side than was used in the poster. But I couldn't find a picture of the original artwork. What I did find, however, was several versions of the poster that had altered the painting significantly, like these shown below.

In this version, the color has been altered (a hideous yellow) so that the sky is so bright the clouds are gone! But the ground has been darkened, removing the details that two of the other versions (further down) prove are in the original painting.



This version has been shifted towards the red, even though the sky is just a uniform gray. The clouds of smoke near the horizon are now yellow, and the ground shows several features, like the white line in the road. Notice that there's much more sky showing over the figure's head, and there's more area to the left, past the gun barrel.



This next one is less red, but the smoke on the horizon is yellow-orange (not red-orange like in the one I used). And notice that there's more ground area showing below the figure's feet here than in any of the other versions!



The one I used has no detail showing in the near-black ground, and the left boarder ends at the gun barrel. But over all, the colors are probably much closer to the original painting than the others.



I knew the figure looked "crowed" — and clearly those other versions of the poster prove that Frazetta's painting expands the visible regions in at least three directions (up, left, and down), so it's very possible that he also included an area on the right we don't see in any of the posters.

That's why I decided to have a little fun by painting in what I thought these missing areas on the left and right might look like. Very Happy



I also added Frazetta's signature . . . Wink

And after all that, I gave in to temptation and painted in the ground, using what I could see from the posters that showed part of it or had text in front of it.

If somebody finds Frazetta's complete painting, it will be interesting to see how it compares to my homemade reconstruction.
Very Happy


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Last edited by Bud Brewster on Tue Jun 07, 2022 3:33 pm; edited 3 times in total
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Rocky Jones
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 22, 2016 12:30 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

This poster seems to be one of Frank Frazetta's less-well known poster creations, in spite of the fact that it was for such an iconic film. Even impawards.com, which is usually good about crediting artists, didn't label this one as his.

Frazetta apparently did a lot more poster work than he's normally known for doing. It seems that during the '60s he scored a lot of work doing those cartoon style posters with many cast members frolicking around. The oddest, I think, is that he did a poster for Mad Monster Party, an animated film based on the drawings of Jack Davis, who is much better known for cartoon movie posters than Frazetta. Check this great blog post by Drew Friedman on Frazetta's comic posters:

http://drewfriedman.blogspot.com/2012/01/comedy-film-poster-art-of-frank.html


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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 22, 2016 1:29 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

________________________________________

Rocky, that is an amazing article about the poster art of Frank Frazetta. We are forever in your debt for sharing that with us.

I had never seen many of the posters displayed in that article, and they raised my already sky-high admiration for the man I consider one the greatest artists of all time.

I got to meet him and his whole family at the World Science Fiction Convention in New York in 1967, and he actually sold panels of his Johnny Comet strip to several pimple-faced fans like me.

I still have them. Very Happy

According to the website below, the two "daily strip" panels I bought (shown her as four jpegs) for $25 each are worth about $8,000 each today. My goodness, I probably shouldn't have them Scotch taped to my refrigerator! Shocked

(Just kidding . . . )













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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
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Last edited by Bud Brewster on Tue Jun 07, 2022 3:30 pm; edited 2 times in total
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Rocky Jones
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PostPosted: Mon Feb 22, 2016 8:25 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Glad you saw that. I'm totally envious that you got to meet the man and score those.

Frazetta has to be my favorite illustrator ever (right next to Maxfield Parrish). For years I scoured the used paperback racks birddogging interesting Frazetta paperbacks (OK. I guess I do deliberately collect some things). I follow a number of blogging artists and Friedman is a great one.

Another goody is James Gurney (who worked with Frazetta on the Fire and Ice film).

http://gurneyjourney.blogspot.com/

Oh, yea, and I suppose I can now let this thread return to being a discussion of Mad Max...
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orzel-w
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PostPosted: Tue Feb 23, 2016 12:33 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Bud Brewster wrote:
I got to meet [Frazetta] and his whole family at the World Science Fiction Convention in New York in 1967...

Now there's a coincidence. I saw Boris Vallejo and his wife at the World Science Fiction Convention in Tucson, AZ, in 1977.

Hmm... That's not much of a coincidence, though, is it.
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Bud Brewster
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PostPosted: Tue Jun 07, 2022 3:36 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Rocky Jones wrote:
Oh, yea, and I suppose I can now let this thread return to being a discussion of Mad Max...

Some boards get a bit bent out of shape when a thread doesn't stay right on topic. At All Sci-Fi we don't worry too much about that.

I view each thread sort of like a conversation among friends who have gathered in a group at a party. The initial subject might wander off the topic and evolve into discussions on related items — the way we've done with the Mad Max poster.

But that's okay, because live discussions do exactly the same thing Very Happy

This conversation will move back towards the movie, of course, but eventually there will be comments about other related items, and it will start wandering around again.

And, like friends at a party, if several folks in the group want to talk more about the related item than the others do, they'll just go off and continue their conversation in another part of the room.

In other words . . . they'll start a new thread. Very Happy

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Is there no man on Earth who has the wisdom and innocence of a child?
~ The Space Children (1958)
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