Wednesday, July 08, 2009

On A Wing and a Circus Elephant

Wednesday Advertising Day.

Three more comic strip film ads.

Winged Victory was a popaganda movie Moss Hart made with real service men. Moss Hart was a very special guy. He wrote several great plays with George Kaufman in the thirties, which in my opinion set the tone and style for all comedy writing in America. In the forties he wrote a couple of less succesful plays on his own. In the fifties he wrote the Danny Kaye Movie Hans Christian Anderson as well as the celebrated Judy Garland version of A Star Is Born. After that he co-wrote and directed several influential plays, including the musicals My Fair Lady and Camelot. Having wrtten a play about comic book artists Simon and Kirby, I would love to do a play about Kaufman and Hart. The ad v=for the movie is a very early photo realistic effort by an unknown artist (although it does look familiar).



This is one of the better know later comic strip film ads, from 1959 when they had all but vanshed from the newspapers. The poses remind me of the work of Greig Flessel, but frankly it could be by anyone.



This even later effort, from 1962, was new to me when I found it.

2 comments:

Smurfswacker said...

The "Center of the Earth" strip was about 50 times more exciting than the movie. That's what always annoyed me as a kid reading Dell Movie Comics. Some great artist (e.g. George Evans) would draw an incredible monster in the comic and when I saw the movie it was a lizard with a cardboard fin. So I gave up going to the movies. The comics were only 10 cents.

Ger Apeldoorn said...

The Center of the Earth was just such a great book. But I get your point. I especially liked the Alex Toth and Mike Sekowsky movie adaptations I got last year. I might show some of them when I get arond doing an oveview of Mike Sekowsky's extraordinary career.