Okay, okay, this isn't out on Blu yet, but I made this for luck.
There's no poster art for this which really catches the flavour of the movie. The movie underperformed at the boxoffice and the marketing campaign got the blame. In all advance advertising they used the pure art deco design, which is a beautiful piece, but everyone who saw it thought it was for an animated movie.
The final release poster was better, but they couldn't seem to make up their mind whether to feature the Rocketeer or the actor. In the end they featured Bill Campell with his helmet off, tucked under his arm (perhaps a contractual obligation?). But the selling point of the movie is the Rocketeer character, so the poster had a poorly rendered Rocketeer figure superimposed up in the clouds. Furthermore, the jetpack is a major star of the movie, but they struggled with shoehorning it into the picture since it is worn on the back. (Guns are a no-no for Disney, hence the Timothy Dalton had his firearm airbrushed out of his hand for the poster.) You can see the pickle the marketing people at Disney were in, trying to sell this movie.
There are several variations of the poster, but none work particularily well. For the DVDs they upended the balance to feature the Rocketeer more heavily, but it still looks cobbled together.
For a successful example of a poster campaing selling a similar kind of movie, I refer you to the wonderful art for the Sky Captain movie. They captured the adventure, the period and the tone just right. I think the same approach should have been used for Rocketeer.
So, could I do any better? I decided to start from scratch, but I'm afraid my own attempt at something cool for the front cover was hampered by the dearth of good picture material out there. Ideally you'd have an action pose of the Rocketeer from the back, looking over his shoulder, jetpack lit, pistol in hand. I only wanted to use art from the actual movie, ignoring all the fan-art, private costume photos or CGI models I found, so this is the best I could do.
For the front I used the image of Bill Campbell from the official poster, and pasted a picture of the helmet prop on top of it. I also resized and replaced the jetpack to be more prominent. I looked for an image of the Rocketeer holding his gun so that I could graft that arm onto the image, but no luck.
The image of Jennifer Connelly was so beautiful it couldn't be ignored. Originally she was in a sitting position, arms slumped over the back of a chair but I altered it to look as if she was free standing. I also did some slight airbrushing of her skin, redid her hair and added some highlights to the lips and eyes to make them stand out more.
I would have liked to fit Timothy Dalton's tommygun in there as well, but it is mostly cropped off to maintain a balance of the figures. The image of him wasn't the best, and I'm sure his agent would have no-no'ed it if this was official art.
And you've GOT to feature the blimp. This is a generic Zeppelin standing in for the fictional
Luxembourg of the movie.
I went a bit overboard with the art deco on the back, but it was just too much fun to resist. I tried to fit the heavy, Lothar, in there as well, but opted to have the image of the airborne Rocketeer there instead. The images on the back are screengrabs from a HDTV recording of the movie. The resolution was just barely adequate to hold up. There is room left for the specs if this ever sees an official release on Blu-ray. Fingers crossed.
This thing took me two whole days, the first of which was spent on the front image. I'm sure professional cover designers are called upon to produce something like this in an afternoon's work. My hat's off to them :-)
That's it, I think I've got this custom cover thing out of my system.
As usual, PM me if you want this.
BTW, I'm using
Illest Villain's cover templates as a basis for all my covers. Thanks go out to him for his generous sharing.
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