I had to take a moment to mention the passing of Drew Struzan, the prolific pop culture artist.
Even if you’d never known Struzan by name, you certainly knew some of his artwork.
If, for example, you remember the famous image of Michael J. Fox looking at his watch, with the DeLorean behind him, then you know at least one of Struzan’s contributions to popular culture imagery and movie memorabilia.
He was the artist who created some of the most iconic and memorable movie posters of all time, including famous imagery for the likes of The Dark Crystal, E.T, The Shawshank Redemption, Back to the Future, Blade Runner, and all the Lucas era Star Wars and Indiana Jones movies.
It occurred to me that, at different points in time, items of Struzan’s work have adorned my bedroom walls. There are two of his posters on my wall right now, in fact.
Working early on with the promotional art for B-movies, it was in the late 70s with the explosion of George Lucas’s and Steven Spielberg’s films that Struzan’s distinctive poster art started to become ubiquitous.
I think the first time I looked upon his art was the iconic poster for Empire Strikes Back – a few years after the fact, as it happened, but that image was on the VHS cover and the novelisation, both of which I got from a boot sale when I was about six.
I used to stare at that Empire Strikes Back image all the time. I think I even tried to recreate it a few times, using only coloured pencils – but my attempts were crap.
But Struzan’s posters remain genuinely fixed in collective pop culture memory. His style was unique and easily identifiable.
Most movie posters today – and even many back then – are generic, streamlined affairs that rarely become striking or even noticeable.
Struzan’s posters, on the other hand, always stood out, always grabbed the attention.
The stylised works were probably retro even at that time, but they definitely feel retro/vintage now: it’s hard not to get a touch of nostalgia whenever you see one of those posters.
They don’t look like that anymore.
Struzan was a big fan of traditional art and of paint. His meticulous technique, the detail and texture, and strangely aged looking colour dynamics, gave everything a mythic, larger than life feel. A sense of timelessness maybe.
It clothed some of those films in an aura of specialness before they were even released, before you’d even watched them.
They captured the imagination. Far more than trailers. I actually dislike trailers as a thing. No trailer has ever caught my attention or imagination like one of Struzan’s posters.
Even posters for movies I don’t even remember ever watching – like Batteries Not Included, for example – look so enticing, like there’s a touch of magic there, beckoning you.
It could probably trick you into thinking an average or below average movie is something more important than it really is. But that’s how impactful his posters could be.
His Blade Runner poster is a good example, because that image makes me always think I love that movie more than I probably actually do.
Lucas retained Struzan for all the Star Wars movies: all those posters therefore have a stylistic consistency across decades. When The Phantom Menace came out in 1999, Lucas in fact demanded that Struzan’s official poster be the only one used anywhere in the world.
Actually, over time, one of the most iconic is the unique poster for the 1978 re-release of the original Star Wars, known as the ‘circus’ poster (see above): it really does look magnificent and it immediately makes me want to watch the film every time I see it.
The last major film poster he created before his official retirement was fittingly enough for Indiana Jones & the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008. A quintessential Struzan poster (and an underrated film, in my opinion).
I can’t imagine another artist in this particular field will ever attain the ubiquitousness or impact of Struzan. Partly because that style of movie poster isn’t really done anymore. And when it is, it’s really as a homage.
And partly because he came to prominence in a very particular era and at a time that his singular style had the most impact. With some of those more classic movies in particular, these posters really were an inseparable part of the overall package, a part of the magic.
The man was a master of the art, and created some truly measurable imagery that will live on with people for a long time.
