Sci-Fi-O-Rama

Michael Whelan - The Snow Queen - A drag queens favourite!

This punchy comic style image with a disco flavour is the front of a flyer promoting the 1980 Pinball Game “Galaxy” made by Stern. I came across this whilst looking through http://www.ipdb.org which is the number one resource for information about pretty much anything you want to know about any Pinball table ever made - some really cool stuff on there. Pinball graphics are often like this, pretty kitsch, exciting and in right in your face.

Anyway to see more of the Galaxy pinball machine check this link personally I don’t think there would be anything much cooler than doing the graphics for a pinball machine… I’ll be posting more Pinball stuff up soon.

Roger Dean’s most famous for his otherworldly album sleeves for 70’s Prog Rockers YES, in the 80’s and early 90’s he also produced a number of of pieces of Cover Art for scouse Software House Psygnosis (mentioned elsewhere in this Blog). “Shadow of the Beast” was one of their most popular releases and featured - for the time - pretty slick graphics, including a lavishly animated main character and parallax scrolling. The gameplay wasn’t all that, it did however have a wicked atmospheric score from computer game music innovator David Whittaker.

Some of the Game Boxes came with a free T Shirt, now highly sort after, and boxes featuring the tshirt show up on ebay selling for north of £50 / $100. As a sucker for geek but knowingly cool rubbish I would pay that, but I’m betting its a shit fruit-of-the-loom job.

Robert D.Blue (1946 - 1998) was an American painter who grew up in Beverly hills, mostnoted for his images of pin-up girls in the 1980’s (an example of which is above). Collectors of Blue’s art have included Jack Nicholson, Barbra Streisand and Hugh Hefner, as well as numerous corporate collectors… more at wikipedia