Friday, February 8, 2013

Mystery On Frazetta Island!


Mystery on Monster Island is by all reports a rather terrible 1980's movie adaptation of the Jules Verne novel Godrey Morgan. This is alas a novel I've never read, and it's a movie I've never seen. But when I stumbled across this movie poster at the fantastic website Wrong Side of the Art, my fancy was immediately tickled by this image which seemed clearly inspired by the late great Frank Frazetta's work.


It turns out that indeed the movie poster was a swipe from a black and white illustration Frazetta produced for Edgar Rice Burroughs' A Fighting Man of Mars. Here's the artwork.


And here's the original page featuring that Frazetta artwork.


But then in doing the search for that source, I found this later VHS cover for the movie and discovered the creators plundered the Frazetta cache yet again to construct an even more obvious swipe. The original swipe is combined with renditions of two Frazetta cover paintings.




While appropriate in tone to the movie's original material, still are pretty overt and unapologetic swipes from the master.

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9 comments:

  1. The poster with the cave girl is a swipe from one of the TWO posters Frazetta did for the 1970s flick LUANA, as shown at the amazing Wrong Side of the Art...
    http://wrongsideoftheart.com/2010/02/luana-luana-la-figlia-delle-foresta-vergine-1968-italy-germany/

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    1. She does look the same, but the sabre-tooth most likely comes from the cover. The swiping gets confusing.

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  2. I read it years ago . It was one of Verne's lesser efforts, one of several Robinsonades he wrote, none of which equalled Mysterious Island.

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    1. There's a ton of Verne I've never read. But lots of folks who have checked them out say what you say. I still want to read the one about the Antartic which might well have inspired Lovecraft.

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  3. That would be either The Sphinx of Ice or The Adventures of Captain Hatteras

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  4. Very tired of having to prove I am not a robot. It makes publishing tedious

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    1. It's annoying I know. I have to do it at all the blogs I visit.

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  5. I haven't read A School for Robinsons either, but I have seen this film. I suppose I won't surprise anyone by noting that neither of the scenes depicted in the posters appear in the film. From one of the reviews at IMDB: "I taped it for my 6-year-old son and we just got through watching the thing; I had to have a bath afterwards in case any stray remnants of this cheesy, inept, incompetently-directed, over-the-top spectacularly bad acting, ill-conceived design, Jules-Verne-insulting, direct-attack-on-filmmaking pile managed to shoot through the pixels and land on me."

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