We Bet You Have Never Seen These Psychedelic Official 'Star Wars' Posters

You Have To See These Hungarian Posters!

By Culture SlatePublished 3 years ago • 4 min read

One of the coolest things about any major fandom is the posters from around the world. Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings are two fandoms that have had amazing artwork for posters around the world, with Star Wars being another fandom that has absolutely amazing pieces. The United States itself has had amazing posters released for the Star Wars movies, particularly the original three: A New Hope, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi. You can find all sorts of posters and different artwork from the originals on posters, books, movies, vinyl records, board games, and more.

It’s not just the languages that change on Star Wars posters from around the world, it’s the artwork, too. And some of the post famous Star Wars posters from outside the United States are those from Hungary. These psychedelic posters have unique and fascinating artwork unlike any other Star Wars poster. With the release of Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope in 1979, the Hungarian painter, Tibor Helényi created one of the most controversial and rare posters. He also did the ones for Star Wars Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back and Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi in 1981 and 1984 respectively. The posters became world famous. Tibor Helényi sadly passed away in 2014.

The posters were originally painted in oil paints. The original artwork was auctioned off in 2015 for a total of $32,100 after being in the Budapest Poster Gallery. See below for detailed images of what is actually in these crazy paintings. The reason that the posters were controversial was that it was originally claimed that Tibor Helényi hadn’t seen the movies before doing the artwork. However, in an interview with a Hungarian blog, Kunszt, in 2013, Helényi told them that he had in fact seen, and enjoyed, the movies. He did not want to paint posters that looked like the ones that the Western Europe and the United States had been coming out with. He wanted to make them different. So, letting his imagination run wild, his own artistic vision came to the page. He even added elements to the posters that were extraneous or didn’t actually appear in the Star Wars universe, such as the tusked monsters in The Return of the Jedi’s poster and the lizard/dragon being holding a sword in A New Hope’s poster.

The other fascinating thing is that A New Hope’s poster spoils the ending of the movie by showing the Death Star blowing up and Luke attacking the specific point needed to destroy it. In the movie it’s obvious that it will be blown up at some point, given the storyline, but the poster spoiling it? That’s a whole new level. But there have been other instances in other fandoms where the posters did spoil things in the movie or depict things that weren’t in the movie at all. So, it isn’t unheard of, just not usually to this level.

The color scheme of these posters is also different from other Western or US posters in that most of it is reds, oranges, blues, and blacks. This creates the psychedelic look, but also gives a much darker look at the world of Star Wars. Not to mention, most of the focus on the posters is of the Dark Side, particularly on Darth Vader, the Death Star, and Star Destroyers.

There aren’t any depictions of the main characters (other than Vader) and not really any depictions of the good guys side of things (other than Luke in his ship), as is the focus of the posters everywhere else in the world. It’s no wonder that people have thought that Helényi never saw the movies. Not to mention the creative freedom he took with how he designed Darth Vader’s look.

Of course Tibor Helényi wasn’t the only Hungarian to do posters for the Star Wars releases, but he is the first and most well-known.

Now, people have been able to print replications of the paintings to sell the posters, however, they are still pretty rare. StarWarsMoviePoster.com, Etsy, and Amazon are all places that you can find the posters in print form, but usually there aren’t many available and you have to be extremely lucky to find a print.

If you are really interested in posters and love looking at the different artwork from around the world, definitely research it. There are a lot of interesting posters out there, and Hungary tends to release some of the best and strangest of them all.

Source(s): Gizmodo, kunszt.com

Written by Elizabeth Dresdow

Syndicated from Culture Slate

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