Leading today with a simple, but effective poster from the Bristol Aeroplane Company (from here) at a 1950s SBAC Farnborough airshow. I presume the flag is Bristol’s own house standard, and note the ‘Bristol’ logotype we discussed earlier here. From the top, the aircraft depicted are the Bristol Type 167 Brabazon, Type 175 Britannia, Type…
Category: TV & Film
The SLV’s Dutchmen
Currently on at the State Library of Victoria (re-opening today) is the ‘Velvet, Iron, Ashes’ exhibition, which among several other great things contains an excellent selection of items relating to the 1934 MacRobertson air race. The display includes a newsreel highlights, and the promotional poster (seen above) as well as one of the many route…
Indy’s Matte Boat
Of course everyone’s favourite archaeologist, Indiana Jones, travels in a flying boat. In this case in the first film, ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’. But how? Here’s a web page covering a ‘then and now’ of the Short Solent Mk.III that stood in for the extinct Pan Am Boeing 314. It’s the survivor at the…
Your Sky, Lady
Today’s Poster is from ‘Le ciel est à vous’ (‘The sky is yours’) a 1943 made, 1944 release French film – a film, I therefore presume was made under the German occupation. It’s an interesting work, and the poster is neat both for the strong, simple and powerful graphic elements, and for having the woman…
Visibly Invisibly Wonderful
By special request, today we have Wonder Woman‘s invisible jet. The toy above (image from here on Flickr) represents one vision of invisibility, while the still from the TV series is quite different below, and almost could relate to the popular plastic model kits with see through structures often touted as the ‘Visible ‘or ‘Invistible’…
AI – A?
Fifty years ago on the 15th September, 1969, the ‘Battle of Britain’ film was released. A painstaking effort at telling the story of the 1940 Battle, as well as an all-star cast, a huge fleet of aircraft was assembled for the real aerial cinematography. Though the film was not a success at the box office,…
See the Stampede!
Period art and design often features items that are regarded askance now. Today’s poster apparently suggests the use of an aircraft to stampede some of Africa’s more famous animals, with lions, elephants and giraffes running at speed from a swooping Fokker F.VII. I’m sure the real story was a lot less hooligan like. Entitled ‘Mittelholzer’s…
‘Aircraft Yet To Come’
Nothing dates faster than the future. The 1936 science fiction film ‘Things to Come’ featured several real aircraft in the present, and near future, and more, completely fictional aircraft as part of the narrative in the future, the last appearing in ‘2036’. A great run down of the various aeroplanes with stills are here in…
Not Defiant
Today’s Poster is for the very-B movie Ronald Reagan Hollywood British bandwagon, from the film ‘International Squadron’. The poster features a squadron of British fighters – Boulton Paul Defiants, and streight lifted from the famous (I think) ‘Life’ magazine shots of 264 Squadron when they were at Kirton in Lindsay, as seen below. Some of…
Rising Wind
Today a still from Hano Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises film. Loosely based on the biography of the designer of the Mitsubishi ‘Zero’ fighter, it’s an aeronautical design fest, even if very free with real history and some design. Other aspects are bang on, and some, such as the Caproni dream relationship feature often forgotten aircraft…
A Year of Aviation Illustration & Art 