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…
Tag: TV & Film
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’…
Travolta’s Smallest Airliner?
The one and only John Travolta (just arrived in Australia as I write) well known as a film star, sometimes known as a pilot, and an owner of several large aircraft, including his own Qantas colours bedecked Boeing 707 – yes, a real, full-size airliner. This is due to be donated to the Historic Aircraft…
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,…
Top Cat
Today’s Poster. From the Smithsonian’s collection, here, unfortunately they’re very vague about some of the details, such as the date or the issuer of the poster itself; one assumes it’s from Grumman, the F-14 Tomcat’s maker. The design is very much an eighties photo-art aesthetic. The name ‘TOMCAT’, if I remember correctly, is actually a…
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…
39 Model
Today’s Poster, a ‘special’ version from the 1939 New York World’s Fair. You may be surprised… It’s from a rather well known and popular film in the aviation niche, ‘The Rocketeer’. It makes a kind of sense from the film, but you really need to see the film to get it – go on, it’s…
A Year of Aviation Illustration & Art 