Long before movie studios promoted their tentpole releases through elaborate sites or postings of HD trailers on Apple's trailer site ("Watch the Avatar trailer a day before its premiere in theaters or James Cameron will shoot a puppy!"), there were these things called official movie souvenir magazines that were exactly like the studio sites promotional material-hungry film geeks can click to nowadays. When I was a kid, either Starlog Press or Topps would devote an entire one-shot mag to an upcoming blockbuster and fill the mag with a spoilerrific photo summary of the movie, fluffy cast interviews, slightly less fluffy crew interviews and the only part of the mag I liked, behind-the-scenes pictures and concept art. Starlog Press did tie-in mags for the Star Trek, Rocky and James Bond franchises, while Topps focused on blockbusters that it produced trading cards for, like Tim Burton's Batman and Touchstone Pictures' wannabe Batman, the Warren Beatty Dick Tracy reboot.
Do mag publishers still put out official movie souvenir mags? I wouldn't be surprised if High School Musical: The Musical or whatever it's called recently had one.
In 1989, Batman was my favorite movie. Twenty summers later, uh... not so much. But both score music-wise and production design-wise, the film remains one of the most impressive from that decade. Production designer Anton Furst's bleak vision of Gotham City won him an Oscar and was so pitch-perfect for this incarnation of Batman that DC incorporated the late Furst's architectural designs into the early '90s comics.
Here are several interesting photos and drawings from my well-preserved copy of the 1989 Batman Official Movie Souvenir Magazine, which I still like to occasionally leaf through even though the Pop Art-colored backgrounds and frothy late '80s fonts are a poor match with the photos from this darker-toned Batman movie--the mag looks like it was designed by the Saved by the Bell opening titles designer.
A visual effects crew member inspects the miniature Gotham set that was built for the Batwing attack sequence.
Was this where the Gotham Central police headquarters name and comic book series title came from?
