Before leaving The Day the Earth Stood Still, I would like to mention one collectible I have. This is a limited edition (2500 pieces), hand signed by Robert Wise, laser disc presentation of the movie (below). It was released in 1995 and uses the 1994 reissue poster as cover art. It is presented in CLV format with a nice transfer of the movie with digital sound and included among other things a 24k gold CD with the Bernard Herrmann’s score. I still watch a fair number of movies on laser discs. I’m sad to say some of the earlier discs I purchased developed “laser rot” and are unwatchable. Fortunately, although I was an early adopter of Laser Disc technology I was not the earliest. Many of the earliest laser discs suffered decay. Many of the best movie titles had special editions released on laser discs with wonderful promotional materials. I plan to discuss them in a future article.
I’d like to touch back on the point I made in the article of the month about posters with similar images printed by different methods. In a related way, sometimes reissue posters, though less valuable than originals, and printed using the same technology are more visually striking possibly due to the particular dyes employed. The classic example is the original and re-issue poster for Invaders from Mars. Printed in 1953 and 1955 respectively. These are essentially identical posters save for the Edward Alperson’s name which appears yellow in the original with blue color credits (below-left poster) and white with teal color credits (below-right poster) in the re-issue. The images in the re-issue poster are much more vivid. Compare the woman’s red dress in both images. Now in this case the price differential between original and re-issue is not huge. If I were buying this poster for display purposes I would purchase the re-issue.