Friday 28 October 2011

Under The Influence - 3





Zipping forward now to the late 70's.
I'm in college, and borderline obssesed with Blakes 7, as here we have a weekly TV show with adult, serious SF drama.
With great looking craft to go with it...
Only not.
Didn't realise until the series finally came out on video that my memory was cheating me - what looked good on a B/W portable at the time sure didn't look as good when seeing it in colour on a regualr screen.
And memory massively cheated in this case as, at the same time series 1 and 2 were airing, i was also semi-obsssesed by the "Terran Trade Authority" books of the likes seen here.
Inside you had glorious A4 reproductions of stunning 70's Sf art of the likes of Chris Foss and Peter Elson.
All accompanied by an awful lot of text, which was pretty good and pretty fun when the author couldn't think of a suitable backstory for a painting, so time and time again was labelled "unknown space wreck".
Didn't matter though - i had Blakes 7 on the telly, Empire Strikes Back at the pictures and these books at home to give me insperation for my scratchbuilds.
Didn't matter that they were crap, i was inspired.

3 comments:

Will Wright said...

Are those the books that insprired Space1999?

Mangamax said...

Well, the books came out from '78, so they weren't a direct inspiration.
But, being collections of artwork done for SF novels over the previous decade or so, reckon they could well be.

WQRobb said...

I have that first one, and love it.