Iteration of a classic tube girl theme

This is a tube girl in this Japanese-language gallery while I was researching another post. What made the illustration stand out for me was its internalization of a classic tube-girl trope. You see, back in the days-that-would-have-been-bad-but-at-least-we-had-pulp-magazines, we often encountered illustrations like this one, which I posted on 14 August 2017: or this one, which I posted on 3 April 2017: or finally this one, which I posted on 14 October 2016:

Notice the common theme? The artists working at that time couldn’t depict nudity (at least, not without running into legal and commercial problems), so putting girls in tubes gave them a way of implying nudity, but putting having the naughty bits concealed by metal rings that were presumably part of the tube’s construction, or occasionally steam or bubbles that were part of the “experiment” she was undergoing.

I doubt that the artist who made the primary illustration in this post faced any such constraints, but the glowing rings around our girl seem like a neat tribute to the older tradition. Provenance is very uncertain, but there is at least a version of the illustration that has captions, if any of you read Japanese.

At least she floats

This slightly-squicky (but thematically appropriate) tube-girl image is a reblog from a 26 December 2018 post at Infernal Wonders. Provenance is a bit obscure in spite of the signature and date in the lower right-hand corner as I can’t OCR them or otherwise reproduce them in a machine-readable format. However some searches indicate that the artist goes by the name of “acerbi.” There is a gallery available at this site (warning: pop-ups/unders), and at least one of the images is thematically similar, and perhaps somewhat less squicky.

Up Up And Away

disembodied monster carrying a girl

This disembodied monster carrying off a pretty girl is from a movie poster concept painting by Jack Thurston for the 1966 (1967 in US) movie “It!” According to this page from an auction site:

19×23″ Crescent illustration board has 10.25×16.75″ tall image area painted in tempera and signed in lead pencil at lower right “Thurston”. Striking image of Swamp Thing type character carrying terrified blond wearing only slip towards viewer. Art is bright and Exc. and extremely well done. Lower right side has small pencil note “Bill Gold Charlie Gold Agency For Warner Bros”. Note refers to poster designer Bill Gold who became head of poster design at Warner Bros. in 1947 and opened “B G Charles” with his brother to do movie promotion with Charles in Los Angeles and Bill in New York City. The 1966 film “It!” was made by Seven Arts Productions for Warner Bros and features the Golem of Prague as its main subject. The film starred Roddy McDowall, Jill Haworth, and Paul Maxwell. Herbert Leder was producer, the screenwriter and director of the film. He also directed other movies including “The Frozen Dead” in 1966. See previous item #2103. The film was first released in Great Britain in 1966 and released in the U.S. in 1967 when Seven Arts Productions acquired Warner Bros. communications company. It was released as a double bill with “The Frozen Dead” and became available on home video in 2008. Author Theodore Sturgeon did a sci-fi story titled “It” for the August 1940 issue of “Unknown” about a swamp creature roaming the country side and destroying everything in its path. Born in 1919, Jack Thurston served during WWII as a sculptor doing scale models of enemy terrain. He was an art director in Rochester and besides movie posters has also done numerous illustrations for book covers. The Jack Thurston iconic poster art of Raquel Welch in “One Million B.C.” from 1966 sold at auction for $77,675 in 2008. A superbly done painting.

poster art concept painting

An actual promotional photo from the movie seems… somewhat less terrifying, as you might expect from a film about the most terrifying thing you’ll ever hope to get when you put a bunch of rabbis in a room and ask them to do dark magic:

carried away by a golem

There’s a page in German here that tracks and displays half a dozen different pulp-magazine and movie-industry uses of the Thurston artwork, which doesn’t itself appear to have have ever been used to advertise the movie for which it was created. My favorite is probably this appearance of just the head on the front of an edition of Famous Monsters of Filmland, which of course this critter manifestly never was and never got to be. Anything to sell magazines, right?

not a famous monster of filmland, but got impersonated by a golem once

This post is a reblog with added provenance from a 16 November 2013 post at Infernal Wonders. The original image source at that time was the now long-gone and greatly-missed tumblr The World Of Doctor Orloff! (A very incomplete copy may be viewed in the Internet Archive.)

Occult ingestion

A tender morsel is ingested by the tentacle monster

We present another pendant illustration to Bait, this our second illustration by Faustus Crow. There’s a great depth of occult symbolism in this illustration, but rather than pedantically spell it out, I invite you to gaze on it for a while and interpret.

If you’re interested in Faustus Crow’s work you can find a blog by him here (“Faustus Crow: Shaman Chaos Magick”) and a book website here (“Goetia Girls”). If you want a list of his books you can buy there is one at Goodreads or you can just search for his name at Amazon. You can also, as I do, support his extraordinary art on Patreon.

Creative Commons License
The illustration above is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Please keep in mind that any moral rights the artist has remain intact under this license.

Ascent, With Girl

girls girls girls movie poster

As is self-evident from the artwork, this is a movie poster for a movie called Girls Girls Girls. Somewhat difficult to research due to a 1962 Elvis Presley movie by the same name, the poster refers to an entirely different movie, the details of which are tricky to pin down.

The most comprehensive and detailed (ha!) information on this Girls Girls Girls movie comes from German-language DVD seller Tabu Film, which offers a postage-stamp view of the DVD clamshell art and a brief synopsis of the movie:

dvd art

Ein Sex-Road-Movie der Sonderklasse! Exklusive Drehorte, ungeheure Aufnahmen, ein Spitzenaufgebot neuer, wunderschöner und hemmungsloser Mädchen sowie eine Spitzenstory von Alan Vydra – das ist “Mädchen, Mädchen, Mädchen”!

The German machine-translates to:

A sex road movie of the special class! Exclusive filming locations, tremendous shots, a top cast of new, beautiful and unrestrained girls and a top story by Alan Vydra – that’s “girls, girls, girls”!

Tabu Film gives the production date as 1981. (However, I do note that the copyright date on the movie poster is 1979.)

Encylo Ciné (a French-language source) says that the movie was a hotbed of aliases and alternate titles, including Teenager In Love, Amies de papa (les), Deux Américaines à Paris, and Flocons d’amour. The Teenager In Love poster:

teenager in love movie poster

Although none of this is living up to the psychedelic disco alien space biker glory of the original poster, the new title leads us inexorably to videotape cover art and screenshot thumbnails:

teenager in love vhs box art teenager in love screencap thumbnails

What any of this has to do with striding above the fogs of the Golden Gate with an armload of blonde, I am powerless to say.

This image is a reblog from a 15 November 2013 post at Infernal Wonders. Its original source was a Tumblr named JD Kickstart: Bikes, Chicks, & Rock n’ Roll, now defunct but fragmentarily preserved by the Internet archive.