Saturday, August 21, 2010

Vigilante- 1947 Columbia Pictures Cliffhanger Serial Ad Campaign Mat






I'm a HUGE fan of Greg Saunders, the Golden Age Vigilante...have been since I was a kid and read All-Star Squadron #29, which was Roy Thomas and Jerry Ordway's re-telling of the origin of the Seven Soldiers of Victory. Love, love, love the character. Probably my favorite DC character of all time.

I'm also a HUGE fan of the now-bygone cinematic format of the cliffhanger serial. One of the things that has always made me sad is that the 1947 Columbia Pictures serial based on the character has never been made available in any form of home video format, be it VHS or DVD. Gray market bootleg copies of the serial have existed since the 1980s on VHS, and recently I discovered someone had made digital video file transfers from one of these VHSs, so those are floating around out there in bittorrent land, for those interested and devoted enough to find them....

Well, on a whim, I stop by a local home having a yardsale, and discover a cardboard box containing old lobbycards and advertising campaign "mats" (studio marketting used to send out press packets to newspapers around the country containing these, which were basically ad copy to be used by local theatres to promote releases)....and this is what I found for one measley dollar....

It must be for a re-release of the serial, because it's copyright dated 1957....but, still...for a Vigilante fan like myself...it felt like fate had led me to that box.


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