This week is Back to the Future week on the Cavalcade of Awesome to celebrate the 25th Anniversary of the original Back to the Future movie on July 3. Today we look at the Back to the Future Souvenir Magazine.
In the ’80s it was fairly common practice to release souvenir magazines and books with the release of big tent pole movies. These magazines would provide story details, lots of movie stills and some behind the scenes info to help promote the movie. Along with these magazines studios would release poster books as well as novelizations. Movies like Aliens, Rambo, Superman II, Star Trek IV, Gremlins and many others received both souvenir magazines and poster magazines. As an example, I myself have the 1989 Tim Burton Batman official souvenir magazine (see above) as well as the movie novelization. I also have the James Cameron directed Aliens movie magazine (to be used in a future article). Shawn on Branded in the 80s did a great writeup on the Goonies Official Souvenir Magazine. The Goonies magazine that Shawn talked about was a goldmine of deleted scenes and concepts as you can see here. The Aliens and Batman magazines I have don’t have as much behind the scenes or deleted scenes depicted in the many, many movie stills within.
Anyway, talking about movie souvenir magazines, today I want to take a look at the Back to the Future Souvenir Magazine.
Released in the Summer of 1985, this was used to promote the movie’s release (as all souvenir magazines tend to do). I bought it off the rack at our local Western Supermarket because I loved the movie (which I literally saw 10 times in the theater). However, my copy was read so often it literally disintegrated in my hands after a few years. It took me a while, but I finally was able to replace my copy with a new, very near mint copy (including the poster!).
As you can see, the cover is nice and bright with a great image of the Drew Struzan poster art. It’s interesting to note that the logo for the movie on this magazine is missing the light blue outline that can be found on the finished theatrical poster. It makes for a visual difference and I like it.
Cavalcade of Awesome 