80s Newspaper Ads

During the late 1970s I saved clippings of various genre ads from the newspaper and magazines. After a hiatus of several years I resumed the practice during the early 1980s. There was quite an explosion of sf and fantasy films during this time period, some good, some bad, but all undeniably awesome.

70s Newspaper Ads

Round about 1978 I started clipping movie ads from newspapers and pasting them into scrapbooks. It seems that I lost interest after a few months, but I did end up with about two books full of ads for a healthy sprinkling of late 70s movies, including:

Star Wars! These ads are for the summer 1978 re-release. My parents weren't huge movie buffs, and my Mother in particular had an aversion to theaters, so movie night for our family was fairly rare and typically occurred at the drive-in. (Often at the Auto-Sky or Airport drive-in, which you'll see referenced in several of these ads.) Such was the case for Star Wars, which I saw for the first time in 1978 at the drive-in. Not exactly Dolby Digital IMAX, but for this particular 9-year old it didn't take away from the magic one bit.

I also remember seeing Battlestar Galactica at the drive-in. According to Professor Google, the film was released in Canada in July 1978, a few months before the premiere of the television series. The Canadian release was a 125-minute edit of the TV pilot; the full 148-minute pilot aired 17 September 1978 on TV. I started a diary in January 1979, and I see that I also watched the TV series pretty faithfully -- it aired at 8PM Sunday in Ottawa. I also caught the 2nd iteration of the show, re-titled Galactica 1980; for example my 3 February 1980 diary entry indicates that I watched Part 2 of the (3-part) premiere.


I'm fairly sure that I didn't see Close Encounters during its theatrical release, but that didn't stop me from snipping a few ads. The film was released in November 1977, but these ads are clearly from 1978 since they tout its Academy Award wins.


Here's a film that I definitely did not see at the time, and still have not seen to this day. Captain Internet tells me that I'm not missing much!

In addition to those above, I also saved ads from:

• Capricorn One
• The Swarm
• Damien Omen II
• Heaven Can Wait
• Jaws 2
• Coma
• The Cheap Detective
• Grease
• Saturday Night Fever
• The Norseman (starring Lee Majors)
• The Buddy Holly Story
• The Bad News Bears Go To Japan
• International Velvet
• The Goodbye Girl
• Revenge of the Pink Panther
• Corvette Summer (starring Mark Hamill)
• Foul Play
• Eyes of Laura Mars