Welcome back to this week's look at Heritage's Sunday night movie poster auction! Each week Heritage auctions off some truly unique finds across all movie genres, such as movie serials, animation, science fiction, romance, and more. Each week I find a few gems that could be overlooked! Here are my pics for this week's unique finds!
While each week we focus on movie posters, every once in a while something really cool pops up. In this case, this is a real poster, of a fictional character's mayoral race in 1992's Batman Returns. This prop poster can be seen in the movie in several scenes. Danny DeVito's portrayal of The Penguin / Oswald Cobblepot was iconic and scared the daylights out of me as a child. While Batman Returns was panned for being marketed as a kid's movie (hello, those specific McDonald's Happy Meals) it was an important film to me as a child. Afterall, Michelle Pfieffer's Catwoman was incredible.
Heritage notes this poster as being unrestored but having general wear. This would be an incredible display piece for Batman fans, or fans of the great Danny DeVito! These do pop up for sale every so often. One sold for $12,500 in March 2024.
It's purely coincidental that an Easter Parade poster would be in an auction that's ending on Easter 2024. Starring Judy Garland and Fred Astaire, Easter Parade was a 1948 musical with music by Irving Berlin. The movie would go on to be the highest-grossing musical movie of the year, and one of MGM's best of the decade. The movie won an Academy Award for Best Scoring of a Musical Picture, as well as an award for Best Written American Musical from the Writers Guild of America Awards.
This unrestored poster is beautiful with bright, vibrant colors. Heritage notes that there are signs of use, including light edge and corner wear. This poster will still display well and would make a great decoration for any Easter (or spring!) gathering.
Honky Tonk Girl Mack Enterprises
This poster grabbed me because of its color scheme, as well as the time frame. However, finding anything about this movie - which is also known as Hitchhike to Hell - is not very easy. This early exploitation film doesn't deliver on the tagline, "It's Adult Fun" as much as it talks about it. Every review I can find on it says the movie is bad. Which is a shame, since this poster is downright terrific. The other posters for this movie are much more salacious, but the simplicity of this poster is very eye-catching.
Heritage notes this unrestored poster as having an overall presentable appearance. These types of exploitation posters are a great find, especially one that's nearing antiquity. The last time a similar poster was up for auction was in March 2010, when it sold for $119.
London After Midnight remains the piece of lost media that I would give almost anything to see. A small part of me hopes that the film will turn up in someone's private collection, and the world will finally be able to see the Lon Chaney film. There have been reconstructions of the film using stills found in magazines, lobby cards, promotional stills, and whatever else is still available. There was a 1935 remake called Mark of the Vampire starring Bela Lugosi, which was received better than London After Midnight. The original lost film has become almost a myth, with a strong cult following. Even if the original wasn't a great movie, it would still be a delight to see a complete copy. Unfortunately, the only known copy was lost in the 1965 MGM vault fire.
This poster, from the 2000s, is a beautiful recreation of the original poster. Heritage did sell the only known original poster in existence for $478,000.00 to Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett. The poster was on display as a part of the It's Alive! temporary exhibit at the Royal Ontario Museum in 2019. I was lucky enough to see the exhibit in Summer 2019 and was taken aback by the poster. At the time the gravity of what it was had not yet crossed my radar - instead, I was openly weeping in front of the original Metropolis poster.
