You probably read my post a few weeks ago celebrating my love of Heavy Metal illustrated fantasy magazine, my love affair with it having begun in my tweens from an enabling 7-11 clerk.

Well, I’ve been getting reacquainted with my old treasures in-between current novel and comics reading projects, and I forgot how, especially in the early years of the magazine, Heavy Metal ran ads for albums and movies which became legends of their time and forevermore. 

We’re talking classic rock albums like Rush’s Moving Pictures, the Scorpions’ Blackout and Meat Loaf’s Dead Ringer. Okay, so Dead Ringer is hardly one of Meat Loaf’s critical gems, but it’s no surprise Epic Records took an ad here, since its cover was done by famed horror and fantasy artist Berni Wrightson. Wrightson being a standard at Heavy Metal in its pages and its 1981 animated film.

What really slayed me was the full-page ads for some of my all-time favorite movies: Blade Runner, Excalibur, the original Conan the Barbarian, Twilight Zone: The Movie, even the first Vacation film. Again, no surprise in the latter case, which ran a two-page spread with Chevy Chase as a nutty yuppie champion of the wasteland theme. The recognizable movie poster was helmed by fantasy art royal, Boris Vallejo, whose covers for Heavy Metal were always mandatory pickups for me.

I confess to being a nostalgic sap while taking cautious steps forward, but even TJ will tell you I got all extra sappy uncorking these advertisements from my youth. 

Sidebar, I was able to get my hands on these adult-oriented comic magazines at age 12 in 1982, but nobody would take me to see Blade Runner because of its R-rating. My mouth hung agape when I spotted Harrison Ford in that ad in Heavy Metal, being a total freak for Han Solo. Blade Runner became an immediate obsession I never got to satiate until seeing it on VHS at age 15. 

Funny to think I was delving into sci-fi softcore porn but denied entry to a hard-edged sci-fi noir film. Seeing my dismay, however, my grandfather bought me a Blade Runner movie magazine as a consolation prize. 

Check ’em out:

–Ray Van Horn, Jr.