Cover stories

One long-planned feature for my pages on the film Things to Come has been a database of commercial cine film and video releases, both official and not so official, and I've finally got round to making a start on it here. Considering the major (to put it mildly) issues about the lost footage from the film, there's a certain unintentional humour in the wildly different running times quoted on the various releases, despite what version is actually on the tape/disc. The most extreme, ironically, was the first pre-recorded tape of the film I ever bought, that put out by Central Video in 1987. It claimed a length of "approx 108 minutes," but sadly turned out to be the "standard" 92m 42s version, running to 89m exactly due to PAL speed-up. Oh well...

The picture seen here, incidentally, was the first incarnation of the Network DVD cover, as seen on Play in the weeks before the release date, which I quite like. Although probably unintentional, there's a nice echo of the way early posters for the film turned the Space Gun capsule into a rocket, by portraying the huge propellor-drive Basra Bombers as jet aircraft!