spaceballs poster artwork

A painting of Lone Starr’s Eagle 5. It was creating by using an underlying photo of the spaceship which was then painted over, but there’s so much painting that you can’t really tell when looking at it. The space background is entirely hand-painted. It’s pretty big (24x20”). The top right area is in poor condition, as you can see. It spent a long time stored with the protective transparent layer, and at some point it wrecked the painting.

I won this at a Van Eaton auction, where a full set of paintings from the Spaceballs campaing was being offered, from the collection of Bill Wallen (pic of the other pieces below). After getting this, I asked my friend Bill McCloskey about it to know a bit more (Bill worked side by side at Intralink from ’82 to ’90. He and John Alvin were close friends. They worked on 69 campaigns, 48 of which became printed one-sheets).Turns out Bill identified this as a John Alvin work, but it's not signed so there's no actual proof of that.

I know there’s a few one-sheets that used the Eagle Five image, but I’ve checked, and that’s not this particular artwork, as there’s some minor differences. Bill told me this collection of portraits was created for advertising purposes and used in several places. He remembers they did a set of stamps (not the first time that happened with a Mel Brooks film), but I couldn’t find pics of that. This was also used, as far as I’ve seen, for the videoclub promotional “spaceballs: the mobile” design (pic below). More recently, the set of paintings was used on a Blu ray edition of the film (all but yogurt's and the princess).