The Gauntlet: Rare Japanese Poster Artwork

The Gauntlet: Rare Japanese Poster Artwork

There’s no doubt about it, when it comes to publicity material for an Eastwood movie - the Japanese market was always up there as some of the very best. A great deal of fans still find this stuff pretty hard to beat. For some reason, Japan always seemed to come up with something entirely different in their concept designs, something that was completely different to the U.S. market. A good example is The Gauntlet (1977), a big favourite among Eastwood fans. The Japanese market had already released some 3 different regular designs, only one of which featured that famous Frank Frazetta artwork. These 3 designs are featured on the dedicated Gauntlet page (here). However, it is only very recently that a couple of other very rare Japanese designs have surfaced, two posters in particular that had certainly escaped my attention - as well as many other fans. One was discovered purely by accident, which led me to a bit of deeper research and resulted in yet another extremely rare poster. I wanted to make sure these were genuine, and as far as I can find out, these were both official releases.

The first of these is an extremely unusual format design for the Japanese market - a 60” x 40” portrait design. The most common Japanese format is the portrait B2 poster (approx 28.5" x 20") - so this larger size was arguably used for some special events or special screenings of the movie. But again, it’s an incredibly striking design, and one that rarely surfaces on the various markets. 

The second recently discovered poster is the landscape format designed ‘Japanese transit poster’, also known as the Japanese Nakazuri size (B3 approx 14.0" X 20.0"). These transit posters were designed and displayed on various forms of transport such as trains, subways and buses. Again, these are not very common and very rarely appear on the open markets.

 

I thought these two posters deserved a post of their own, although I will be also adding them to the Gauntlet’s dedicated page. They are certainly very special, and again demonstrates just how good Japan were at marketing films back in the 1970’s. 

Below: The Landscape design B3 poster

Below: The portrait 60" x 40" design