There have been a lot of compilations of album cover art, and they’re usually good for a flip-through but lack focus and insight. Planet Wax: Sci-Fi/Fantasy Soundtracks on Vinyl is in a whole other universe. Collecting the covers of sci-fi and fantasy soundtracks, Aaron Lupton and Jeff Szpirglas’s new book has a specific focus and is atypically enlightening.
Don’t be fooled by the way the art dominates the pages of this coffee-table book. You’ll still learn quite a bit about the music’s production and quality from writers with a strong musical vocabulary. They even went to the trouble of fleshing out their insights by conducting interviews with the likes of Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan-director Nicholas Meyer, Clash of the Titans-composer Laurence Rosenthal, Limahl of NeverEnding Story (and Kajagoogoo) fame, and Michele Gruska, who provided the voice of Sy Snootles in the unspoiled edition of Return of the Jedi, among others.
Lupton and Jeff Szpirglas are less interested in the images that overwhelm their pages, but that’s okay since the album covers are mostly square movie posters rather than unique pieces of art (there is the odd exception, such as a faux advert that is way too groovy to be wasted on the soundtrack of The Monster Squad). Of course, since sci-fi and fantasy are so visually imaginative, these are some of the best movie posters ever created. Robert McCall’s work for 2001: A Space Odyssey, Roger Kastel’s for The Empire Strikes Back, and Robert McGinnis’s for Barbarella remain endlessly engrossing, particularly when presented in a package as appealing as Planet Wax.
