Danny writes:
The “teal” Empire Strikes Back re-release poster from 1982 (ESB R82) has always been a mystery. This variant has a light blue background instead of the normal dark blue color. It has a 10 star rating in Sansweet and Vilmur’s The Star Wars Poster Book denoting it as both extremely rare and highly desirable to collectors.
Informal polling of fellow collectors and perusing auction house history, I estimate that there are about 25 examples floating around the collecting community. By comparison, Star Wars theatrical posters sent to theaters number in the hundreds or even thousands.
No one knows why these posters were created or where they came from. Over the years, I’ve heard several theories tossed around including “a printing press contractor for the National Screen Service (NSS) in Texas accidentally punched the wrong color code for the blue background” or that this was a test print that was rejected “after studio people (including likely George Lucas) saw this poster, they did not like the color at all, and immediately changed it to a dark blue.”
In conversations with long time Star Wars poster collectors, I’ve heard their first hand accounts how they purchased their examples. I’ve heard that many of these posters were purchased from Jerry Ohlinger's Movie Memorabilia Store in New York City. A legendary collector claims that circa 1989, Mr. Ohlinger “had a roll of about 10 to 15” of these posters. Another told me that he bought two copies from REMEMBER WHEN in Dallas and that Mr. Ohlinger was one of that store’s suppliers. This probably explains why so many were found in Texas.
Before I start, here is a quick primer on offset printing techniques used to make vintage theatrical Star Wars posters.
Most vintage Star Wars posters were printed using four different printing plates; one for each of these colors: Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, and blacK which we often abbreviate CMYK. Additionally, these plates are printed using a process called halftone. Instead of printing the ink in a continuous span, the colors are printed as series of small dots with spaces in between. These spaces are small enough that from normal viewing distance our eyes blend the dots together in an optical illusion as if it were continuous. The spaces between the dots allow for room for the other color plates to put their ink dots in and our eyes blend the different inks together to make all the colors of the rainbow. Printing all these different color dots in a checkerboard like pattern can cause weird optical illusions as the overlapping grids produce interference called a moiré pattern. By printing the different plates at different angles the moiré pattern is reduced and when looking under magnification, you can see these differently angled dot patterns clump the dots together into what looks like little bouquets of roses which are referred to as rosettes.
Finally, on the edges of the poster, there are guide marks to help the printer line up the plates correctly and there is often a color bar on at least one side showing the plates that were printed running all along the poster. The printers use these guide marks and color bars to make sure that all the plates are aligned correctly and that the colors are consistently printed across the whole poster. These color bars are cut off before the poster is sent to theaters so only a few, if any, uncut posters escape from the printing facility.
As a catch-all term, we use the term “test print” to refer to these snuck out posters that never made it to the theaters. They could be left over posters from a proof run/press check, or they could be a test printing to see how the posters look at various sizes and colors. Since these test prints were never meant to be seen outside the printing facility, sometimes, to save paper, some test prints have a different poster on the back.
Sadly, there are currently no ESB R82 test prints with the color bars still attached known to exist.
Recently, I acquired one of these “teal” posters and discovered several new things that either have never been noticed before or have never been publicly revealed.
Each NSS printing facility uses a slightly different Graphic Arts Union (GAU) logo. While the GAU logos on these “teal” posters are a bit blurry, it has the logo for the Cleveland location and not Dallas. Therefore, contrary to popular belief, these posters did not originate from the Dallas NSS facility.
When I examined this “teal” poster, I immediately realized why this poster is light blue. I think the answer is so obvious that perhaps to increase the mystique or try to obfuscate the origin, these posters are referred to as “teal.” But this blue background isn’t teal, which has a greenish blue color; this poster’s color is actually aqua. What’s another name for the color aqua? Cyan!
Yes my friends, this is just plain cyan. Examining the light blue color with a jeweler's loupe you will see it’s just printed half tones of pure cyan without any other color printed there.
Full-tone Versus Halftone
That’s not the only other difference. The production version has a deep red border around the artwork. In the “teal” version, this border is white. I own several dark blue R82 posters and one of them has an interesting feature where several spots of this red border’s ink are missing. Furthermore, on the back are also red splotches of ink in the same red color. I realized this meant the posters were stacked while this red ink was still wet and some of the ink transferred onto the poster next on the stack. This is why mine has ink on the back (from the poster that was originally stacked underneath) and missing some of its red border which must have been transferred to the back of the poster on top.
I didn’t think much of it at the time but it was strange that only the border was wet. I also didn’t consider that this ink was red but there is no red plate, the closest color on a regular poster printing plate is magenta.
Reverse of same poster showing dark red ink staining from other poster with same issues
When I look at the normal dark blue version of this poster, the center artwork has rosette dot patterns of the four CMYK plates as expected, however both the dark blue AND the red border do not have rosette patterns. Instead, these colors are printed in a full-tone completely covering the area spread like cream cheese schmeared on a bagel.
Several other Star Wars posters, including the ESB Advance (floating Vader head), the ESB R81 and the ROTJ Style B posters, used an extra color for their titles to make the posters pop. The R81 uses a yellow color for the title, while the ESB Advance and the ROTJ use a silver color. We have test print examples of each of these posters with and without this extra title color. On the test prints for the ROTJ Style B poster for example, there is an extra silver bar adjacent to the normal CMYK bar. Since the titles would be filled in with only this extra color, there are two interesting features to note:
1) Since the title areas are not colored by the normal four plates, they don’t waste ink filling in that area beforehand. Therefore, on test prints that are missing this extra title color, the title areas only show the plain white paper stock. These are what we call the “white title” versions.
Finally, the clincher. I also happen to own a normal dark R82 poster that has a slight mis-registration of the plates and in the top corner you can see some cyan peeking out underneath the full dark blue ink.
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