Rejected Reefer Madness live posters
Added 2019-09-12 19:14:19 +0000 UTCHowdy folks,
Your future friend Erik here with a special message on this 4/20 (or "20th April", depending on which side of the Atlantic you're on).
Since today is typically used as an excuse for making "marihuana" puns, I thought it might be fun to show something that few have seen until now.
Back in 2010, as we were gearing up for our second year of RiffTrax Live shows, we began working with Fathom to create key art for the Reefer Madness show, happening in August. We "borrowed" the title treatment from Legend Films' DVD of the movie (which Legend had colorized and released earlier, with Mike Nelson's solo commentary — since Legend still owned RiffTrax at that point, it was totally fine) and we used it for our theatrical lobby poster.
Well, it turns out, theater chains had an issue with putting images or references to drugs on their lobbies' posters, so we had to come up with a clever way of "censoring" the imagery to make it acceptable.
Here for you, then, is a triptych of the original poster, and two of the "censored" variations we came up with. The final version is different from all three; in the end, we were allowed to use the word "Reefer" but without any leaf, smoke, etc.
BONUS! Here's a rejected trivia slide that is somewhat relevant, given the context.
Oddly enough, this slide was accepted as part of our original Night of the Living Dead show, but was rejected for last year's rebroadcast! Somebody's smokin' something, am I right?!
Thanks again for all of your support, DripTraxians! More good stuff coming your way soon, so stay tuned!
Yours in Riffing,
Erik "The Web"
