As Matt Haber observed last week, the cover of Radar’s September/October issue was art directed by George Lois, the advertising genius who created dozens of classic Esquire covers between 1962 and 1972. The new Radar cover is a parody of a Lois Esquire creation that caused a big controversy in early 1968.

Here’s what no one’s noticed yet: For some time now, George Lois has been happily recycling his old Esquire covers for a bunch of other magazines. The one below is on the newsstand right now. Click on the image to see the Lois original.

[This post originally contained two more George Lois riffs, but I don’t think they worked as well as the one above, so I took them down…]

(Go to this page for more stuff like this.)

That primary-colored magazine you’ve seen floating out of your local newsstand this past week is the American debut of OK!, a lighter-than-air British import filled with sundry piffle about various B- and C-list celebrities. More interesting than anything inside the magazine is the three-word phrase that runs along the top of the cover:

It’s certainly a premiere issue. And if you’re comfortable postulating the existence of a human being who keeps a permanent stash of landfill-destined celebrity magazines, I suppose you could also call it a collector’s issue. But “Premiere Collector’s Issue”? The phrase can only mean two things: “an issue for premiere collectors” or “the first in a series of collector’s issues.” It might literally be true that this issue marks the beginning of a sequence of OK! collector’s issues, but I’m pretty confident that’s not what the editors were intending to proclaim: “Hey, all you collector’s issue lovers, check it out! Have we got a collector’s issue for you! And if you love this debut collector’s issue, you’ll also enjoy our future collector’s issues, which are forthcoming!”

Paperdoll Heaven is “an online celebrity dress up game for girls (and boys) of all ages. The original idea was to provide an entertaining game for girls which wouldn’t contain any of the contents that is usually associated with games directed to boys. There just weren’t too many games for girls. We want to offer a clean and good enviroment for girls to spend time with. … We get visitors from all around the world, most of them are of course girls of ages between 5-20.”

There are individual pages for dozens of celebrities, everyone from Eminem and Bjork to Ashton Kutcher, Kelly Osbourne, and the Olsen Twins. At the beginning of each “game,” the celebrity is wearing nothing more than skimpy underwear or negligee; you play by dragging clothes from the hangers and placing them on the appropriate part of the celebrity’s anatomy. That’s the concept, anyway.

Here is my favorite, Camilla Parker-Bowles. Hubba hubba!

The creeps at Bad Touch Weekly have put Michael Jackson on the cover again. This must be BTW’s sixth or seventh Jacko cover in a row. Jeez.

I was going through some unopened mail today and came across a direct-mail pitch from a fledgling magazine. I don’t know how long this sealed envelope had been sitting in my apartment, but I decided to slice it open and check it out. The pitch is made up of several different components, including a letter from the publisher that is so flattering it made me blush. In his letter, the nice publisher assures me that “only a select few will receive this exclusive invitation.” I have been chosen for this offer, he explains, because I am someone “with a curious nature, an acute sense of style, a level of sophistication that matches our own, and a quick and agile wit. … Someone who appreciates good conversation, great writing, and exquisite design.” I don’t know how he knows these things about me, but of course he’s right. Well, okay, I don’t know how sophisticated they are, so I don’t know if their sophistication level matches mine. But the other flattering statements are definitely true.

Anyway, it looks like this magazine is totally filled with celebrities and stuff, so I’m sure it’s awesome. Below is the most elaborately designed component of the pitch; it’s a foldout, so it has built-in suspense. I love all these wacky facial expressions—they totally make this magazine seem so much more fun and sophisticated than all those other magazines that fawn over celebrities:

And then, when you open the final fold, you get this:

[Continue reading "Direct-Mail Time Capsule"...]

I’m in L.A. for vacation this week, so posting will probably be a bit light until about April 18.

I tend not to get too excited by celebrity sightings, because I’m, y’know, cool and stuff, but last night I had a good one: I was sitting at the counter at Fred 62, a cool diner in Los Feliz, and a few seats away from me were two of the young actresses from Arrested Development: Alia Shawkat, who plays Maeby Fünke, and Mae Whitman, who plays Ann, George Michael Bluth’s girlfriend. Arrested Development is so much better than almost anything on television these days, so I’m still a little giddy about this sighting. I love that show.

Hey, check it out, a new magazine:

I did this one in Quark.

(See more stuff like this via the magazine covers tag.)

This two-minute video curiosity is sophomoric and mean, but it’s also pretty entertaining. In December 1993, Michael Jackson videotaped an anguished public statement addressing the disturbing allegations that were then starting to swirl around him. At some point afterward, someone with access to video editing equipment twisted Jackson’s bizarre statement into an even more bizarre exercise in self-incrimination and self-abasement.

I have no idea who made this or when it was made. As usual, it’s from one of my Media Shower tapes.

(If you want to link to this, please link to this post, not to the file itself. Thanks!)

Pea-brained thespian Sylvester Stallone has a new magazine out. Who would’ve guessed they’d go with such an allusive design?

I reverse-engineered this in Photoshop this time—not in Quark, as I usually do. Here is the real cover of Sly.

[Not sure what this is all about? Some insight can be gleaned here.]

You can see more stuff like this via the magazine covers tag.

Nothing interesting can be said of Paris Hilton, the mantis-like creature who represents celebrified Homo sapiens in its purest form. Except this: One of her aunts is Kim Richards, the ’70s child star who appeared in such fine cultural offerings as No Deposit, No Return, James at 15, and, most significant, Escape to Witch Mountain, the classic 1975 Disney flick about two badass kids with magic powers. Richards’s character, Tia, was the Buffy of the 1970s preadolescent set. Also noteworthy is the fact that Escape’s villains were played by Ray Milland and Donald Pleasence, which is just awesome. (The villains in the 1978 sequel, Return From Witch Mountain, were played by Bette Davis and Christopher Lee, which is also just awesome.)

And what of Ike Eisenmann, the young boy who played Tony, Tia’s brother? In 2002, he directed and co-wrote a short movie called The Blair Witch Mountain Project, a Blair Witch parody and nostalgia exercise that features appearances by several actors who had roles in Escape to Witch Mountain:

In the 13-minute-long production, filmmaker Blair Billingsly (played by actress Hope Levy) seeks out members of the Witch Mountain casts and visits various locations where the movies were shot in a quest to uncover why, more than 20 years after their initial release, the pictures remain so popular. As she encounters many of the actors, she becomes increasingly obsessed with finding Tony and Tia, the two “alien” children who starred in the features. At one point, she even interviews famed celebrity biographer J. Randy Taraborrelli (author of Michael Jackson: The Magic and the Madness and Sinatra: Behind the Legend, among other books).

You can watch The Blair Witch Mountain Project here. It’s cute but, um, not so good.