It’s no secret that Paxton and I love the Young Guns flicks, I mean just give our double feature a listen (part 1 & part 2), but we share another deep seated love in common, movie novelizations! Between the two of us I think we own like 90% of the novelizations and tie-ins published between 1970-1995 (here’s Pax’s collection and here’s mine, at least what I’ve scanned so far…) Back in the day these books were amazing because for a while they were one of the only ways to relive these movies because either the flicks weren’t available on home video or there were a lot of us didn’t own VCRs yet. Not only that, but since these book were typically written in tandem with the release of the flicks, the authors only had a copy of the scripts to base their work and more often than not there were deleted scenes and plots that were included. These novelizations are treasure troves of material like this and Pax and I have both been trying to track as many of these down as we can over the years.
Not all movies tended to get adaptations, but a lot did, so and there are a handful of flicks over the years that were never made into books that are truly surprising. Topping both mine and Paxton’s lists of un-adapted books are the Young Guns flicks. These are exactly the kind of films that were typically adapted, action packed genre stories starring some of the era’s biggest stars. Well, recently Pax and I spent some time working on a project creating a set of digital vintage style trading cards for both Young Guns flicks (another piece of merchandising these films were robbed of back in the 80s) and we had so much fun we decided we should also collaborate on making some awesome covers for Young Guns mass-market paperback novelizations that totally should have existed…
After working on these book covers both Pax and I were kind of filled with a mix of yearning and sadness. Both of us would kill to have copies of these on our mutual bookshelves!
As I mentioned above, we also collaborated on a couple of vintage Topps-style Young Guns trading cards. When creating those sets we not only envisioned the cards, but also the wax wrappers they were sold in…
We envisioned these cards in two sets with continuous numbering…
We recently shared both sets on our sites, Branded in the 80s and the Cavalcade of Awesome, but we thought it would be fun to share some special chase cards and variants here….
So if you want to collect them all, head on over to Branded and the Cavalcade and snag ’em!
I always felt that only the written word could accurately capture the feel of Gleaming the Cube.
LOL, you know, I would read the everliving hell out of that book. Right after I read the novelizations of Rad, Thrashin’, and North Shore. Seriously, I would love to have a book of that…
Along those lines a novelization of Airborne would be kind of hilarious. But I’d probably get tired of reading “Brah” every other sentence.
Narrated all from the perspective of Seth Green
Woh! Sneak peak of the Young Guns II set!! I love these images so much. #tear
I super stoked we willed these into some sort of existence…
So be honest… have you printed off a copy of this and glued it to the cover of an existing book so you can pretend?
No…BUT I AM NOW!!!!!!!!!!!
Nope, I’ve never done anything like that, nope, never…