Retro Sci-Fi: GIF Edition

Moebius did this flipbook-style animated sequence in his book Inside Moebius – at least, I think that's the title it's in, even though I didn't find it with a quick look through the edition that's available on Internet Archive. At any rate, someone on Tumblr recently put the sequence together into a gif.

Don't miss the tiny guy in the final frame!

Seeing that gif reminded that I've collected a handful of interesting gifs related to retro science fiction art, games, and film over the years. So I figured it was worth a newsletter taking a look at them all.

Hopefully this works in your inbox! If not, you can read this same post online here.

First up: Abel M'Vada created this gif.

It's a reinterpretation of Terry Hoff's original 1982 Atari 2600 box art for Star Raiders, which I just featured last week in my "looking out of spaceships" post. As you can see from that artwork, M'Vada rebuilt the entire scene for the gif.

Tumblr user moviesludge animated this Chris Moore illustration, originally used as a 1991 cover to The Sentinel, by Arthur C. Clarke.

The original, via HumanoidHistory:

I'm not sure who created this gif, but you might recognize the images from my 2023 art collection Worlds Beyond Time – they're both by Philippe Caza, originally done as covers for a two-volume edition of John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up.

I really love this next one. The original creator appears to have deleted their tumblr, but their original post was captioned "Scientifically inaccurate motion reading of a Mike Hinge illustration." I'd say it's about as scientifically accurate as the original illustration was!

This was Hinge's January 1973 cover to Amazing Science Fiction magazine.

I have no info on any context behind this version of Roger Dean's Yes logo, but it looks nice!

Here's a Tumblr gif from the 1994 game “Uchū no Kishi: Tekkaman Blade - Orbital Ring Dakkai Sakusen” for PC-98.

It's likely illustrated by Shigeki Kuhara (工原しげき), according to a fact-check from Downthetubes.

Here's a shot from a 1977 promo commercial for Electric Light Orchestra's "Out of the Blue" that animates Shusei Nagaoka's album art. From the Groovy Archives tumblr.

Nagaoka's original art wrapped around to the back, as well.

This Heinz Edelmann animation is amazing, although you can honestly see a better version of the full thing with sound on YouTube: It's the 36-second intro to Der Phantastische Film, a 1970 German TV program featuring classic and obscure horror and sci-fi movies.

This 1977 gif of a NASA clip showcasing their classic "worm" logo is also great.

Some more 70s animation worth checking out? Fantastic Planet, aka La Planète sauvage, 1973:

Wizards, 1977:

Heavy Metal, 1981 – using a scene from Angus McKie's graphic novel So Beautiful and So Dangerous.

"It was just like a fish. If it stayed very still, no one could see it. And then, this was the whole, I remember seeing it very clearly in my head, that, you think you’re looking at a rock just as if you were under the sea and then suddenly something moves and you realize that it’s an object." – Chris Foss on the Pirate Ship design for Jodorowsky’s Dune

However, if you're looking for the best and most ambitious animated gifs of illustrated work, check out Greg Rozeboom. He's done a bunch of impressive version of classic sci-fi scenes like the ones below.

You can reach him at grozanimate@gmail.com for animation work like this. (He's not paying me to say that, I swear! He just asked me nicely)

Cool Links and Music Rec: Age of Exploration - Utopian Scholastic Music Mix.

This is two hours of chill 90s/early 2000s world music, with a little on-theme 2020s retro lo-fi mixed in. It's a sequel to a similar great set that's also in the "Utopian Scholastic" microgenre, a "kitsch aesthetic based upon the visual identity of edutainment media produced from the late 1980s to late 1990s." Basically, this sounds like how a Millennial's elementary school library felt.

I'm not even super into that as a music genre (it's mostly a visual aesthetic), but this creator's mixes in particular have a sharp sense of time and place – one of the biggest elements that AI slop mixes miss the mark on. That, or I'm a sucker for this exact hyper-targeted nostalgia.

Here are my other favorite no-AI YouTuber DJs. Check them out. If you have any similar ones to recommend, drop a comment. Confused bi-Product of a Misinformed Culture, Deep Sea Current, SoulSearchAndDestroy, Ackerlady, Jason Sanders.

Next Time: Paying subscribers get a look at two very different yet complementary science fiction artists – Enki Bilal and Roy G. Krenkel.