The Black Hole Comic Book Ad

The Black Hole has always humored me as a Disney film. After passing on the opportunity to distribute Star Wars, Mickey was sure he had a Star Wars-sized hit with The Black Hole. It was pretty much the first movie from Walt Disney Productions that really strayed away from "the Disney formula" quite a bit and just didn't feel like a Disney picture. Even though it's quite different from the studio's earlier products, it was still marketed just like every other highly-anticipated Disney flick. So even though there were Disney firsts like mild profanity and on-screen death, you could still buy your share of Black Hole action figures, Black Hole lunch boxes and (in my case) Black Hole pajamas. Here we have an in-house ad from Whitman Comics for their adaptation of the 1979 science-fiction flick. There was also a Sunday comics adaptation that appeared in newspapers to hype the film. The comic strip version has recently been reprinted in Disney's Comic Zone Digest.