Small Soldiers

Toy action figures come to life and do battle in SMALL SOLDIERS, with a suburban neighborhood caught in the middle.

When newspapers were the most popular way to find movies at local theaters, movie studios generated a large amount of new artwork for newspaper ads. These ads would change weekly to maintain interest weeks after a film’s release. The highest number of people to see a movie’s key art would be as a small black and white ad in their local newspaper. In larger markets, those ads in the Sunday paper were upgraded to full page color ads, large inserts, and other promos.

For Small Soldiers, many of the ads centered around the toy soldiers. This promo poster had the soldiers re-creating the iconic “Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima” photograph. I had mixed feelings about this obvious parody, especially since the toy soldiers were the villains in the movie. This composition was created by taking parts of each soldier for a large selection of images in order to “Frankenstein” this pose together from many different elements.