As I recall, my quest to locate all the bits that adorn Lister's jacket began in the early 1990s, on the day I was accompanied to Dillons bookstore on New Street in Birmingham (formally Midland Bank, latterly Waterstones, and presently an Apple store).
Walking up the steps to the raised ground floor, much to my budding delight, staff had carefully arranged a featured display – née treasure trove – of Red Dwarf publications, spanning the Official Companion to Primordial Soup. By then I was already a dedicated fan, and very fortunately, my mother kindly offered me the chance to take my own handful of tie-ins up to the till before we headed to the bus stop for home. Felt like Red Christmas.
Hours later, I remember excitedly pouring through those crisp pages – in particular, the large cast stills in the Companion that featured intriguing minutiae regarding the series' costumes. One item that required more than a soupçon of head-tilting was the large plastic keychain that hangs off the silver zip of Lister's screen-right breast pocket. With the three-dimensional nature of these types of holographs tricky to reproduce by regular printing methods, through squinted eyes I extrapolated some sort of vague, iridescent snowball at the heart of the image. And, wouldn't you know, thirty-odd years later, younger me has been proven entirely right.
This find was a particularly encouraging one, as, within the last year or so, I had found a similar keyring, also made by 'Prismatic, featuring a different design (that of the moon). On closer inspection, not only could I find that very same moon at the upper-right hand side of this artwork, but also a depiction of an astronaut found on another example that I subsequently picked up.
In terms of which episodes this item appears in, any from Series III, IV, and V that feature the jacket are deadlocks. From Series VII-onwards, the keyring appears to be tucked into the screen-right breast pocket, itself – why this is the case, I can only theorise. Distracting damage to the plastic, perhaps? Cadmium II exposure? Craig started using it to pick his ears clean with? The mind truly boggles at the distinct lack of possibilities.
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As I sought out more regarding the history of these holographs, I was fortunate enough to come into contact with Barclay Thompson (Managing Director, A.H. Prismatic), Ian Dayus (Sales Director, A.H. Prismatic), and John D. Brown (Chairman, Light Impressions International). They were kind enough to share these recollections...
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RICH: Pardon the pun, but could you start by shedding some light on how you guys came to work together, including the origins and initial aspirations for AH Prismatic?
I did some selling for them in the North-East in 1980 after Bachmann Chandeliers was sold and I was made redundant. I sold a lot of badges, and they were impressed and asked me to become a partner and handle sales – I bought a third share of the company for £1,000. In my first year with them, sales went from a few hundred a month to £240,000 for the year. The main challenges were financial – we needed bank funding to manage cash-flow and that was hard to come by.
IAN: I was a greeting card rep for American Greetings and while on a skiing holiday in Switzerland I met a guy called Ian Lancaster who was part owner on a film hologram producer called "Third Dimension". Ian asked me if I would be interested in marketing and selling there products. I accepted and AH Prismatic was a customer of Third Dimension. After three years I was approached by Barclay of AH Prismatic to work for them, which I did for 10 years.
JOHN: In 1968-69, my second full-time job was to work at The Institute of Contemporary Arts, which moved to The Mall in London, and we put on a number of experimental concerts there with people like Brian Auger, and The Trinity who were a big band at the time. The Nice, who were very big and partly became Emerson, Lake & Palmer, and various other people. One of the shows, bizarrely, not in the context of experimental Rock, was a Harmony band from America called, The Chambers Brothers. They performed in front of a back projection screen. Nobody had seen a light show this good in England before, or in Britain, and it made a great impression.
My colleague at the ICA, Brian Croft, was asked to put a small crew together to help him with the 1968 Rolling Stones tour of Europe, I didn't go on that tour, Brian went on it and left me behind at the ICA (yeah, he had rather more fun). But in 1969, which is when I really started getting involved, '69 was also the year of Woodstock, The Rolling Stones played Altamont which, you probably know, people were killed there. After that, the Stones came back to the UK and wanted somewhere to chill out.
I set out on my own, and got involved in multi-screen slide projections and things like that, but then realised there was a demand for lighting rock bands. It was a very exciting time, and then the company really boomed. We were very lucky. We got a reputation for handling American acts touring in Europe. It started with Led Zeppelin and ended with Abba.
Apart from The Rolling Stones, Elton John, and Queen, I did all The Moody Blues shows in Europe for a long time. I was David Cassidy's lighting designer. I did an Andy Williams tour. At the end of '77, I got burnt out by it all. There was a world of constantly touring, and a lot of drugs and a lot of alcohol, so when someone turned up and said, "We want to consolidate the two companies", I took the money and ran, and invested in holography.
JOHN: As a result of touring around Europe, Amsterdam was a place where we went to a lot, and you obviously had time off when you were touring, and one of my crew members had discovered Steve McGrew in a little office on the Herengracht, and he was making very early holograms. He was a draft dodger hiding out in Amsterdam, and there was this early type of hologram called a multiplex hologram, and he developed a machine for producing that.
Steve realised that no one was going to make any money with that type of photography, and what was needed was a way of producing holograms very cheaply. This process of embossed holography, where you make a master hologram and then convert it into a nickel shim, and the nickel shim retains all the information that was on the original glass hologram and can then be stamped into metallised plastic, and it produces the holograms that everyone's seen for the last 50 years. They're called Optical Variable Devices, and it can cover everything from, for example, the lenses in your iPhone – all very thin Holographic Optical Elements...
Steve set up Light Impressions in Santa Cruz in California, and made all the master Holograms there originally, and then we set up Light Impressions Europe, as it was called, and we built an identical setup to the one they had, so we were able to make the master hologram shims and emboss them into plastic all in-house.
It started out as being a novelty and was a very big sales promotion item – Kellogg's being our biggest and most successful customer, sold hundreds of millions of holograms, and obviously Barc was a person who saw the potential for using it for gift shop items.
After that, about '92, the shift happened away from promotional and novelty holography into the security business which is what we ended up doing until I sold that business in 2008. So, 26 years, a long time.
BARCLAY: Dave and I saw our first embossed hologram whilst visiting someone in London. They had just come back from San Francisco and had bought it from Holos Gallery from Gary Zellerbach (the business I purchased in 1990). The hologram was a 6 x 6 inch 3D hologram of an animal skull by a California holographer called John Kaufman. Dave and I looked at each other and realised that it was the future for our company.
If I remember correctly, it had the initials "S McGrew" on it and I managed to trace him to his home in Northern California. Bearing in mind that this was 1983 or 1984 and there was no Google. I can’t remember how we found him – but I seem to remember it was through the Museum of Holography in New York, who told me of his university and entailed some very expensive international phone calls.
I flew over to meet Steve McGrew in his California home and we negotiated on his lawn and I got a verbal agreement for European distribution for his current and future stock products in the gift/toy industry. John Brown had beaten me to the punch and he set up Light Impressions Europe to handle the promotions/custom market. Steve later came to England to visit John and and he showed us some images of E.T. that he had done for the US manufacturer of Reece’s Pieces, which featured in the movie (E.T. follows a trail of them at one point). They were not fully 3D, but what we came to call 2D/3D – two layers of 2D images that reflected bright colours in light.
We commissioned a range of 2D/3D holograms 9 x 2 inch images on the 6 x 6 inch sheet and made badges, keyrings, fridge magnets, stickers and the first range of holographic greetings cards ever. Just before their release in July 1984 (I think) I bought out my two partners from the business. In the following years we commissioned more exclusive ranges and distributed Light Impressions’ ranges and sold our products world-wide. We were indisputably market leaders, but there was soon competition; cheap imitations from Hong Kong, and companies could always commission their own custom images from Light Impressions.
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RICH: I distinctly recall these laser hologram keyrings adorning the shelves of many a museum gift shop. I had no idea the products had such a huge reach.
IAN: The products were adapted into saleable products like keyrings, wall-hanging pictures, stickers, puzzles and many more. They were sold in hologram galleries, photographic museums, gift shops, toy shops, theme parks, department stores and museum stores. Hamleys was a big customer in those days.
BARCLAY: Most of the company’s sales were export. We sold to Japan via distributors and directly to Tokyo Tower, Singapore, Australia, and throughout Europe. Museums needing additional funding opened gift shops and we tailored our products to their needs. We had 'Space' ranges, 'Endangered Species' ranges and 'Dinosaurs'. We also made sure our packaging was educational. In 1986, I did a deal with the New York Museum of Holography – they owed me money for product. Instead of paying me they suggested that AH Prismatic ran their shop and paid them 20% of post-tax sales. I used the opportunity to start to distribute in the US. I had been there about 3 weeks, when the museum was asked to bid to provide holograms for the windows of a building on the corner of 59th Street and Fifth Avenue. FAO Schwartz, the US equivalent of Hamleys, was moving out and the real estate company did not want to empty windows during the Christmas sales period.
We sold $240,000 worth of holographic merchandise in 10 weeks and it basically gave me the funds to set up distribution in the US. It also kickstarted hologram galleries/shops in the US – they sprang up in Dallas, Houston, Chicago, Detroit... everywhere. And, of course, they got a lot of their merchandise from AHP. Our sales rocketed to around $2.2 million in the US alone. Later this increased further, helped by us licensing images for Star Trek, Star Wars, and Jurassic Park.
Initially we had an office in the Museum of Holography’s building in SOHO – near to Chinatown and Little Italy. After the success of the Fifth Avenue store we moved into a nice office on Canal Street – ironically, the street where the prismatic material had first been sourced by one of the founders of AH Prismatic, prior to my joining them.
In 1990 I bought Gary Zellerbach’s company, which included his hologram gallery on Haight Street, San Francisco, and his wholesale business, also based in SF. In 1991 I moved the operations to California, from New York.
BARCLAY: Yes, there was a holo-bubble in the late Eighties/early Nineties. I was aware of the need to diversify, and we started selling glow-in-the-dark, puzzles and other products that might be sold in science and natural history museum stores, zoos, theme parks, etc. One of the problems I faced was that our brand was so closely associated with holographic and light related products – we were called AH Prismatic, after all. I also made some crucial errors and was badly ripped off by a US company and also by a US employee.
Jane Faulkner, our sales assistant, was in New York recently and discovered that Holographic Studios is still open. A good old-style holographic gallery, run by Jason Sapan. Despite being quite a regular visitor to NY, I had never realised it was still going.
JOHN: These are quite fascinating things to see and look at, and people had never seen them before, so holograms became a fascination. When it became possible for Kellogg's to buy a 4 x 4 inch hologram at a very reasonable price, because of the mass production technology that we had developed, they were able to get something on the front of the pack that was shiny, that was very novel and very different, and 3D, which seemed to fascinate. So we had a boom of people really wanting to use holograms on everything.
It was aimed at children to begin with, lots and lots of promotional stuff for kids and games and toys and things. You were looking at pure rainbow colours; so you were getting pure red, orange, yellow, green, indigo, violet, which you don't get to see normally, so there are all these positive things happening.
Primarily, it was the novelty of it all that was driving the commercial need and want, and we just overexploited it. In 1992, there was a pretty heavy recession, so people started to cut back. It hung around in packaging, and it's still used in packaging to this day, but in terms of the sticker market it just disappeared. I mean I can't find anybody making them nowadays. There's a lot of rubbish you can find, but not really good, well-designed, high quality art.
I believe holography died for sales/promotion because everybody wanted real colour holography and we just couldn't do it. You can't do it as a mass-produced product. For a brand manager, where colour has become an important aspect of the design of the brand, after a while, just having everything in silver tired. I think, that if we could have mass produced real colour 3D holograms, then it would have had a much longer lifetime.
BARCLAY: We had a die made that cut the sheet into nine squares and made keyrings from all of them.
RICH: I noticed there are nine repeated copyright
notices spaced evenly near the edge of each square of
action, as if primed to be cut, so that makes perfect sense.
BARCLAY: My company did commission holograms from Light Impressions and other companies, but that one was owned by them. The holographer was Randy James. The artist was a lady who worked with Light Impressions Inc. in Santa Cruz, Ca. owned by its founder, Steve McGrew. She was good – did the 'Dinosaur' sheet, and 'Endangered Species' sheet. The holographic 'Space' images were designed and mastered there. They would then have been printed by The Diffraction Company Inc. in Maryland.
RICH: I have always been fascinated by holography, and it certainly factors into the series from a storytelling perspective. Aside from the keyring on Lister's jacket, do you recall any other connections between Red Dwarf and yourselves?
BARCLAY: I think we have dealt with Rimmer’s ‘H’. The programme producers must have seen our kinetic badges for sale in London and traced them to AH Prismatic.
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RICH: Wow! Can you share any more info on how that material for the 'H' was produced/sourced?
BARCLAY: Rowland were investigating light-reflecting material to make highly light-efficient road signs and came up with the lenticular sheet. They
manufactured two types. The thin, flexible ‘Illusion’ material and
the thick, more kinetic material with the moving 3D balls. We made
products with both. Rowland used to make the thicker/kinetic material in several ball sizes including one with really large balls, which we never used because it didn’t work on the smaller items we made.
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| © Greg Garris 2023 |
The flexible material was much, much less expensive and they sold a lot of it for signs and products like ours. Looks like it is still being made. The thicker materials are much more interesting. The price of the kinetic/3D type prevented it from being a commercial success, I suspect. The material was expensive and hard to cut, and I seem to remember we used a company in South London, but I am not sure of that either.
RICH: Looks like there were some vintage bookmarks that resemble that design, and even some cufflinks with what appears to be the screen-accurate material. Just to ask, what is the difference between holographic and lenticular artwork?
JOHN: Interestingly, there's a great similarity. In the multiplex hologram, you take a frame of film and produce a thin slice of visual information, and then put them together. So, as you look at them, they all come back, basically.
Lenticular is a printing process whereby you take two stereoscopic-type views and slice them up, left and right, and then you put it on a computer and have alternating views. Before the lenticular plastic is put on the top, you just see a standard print with lots of little strips of the picture. The lenticular plastic on the top causes that image to merge and give you the animated movement, so it looks like you're looking at something from both sides. I actually think those RowLux ones were more sophisticated than that; different layers of plastic. I wasn't an expert on that.
Holograms are infinitely more sophisticated. With a hologram, if you take a model and you expose it with laser light, and you record the reflections off the object, the beams of light that hit the object go onto a photosensitive plate. Basically, the plate sees lots of different facets of the image. On a lenticular, you might have a hundred different slices. On a hologram, you've got at least 14,000.
It retains the information from the original glass holographic photographic plate, and it is those lines that you're actually stamping into the plastic. You are, in fact, stamping very, very thin lines, so it's very high resolution.
RICH: How long are these types of hologram expected to last?
JOHN: The embossed hologram is a structure embossed into the aluminium on the plastic film. The adhesive is the only thing that's going to change. On the surface, you've got polyester or, in certain cases, PVC, then you've got the metal. The hologram is embossed into the metal so the structure is going to last for a very long time. There was a different type of hologram called a dichromate hologram. We took round, glass discs and sold as keyrings, and that type of thing. They failed after a while, because if moisture got inside, the dichromate went.
RICH: Finally, how and when did AH Prismatic close its doors, and what was next for the team?
BARCLAY: We closed in summer of 1998. AH Prismatic had been going 18 years in England and 12 in US. Many of the UK staff had been with the company for 15+ years. I had always tried to run the business ethically and paid good wages, etc. Most of the staff had bought houses in Brighton and when we closed they went on to good jobs. Ian Dayus, sales manager, left before we closed and started a new company, Great Gizmos Ltd. Jane Faulkner retrained as a podiatrist and owns Sole Sister in Brighton – which my wife and I attend. She was also a soul music fan! Sheila Bagley, my PA in England, who went to run the US company, has stayed in San Francisco. Andy Meehan, an English guy who was so instrumental in the rapid growth of the US company, now lives in Philadelphia and is still active in the greetings card business.
Janet and I had a son in 1996, so travelling the world on business was no longer so appealing, so I started a business consultancy, which eventually became Clear Business Development. I specialised in working with companies in the Creative Industries. I am now retired, except for a couple of long-term clients I work with. I now play in, and manage, South Coast Soul Revue.
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And so, in what can only be described as a cosmic fluke, my long-standing efforts to track down one more obscure example of jacket ephemera has resulted in the identification of both the supplier and distributor of the very same hologrammatic lenticular material used in the making of Rimmer's iconic 'H'!
If that wasn't exciting enough, Barclay kindly sent over some samples of the very Rowland Technologies designs thought to be used on-screen. Of the several colour combos available (moving ball colour first), the green/blue pattern was likely used for Series III-IV (sans serif). The red/green pattern during Series V-VI (serif). The red/blue design, I strongly suspect, during Series VII, Back To Earth, and Series X-onwards (serif). Furthermore, I am almost positive that the red/blue version of these circular pin badges was used wholesale for the Holoship uniform insignias, whilst that crew's circular 'H' (and also Camille's) utilised the red/black type. There are few examples of screen-used 'H's in the wild, but reddwarfprops.com hosts some photos and info that alligns with my own research. The red/yellow type is not thought to have been used on-screen, but the fiery colour scheme may well have suited Future Rimmer's garb as seen in Out Of Time.
Furthermore, the graphical shift from serif to sans-serif for Rimmer's 'H' occured the same time the overarching series' logo and branding began incorporating larger strokes to its 8 kerned characters. Talk about quantum entanglement. But please, in 500 words or less.
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It is slightly difficult to describe, but Rowland Kinetic Material is easily the smoothest lenticular effect I can ever recall seeing. To my eye, there is virtually no lag or stepped motion when the badges are animated; also boasting an effortless magic-eye effect that can altogether best be described as a voyage to Trip-Out City. After enquiring with some helpful stockists, I also learned that it was originally sold in rigid sheet form, has long since been discontinued, and that its nodular patterns were available in clockwise or counter clockwise "twists".
Capping-off this unforgettable stroll down Lenticular Lane came these kind words from the man who made Rimmer's 'H' from Series IV-on, the one-and-only, Mike Tucker of
"The prismatic material was used on the lids of some small boxes that were available at the time from Athena, or some similar shop. There were green ones and red ones. We bought them in bulk, and removed the material from the lids. I did all of Rimmer’s H’s, and all of the Holoship crew ones, too. I recall that Howard Burden specified the colour he wanted. I had a small card template that I used, marked out the material on the reverse side, and then I cut the 'H' shape using an electric fret saw, and sanded them by hand. The boxes were small, between 2-3 inches square. You could only get one 'H' per lid."
So there you have it. Beginning Series V, Rimmer's 'H' was crafted by Mike Tucker using Rowland Technologies' "Kinetic" material sourced from AH Prismatic Amazing Laser Boxes! Marvellous.
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Interesting that Mike notes how Costume Designer, Howard Burden, decided on the colour tone of the 'H' as, around this time, Rimmer's uniform transitioned from emerald green with red shot to red with green shot. Depending on the viewing angle (much like an actual hologram), a shot of either red or green weft thread would catch the light, thereby throwing an iridescent sheen to the poly taffeta fabric. Considering the serif 'H' from Series V-onwards is indeed the red/green Rowland version, this too correlates with Howard envisioning a complimenting badge/tunic colour scheme, from Camille-onwards...
"I can't remember why the colour red, it was just... it was, I think because Rimmer's costume was green with a red shot colour, so we took the red which was shot with green, so they were... it was the same fabric, but it emphasised the red as opposed to the green. It just made them stand apart. It did work so well on camera, which I think is what prompted Doug to, you know, to ask for Rimmer-Red for the next series."
– Howard Burden, Built To Last - Series IV
The creator of the inaugural, prismatic, sans-serif 'H' from Series III remains unknown. Though, with any luck, it's going to be a laugh finding out.
Oh, and something else I found out. Do you know what the 'A.H.' stands for in 'A.H. Prismatic'? "Ageing Hippies". So bang goes my theory of "Arnold Hologram".
I must say, this is just the kind of information I hoped
might one day come the blog's way. To happen upon the root of something
so iconic has been such a joy, and I would like to extend
my sincere thanks to Ian, Barclay, John, Mike, and Jane for their fascinating insight. And all for Caviar Vindaloo's fiftieth article, too. Nice.
As I am yet to get my hands on an actual comet keyring from this line, I would ordinarily chalk this one up as 'Unconfirmed', but it would simply wrench my heart from its socket to do so.
Dimensions for this range of keyrings are 55 x 63mm, not counting the keychain itself.
Amazing! followed the article about the hologram, and finally got lots more info on the Rowland kinetic material! woohoo!!!! been obsessed with this stuff for a while but its so hard to find on ebay because nobody knows much of the history.. well until now!! im absolutely linking this blog to my comments on a video i did to collect more info. https://youtu.be/gDmepvmy9I8
ReplyDeleteFantastic - love your video, and glad to be of some help!
Deletealso a little info in a patent on the kinetic stuff. https://patents.google.com/patent/US3357772A/en?inventor=William+P.+Rowland&page=1
ReplyDelete