Vintage Belgian Movie Poster The War in Space 🚀 1977 Toho La Guerre de l'Espace SciFi

Remember The War in Space? 🚀 Vintage 1977 Toho La Guerre de l'Espace Belgian Movie Poster

Size: 14" x 22 in ~ Unused archive stock, slight to minor edge wear and/or some discoloration that doesn't touch the image. Everything here is stored in the dark, under 40% relative humidity, at a steady 72°F, climate controlled - whatever age a sheet shows, it had before it came to me.

🚀 The Belgian Affiche

Nobody else in the world printed film posters at this size, and the Belgian ones were often the flashiest anywhere - their own size, their own art, and not many of them around, which is exactly why collectors go after them. This one's a beauty: a full-color space battle for Toho's 1977 sci-fi picture The War in Space, released in Belgium as LA GUERRE DE L'ESPACE in French over DE RUIMTE OORLOG in Dutch, with CINEMASCOPE and COULEURS billed alongside, all under the banner of its Belgian distributor, COSMOPOLIS-FILMS, printed across the top margin.

🎬 The Film Behind It

The War in Space - Wakusei Daisenso in Japan - is a 1977 tokusatsu space opera produced by Toho Pictures and Toho Eizo and directed by Jun Fukuda, released in Japanese theaters on December 17, 1977. The French title carried on this sheet, La Guerre de l'Espace, is the film's own French-language release title. The whole thing was spurred by the worldwide success of Star Wars - but underneath, it's really Toho's own undersea adventure Atragon redressed for outer space, with a nod to the anime Space Battleship Yamato: the heroes' ship, the Gohten, owes a lot to Atragon's Gotengo. It's set in 1988, when aliens from a dying planet in the Messier 13 nebula invade Earth, and a UN team has to finish a space defence ship and take out the invaders' mothership on Venus. Kensaku Morita and Yuko Asano lead, and Toho regular Akihiko Hirata plays Commander Oishi; Teruyoshi Nakano ran the special effects. By 1977 the name Toho already meant Godzilla, Rodan and Mothra - monster pictures made with actors in suits stomping through big, detailed miniature sets - and the two men steering this one came straight out of that school. Jun Fukuda had directed five Godzilla pictures, from Ebirah, Horror of the Deep in 1966 to Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla in 1974, and Nakano had done the effects on the last three of them. The Gohten itself was built as two models, the bigger one nearly eight feet long - now that's my kind of spaceship.

🗄️ Cosmopolis Films, the House That Sent It Out

COSMOPOLIS-FILMS, printed in small capitals across the top margin, was a Brussels distributor at 4 rue des Palais in Schaerbeek, right in the middle of the city's film-distribution district alongside houses like Belga Films and Cine Vose Films. It's in the trade directories at that address in 1953, 1955, 1957 and 1963, and Belgian censorship visas carry the Cosmopolis name from December 1947 through October 1987 - the better part of forty years in business. Their catalog ran wide: postwar Italian and French dramas, peplum and gladiator pictures, Eurospy thrillers and spaghetti westerns, Hong Kong and Taiwanese action, and Japanese genre film - including other Toho titles like Terror of Mechagodzilla. A house that already knew how to sell Toho's monsters to Belgian audiences was a natural fit to bring over Toho's answer in space opera too.

This sheet is from the archive of the now-defunct Cosmopolis Films, kept together as one collection since 2007 - unused archive stock rather than something pulled down off a cinema wall.

🎨 Reading the Artwork

It's a full-tilt space battle. A huge yellow-orange planet fills the upper left, with small saucer-like craft hovering near it and a cigar-shaped mothership caught in an explosion just in front of it. Finned rockets streak in from the upper right on long light-trails, arrowing toward a cratered gray lunar surface at right. In the foreground, a battery of white-and-orange rockets and a beam cannon fire up into the fight. The French title bands the foot of the sheet in yellow, the Dutch title in red beneath it, with CINEMASCOPE and COULEURS credited to either side. One sheet had to work for French-speaking and Flemish cinemas alike, which is why Belgian posters so often carry their title twice - and DE RUIMTE OORLOG is the name the film went by in Flanders.