John Oliver ended Sunday’s Last Week Tonight by doing a dive into the world of movie posters as reimagined by Ghanaian artists.
These posters, he noted, don’t always represent what a movie is actually about. For example, a poster for Ghost features Demi Moore screaming as Whoopi Goldberg’s head bursts through her abdomen.
“Even if all you know about Ghost is ‘pottery that fucks,’ you are probably aware that Whoopi Goldberg does not ‘Here’s Johnny’ her way out of Demi Moore’s uterus,” Oliver quipped.
He noted that Ghanaian artists have been making their own posters for Hollywood movies for decades — posters that have very little to do with the plot of the movies. Other examples include one for Jurassic Park featuring a golfer and another for The Spy Who Loved Me boasting a huge fish.
As Oliver explained, foreign videocassettes were introduced in Ghana in the 1980s, which led to locals buying TV monitors and VCRs as part of an effort to set up makeshift screening locations. As Ghana was being ruled by a military dictator at the time, they were not able to properly advertise the screenings due to a lack of access to printing presses. Thus, local artists were commissioned to create posters, sometimes using repurposed flour sacks as their canvases.
Some of these artists then decided to make the movies “seem more interesting than they otherwise might be” by incorporating elements that had nothing to do with the movie. For example, a Predator poster with the predator holding a naked woman, a poster for Hellraiser III with Pinhead eating a person whole, a Jaws poster that features Chuck Norris (who is not in the movie) and a Wizard of Oz poster where almost all of the characters are vampires. This has often led to confusion among audiences who demanded their money back upon realizing the truth.
However, if you haven’t guessed, Oliver himself was giddy with excitement over these posters. So much so that he commissioned one for his show to use as part of its FYC Emmy campaign. He shared on Last Week Tonight that he commissioned Ghanaian movie poster artist C.A. Wisely to create a poster for his show based on three images he sent: a shot of Oliver “trying to force my way onto a soap opera”; his “wife, Wanda Jo, helping me open a med spa”; and the Moon Mammoth mascot he introduced for a minor league baseball team rebrand. The artist was told to use their imagination and include at least one character who isn’t a part of the show and as many trademarks of Ghanaian movie posters as possible.
“Each year, during Emmy voting season, HBO launches a campaign on behalf of its shows with tasteful ads … . They even rent out billboards in L.A. for the ads. And while it’s always done in a restrained, classy style, it never really felt like it spoke to the chaos we like to think we stand for here,” he shared.
Oliver then debuted the poster on his show. It features him wielding two guns and drinking wine with a horse who has a very human-like hand; a chainsaw cutting through tentacles; snakes; and the Fonz (Henry Winkler), “holding a pickax for no clear reason other than, I’m guessing, to defend himself from everything happening around him.”
“I love this painting so much,” he added. “I think we can all agree, it’s an ad for a much more entertaining show than the one you just watched.”
Oliver said he’s convinced HBO to display the poster on a digital ad on Los Angeles’ Sunset Boulevard sometime in June between 2 and 6 a.m.
In addition, viewers can buy prints at hangjohnoliver.com for $50 each, with 50 percent of profits going directly to the artists in Ghana and the other half going to the Ghana Community Impact Fund.
“It’s beautiful,” he said at the end of his show. “It’s just beautiful.”
See the poster below.
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