WONDERLAND • The Ultimate Wonder Woman Site

	Ever since the Farrah Fawcett phenomenon, which started in September of 1976, many people who never thought of the poster as an entertainment medium began to look at this creative art form in a new light. Prior to 1976, a poster was considered a fad for the youth market, which bought, generally speaking, ninety per cent of the posters sold in the country. Today, though, a poster is a status symbol, not only for the individual on the poster, but for the purchaser as well-adult or young person.

	Since 1965, with the creation of the black and white personality posters of W. C. Fields, Greta Garbo, Bela Lugosi and Clark Gable, the poster has come a long way. In 1967, the popular ones were the antiwar posters. From 1970 to 1972, the big sellers were psychedelic blacklight posters, and from 1972 to 1975, they were blacklight velvet posters. However, not one of these stuck out as an all-time bestseller.

	During the '60s and '70s, there were perhaps fifty or sixty poster companies in the United States. Through the last five or six years, though, only a handful were able to weather the
difficult financial periods and remain in business today. But during that time, one poster-Farrah Fawcett in a red bathing suit-took the poster business from its faddish, youth-oriented market and put it into the limelight as an entertainment medium to be compared with radio, television, movies, records and even book publishing. A poster now has as much potential of selling a million copies or making a million dollars as any of these other forms of entertainment.

When you think of Farrah Fawcett, you think of that red bathing suit poster, the classic which has sold several million copies and has been reproduced an estimated two hundred million times since coming out in 1976. When Pro Arts first approached Farrah to model for a poster, she was already advertising several products. Due to the exposure she'd gotten on television, she'd developed a cult following among college students-she became a dream girl for many young adults. She liked the idea of a poster, so we negotiated and signed a contract in June 1976. We began considering photographs for the poster, and finally picked the one which Farrah herself liked, the now-famous red bathing suit photo.

As Farrah grew in popularity, people were soon coming to us to do their posters. We, of course, sought other personalities hoping to find posters that would sell as well as Farrah's had. Cheryl Ladd's first poster was considered somewhat daring, and so, for the first time in Pro Arts' history, we released two posters of one individual simultaneously. The idea was to sell one to retail accounts which were not critical of a daring poster, and to sell the other one to the major chains which were sometimes critical of them. Both Cheryl Ladd posters sold very well-her entry into the poster marketplace was an instant success. Her third poster ("Cheryl Lace" in the book) was taken from the classic Rita Hayworth pose. The quality of the photograph was extremely good, and the poster looks more like a photo than a poster. It remains one of the best we've produced.

The Lynda Carter poster in this book was the best-selling poster for 1978. The design shows Lynda in a natural background-the photo was taken at her Malibu ranch. When it was submitted to Pro Arts for poster production, there was no mistaking that this was Lynda Carter, the woman, and not Wonder Woman, the fantasy. This sensual aspect of Lynda helped create a whole new image of her as an actress.

The Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders poster was the first one we had done of a group rather than an individual. When we first produced this one in May 1977, many people thought that it would only sell in Texas. But our research had shown that the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders would be popular elsewhere, too. Television crews often turned their cameras on the Cheerleaders in between plays or when the Cowboys were in a huddle, which we thought had created a tremendous amount of interest nationally. As it turned out, many more copies of this poster have been sold outside Texas, and it has now sold over a million copies. Since that time, Pro Arts has produced a number of cheerleader posters and sold them nationwide: we've done the Oakland Raiderettes, the Miami Dolphin Starbrites, the L.A. Rams Cheerleaders, the Chicago Honey Bears and the Sunshine Girls of Toronto.

The poster of Cheryl Tiegs in a pink bikini was the second one of Cheryl we produced. The first one, although very sensuous, was not as exciting as many of the photographs of her we'd wanted to use. Our reluctance to print a more exciting poster simply reflected the retail stores' unwillingness to display anything but " conservative " posters of women. Despite this, sales of the pink bikini poster exploded throughout the U.S. Its success illustrate that these posters were being picked up readily by the public.

The posters in this book have been selected because they are the most successful ones we've produced. If a picture is worth a thousand words, at Pro Arts we like to think that. one of our posters is worth ten thousands words.

T. N. TRIKILIS Vice President, Pro Arts, Inc.