Who Is Noriyoshi Ohrai?
If you are like me and belong to the American demographic, you’ve probably never heard of Noriyoshi Ohrai because they shelved all his promotional illustrations on this side of the Pacific. This is a grave injustice, a crime against art—look at this shit:
The story goes that George Lucas saw Noriyoshi Ohrai’s homage to the first Star Wars film in a science fiction magazine and reached out to Ohrai-san personally.
Ohrai secured the commission to illustrate the poster for the international release of the second installment of the Star Wars trilogy, 1980’s The Empire Strikes Back, on the strength of his fan art.
Commentators regard this as Ohrai-san’s ‘big break’, but if you ask me, he never really got one.
After ‘The Empire Strikes Back‘, Noriyoshi Ohrai only accepted two more commissions doing illustrations for American films— significant because America via Hollywood was the dominant force in international cinema at that time, and Hollywood promotions typically paid a years salary for an illustrator in a single commision.
Here in the United States, we hardly caught a glimpse of Ohrai’swork. The posters we ended up with were often more appropriate to the films they decorated; what I mean is that they all look dated. Even when they were new, their luster was dimmed by a patina of real or imagined cigarette smoke. Fresh off the press, they looked like they smelled like old books.
Meanwhile, Ohrai-san’s renaissance-level approach gave the material an air of timelessness. Under the heat and pressure of his intense focus, the master illustrator compels his crude source material to shimmer. His style is ‘Neon-Classical’— his pen build crystal castles.
The products he advertised for could hardly match the expectations generated by his promotional efforts, and maybe that was the beef American distributors had with his work— Ohrai smoked too tough.
Star Wars (1980)
This is the international promotional poster for The Empire Strikes Back (1980) which Noriyoshi Ohrai produced at the behest of George Lucas; the piece that introduced this uncanny talent from the other side of the Pacific to the international market.
I haven’t had any success in tracking down the name of the publication where Ohrai’s early Star Wars illustrations first appeared; the one that got him noticed by George Lucas.
The entry for Noriyoshi Ohrai on the Star Wars fan wiki says this much:
‘
'He made several posters for the Japanese versions of the three first Star Wars films.
He also made covers for the Japanese editions of the Star Wars mangas in 1997,[and] a gatefold cover for a Japanese magazine in 1999 for the start of the prequel trilogy.'
This is one of several theatrical posters for ‘The Empire Strikes Back‘ used to market the film in the United States. I picked this one because it is arguably the best of them—
Not that it isn’t good, but you must admit… it isn’t as good.
Beastmaster (1982)
Next up we’ve got 1982’s Beastmaster; a Bronze Age Heroic Epic that is second only to Conan: The Barbarian (1982):
Looking at this poster reminds me of what it felt like to watch The Beastmaster as a four-year-old (hint: it was fucking awesome).
Like a Frank Franzetta illustration helming an old Conan book, Ohrai’s visual copy for The Beastmaster was a bold testament to what sword and sorcery could be. His rendering set a high bar— one the film walks right under.
It might be hard to understand at this distance, but this film was a bonafide cultural moment. Marc Singer as Dar, the titular beastmaster, generated a wave big enough for Universal Studios to ride for over a decade; The last Beastmaster film, ‘Beastmaster III: The Eye of Braxas‘ was released in 1996.
Don’t take this as an endorsement; The Eye of Braxas was made for television, and a real piece of shit. The point is that there was enough money in the franchise that a major studio like Universal kept investing in it.
The first Beastmaster film wasn’t even a Universal project— Universal Studios bought branding and distribution rights from MGM/ United Artists after The Beastmaster became a cultural phenomena and kept it on a shelf until 1991, when Marc Singer reprised his iconic role in the travesty that was Beastmaster II: Through the Portal of Time.
The Sword and Sorcery boom of the 80s had gone bust, but Universal Studios almost single-handedly kept the plug-and-play formula of Swords, Sorcerers, and scanty clothing on life support. Four made-for-TV Hercules movies were released in 1994, preceding a Hercules television series starring Kevin Sorbo which ran from 1995 until 1999 right alongside Xena: Warrior Princess (1995-2001) starring Lucy Lawless— all Universal franchises.
Taking it back to where it all began, here’s the poster American theater-goers saw in the summer of 1982 which beckoned them into an age undreamed of; a time of might and magic and human sacrifice:
Here The Beastmaster looks less like Marc Singer and more like how Donald Trump might have looked in the 80s if he were absolutely chiseled:
This might be a good place to discuss the intersection of white supremacy and Sword and Sorcery, but I’m trying to do better about staying on topic and already fucking it up.
Back to the movie posters— I mean, the US edition isn’t bad but… are these posters in the same league? Are they even playing the same game?
Of course they are. This is advertising, and I would go see both films— so I guess they both win… but do you see what I mean?
Noriyoshi Ohrai’s art fucks. I have to wonder if the seemingly unanimous decision to circulate it everywhere except in the United States wasn’t part of a broader picture. This was the Reaganomics Era; the American economy was in the toilet, and competition with Japanese steel, automobiles, and electronics was heating up. Maybe the superior design sensibilities of Japanese illustrators were perceived as a threat, and shelving Ohrai’s work was considered to be in the National interest.
By the end of this article, it should be clear that any competition between Japan and the United States probably isn’t real— leading us to the next most obvious conclusion that seems patently ridiculous:
They didn’t use Ohrai’s work in the United States because they were genuinely convinced it would not go over well with an American audience.
V (1983)
Ohrai produced the Japanese promotional art for a 1983 American television all-star V, which is pretty interesting because V also stars Marc Singer, who was fresh off of playing a telepathic barbarian in The Beastmaster:
If you couldn’t guess from Ohrai’s jarring masterwork of sci fi illustration, V is about the invasion of earth by a predatory reptilian race who come disguised as humans.
In November 2005, Entertainment Weekly named V one of the 10 best miniseries on DVD.[13] The article noted, "As a parable about it-can-happen-here fascism, V was far from subtle, but it carved a place for lavish and intelligent sci-fi on TV.
Featuring mind control, horrifying biological experiments, and shapeshifting reptilian extraterrestrials, and El Salvador, V was a prescient work which anticipated the shape of fringe conspiracies to come by several decades. Some commentators (see: David Icke, The Pleiadian Message) have seen in V a work of soft disclosure; it boldly aired the truth of the world to play it off as fiction, letting the cat out of the bag while also furthering the aims of the Great Deception.
Officially— and ironically— V began as an attempt to adapt Sinclair Lewis’ antifascist novel It Cant Happen Here (1935) for the screen. The project was deemed ‘too cerebral’ for American viewers by the executives at NBC and man-eating, shapeshifting nazi space-lizards were shoehorned in to captialize on the popularity of things like Star Wars and Star Trek.
Fast forward forty years and it looks like a science fiction television series exploring the nature of propaganda and the social mechanics of the holocaust was worked into blood libel that helped get a fascist elected.
The idea of man-eating reptiles occupying the highest seats of world government gathered strength like snow on a frozen mountaintop. It fell gently and quietly for many years in the no-mans-land of conspiracy circles until reaching critical mass in the mindfuck toilet of Facebook and YouTube during the mindfuck toilet that was the 2016 election season, where it fell like an avalanche on an unsuspecting public— but it might have all started where V did: on May 1st, 1983— the day V was first aired on American public television:
Once again, Noriyoshi Ohrai knocks it out of the park with top-tier visual aesthetic:
The first run of V was so successful that it lead immediately to a 1984 reboot, and was reimagined and resurrected in another reboot that ran from 2009 until 2011— but it only takes a glance to see that Japan had more respect for American sci-fi than Americans did:
The Goonies (1985)
Next up we’ve got The Goonies (1985):
We used to watch this one in Spanish class. Do people still watch it? I’m not sure how well it would go over today. I picked up a copy at a local AMVets thrift store to try and find out—
Holy shit. Ableism, racism, body-shaming, child abduction, kids making jokes about sex and drugs; this motherfucker should come with a trigger warning, or several. It’s so much worse than I remembered. The Goonies comes sealed with Stephen Spielberg’s endorsement, so I shouldn’t be surprised about that—
What’s wrong with Stephen Speilberg, you ask? Not right now. We’re here to talk about movie posters.
Like with The Beastmaster, I dont know how to convey what a big deal The Goonies was. For kids that grew up between 1985 and 1995, this was our ‘Stranger Things‘— a gentle way of saying ‘the world has come a long way since then’.
Genius can be difficult to pin down or quantify and so is notoriously difficult to commodify. Fortunately for Hollywood, genius is a hardly necessary component of profitable cinema— unless you mean the genius of a proven formula.
‘The Goonies’ is formulaic— a Tom Sawyer Nancy Drew picaresque mystery-adventure set in the suburbs— but it’s got genius, too. It’s shocking that there was never a sequel— is this a rare instance of the executive arm knowing when to leave well enough alone?
Forbidden caverns full of lost pirate treasure; following antique maps into labyrinths of scheming and danger; a bunch of punk kids engaging in bawdy humor and outwitting the incompetence of evil; The Goonies was fun for all ages in a by-gone era where people were built tough; an age undreamed of, where children’s movies were a place latchkey kids went to bask in street smarts.
Or, The Goonies was the immediate byproduct of a highly toxic culture and did it’s part to normalize the abnormal and perpetuate generational trauma.
I’ve never heard a word uttered against the film by those who came up with it, and I’m a little startled to find myself on the other side of that, but coming at the film with fresh eyes and a few decades of emotional development under my belt: either the way the word ‘goon’ is used in 2025 is in line with some of the film’s Speilberg-approved subtext, or I have spent way too much time in all the darkest corners of the internet.
Either way, I don’t love the movie like I once did, and in my heart of hearts I feel future generations won’t love it either— The Goonies is an artifact holding memories of a world no one ever really wanted to live in, and letting it die might be better for everyone.
I’m probably being too harsh. Just like I’m about to harsh on the US theatrical poster—
Here it is, the theatrical poster for the US distribution of 1985’s The Goonies, presented by Steven Spielberg and directed by Richard Donner:
This is just how film promotions looked in the United States in that era. A lot of what was produced back then was like the people— it looked old even while young.
This is instance where I have to admit that Ohrai’s composition is actually less compelling— but it’s got a richness that rivals the treasure-horde of One-eyed Willy.
Lemme stop right here to point and say,
‘See, that’s what I mean about Steven Speilberg and The Goonies— the treasure of One-Eyed Willy, in a coming-of-age story for pre-pubescent kids looking down the precipice between the sixth grade and middle school— how much more fucking on the nose could you get? The messaging, man— its goony.
Back to the poster… Maybe it looks like that because everything was designed to interface with the dense patina of cigarette smoke that shrouded every public outlet in America in its wayward youth. The washed-out, antique quality of all these posters makes them feel like they were meant to hang in rooms where people smoked a lot of cigarettes, seemlessly matching amber glass ashtrays, wood paneling, and cathode ray televisions.
You could still smoke in movie theaters and restaurants across the United States in 1985. I remember cigarette vending machines in bowling alleys; tall ashtrays strategically placed along the maze of red velvet ropes that theater lines used to be made of. I remember scoring half-smoked cigarette butts from the smoking section at a local Big Boy restuarant as a minor— and The Goonies was definitely a film made for kids who would grow up to sneak off -campus to smoke cigarettes during lunch hour.
I know the kids are still doing that shit, but it’s an aspect of the culture we used to celebrate. Thank god that’s over.
Mad Max 2 (1981)
This next one’s a bit of a stretch. The article is called ‘American Films Noriyoshi Ohrai Illustrated‘, and this film isn’t American at all:
It’s George Miller’s highly influential post-apocalyptic heavy metal thriller Mad Max 2:
An Australian film with an Australian cast by an Australian director, 1981’s Mad Max 2 was the highly anticipated sequel to the first Mad Max.
Both films did extremely well in international markets.1979’s ‘Mad Max‘ held the title of ‘most profitable film ever produced’ in the Guinness Book of World Records for twenty years after it’s release, and was only superseded in 1999 by the famously low-budget Blair Witch Project.
Maybe I am jaded, a victim of the constant improvement of our society— but if you ask me, Ohrai-san’s poster is much better than either film. That’s usually the case with Noriyoshi Ohrai’s film promotions, but I feel it most keenly here. For all the grit and grime of this highly original spin on the Lone Gunman trope, the Twisted Metal techno-fetishism of George Miller’s world does nothing for me.
Looking at this poster, though, I asked myself if there was a chain of influence leading from Mad Max to the world-famous shonen manga First of The North Star:
Debuting in 1983, Fist of the North Star followed close on the heels of Mad Max chronologically, visually, and thematically: both are violent post-apocalyptic adventure stories where lone-wolf warriors fight against cults of lunatic bandits against a backdrop of decaying machinery and human desperation.
Tetsuo Hara, writer and illustrator of Fist of the North Star, created a promotional piece for Mad Max creator and director George Miller’s 2024 film Furiosa. In a remote teleconference where Hara-san presented Miller with the piece, he said:
The series I drew, Fist of the North Star, took inspirations from your film, Mad Max 2. I never imagined that, 40 years later, I’d be able to meet you, and I am truly grateful to you. It is an honor to be able to meet you.
Above is Tetsuo Hara pictured during a remote interview with Mad Max creator George Miller. Miller is holding an autographed copy of Hara’s promotional illustration for the release of Mad Max: Furiosa (2024).
Mad Max was the highest-grossing Australian film of its day and is considered responsible for introducing Australian New Wave cinema to the global market, while Fist of The North Star is one of the best-selling manga of all time; both these men fathered evergreen franchises that have settled into the bedrock of post-apocalyptic literature and film.
Here is the poster American audiences saw when they went to see Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior:
yawnnnn….
… and that’s it. Those are the American Films that Noriyoshi Ohrai produced illustrations for. That doesn’t mean he stopped producing illustrations; the master illustrator worked until he died in 2015 at the age of 79.
Instead of catering to the utterly baffling tastes of the American public, Ohrai appears to have shifted his focus to distinctly Japanese franchises after 1985—
Beginning in 1987, Ohrai’s skills were pressed into the service of a burgeoning video game industry. With few exceptions, he seems to have exercised a strong preference for titles relating to Japanese military history:
Between the international poster for 1985’s The Goonies and the artists death in 2015, the only franchise he produced illustrations for that would be immediately recognizable to the average American consumer was video game series Metal Gear Solid— of course, the average American knows about Godzilla, but the average American has never actually seen a Godzilla film. Then again, most of us haven’t played Metal Gear Solid— or sat through the Beastmaster— but… well, damnit. I’m trying to make a point, here, which is that Noriyoshi Ohrai ducked out on Hollywood.
Was Ohrai disillusioned with the wiles of the international market?
Given his apparent interest in Japanese military history, the question arose in my mind: had he abandoned the international market as a staunch Japanese Nationalist?
After all, how many blue-eyed, auburn-haired anime protagonists could one man be expected to stomach before toleration turned to outrage at the brutal colonial tactics visited upon a once-proud warrior nation by an occupying force?
Japan’s surrender in the aftermath of World War II was unconditonal. They were totally disarmed and the emperor on the Chrysanthamum Throne was reduced to a figurehead. As of 2025, the Japanese Self-Defense Force is ranked the 10th most capable military on the planet— but to what extent is it a satellite of the United States?
Returning to the Nationalism of Noriyoshi Ohrai— there are no English language interviews with the artist available for us to consult.
There aren’t any interviews at all, from the looks of it— so we decided to cast his horoscope.
…Check out Noriyoshi Ohrai’s Natal Horoscope?
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