Dating The Aristocats Daybill
Some background first: In 1928 Greater Union (GU) sold their first distribution company “Australasian Films†but by 1932 they were back in the game with Union Theatres Feature Exchange which was subsequently restructured in 1932 to become British Empire Films (BEF). Over the years Disney has used a range of companies to distribute their films in Australia, including Union Theatres Exchange in 1929; United Artists 1933 to 1937; RKO 1937 to 1954; Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer 1959 to 1972 and BEF-MGM from 1973 to 1975.
In 1975 MGM-BEF becomes Greater Union Film Distributors, (remember this...)
The Aristocats
The movie released in USA December 1970, it was not released in Australia until December 1971, so any Daybill that is claiming the poster is 1970 is of course incorrect.
In terms of release and re-release dates, all I have actually been able to dig up with confirmed dates are:
1971
1980/81
1987/88
1994
IMDb states Australia had a 1980 release and a 1994 (yet don’t mention a 1987/88 one).
As an aside, in the two main online movie poster databases (no names) I find a lot of 1SH and WCs that are either dating an original poster as 1970 or 1971, but on all of them I looked at I can see the (NSS) date clearly says 1971, it'd be nice if there was some consistency.
10 years later we have an advert for a Drive-In Theatre for the movie in May 1981
I don’t know much about Drive-Ins so can’t comment as to whether this is a Nationwide re-release for the movie or not - BUT if it is then it would stands to reason that there would have been during the Summer holidays season (May is the middle of winter downunder) which of course would have been December 1980
Here is an article from 1987 talking about the movie being re-released (it's written from USA so is it a USA 1987 release, which means perhaps an Australian 1988?)
And seven years later another article discussing the 1994 re-release of the movie
So now to the posters
The following poster is often referred to as being from 1971 and that would be correct, it is also sometimes called an called R70s, which is technically correct, however...
As you can see there are two versions of this poster:
LEFT POSTER: Note the rating; “For General Exhibitionâ€, meaning it was printed before the November 1971 ruling and perhaps before the October 1971 announcement
RIGHT POSTER: Some might say the snipe might suggest it is a NZ Daybill, I am suggesting that the snipe was added after the posters were printed when the new G Rating was announced (October 1971) but before the distributor knew what the new rating looked like, and hence the ‘blank’ snipe.
I think the ‘sniped’ posters are still from the 1971 release however, the one that is more valuable (to me) is the one without the snipe.
The following poster is often referred to as being from 1971, that is incorrect.
Note the Greater Union logo, bottom middle - Greater Union Film Distributors weren't known as such until 1975. As we seem to have some evidence supporting a 1980 release but nothing earlier than that I am calling it R80.
This one is sometimes referred to as an R86, I don't believe that is so
As I found evidence that there was a season in Australia in mid early 1987 (see article above), I think it would be better to refer to it as R87, don't you?
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