We've all heard the rumor that the original Halloween poster with the supposed "blue" ratings box was somehow the indicator of the "first" prints of the poster. There are 3 major details that make me believe the story is nonsense.
1) When examining the Ratings box under a loop on the "blue version", you can clearly see that the black ink has been pulled back from the edge of the white letters leaving the cyan and I believe yellow inks forming the white letters. What has been done is called an ink "holdback" in the printing world. When too many inks try to form tiny white letters, registration becomes very hard and there's a chance those tiny white letters will fill in with ink and become unreadable. What would happen on a modern design is that the black would be allowed to form the white letters and the underlying bump colors would be held back. Since this printed in the late 70's, and they were working with rudimentary tools and processes, they probably didn't know or care about the correct way to fix the problem.
2) The white ratings box version is rarer than the blue box ratings version from what I can tell. This means that if the white version was the newer version, there would be more of them in circulation, which is not the case. Also, the white ratings box was probably the initial run and then they realized the tiny white letters were filling in due to all the black ink coverage and someone made the rash decision to pull the black away from the letters to solve the problem. This was done before computers, so the change probably involved taking an opaque brush and enlarging the border of the letters on the black negative. This would explain why the edges of the blue area are very imperfect.
3) A much newer "video" release of this poster also has the supposed "first run" blue ratings box also. How could a much later printed video poster have the same blue ratings box when it was printed after the white ratings box edition? The only answer would be the blue version was the "correction" to the white version and it remained the design for later posters as well.
Video One Sheet:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/MEDIA-PRESENTS-HALLOWEEN-1978-ORIGINAL-PROMO-POSTER-/301091971494So, how and why did the legend begin about the blue-box being the "first run"? My only guess is that a dealer or collector was trying to increase the value of their investment. Of course, I could be totally wrong about all of this. Even if I am wrong, I think the white ratings box version looks far better than the blue version regardless.
