VHS Cover Redesign 01 Kamen Rider AMAZON! (1974)

So as an employee at Scarecrow Video I get to see a lot of films, and a lot of cover art for movies. Many of them are brilliantly designed, some of them are amazing paintings, a few are terrifically horrible and have a beautiful quality of their own. Most of the video covers that I see are bland and/or just rotten. Lazily constructed from production photos and over-used Photoshop effects.

With nearly 100,000 videos in the Scarecrow inventory, there are covers at the store that have no "real" cover art at all. Someone printed out the title of the film, maybe with a found photo from the Internet onto a sheet of day-glow paper. It's then put into a plastic VHS or DVD case and put on the shelf. There's really nothing appealing about this and only if you're searching for this title would you be interested in even touching this case.

As a designer and a critic of cover art, I'm taking it upon myself to design some covers for these lost covers. This gives me the chance to design covers with all sorts of freedom. Scarecrow doesn't care that I'm doing this, so they're not going to edit what I do. They'll hopefully gain some more turns on these rentals. I'm not getting paid anymore to do this. It's more or less an exercise for me. To get my designing muscles stronger and maybe land a real job designing this type of thing.

The first cover I tackled was for a VHS that we have with some episodes of Kamen Rider AMAZON! This Japanese television show from 1974 was priority for me to design a cover for. I recently chose it for my monthly staff pick and the previous cover was quaint, but I knew it wasn't going to rent. So I came up with what you see below.

I researched pictures of Amazon and found a set of photos that were taken of the highly detailed action figure that was produced by Medicom. So I found the picture that I thought would be the best on the cover and repainted it using Photoshop and my WACOM tablet.
This was my first redesign so I didn't put a lot of creativity into it. I was mostly interested in having a realistic image of the character on the cover, I concentrated on rendering the digital painting well enough.

photo: copyright modxtoy.com

Here's the original artwork that was in the store for years. Yeah, it was made sideways.