I was recently flipping through a few of my issues of ThunderCats magazine (as you do) and decided to finally remove and unfold some of the included posters that each issue contained. Most of them are pretty bad, awkwardly painted versions of the characters in a sort of collage, but one of them kind of blew my mind. It was a full on map of 3rd Earth!
It looks like it’s pretty much strict to the season one stories as there’s no mention of the Lunataks, but it’s still pretty damn amazing. I love knowing that the Ro-Bear Berbil village was right behind Cat’s Lair and that Castle Plun-Darr is out in a little peninsula. I shared this scan on the Branded facebook page and on Instagram and when I was talking to folks about it, it reminded me that I had a couple other pop culture maps in my collection. The first one that sprang to mind was another magazine centerfold, though this time it was from issue number four of Muppet Magazine from 1983…
The lands of Fraggle Rock! Of course, this is just the immediate vicinity of the day to day Fraggle wanderings and doesn’t account for the vast lands of “Outer Space”, but I have to assume that Uncle Traveling Matt has this covered and is working on more maps…
Of course, my favorite map in my collection is a replica of One Eyed Willie’s treasure map from the Goonies. I have it handing on my living room wall right next to a nifty portrait of the Fratellis by Matthew Luxich, a replica of the doubloon, and a print by Scott Fuller.
After wracking my brain I also realized that I had a map of Nockmaar from the film Willow that was in an old Sourcebook that I used to have….
…as well as a pretty rad map of the Smurfs’ village that was an insert in the really cool World of the Smurfs book I reviewed a few years ago! Though the Smurf book is out of print, it’s is still pretty easy to snag over at Amazon.
Talking about these on Facebook, the super rad Douglas Bodine sent me scans of an amazing map of the world of The Dark Crystal! The map was included in an old storybook called The Tale of the Dark Crystal…
The last piece of pop culture cartography that I have is the map that was included in William Goldman’s The Princess Bride (which I totally forgot about until my girlfriend Jaime pointed it out…)
I bet these would look pretty awesome framed and on the wall (well, I know the Goonies map does for sure.) It also has me wondering what other cool pop culture maps are hanging around out there. I know that a series of maps for the lands in the Masters of the Universe were just released with the MOTU Classics figures including Eternia and Etheria. I’d love to get my hands on those. So, any other cool pieces of cartography that are 80s-centric?