The Lovely Album

Media Moment: The Lovely Bones
Queen Related: Debut album

I had PVRed The Lovely Bones a few months ago and finally got around to watching it this weekend. It was actually one of the few movies I’ve recorded lately that I wanted to watch from beginning to end since the trailer looked interesting, which came as no surprise since Peter Jackson had directed it.

At roughly the 8:00 minute mark, the camera pans across a shopping mall scene, past an Indian character who is standing in front a record store. As the shot moves past him, a blurry Queen album cover can be seen amongst the record store promos behind him (top image).

I was about to rewind a few seconds to confirm what I had seen when the next scene zoomed out from the store and showed more of the Queen promo item I had just seen (lower image). It occurred to me when I saw both the free-standing Queen promo (with yellow band) and the top of the actual LP (seen to the right of Stanley Tucci’s character in grey coat) that someone on the film’s production design team needed to choose albums from 1973 to display because that is the year in which the main character, Suzie Salmon, gets murdered by Tucci’s character.

I wonder if the production team had to recreate the promo or if they managed to track down an original somehow. The curious thing is that this film takes place in the United States (Pennsylvania) but yet the most prominent album being marketed in the record store is Queen’s debut album. I’m not even sure if Queen had been aggressively promoted there in 1973 since we hear it wasn’t really until Sheer Heart Attack in 1974 that Queen made significant inroads in the U.S.

This isn’t to say that there weren’t Queen promos around in 1973 in American record stores, but why showcase Queen so prominently with an album not as well known as perhaps others from that period, such as Bob Dylan (Dylan), The Hollies Greatest Hits, Wings (Band on the Run), or even Aerosmith’s debut album from 1973?

Methinks there’s a Queen fan over at Jackson’s camp.