Icons | Incredibly Strange TV

What started as some fun-filler in the 1995 Incredibly Strange Film Festival Guide, has now become a permanent fixture in the Incredibly Strange World. Every year we sit down with much red wine and come up with new icons for some of the films playing. Then the rough pencil sketches are transformed into iconic works of ink by the talented artiste Mike Sheils.

Many of them never see the light of day, due to the following reasons: Too ugly, too offensive, too dumb and sometimes too obtuse. Their existence is solely due to the fact that people use them, sometimes even bypassing the reviews and looking up the icons to base their decision on whether they want to see a film or not.

One year, one of the icons incensed a minor sponsor so much, they demanded their advert pulled from all the guides after they had gone to press. When this was refused they tried some strong arm tactics and got some heavy swinging legal firm to call up and DEMAND the guides be pulled from circulation. This intimidation treatment backfired when a business weekly picked up the story and AT threatened to send their parent company some incriminating evidence. All this from the power of one icon.

And this year the icons go global - the Fantastic Fest in Austin run by our good buddy Tim League and AINT IT COOL will be spreading the power of the Icons to the US of A. There's no stopping them now.