Former WWE Artist Tom Fleming Discusses Designing WWF Royal Rumble 1994 Poster
Tom Fleming started with WWE in 1990 and came up with any designs and pieces of art for the company that hold up today.
Fleming played a part in designing the purple pants, Adam Bomb’s gear, and many event posters from 1990 and 1994.
Appearing on the Two Man Power Trip, Fleming discussed how he got his start with WWE.
“It started off as like a trial period. My first job was not working in the office there, it was doing a painting for the Legion Of Doom’s merchandise poster. If you remember back then, there was a poster of Hawk & Animal standing in an alleyway. They basically said ‘We need this super realistic so that we can superimpose the figures on top’. They gave me the rundown and I took it back to my home studio, worked on it there and just drove it in. Once they were really happy with it, they said they were going to put me on a two-three day trial working in-house and if everything goes well then we’ll go to two-three weeks and go from there. It pretty much turned out to be almost a decade after that,” he said.
One poster that had Fleming’s prints on it was the Royal Rumble 1994 poster that featured wrestlers coming out of the television and into the laps of fans watching on their couch at home.
Fleming said about the concept, “They basically told me they wanted the feel of larger than life, the actual characters coming out of the TV and interacting with the viewers because it’s that interactive. They basically said do your thing, but they gave me a lot of creative room to play around with the composition and stuff. The giant TV with all of the wrestlers pouring out of it, and the people on the coach, funny enough, was my wife, the kid next door, and Mike Foley who was one of the art directors in the WWF at the time.”
Elsewhere during the interview, Fleming discussed his concept design for Razor Ramon. You can find his full comments by clicking here.
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