Published by Weldon Owen and edited by Malcolm Croft this is a two volume book released to coincide with the 2025 Linus O'Brien's documentary Strange Journey - The Story of Rocky Horror.

Rob has also writen us a review which you can read further down the page.

WOW! This is one of the best Rocky Horror books to come out so far. The slip case is embossed with a fishnet pattern and Rocky Horror is gloss overprinted and embossed too. There is even a ribbon fixed so you can pull the books out without damaging the slipcase. It's a two volume collection packed with images and information.

Book one is titled IT WAS GREAT WHEN IT ALL BEGAN - THE OFFICIAL ROCKY HORROR SHOW ANNOTATED SCRIPT.

Hardback book, with red embossed printed Rocky Horror lettering on the front cover.

The script is not the current UK stage tour version, the most noticable difference being Sweet Transvestite being before the Time Warp. Also included are loads of images from the original productions as well as a Virgin's Guide to Rocky Horror, which are scripted shout outs. Not many of these are what you would hear in the UK at a stage show. There are also references to water pistols, etc. which are banned from UK shows.

Book two is STRANGE JOURNEY - THE ILLUSTRATED ORAL HISTORY OF THE ROCKY HORROR PICTURE SHOW.

Hardback book, with grey embossed printed Rocky Horror lettering on the front cover.

This volume is the companion book to the 2025 Linus O'Brien's documentary Strange Journey - The Story of Rocky Horror and contains loads of interviews with the stars and fans of the show and movie. Again this is packed full of interesting facts and many, many previously unseen photos.

This book covers over fifty years of Rocky Horror history, starting with the original show, through to the movie and up to the present day.

Release date November 20th, 2025

370+ Pages in all

Hardcover

Overall Weight: 3.5Kg

Overall Dimensions : 240 x 53 x 295 mm

ISBN 979-8-88674-335-7

THE OFFICIAL ROCKY HORROR LATE NIGHT DOUBLE FEATURE:
50th ANNIVERSARY COLLECTOR'S EDITION

Book review by Rob Bagnall

Following an abundance of books released this year to commemorate the 50th anniversary of The Rocky Horror Picture Show comes the official companion to Linus O'Brien's engrossing and emotional feature-length documentary Strange Journey: The Story of Rocky Horror.

Released as a hefty two-volume set in a beautifully glossy slipcase, appropriately embossed with a rather nice fishnet pattern, this is of course a significant addition to every collector's bookshelf.

In my opinion, Strange Journey: The Illustrated Oral History of The Rocky Horror Picture Show is the perfect tie-in to the documentary, packed with an abundance of anecdotes, thoughts and memories from the film's innumerable contributors, as well as a wealth of gorgeous illustrations and photographs. Like the documentary itself, the book details Richard O'Brien's own personal journey, the history of the original stage production, and the Rocky phenomenon's now fanatical following.

When I first saw Linus's captivating film, one particular stand-out thrill for the endlessly ravenous Rocky Horror geek in me was a moment which saw Richard re-reading his decades old handwritten notes, discovered by his ex-wife (and Linus's mother) Kimi Wong amongst a collection of old Rocky treasures. Already knowing that a tie-in book was in the works, I immediately expressed my hope that this essential historical document - entitled 'How I love those 'B' movies' and exemplifying Richard's comprehensive understanding of the specific reality and deadly earnest acting style ('no pastiche' as he stipulates) which have always been absolutely essential to The Rocky Horror Show's success - would be included in its pages. These fifty-year old notes, along with a few reprinted pages of Richard's handwritten dialogue from a then work-in-progress script - 'Our amiable host is an alien, an extraterrestrial being from the planet Tran-Zell' explains Dr. Scott at one point - are definite highlights of the book for me.

Unfortunately, the set's other book - It Was Great When It All Began: The Official Rocky Horror Show Annotated Script - is already causing ripples and controversy amongst purists and devoted Rocky enthusiasts, and not without good reason.
Although presented, somewhat questionably, here as the 'Official' (on the book's spine) and the 'Original' (inside the book itself) Rocky Horror Show script, it appears to me, at first glance at least, that this version has been cut, pasted and edited from more than one source - and has even been reworded in certain places - so is sadly not a true representation of Richard's original libretto.

Some of the editing looks a little dubious too. At the bottom of page 122, after Columbia is shot, Frank asks, 'Did you do this for me?' - a line not in the original published script, although added for a couple of later productions - but on the following page of script we get the stage direction: 'Columbia throws herself between Riff Raff and Frank - ZAPPP - Columbia and Frank are both killed', meaning that, due to poor editing and lazy proof-reading, Columbia dies twice in this edition. Whereas a lot of these stage directions and lines of dialogue match those of the 1983 published edition of the libretto (to my knowledge the first version to be commercially available to the public), others seem to have been reworded. Even the 'sound' of Riff Raff's laser - 'BLATTT' in the 1983 published Samuel French edition - has been changed to 'ZAPPP' here.

As long time aficionados will already know, Richard O'Brien's initial outline for the show's plot was fleshed out - with songs and dialogue being added and constantly tweaked - while the original production was being rehearsed at London's Royal Court Theatre in 1973; with further material - most notably the song 'Eddie' (aka: 'Eddie's Teddy') - inserted for the show's transfer to the Chelsea Classic later that year.
With the production expected to run for just a few weeks in the summer of '73, there were initially no backing singers or understudies in the cast. Therefore, the actors playing Riff Raff, Eddie and Columbia also played creepy Ushers at the beginning of the show, their faces hidden by featureless translucent masks, to both set the scene and serve as actual front-of-house personnel.
Once the show transferred to a larger venue for a longer run, male and female understudies - Ziggy Byfield and Angela Bruce - also serving as backing singers were added to the roster.

Strangely, however, even The Transylvanians appear in this book's list of the show's characters - when surely they did not exist until the subsequent movie screenplay - which will only cause more unnecessary confusion between the Show and the Picture Show.
Yet more bewilderingly, while correctly called Ushers (as they were in the original 1973 script) at some points in the book, the 'chorus' characters are also often referred to as Phantoms at various other places (the terms being used interchangeably it would seem). To the best of my knowledge, these ensemble characters (originally known as Ushers or, in some later 1980s productions, as Ghouls or Transylvanian Ghouls) were not officially renamed Phantoms until the 1990 West End revival in London.
The book even splits the script into two separate acts, as it is usually performed today, whereas the original production famously played as a continual piece without an intermission.

Personally, I would have preferred the book to have presented a copy of the first fully typed up script from 1973 without any edits or rewording of the stage directions and then shown the evolutionary nature of the show by adding the various post-1989 updates and changes as separate clearly marked annotations. To be honest, a book of that nature could even add the more recent alterations too. For instance, why has the Narrator's line, 'It's true there were dark storm clouds - heavy, black and pendulous - towards which they were driving' been changed in recent touring productions to, 'It's true there were dark storm clouds towards which they were driving. Black, heavy and pendulous.'?
This drives my Rocky-OCD absolutely bonkers, and I would love to get my hands on the current Narrator's book and write the original lines back in.

On the plus side, Richard's explanations of the show's characters - 'He is NOT camp in the effete way' he specifies about Frank-n-Furter for example, 'Avoid becoming a poor drag act' - and the overall style of the piece as stated in his Foreword - 'I must stress that there should be NO touching, fondling, or looking up skirts or down knickers at ANY TIME other than the bedroom scenes by ANYONE. We have nowhere to go once we have. Keep the sexual tension in a constant state of foreplay - to travel hopefully is better than to arrive.' - are absolutely essential and should, in my opinion, be wholeheartedly embraced by every new actor and director who might approach this seminal piece of theatre.

Whilst definitely an impressive looking addition to every fan's library of treasured Rocky tomes, and certainly an excellent companion piece to the brilliant Strange Journey documentary, this much-anticipated and beautifully presented publication ultimately falls a little short of being the definitive coffee table book we have craved for years - primarily due to some dubious editing and the misleading nature of what erroneously claims to be the original script - and I still think that there is room for a more comprehensive look at the complete history of this continually evolving theatrical landmark.

© Rob Bagnall 2025