Psychedelic animation of the Grateful Dead from the Mars Hotel

Although the building mentioned in the title of the Grateful Dead’s 1974 album Grateful Dead from the Mars Hotel is a shabby hotel that once stood in a neighborhood in San Francisco, the art on the front cover of the album seems to depict a hotel on the planet Mars, while the art on the back cover seems to portray the band members as some kind of aliens. In any case, check out this 6-minute sequence of psychedelic animation that I believe was created by Gary Gutierrez for The Grateful Dead Movie (1977).



Presumably, award-winning science fiction author Allen Steele is a big Dead fan, as his first published piece was a short story entitled “Live from the Mars Hotel” (1988), reprinted in the anthology Isaac Asimov’s Mars (1991).