Your Similar Album Covers of the Week - Special Toast Edition

Hey kids, remember After Dark? You know, that awesome screen saver program that we used on our old Macintoshes back during the dawn of the 90's? Of course you do. They were the ones who brought us the most iconic of all screen savers, The Flying Toasters:



















This little piece of randomness tickled the public's fancy in just the right ways, helping After Dark software to skyrocket in popularity throughout the 90s. But few know that the idea to put wings on toasters did not originate with screen savers. Case in point, Jefferson Airplane's 1973 live album, Thirty Seconds Over Winterland (which proved to be their final album):
























The similarities here were so blatant (down to the 1950's style toaster) that in 1994, Bay Area band Jefferson Airplane sued Bay Area company Berkeley Systems (the company that released After Dark) for stealing their iconic imagery, originally illustrated by Bruce Steinberg. The judge eventually dismissed the case due to the fact that the album art was not copyrighted by the time that Flying Toasters was released by Berkeley Systems in 1989.

In case you were wondering, After Dark screen savers are not currently available for use with your new MacBook. Berkeley Systems is long gone as a company, and it is unclear who holds the rights to Flying Toasters at this point. I'm sure I'm not the first to say that a re-release is sorely overdue....