Via Slashfilms.com:
Star Wars: The Force Awakens is one of the most popular movies of all time, and we’ve posted about all the hidden Easter eggs, seen many video essays about the plot comparisons to A New Hope (which even Abrams has admitted was by design) and seen a bevy of posts and videos pointing out the film’s flaws. But one error I haven’t seen mentioned many places in the mainstream press is the fact that Star Wars: The Force Awakens opening crawl features a different font from the previous six live-action films. And there’s almost nothing nerdier than typography and font geekery, but if this kind of thing interests you, hit the jump and find out how it’s wrong.
An essay on Medium by FixTheCrawl was the first to point this out:
The ‘roll-up’ has a very specific typographical treatment in the previous six films — and the font used for the episode title, “The Force Awakens”, is wrong. Really wrong. The Star Wars opening crawl is perhaps the most famous narrative device in cinema history. Star Wars has many stylistic hallmarks, such as the Kurosawa-inspired scene wipe. But the opening crawl has become so associated with Star Wars that no other film could possibly use it without seeming like a blatant lift. In fact, you might say that the opening crawl is the thing that makes a Star Wars film feel like The Real Deal™. When series creator George Lucas got his chance to make the first sequel to Star Wars (1980’s The Empire Strikes Back), he made a very controversial move — re-titling his original blockbuster, Star Wars, by appending Episode IV — A New Hope. With this in mind, he decided the visual consistency of the opening crawl across all future episodes would be so sacrosanct, that he completely re-shot a new opening crawl that contained the new title and episode number. Ever since, every main saga episode of Star Wars has contained the Episode number, typeset in the News Gothic family, and the title of the film itself, typeset in the Univers family.
But apparently Disney got it wrong with The Force Awakens opening crawl. The episode’s title is set with a condensed version of News Gothic, when it should be set in Univers, Ultra Condensed. I’m not nerdy enough to explain how it’s different, so here is another excerpt from FixtheCrawl:
News Gothic (also used for the body text) is very round, friendly, and readable, whereas Univers gives the title of the film some stately heft — telegraphing the impression that the events about to transpire are carved in the stone of destiny (or something). … It’s subtle, but noticable. The ‘S’ and ‘R’ glyphs, in particular, are very different. Overall, it’s boxier, and feels more staid. Less urgent.
Click below to read the full article.
