Before any buckles get swashed, however, we must first sit through one minute and forty seconds of this:

This is not a positioning shot of deepest, darkest space. Nor is it a close-up of a black hole—although it could be a close-up of The Black Hole, Disney’s sci-fi adventure. That’s because The Motion Picture and The Black Hole, both released in 1979, were the last two big Hollywood movies to feature a musical overture before the start of the movie proper. If you begin either movie and see nothing but beautifully-scored blackness for a couple of minutes, don’t worry—just hum along to the theme tune, and wait for the typography to begin.

If you’re a fan of Star Trek: The Original Series, you might be expecting to see the font from its opening titles in Star Trek: The Motion Picture too. This font was (perhaps unsurprisingly) called Star Trek, though its modern-day digital version is known as Horizon, and is available only in non-italic form:

In addition, I’m delighted to report that during season one, Star Trek was accompanied by a variant of sci-fi stalwart Eurostile in its closing credits:

The Star Trek font also appeared in a non-italic version, to introduce William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy to 1960s TV audiences:

Sadly, this is where the good news ends. When The Original Series returned for a second season, it added DeForest Kelley (Dr. “Bones” McCoy) as a second “ALSO STARRING”:

The problem here is obvious, isn’t it? Unlike the Es in “SHATNER” and “LEONARD,” the ones in “DEFOREST KELLEY” have straight corners, not curved ones:

Alas, The Original Series’s inconsistent typography did not survive the stylistic leap into the 1970s. To make up for it, The Motion Picture’s title card introduces a new font, with some of the curviest Es known to sci-fi. It also follows an emerging seventies trend: Movie names beginning with STAR must have long trailing lines on the opening S:

The font seen in The Motion Picture’s titles is a custom typeface created by Richard A. Foy, known at the time as Star Trek Film (and now known in digital form as Galaxy):

Star Trek Film also shows up on the movie’s US one-sheet poster, with bonus Technicolor beveling to make it even more futuristic:

Illustrated by Bob Peak, the poster for The Motion Picture has become something of a classic. Its striking rainbow motif was reprised in a limited-edition poster for 2016’s Star Trek Beyond, presented to fans who attended a Star Trek fiftieth-anniversary event.

On which theme: If you’ve ever doubted the power of type to aid recognition, note that the teaser poster for Star Trek Beyond features the word “BEYOND” in metallic, beveled, extruded Star Trek, without feeling the need to add the actual words “STAR” or “TREK.” The presence of the Enterprise and the use of an iconic font were deemed more than sufficient to identify the franchise. (Although it would have worked far more effectively if they’d remembered to curve the E.)

If you like the style of Star Trek or Star Trek Film, and want to use them to spice up your corporate communications, I have excellent news. In 1992, the creators of the Star Trek franchise partnered with Bitstream to release an officially licensed “Star Trek” Font Pack. The pack contains full versions of Star Trek and Star Trek Film, plus Star Trek Pi (a collection of insignias and Klingon glyphs) and Starfleet Bold Extended (a Eurostile look-alike that appears on the outside of many Starfleet craft). It also, of course, uses Eurostile Bold Extended liberally on its front cover:

Let’s take a look at Bitstream’s examples of how the fonts should be used, from the back of the font pack’s box:

If you’re looking to bring character to all you do in Microsoft Windows 3.1, the “Star Trek” Font Pack is for you.

But back to the movie. Its opening scene starts with a menacing close-up of the movie’s central antagonist, which just happens to be a gigantic glowing space cloud:

Clouds are not generally known for their evil, murdering tendencies. To work around this potential dramatic limitation, the movie’s producers cleverly employ a scary sound effect whenever we’re meant to be intimidated by this galactic floaty miasma. Despite aural evidence to the contrary, the cloud’s twangling menace was not made by throwing a ham
into a sack of pianos. Instead, it’s the sound of a Blaster Beam, a twelve-to-eighteen-foot aluminum guitar-like device invented in the early 1970s by musician John Lazelle.

Los Angeles–based Beam player Francesco Lupica, who has performed as the Cosmic Beam Experience since the early seventies, is mentioned in The Motion Picture’s credits for his work creating sound effects for the movie. However, the primary credit for the cloud’s eerie twang goes to Craig Huxley, a child actor and musician who originally appeared in The Original Series as Captain Kirk’s nephew, before going on to create The Motion Picture’s scary soundscape.

As part of his collaboration with composer Jerry Goldsmith, Huxley (by now a professional musician) composed the Blaster Beam cadenza for The Motion Picture’s climax. He subsequently obtained a patent for the Blaster Beam’s design, and went on to bash its eerie strings in Back to the Future Part II and Part III, Tron, 2010, Who Framed Roger Rabbit, and 10 Cloverfield Lane, plus several more Star Trek movies.

If you’re not sufficiently freaked out by reading about how the Blaster Beam sounds, here’s Craig playing all 18 feet of it in a variety of movie scores:

Following its starring role in The Motion Picture, the Blaster Beam became so synonymous with sci-fi that it was featured in Seth MacFarlane’s The Orville as an aural homage to the original Trek movies. It’s basically become the audible equivalent of Eurostile.

As the cloud twangles ominously, three Klingon ships float into view. Clearly intimidated by the cloud’s noncorporeality, the Klingons fire some photon torpedoes into its inky midst. (It’s not entirely clear what they hope this will achieve.) As they optimistically launch their missiles, we see their native tongue translated into English in a slightly fuzzy Pump Demi:

The Motion Picture is notable for being the first time in Star Trek history that Klingons speak Klingon, rather than conversing in English. An initial Klingon dialect was created for the movie by UCLA linguist Hartmut Scharfe, but wasn’t felt to be alien enough, so James Doohan (aka Scotty) volunteered to work on an alternative. Doohan’s skills with accents were already well known—after all, he played a Scotsman, despite being a Canadian with Irish parents—and he helped come up with a number of nonsense phrases that formed the basis of the movie’s Klingon language. Associate producer Jon Povill described the birth of Klingon this way:

After Hartmut had done his thing and worked it all out logically, Jimmy and I just sat down one day and made up stuff. We created the Klingonese by using some of what Hartmut had done and then combining it with our own: We strung together nonsense syllables, basically—totally made up sounds with clicks, and grunts, and hisses.

The Klingon typography seen in the movie is just as nonsensical as the spoken language—the limited set of Klingon glyphs seen here don’t actually mean anything. They were nonetheless adapted (along with various Starfleet and Klingon insignia) into a “Star Trek” Font Pack typeface known as Star Trek Pi:

The Motion Picture’s Klingon might be nonsense, but the language has had a long and active development since the movie’s release. Doohan’s guttural phrases were adapted by linguist Marc Okrand into a full language for 1984’s Star Trek III: The Search for Spock, which was followed in 1985 by an official Klingon Dictionary:

This dictionary describes the language’s grammar in detail, and provides two-way translations for common English and Klingon phrases. The dictionary has since been translated into Portuguese (Dicionário da língua Klingon), German (Das offizielle Wörterbuch: Klingonisch/Deutsch; Deutsch/Klingonisch), Italian (Il dizionario Klingon), Czech (Klingonský slovník), and Swedish (Klingonsk Ordbok).

Star Trek’s producers were not the first world builders to create an entire language, however. Lord of the Rings author J. R. R. Tolkien, inventor of two complete Elven languages, was a philologist long before he was a novelist. From his early days at the Oxford English Dictionary (where he was responsible for words starting with w), through his multiple professorships at Oxford University, Tolkien loved the study of language more than anything else. Indeed, he didn’t construct his Elven languages to add color to his novels; rather, he wrote novels to provide a world in which his created languages could live and breathe. Tolkien believed a language was truly alive only when it had a mythology to support it, and his books provided a world in which that mythology could exist.

Had Tolkien lived to see 1991’s Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, I am therefore sure he would have approved of Klingon chancellor Gorkon’s tongue-in-cheek statement: “You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.” This comment inspired the Klingon Language Institute to produce The Klingon “Hamlet,” an equally tongue-in-cheek 219-page restoration of Shakespeare’s famous work to its original Klingon:

Despite the Klingons’ use of their native tongue, things are not going well for them in their battle against the evil space cloud. A distress message from the Klingon command ship is picked up by a sensor drone from space station Epsilon 9 and translated into English for the benefit of the station crew. This time, the Klingon does not translate into Pump. Instead, it’s a customized version of Futura Display, which is almost certainly the Letraset Instant Lettering version with bits cut out of it to make it more futuristic:

Its final sentence is completed by a voice reading out the English translation: “IMPERIAL KLINGON CRUISER AMAR… CONTINUING TO ATTACK.” (Given that these events take place during the opening ten minutes of the movie, you can probably guess how “CONTINUING TO ATTACK” is going to pan out.)

As we cut back from Epsilon 9 to the cloud, we see that only two of the three Klingon ships remain. According to the movie’s shooting script, this is because a “FRIGHTENING WHIPLASH OF ENERGY” has been fired from the cloud, creating evil lightning that makes Klingon ships disappear. A second frightening whiplash takes out ship number two, leaving only the command craft. As a third bolt appears on the Klingons’ tactical display, the command ship poops a red torpedo, but it is all to no avail. The command ship is whiplashed into nothingness.

As they express their shock, the watching crew of Epsilon 9 observes that the sinister gassy blanket is heading directly for Earth. The cloud puts on its best evil face, and makes its destructive intentions clear via some particularly dramatic twangs.

With twangling in our ears, we quickly switch scenes to Vulcan, which is easily recognizable from its lava-strewn matte paintings and suspicious geological similarity to filming locations in Yellowstone Park. Look—it’s Spock! He’s talking in Vulcan, which also translates into English as fuzzy Pump Demi:

The lady Vulcan here is talking about the many years Spock has spent striving to attain Kolinahr, a state of pure logic in which Vulcans shed all of their emotion. She offers Spock a symbol of total logic to commemorate his imminent Kolinahr-ization—but just as she does so, Spock hears an 18ft cloud-guitar twangling in space. Lady Vulcan realizes that Spock’s goal lies elsewhere, and despite several years of exhortations, he fails to Kolinahr.

After our brief trip to Vulcan, we switch straight to San Francisco, specifically to the Golden Gate Bridge, as we follow an air tram on its way to Starfleet Command. The most notable change between now and the 2270s is that the bridge’s traffic lanes have been covered, thereby hiding the vehicles and making for a much cheaper effects shot:

Spoiler alert: That flying air tram contains Admiral James T. Kirk, who is heading to Starfleet Headquarters in San Francisco’s Presidio Park. There’s a nice close-up of the United Federation of Planets logo during a positioning shot as he arrives. This looks to be Eurostile Bold, but not quite—there’s something wrong with the capital Ss:

Starfleet is the military and exploratory arm of the Federation, which explains the use of the Federation’s stars-and-thistles logo as part of the floor decoration. We see the same logo a few moments later, on the side of Kirk’s air tram:

…and again when Kirk briefs the crew of the Enterprise about their upcoming mission:

Confusingly, each of these Federation logos has a different thistle design and a different constellation of stars. Perhaps more importantly, they bear a remarkable similarity to the official flag of the United Nations:

This is clever branding by the movie’s design team. A viewer’s subconscious recollection of the United Nations via this extrapolated logo and color scheme gives the Federation (and therefore Starfleet) an immediate association with peacekeeping and ethical behavior, eliminating the need for an extended explanation of their role in the movie’s universe. (All of which goes to show: Design doesn’t have to include typography to provide a shortcut for exposition.)

Just in case you have any doubt about the coincidence of this similarity: The “Star Trek” Star Fleet Technical Manual, published in 1975, includes the charter of the United Federation of Planets. It’s a direct copy of the United Nations charter, but with life forms instead of humans, and planets instead of nations. Differences are indicated in yellow, additions in green:

Shortly after arriving at Starfleet, Kirk transports to a space station near the USS Enterprise, which has been in dry dock while undergoing a post–Original Series refit. On arrival, he meets up with Scotty, and they take a shuttle to go and see the ship:

As they depart for the Enterprise, we see a mix of fonts on the side of the shuttle and station. “OFFICE LEVEL,” seen on the right, is, of course, perennial sci-fi favorite Eurostile Bold Extended:

…although, according to the Star Fleet Technical Manual, the “Earth font name” for Starfleet’s official type style is Microgramma Ext, suggesting that we may be looking at Eurostile’s predecessor Microgramma instead:

The “05” on the side of the shuttle is not Eurostile Bold Extended, however. This is Starfleet Bold Extended, the fourth and final font from the “Star Trek” Font Pack:

Unlike Eurostile, it has an outline, giving it a more curved silhouette overall. It also has higher bars on the P and R, a squared-off corner for the Q, and a very different number 1. (Eurostile’s 1 is perhaps its least practical glyph, which may explain why the Star Fleet Technical Manual extract above states that it should not be used in fleet operations.)

The R and the 1 make it easy to tell that Starfleet Bold Extended is used for the Enterprise’s hull classification symbol (“NCC”) and number (“1701”):

Indeed, Starfleet Bold Extended is used on the front of USS Enterprise NCC-1701 (and 1701-A, B, C, D, and E) in all subsequent Star Trek movies and TV shows, in essentially the same style as in The Motion Picture. This gives a consistent, instant recognizability to each iteration of the craft, despite the crew’s tendency to crash or otherwise destroy the ships for dramatic effect.

A different style was introduced for 2009’s Star Trek reboot, and continued through 2016’s Star Trek Beyond. The reboot movies use an outlined version of plain old Eurostile Extended for “U.S.S. ENTERPRISE,” though they continue to heed the advice from the Star Fleet Technical Manual about Eurostile’s 1, opting for flat lines for the 1s in “1701”:

In 2017, the Star Trek: Discovery TV series rebooted the typography once more, opting for Eurostile Bold Extended for the USS Discovery’s name and designation. Crucially, the Discovery becomes the first central Star Trek craft to ignore the Starfleet official type style, shamelessly using a Eurostile 1 character without modification:

The Enterprise’s complex shape could easily make it a nightmare to navigate. Thankfully, it has a fancy horizontal-and-vertical elevator system known as a turbolift, which whizzes crew members from A to B via handily placed turboshafts. We see a two-part map of the craft’s turboshaft network as Kirk heads up to the bridge. Judging from this map, it looks like the turbolift can move in all three dimensions, including along a curved route:

The white dot on the map indicates the lift’s current position. We see it move from right to left as the lift departs, and it’s clearly visible at the top of the map after the lift arrives at the bridge:

The turbolift’s multidirectional nature is also represented in its iconography, seen when Decker boards a turbolift on level five later in the movie:

Despite the turbolift’s obvious futurism, Star Trek was not the first to propose a multidirectional elevator. That honor goes to Roald Dahl, whose 1964 novel Charlie and the Chocolate Factory features a glass elevator that goes “sideways and longways and slantways and any other way you can think of.” (Unlike the turbolift, it can also propel itself out of its containing building and into the air via sugar power.)

The turbolift’s secret is being able to switch cars between shafts dynamically, in order to route travelers around the craft in the most efficient manner. This may have been a futuristic concept in 1979 when The Motion Picture was released, but I am delighted to report that it recently became a reality. In 2017, German elevator company thyssenkrupp performed the first real-world test of its MULTI elevator system.

According to thyssenkrupp, MULTI increases elevator capacity by 50 percent, while halving the elevator footprint within a building. It allows ninety-degree turning of the system’s linear drive and guiding equipment, enabling cars to quickly move between horizontal and vertical shafts during a single journey.

MULTI operates in two dimensions, not three, so it’s not quite a full-fledged turbolift. Nonetheless, its motors are based on technology from a magnetic levitating train system, so it’s still pretty damned futuristic.

Kirk gathers his crew and explains that they are the only ship near enough to intercept the evil space cloud, and so they’re going to have to save the day. A message comes through on the big screen from Epsilon 9, informing everyone that the cloud is “over eighty-two AUs in diameter.” This seems somewhat incredible, given that one AU (astronomical unit) is the average distance from Earth to the sun, which is about ninety-three million miles. (Indeed, it’s so incredible, that the director’s edition of the movie used some sneaky dialogue editing to make the cloud “over two AUs in diameter” instead.)

To give some context to vastness on this scale: On August 25, 2012, NASA’s Voyager 1, humankind’s farthest-traveling spacecraft, entered interstellar space at a distance of around 125 AUs from the sun, after traveling nonstop for nearly thirty-five years. Even this distance is still technically within our solar system, however, and it will be another forty thousand years before Voyager 1 approaches a planetary system outside our own. (Unless, that is, a Voyager craft finds a way to sidestep such vast distances by traveling through a black hole—not that this is likely to be relevant to the plot of The Motion Picture, of course.)

Regardless of the true size of the cloud, it makes short work of dispatching Epsilon 9 (and a random man, with really big hands, in an orange spacesuit) while the Enterprise crew looks on. Kirk tells the shocked crew to get ready to leave, and they set about their preparations.

As the Enterprise heads cloud-wards, Kirk notes that he must risk engaging warp drive while still within the solar system. In a turn of events that will surprise no one, engaging a not-properly-tested warp drive while still in the solar system turns out to be a bad idea, resulting in the Enterprise being dragged into a wormhole. Everything goooeeesss a biiiiiit sloooooow moootionnnnnn as the crew tries to destroy an asteroid that has been dragged into the wormhole with them. This scene’s highlight is an excellent use of some spare Letraset Instant Lettering, in which a combination of symbols from the bottom right corner of a Letraset sheet are used upside-down in a weapons system’s “TRACKING SEQUENCE”:

With the wormhole successfully navigated, the Enterprise continues on its way toward the space cloud. Not much happens. Indeed, there are ten whole minutes that basically consist just of people looking at a cloud, without any typography. So let’s skip ahead to the cloud’s approximate center, and the mild peril therein.

Intruder alert! A strange alien light-beam probe intrudes into the bridge. It heads over to the science station and starts calling up blueprints of the Enterprise:

These blueprints are taken directly from 1973’s “Star Trek” Blueprints by Franz Joseph, who also wrote and designed the Star Fleet Technical Manual. Specifically, these blueprints show the inboard profile and crew’s quarters of the Enterprise. (Strictly speaking, this means the probe is scanning blueprints from before the Enterprise underwent its Motion Picture refit, but let’s not worry too much.)

Joseph’s Blueprints and Technical Manual were spectacularly successful publications for Ballantine, with the Technical Manual reaching number one on the New York Times trade paperback list. (Indeed, it is entirely possible that the books’ success contributed to Paramount’s decision to revive Star Trek in the first place.)

After scanning the blueprints, the probe zaps Deltan crew member Ilia, and she disappears. She’s not gone long, though. A few minutes later, she returns as IliaBot, a synthetic replacement created by the mysterious life force at the space cloud’s center in order to communicate with the “carbon units” aboard the Enterprise.

The newly appeared IliaBot notes that she has been “programmed by V’Ger to observe and record.” In doing so, she provides a name for the mysterious cloud-based entity that’s been causing everyone so much trouble. (Although why there would be a flying entity called V’Ger this many AUs from the sun still remains unclear.)

Spock advocates a thorough medical analysis, and IliaBot is whisked off to the Enterprise’s sick bay, where she is scanned on a futuristic medical table:

Alien, also released in 1979, features a remarkably similar scanner in the Nostromo’s onboard “autodoc.” Alien’s version didn’t make it into the original theatrical cut of the movie, but you can see it in the 2003 director’s cut, in which it is used to scan the body of a recently face-hugged Kane:

Both of these devices look to be inspired by the just-invented science of X-ray computed tomography (better known today as a CT scan), for which physicists Allan M. Cormack and Godfrey N. Hounsfield shared a 1979 Nobel Prize.

These two scanning devices may have seemed futuristic to 1979 viewers, but as CT scanners became more common, later sci-fi outings had to up their game to keep one step ahead of reality. Lost in Space (1998) and the “Ariel” episode of Firefly (2002) both moved to holographic scanners, projecting a virtual image of a patient’s innards above their actual body instead of on a screen.

More recent movies have adopted even more advanced approaches. Prometheus (2012), Elysium (2013), and Passengers (2016) all feature devices that perform actual surgery without the need for a doctor.

These devices are definitely one step ahead of present-day robotic surgery, which focuses more on improving the precision of humans rather than removing the need for them altogether. Their nearest real-world equivalent is the da Vinci Surgical System from Intuitive Surgical, which was approved by the FDA in 2000, but is still controlled by a specially trained surgeon from a nearby console.

The most impressive movie medical gadget, however, is surely the reconstruction device seen in 1997’s The Fifth Element, which can re-create an entire living being from a single bone fragment. Despite recent real-world advancements in growing human replacement organs, we can be confident that this device will remain futuristic for some time yet.

As these medical devices show, the threat of technology catching up with the future is a perennial problem for science fiction, especially in a franchise as long-running as Star Trek. In the time between The Original Series (1966–69) and The Motion Picture (1979), hand-held communicators of the type used by the original Enterprise crew had gone from a futuristic possibility to a technical reality. As a result, Gene Roddenberry felt a new style of communicator was needed to make The Motion Picture feel like it was set in the future. In the place of hand-held devices, The Motion Picture introduced wrist-based communicators, worn at all times by Enterprise crew members.

Despite their always-available convenience, these wrist-based communicators are used to advance the plot in only two scenes—when Decker tells the crew to return to their stations, and when Kirk speaks to Uhura from beside the V’Ger craft. Indeed, it’s notable that earlier in the movie, Kirk uses a desktop comms panel in the Enterprise’s sick bay rather than speaking into the device on his wrist:

Real-world wrist-based devices such as Apple’s cellular Apple Watch don’t require the device’s built-in microphone to be held anywhere near the face in order to be effective. However, in a movie, it’s necessary to move the device close to the actor’s mouth to make it clear that it is being used to communicate. (The alternative—keeping the actor’s wrist by his or her side—makes it look like the actors are simply talking to themselves.) This practical storytelling disadvantage, with the potential to mask the actor’s face, may be why the otherwise futuristic wrist communicators were used sparingly in The Motion Picture—and were quietly replaced by more traditional handheld devices in later Star Trek movies.

The medical scanner’s analysis tells Bones that IliaBot is made from “micro-miniature hydraulics, sensors, and molecule-size multiprocessor chips.” However, despite the spectacular level of detail in this mechanical marvel, V’Ger’s creation is sadly missing any sign of emotion. An optimistic Decker takes it on a tour of the recreation deck, one of Ilia’s favorite hangouts pre-robotification, to try to connect with its non-robotic side. Here, Decker introduces IliaBot to a set of illustrations of five historical ships called Enterprise:

From left to right, they are:

The USS Enterprise (CV-6) is not the only aircraft carrier to have a Star Trek connection. Its successor, the nuclear-powered CVN-65, appears in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, when Chekov and Uhura attempt to steal some nuclear power to recrystallize their dilithium. We can be confident that they steal it from the USS Enterprise (CVN-65), because the US Navy has conveniently left out some large signs that say “USS ENTERPRISE CVN-65”:

UPDATE: Actually, it turns out we can’t be confident that this is the USS Enterprise (CVN-65), because it was out at sea when this scene was filmed. The non-nuclear USS Ranger (CV-61) stood in for it instead.

The inclusion of the space shuttle Enterprise (OV-101) in this gallery is also of note. NASA’s prototype space shuttle was originally going to be called Constitution, to celebrate its unveiling on the anniversary of the signing of the United States Constitution. However, Star Trek superfan Bjo Trimble, who had previously led a successful letter-writing campaign to bring back The Original Series for a third season, launched a new campaign to encourage fans to ask for the shuttle’s name to be changed to Enterprise. Tens of thousands of fans responded. This led President Gerald Ford’s senior economic adviser, William F. Gorog, to write a memo to the president, advocating for the name change:

Four days later, Ford received a follow-up memo from James Connor, secretary to the cabinet. Ford was convinced, and the Constitution became the Enterprise.

When the shuttle was unveiled on September 17, 1976, many of the Star Trek cast were in attendance as special guests, along with creator Gene Roddenberry. To complete the occasion, the Air Force band struck up a surprise rendition of the Star Trek theme in their honor.

Paramount wisely made the most of the announcement’s PR value, taking out a full-page ad in the New York Times a few days later to announce the movie to the world:

As a prototype, the space shuttle Enterprise was constructed without engines or a functional heat shield, and was therefore incapable of independent spaceflight. The photo seen in The Motion Picture’s recreation room looks to be from the Enterprise’s final test flight in 1977’s approach and landing tests, during which the Enterprise was flown atop a Shuttle Carrier Aircraft (a heavily modified Boeing 747), then jettisoned from its perch using explosive bolts. After its release, it glided to a landing on the runway at Edwards Air Force Base. (The engines seen on the back of the craft in the photo are dummy engines, for aerodynamic test purposes only.) Despite initial plans to retrofit the Enterprise as a spaceflight-capable vehicle, this ended up being financially impractical, and the Enterprise never made it into orbit. Nonetheless, its 1977 test landing happened just in time for a photo of OV-101 to appear aboard NCC-1701.

The space shuttle Enterprise might not have made it into space, but some of its campaigners did. As a thank-you for the letter-writing efforts, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry asked Trimble to organize a cattle call of fans to appear in the recreation room scene. The Enterprise crew members shown listening to Kirk’s impassioned speech in The Motion Picture are all Trekkers, in a range of costumes and latex alien masks:

UPDATE: According to none other than Bjo Trimble herself in the comments below, the crew in this scene is actually a mix of Trek fans and professional extras (at the insistence of the Screen Extras Guild). The good news is that fans were paid the same as the professional extras for their time; the bad news is that both fans and extras were on set from 5am until midnight, as the scene was filmed in one day rather than the expected two. Bjo herself is in a white uniform, halfway back, behind an extremely tall extra.

The space-faring hopes of real-world Enterprise craft didn’t end with the space shuttle Enterprise, however. In December 2009, Virgin Galactic unveiled its SpaceShipTwo spacecraft, as part of an attempt to become the world’s first commercial space carrier:

From a Virgin Galactic press release of the time:

In honour of a long tradition of using the word Enterprise in the naming of Royal Navy, US Navy, NASA vehicles and even science fiction spacecraft, Governor Schwarzenegger of California and Governor Richardson of New Mexico will today christen SS2 with the name Virgin Space Ship (VSS) ENTERPRISE. This represents not only an acknowledgement to that name’s honorable past but also looks to the future of the role of private enterprise in the development of the exploration, industrialisation and human habitation of space.

Sadly, this Enterprise didn’t make it into space either. During a powered test flight in October 2014, the VSS Enterprise was destroyed after a premature deployment of its descent device.

In a twist of hope for The Motion Picture fans, the VSS Enterprise’s successor was nearly named VSS Voyager. Its final name, however, was chosen by physicist Stephen Hawking, who christened the new craft VSS Unity instead.

While Decker gives Ilia a tour, Spock sneaks outside in a spacesuit and flies through V’Ger’s pulsating orifice with pinpoint timing. He encounters a giant pseudo-Ilia, with whom he attempts a mind-meld. A dazzling montage of images flashes up on his space helmet during the meld, including one of particular interest:

This illustration is from the six-by-nine-inch gold-anodized aluminum plaque mounted aboard NASA’s Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft, which traveled to Jupiter (and in the case of Pioneer 11, to Saturn) in the late 1970s:

These plaques were created by author Carl Sagan and SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) Institute founder Frank Drake, and illustrated by Linda Salzman Sagan, as a message from mankind to any passing extraterrestrials that might chance upon the flights.

The purpose of these plaques was to educate inhabitants of other planetary systems about Pioneer’s home planet. Pioneer 10 is shown leaving the solar system after passing Jupiter, though the arrow symbol indicating its trajectory is unlikely to make sense to extraterrestrial species unless they, too, evolved from a hunter-gatherer society.

This Pioneer plaque also appears briefly in Star Trek V: The Final Frontier, though it is erroneously facing outward for shot-framing convenience. It doesn’t really make a difference, as the Pioneer craft is unceremoniously blown up by a passing extraterrestrial, without so much as a glance at the engraving. (The moral: Let’s hope mankind’s actual first contact does not involve a Klingon.)

Pioneer’s successor, the Voyager program, also contained a message to extraterrestrial life. For Voyager, however, Sagan went one better than a plaque, sending an entire album of Earth facts into the cosmos. And when I say “album,” I really do mean it in the old-school vinyl LP sense. Voyager 1 and 2 each carried a golden record of earthly sights and sounds, along with engraved instructions as to how to play the record.

The Voyager golden records include music, spoken phrases, a recording of human brain-waves, and a series of encoded images including food, anatomy, biology, animals, and architecture. The presence of these images showing Earth’s amazingness raised concerns around the launch of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 that if an intelligent species ever did encounter one of the records, it might decide to invade or attack Earth to control that amazingness itself. Still, I’m sure there’s no chance of that happening in practice, right?

After a tense standoff during which a mysterious being named “V’Ger” threatens to attack Earth to control its amazingness, the Enterprise crew manage to gain an audience with V’Ger itself. Much to everyone’s surprise, the all-powerful creature at the center of the evil space cloud turns out to be an old-school NASA spacecraft. As the crew inspects the craft, Kirk rubs some dirt off a sign on the side and reads out, “V-G-E-R. V’Ger.” Oh my goodness—it’s a hypothetical Voyager 6!

The timing of The Motion Picture’s release is important when considering the cultural significance of this scene. Voyager 2 launched on August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 a couple of weeks later. (Voyager 1 overtook its sister craft in December 1977, hence the unusual ordering.) Both craft completed their observations of Jupiter during 1979, shortly before The Motion Picture was released. In the same way that 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey leap-frogged the Apollo moon missions and aimed for Jupiter, 1979’s The Motion Picture leapfrogged Jupiter and imagined humanity sending a probe far beyond its 1970s counterparts.

The idea of a rogue Voyager would not have been alien to seventies viewers, either. Shortly after the launch of Voyager 2, the probe started triggering its onboard systems independently, ignoring the post-launch instructions of its creators. The extreme shaking of Voyager 2’s launch rocket had made the probe think it was failing, causing it to switch to its backup systems and
try to figure out what was going on. Indeed, for a few days NASA engineers on Earth had no idea whether the Voyager 2 mission had been lost altogether. Newspapers ran headlines such as “‘Mutiny’ in Space” and “Voyager Going to HAL?”, with 2001’s antagonist HAL 9000 clearly still a reference point for space-based computers turning rogue. Thankfully, Voyager 2’s trajectory stabilized and conditions returned to normal operating thresholds, ending its temporary rebellion.

The real-world Voyager 1 and 2 were sadly not succeeded by Voyagers 3 through 6, leaving The Motion Picture to imagine what the program’s future might have been. Its ambitions are certainly grand—during the movie’s finale, Decker suggests that V’Ger traveled to the far side of the galaxy after falling in to “what they used to call a ‘black hole’”. This is impressive, given that the nearest black hole to Earth is HR 6819, which is about 1,120 light years away from our solar system. Even traveling at its current speed of 38,000mph, it would take Voyager 1 nearly 20 million years to reach this black hole. (No amount of Eurostile Bold Extended can set The Motion Picture that far in the future.)

Back in the movie’s finale, the Enterprise crew deduces a remarkable amount of V’Ger’s life story from zero evidence, thereby accelerating the exposition nicely. Without any assisting typography, they determine that V’Ger wants to physically join with a human to become one with its creator. Decker bravely volunteers to join with IliaBot. He turns all sparkly, and his hair blows crazily in the breeze. Ilia’s does not. As their join completes, the entirety of V’Ger turns sparkly and disappears to leave nothing but the Enterprise, flying pointedly toward the camera.

As we wave goodbye to the Enterprise, we should note that unlike many sci-fi movies, The Motion Picture has not once shown a present-day company in a futuristic setting. To make up for it, Italian car manufacturer created a movie tie-in ad for the launch of their own spacey craft, the Fiat Panda:

The text on the poster can be translated as: “The human adventure is just beginning. [This was The Motion Picture’s tagline.] Fiat Panda. The conquest of space.”

To find out if this is a fair comparison on Fiat’s behalf, let’s pitch the USS Enterprise refit against the Panda 30:

Here’s that seven-position adjustable rear seat in action, converting from fold-up storage to a comfortable bed:

Impressive as the Enterprise undoubtedly is, I think we can all agree that the Panda is the clear winner here.

– Dave Addey

The article above is an expanded chapter from the Typeset in the Future book, which you should absolutely go and buy while you’re all excited about sci-fi typography. There’s even a Japanese edition! The book also contains an in-depth interview with Mike Okuda, designer of many Star Trek movies and TV shows, and creator of the LCARS computer interface first seen in Star Trek: The Next Generation.

If you’re not yet sold by just how much you need the TITF book in your life, you can always check out my other articles, including 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, Blade Runner, WALL·E, and Moon. And if you’d prefer even more Star Trek font trivia, I highly recommend The Fonts of Star Trek by Yves Peters.

⁽¹⁾ USS Enterprise (refit) max speed warp factor = 9.2
Warp speed calculation: speed = (warp³) * c
speed = (9.2*9.2*9.2) * 299,792,458 m/s
speed = 778.69 * 299,792,458 m/s
speed = 233,444,789,535 m/s
speed = 522,201,121,422 mph

(2) 0-60mph in 34 sec = 0.08 g

Exciting news: there’s a Typeset in the Future book! Typeset in the Future: Typography and Design in Science Fiction Movies, published by Abrams Books, is available to buy in all good bookstores.

Even more exciting news: there’s a Japanese edition! ＳＦ映画のタイポグラフィとデザイン, published by FilmArt, is available in all good Japanese-language bookstores.

•  Amazon (Print / Kindle)
•  Amazon (Print / Kindle)
•  Amazon (Print)
• Amazon (Print)
• Amazon (Print)
•  Apple Books (ePub)
•  Barnes and Noble (Print / Nook)
•  Kobo (ePub)

The book contains new and expanded TITF studies for seven all-time classic science fiction movies, in a form that is beautiful enough to adorn even the most discerning of coffee tables. It’s the perfect holiday present for the design / sci-fi geek in your life, even if that geek happens to be yourself.

Does it include my favorite sci-fi movie, [MovieName]?

The book studies seven classic sci-fi movies, focusing on those that create a detailed vision of the future through design and typography. (The list is also heavily inspired by requests I’ve received on TITF over the past few years.)

Here’s the line-up:

• 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), adapted from the original article
• Alien (1979), adapted from the original article
• Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979), plus a look at the wider world of Star Trek typography
• Blade Runner (1982), adapted from the original article
• Total Recall (1990)
• WALL·E (2008), which I’ve also posted as a brand new article in its entirety
• Moon (2009), adapted from the original article

The book also includes interviews with sci-fi, typography, and design experts, including:

• Paul Verhoeven, director of Total Recall, RoboCop, and Starship Troopers
• Mike Okuda, scenic art supervisor for Star Trek: The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager, and Enterprise (plus associated spin-off movies)
• Ralph Eggleston and Craig Foster, production designer and graphic designer for Pixar’s WALL·E
• Stephen Coles, co-founder of Fonts In Use, author of The Anatomy Of Type, and Associate Curator at Letterform Archive
• Antonio Cavedoni, font designer and expert on Eurostile creator Aldo Novarese

And if that’s not enough, there’s also:

• A study of the tricks movies use to make their worlds look realistic without distracting you from the plot
• A detailed guide on how to make your own text look futuristic
• A study of futuristic movie font Eurostile Bold Extended
• A foreword from Matt Zoller Seitz, editor-in-chief of RogerEbert.com, and author of New York Times bestsellers The Wes Anderson Collection and The Wes Anderson Collection: Grand Budapest Hotel

How does the book differ from the web site?

Four existing articles from typesetinthefuture.com have been revised and expanded for the book, with even more geeky detail than the originals. (The book’s 2001: A Space Odyssey chapter already contains twice as much goodness as when I first studied the movie in 2014.) Three new studies have been written entirely from scratch, alongside in-depth interviews with the typography and sci-fi experts listed above.

Sounds great! I’m going to buy a copy right now.

Why thank you!

[This article is from the Typeset in the Future book, which is really very good and you’re probably going to want to buy a copy of. If you’d rather read the article first, don’t worry—I’ll remind you again later on.]

Before we get started, there is an important detail we must clear up. Our hero’s name is not, as you might think, WALL-E. Moreover, it definitely isn’t WALL•E. His name is WALL·E, and that dot is an interpunct, not a hyphen or a bullet.

An interpunct is, of course, a vertically centered dot originally used to separate words in Latin and ancient Greek. (Spaces weren’t invented until several centuries later.) The interpunct is still in use today—it’s the official decimal point in British currency (£9·99), and is used to represent the dot product of two vectors in mathematics (x · y). Most relevantly, it’s used in Japanese to separate titles, names, and positions, as in “課長補佐 · 鈴木” (Assistant Section Head · Suzuki). It is therefore entirely appropriate as the separator in WALL·E, which is short for Waste Allocation Load Lifter · Earth Class.

The bold extended typeface seen on WALL·E’s front plate is Gunship, designed by Dan Zadorozny, one of the unsung heroes of modern sci-fi type design. Dan is an amateur type designer from Texas whose Iconian Fonts website features more than six hundred free hand-crafted typefaces, many of which have been used by sci-fi movies, TV shows, and book designers.

In addition to WALL·E’s front plate, Gunship is seen on Earth and aboard the Axiom, the flagship spacecraft of megacorporation Buy n Large (BnL, for short), most notably for robot-facing wall and door typography. Its upper- and lowercase variants include different combinations of cutouts and curve orientations, giving designers flexibility when crafting robot signage. (Strictly speaking, this means that our hero’s name, correctly capitalized, is “waLL·e,” with the interpunct as a further customization—Gunship’s own interpunct is rectangular.)

The movie begins with an insight into WALL·E’s typical workday, which is spent building gigantic piles of trash by compacting waste into neat, stackable cubes. After a hard day’s crushing, we follow him on his journey home, learning some useful exposition along the way. This includes a bank of electronic ads for BnL, promoting everything from liquid air to quadruple-patty burgers. Common throughout these ads is an insistence on immediate consumption—“DRINK NOW,” “HUNGRY NOW,” “RUN NOW,” “CONSUME.” And if consuming a product once isn’t enough, you can repeat the experience a second time—the signage seen below includes ads for both “100% Reused Food” and “Regurgi-Shake: Twice the Flavor.”

We’ve seen how corporate mergers, such as Alien’s Weylan Yutani and Blade Runner’s Shimata-Dominguez, are an inevitability in sci-fi futures. WALL·E’s Buy n Large is similar, except that this company was formed by a merger between a frozen yogurt manufacturer (Buy Yogurt) and a maker of suits for the larger gentleman (Large Industries). Clearly a marriage made in heaven, this corporate combination led to a rapid expansion, culminating with Buy n Large owning every company and government in the world.

The Buy n Large logo is an over-italicized customization of Futura Extra Bold Oblique, as demonstrated by a super-distinctive capital G in the BUY N LARGE BANK logotype that WALL·E passes early in the movie.

If the red-and-blue logo feels familiar, it shouldn’t be a surprise—it’s because BnL uses the exact same typeface and color scheme as real-world retail giant Costco Wholesale Corporation.

There’s another curious BnL subsidiary to be found among the city’s electronic ads, on a beaten-up billboard advertising “Eggman Movers (Creating More Space).” This company is an Easter-egg reference to WALL·E production designer Ralph “Eggman” Eggleston, and it shares the name of the moving company from 1995’s Toy Story, for which Ralph was art director.

The presence of a Buy n Large–branded bank means Buy n Large–branded banknotes, which are unusual for being strewn across the floor of the deserted city. If you look closely at the notes, you’ll see that some of them have “10⁶” in the corner, and are marked “ten million dollars.” Others look to be marked “99⁶,” suggesting that Buy n Large stores continued the classic $9.99 pricing trick even after adding six zeroes to the end of everything. (Indeed, it says much about the Buy n Large approach to consumerism that it prints notes with the 99s already included, to avoid customers having to receive any change.)

We discover later in the movie that the Axiom left Earth in the year 2105. This suggests that in the preceding years of overconsumption there was a period of severe hyperinflation, making a $10 million note a necessity. This is not without historical precedent—Earth’s most extreme example of hyperinflation occurred in Zimbabwe in November 2008, just a few months after WALL·E’s release, when the inflation rate for the Zimbabwe dollar reached a staggering 79,600,000,000 percent per month. At this point, a single US dollar was equivalent to 2,621,984,228 Zimbabwe dollars. The largest-denomination note printed during this time was the $100 trillion note, which makes Buy n Large’s $10 million bill seem like small change by comparison.

WALL·E leaves the bank behind and continues his journey via the disused tracks of the BnL Transit monorail system. In the absence of working trains, these concrete tracks provide a convenient route through the middle of the deserted city.

Despite their association with aspirational futures, monorails have been failing to become a global mass-transit system for almost two hundred years. The first passenger monorail opened in 1825 in Cheshunt, England, primarily to transport bricks, though it was also utilized for transporting people, mostly for novelty purposes. Unlike the top-of-rail system seen in WALL·E, Cheshunt’s monorail consisted of carriages suspended beneath an overhead track, and was powered by a single horse.

The Cheshunt style of monorail—with suspended carriages hanging beneath a single rail—was also adopted by the Wuppertal Schwebebahn, which began operation along the Wupper River in Wuppertal, Germany, in 1901. The Wuppertal’s suspended system is still in operation today, carrying more than sixty-five thousand passengers on an average weekday.

The monorail seen in WALL·E is of the style popularized by Swedish entrepreneur Axel Wenner-Gren, whose prototype ALWEG (Axel Lennart Wenner-Gren) monorail system came to the attention of Walt Disney after a family visit to Wuppertal gave him monorail fever. Disney saw the potential for a monorail attraction at his new Disneyland theme park in California, and the Disneyland-ALWEG Monorail System opened in June 1959. The system remains in operation today (under the name Disneyland Monorail), and there are similar attractions at Disneyland Tokyo and Walt Disney World in Florida. In total, Disney monorails have transported more than one billion passengers into an aspirational transportational future.

It’s not entirely clear what US city WALL·E lives in, but the presence of a monorail network certainly positions it as a location that was once optimistic about the future. This mid-century futurism is borne out by other architectural features of the city, most notably a curved building seen among the billboards encountered earlier. This building is strongly reminiscent of the Space Needle observation tower in Seattle, Washington, which was built for the city’s 1962 World’s Fair, together with an ALWEG monorail system that is still in operation today.

Near the monorail, WALL·E passes a promotional poster for himself, with the caption “Working to dig you out!” This poster has definite communist propaganda undertones, showing a stylized army of WALL·Es working together to build a brighter future. The implication of this design choice—that communist values are the solution to decades of rampant consumerism—is a pretty bold political statement for what is only the fourth minute of the movie.

The future to which these WALL·Es aspire is apparently just above and behind the viewer—a common trope for communist propaganda, where the aspirational group gaze is almost always in this direction.

Indeed, this gaze is such a common trope that it became the primary styling of the promotional poster for 2014’s banned comedy movie The Interview, in which two Americans travel to North Korea to interview the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un. (The WALL·E poster’s bottom-edge caption, punctuated by an exclamation mark, is a recurring design feature in North Korean propaganda posters.)

This aspirational style is an example of socialist realist design, the officially sanctioned visual aesthetic of the Soviet Union, which positioned broad-shouldered, purposeful workers as the true heroes of the age. As a robot who is literally a rectangle, there is surely no worker more broad-shouldered and purposeful than our movie’s eponymous hero, WALL·E.

WALL·E’s self-promotional poster is also a fine example of Handel Gothic, one of the movie’s supporting typefaces. Originally designed in 1965 by Donald J. Handel, the font has become a mainstay of design futurism. (Indeed, it is quite possibly the originator of one of our rules for futuristic type: Make straight things curved.)

My favorite use of the typeface in WALL·E occurs later in the movie, when we see the distinctly curved E of some Handel Gothic… on a handle. (I refuse to believe this is anything but a deliberate typographic joke.)

Handel Gothic enjoyed a particular resurgence when the type family was expanded in the 1980s, and will be immediately familiar to anyone who visited EPCOT Center at Walt Disney World in Florida, which opened in 1982. (Later in this article, we’ll look in detail at the theme park, which is now named simply Epcot.) The original EPCOT Center logo was Handel Gothic all the way, making particularly good use of a lowercase n in “Center” to bring some extra curviness, and choosing a font variant with a curved leg in its R for consistency. (It also added letter joining and slicing for good futuristic measure.)

Handel Gothic will also be familiar to Star Trek fans, from its appearance in the credits for both Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993–99) and Star Trek: Voyager (1995–2001).

The movie that made Handel Gothic synonymous with sci-fi, however, was almost certainly Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, released in 1977. Close Encounters used the typeface for its theatrical poster and for its opening credits, with the very words “Close Encounters” offering not one but three opportunities to recognize Handel Gothic’s trademark E.

But back to WALL·E’s journey. Toward the end of his trek home, he passes many more WALL·E units, all of them rusted and dead. The sole remaining WALL·E happily cannibalizes a Caterpillar track from a nearby broken unit to replace his own damaged part, and motors onward with the new track in place.

It’s an easy detail to miss, but WALL·E’s home is a broken-down “BnL WALL·E Transport” vehicle, which may once have housed all the dead units he just passed. When he reverses himself into a WALL·E-size bin in a rotatable storage rack a few minutes later and rocks himself to sleep, his loneliness as the last robot on Earth is made all the more acute by the uninhabited bins around him, now filled with ordered trash.

Before he climbs into bed, WALL·E retrieves his favorite VHS cassette from a nearby toaster, and pops it into a VCR. It turns out this is a beaten-up copy of Hello, Dolly!—1969’s awkwardly punctuated Jerry Herman musical. Delightfully, the typography of this cassette is taken directly from the movie’s 1991 VHS release, though the identity of its non-futuristic title font—half Century Schoolbook, half Benguiat Caslon—has sadly eluded my detective skills.

WALL·E watches his Hello, Dolly! cassette via a small, portable device that looks almost exactly like an Apple iPod Video. I say “almost,” because the real-world iPod Video had a smaller click wheel than the one seen in WALL·E, had white labels on its buttons, and did not support external playback from a VHS cassette player. Nonetheless, this iPod is just one example of many in WALL·E’s home that evoke nostalgia for gadgets past, reinforcing that WALL·E himself is the discarded, unwanted technology that humanity left behind.

To work around the tiny scale of his iPod’s screen, WALL·E uses a plastic Fresnel lens as a magnifying device to enlarge the image to several times its original size. In doing so, he follows a trend started in Terry Gilliam’s similarly dystopian Brazil, in which employees at the Ministry of Information Retrieval huddle around tiny CRT screens to watch westerns through Fresnel lenses when their boss isn’t looking.

WALL·E awakes from robotic sleep on day two of the movie, low on power and dynamism. The fact that his head is a big pair of binoculars gives a great opportunity for a visual gag, as we see him literally bleary-eyed before activating the zoom lock on first his left eye, then his right, to reveal an eye-test chart in the opposing rack.

WALL·E’s binocular form is mimicked in the shape of his heads-up display (or HUD), which has the classic “two circles” shape used in many movies to indicate that we are looking from a character’s viewpoint through a pair of binoculars. This HUD raises an interesting question, however. Why does WALL·E have a heads-up display, with information overlaid on a video stream? A heads-up display really makes sense only if you are a human who has eyes; for a robot, any video input is combined with additional metadata from environmental sensors (such as direction, zoom, and power), and fed directly into the robot’s processor. Overlaying environmental information on a video stream implies that the robot has cameras that look at the world, and then more cameras that look at the augmented output of those cameras, which doesn’t make sense at all.

The answer, of course, is that WALL·E has a HUD because movie robots have HUDs, and movie robots have HUDs because they enable the viewer to visualize what the robots are thinking, even if it makes zero sense in technical reality. This trope began in 1973’s Westworld, whose final act shows us the world from the vantage point of Yul Brynner’s gun-slinging robot. Although Brynner’s HUD is not augmented with data, it is nonetheless the first use of computer-generated imagery in a feature film. Director Michael Crichton cuts several times from a real-world scene to the robot’s pixelated version of the same, including a thermal image when Brynner chases his prey in the movie’s final act.

Westworld’s “robot viewpoint” trope was codified by 1984’s The Terminator and 1987’s RoboCop, both of which augmented their HUDs with additional data and text. Following these two movies, a heads-up display pretty much became the de facto expectation for any on-screen robot whose motives need to be understood.

Pixar’s robot HUDs tend to include the shape of the robot’s eye(s) within the heads-up display, to help us associate the HUD with the character it represents. The Incredibles’ Omnidroid predates WALL·E’s binoculars in this regard. Other WALL·E robots—M-O, SECUR-T, and EVE—also follow suit.

Pixar’s neatest variation on the robot HUD trope occurs all the way back in 1999’s Toy Story 2, where a plastic toy’s marketing gimmick (plus some clever camera framing) enables us to literally see through the eyes of the movie’s robotic bad guy.

There is one further question raised by WALL·E’s binocular HUD. How does his directional compass—seen at the top center of his HUD—continue to work when he is aboard the Axiom? Lots of planets may have a north, but the same is not true of spacecraft—north, south, east, and west make sense only when you’re on the surface of a sphere.

Day two (and act two) of WALL·E see a Buy n Large scout ship arrive on Earth, disrupting WALL·E’s routine. Most importantly, it introduces us to EVE, who is everything WALL·E is not. EVE’s shiny white design is technologically advanced; she’s the curvy iMac G4 to WALL·E’s boxy Mac 128K. Her design evokes sleek Apple products of the 2000s, with her head, in particular, highly reminiscent of a 2002 iMac G4’s base. Even her reboot sound is a futuristic take on Apple’s famous startup chime, whereas WALL·E’s post-charge chime is the version Apple introduced in 1998 and removed altogether in 2016.

EVE’s evocation of Apple product design is not entirely coincidental. In a 2008 interview with Fortune magazine, director Andrew Stanton stated: “I wanted EVE to be high-end technology—no expense spared—and I wanted it to be seamless and for the technology to be sort of hidden and subcutaneous. The more I started describing it, the more I realized I was pretty much describing the Apple playbook for design.” This led to a 2005 call to Steve Jobs—at that time, both owner of Pixar and CEO of Apple—which in turn led to Apple design head Jony Ive spending a day at the Pixar headquarters in Emeryville, consulting on the EVE prototype. (It is surely entirely coincidental that EVE’s wireless arms and hands are reminiscent of Apple’s wireless Magic Mouse, released the year after WALL·E.)

During a dust storm, WALL·E takes EVE back to the safety of his home, where he presents her with a small multicolored cube. In the three seconds the camera pans away for WALL·E to retrieve Hello, Dolly!, EVE solves the Rubik’s Cube and returns it to her astonished host.

EVE’s cube-solving time would be impressive for a human; the current world record is 4.22 seconds, set by Feliks Zemdegs in May 2018. Sadly, because of the camera pan, we’ll never know if EVE broke the world record for a robot, which currently stands at a mind-boggling 0.637 seconds. This record was set in November 2016 by Sub1 Reloaded, a cube-solving robot built by German engineer Albert Beer. Six high-performance stepper motors turned the cube twenty-one times to complete the task, averaging just 0.03 seconds per rotation.

Spare a thought, then, for poor WALL·E. His surprise at EVE’s accomplishment is understandable—he lacks color vision and has only three digits on each hand, which means that Rubik’s Cubes are really not his specialty. (There’s a reason Guinness doesn’t have a “fastest dog” Rubik’s Cube category.)

One other point of note: This scene is the only time the color green appears in WALL·E in a scene unrelated to a plant. While this breaks the movie’s careful color scripting, it’s worth it for a good gag.

All seems to be going well with WALL·E and EVE’s introductions, until they are rudely interrupted by EVE’s spotting a plant that WALL·E has excavated from the trash. She subsumes the plant, as per her “directive,” and enters hibernation mode. WALL·E’s attempts to wake her invariably end in comedic pain, though one of them does reveal EVE’s serial number, 051682, set in Handel Gothic. (I can’t help but wonder whether someone in Pixar’s art department was born on May 16, 1982.)

WALL·E gives up on reviving EVE and disconsolately returns to his trash-crushing routine. Shortly afterward, the Axiom’s scout ship returns to Earth and collects EVE to take her home. Desperate not to lose his new friend, WALL·E hitches a ride on the outside of the scout, causing him grief when the ship blasts through Earth’s surrounding satellite trash. As the satellites fall away, we see that WALL·E has a Soviet-era Sputnik 1 satellite on his head. This is impressive, especially given that Sputnik 1—the first man-made object to orbit Earth—burned up on reentry to Earth’s atmosphere in 1958.

We see Sputnik 1 again later in the movie, as a model in Captain McCrea’s display cabinet. This model is accompanied by a NASA space shuttle launch/entry helmet, as worn by space shuttle astronauts between 1982 and 1986 during launch and return from space.

This “retro space tech” theme can also be seen on Earth during EVE’s scan for plant life. After scanning a Toy Story Pizza Planet truck and a portable lavatory, EVE checks a rusting Apollo command module before slamming the door shut in disgust at its absence of plant-based life.

Showing recent space technology as trash or as museum pieces positions our personal experiences of space as archaic and quaint in comparison to the Axiom’s futuristic styling. This further reinforces WALL·E’s own obsolescence as a discarded piece of technology, and sets us up neatly for a transition to the shiny futurism of the Axiom.

The Axiom paints a vision of the future where every menial task, no matter how small, has a dedicated robot created expressly for the purpose. Like 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL and Alien’s MU/TH/UR, all these robots have cute acronyms to make them human-friendly.

Of particular note is VN-GO, the painterbot, whose acronym perpetuates a common yet incorrect pronunciation of Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh’s surname. (According to the BBC Pronunciation Unit, it is “van Gokh,” with the kh pronounced like the ch in the Scottish word loch.)

EVE’s acronym, sadly, is even worse. Her denomination as Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator could not be more inaccurate, given that her entire reason for existing is to evaluate vegetation on the planet Terra (as Earth is known in Latin). Presumably, her moniker was chosen for cuteness rather than linguistic accuracy—after all, this movie is about WALL·E and EVE, not WALL·E and TVE.

Also of note is TYP-E, a typingbot who is designed solely to press keys when someone approaches the elevator shaft to the captain’s quarters. TYP-E provides an excuse for one of the movie’s best visual gags—as a robot, he has a keyboard made entirely, of course, from ones and zeroes.

M-O’s cleaning colleagues (VAQ-M, SPR-A, and BUF-4) may bring back memories for fans of 1997’s The Fifth Element. In Luc Besson’s over-the-top vision of the future, evil industrialist Zorg demonstrates his own array of task-specific robots by dropping a glass tumbler on the floor to trigger their “lovely ballet.” As two sentrybots stand guard, a sweeperbot, a spraybot, and a bufferbot clean up his mess before returning to a nearby storage station.

The Axiom’s robots travel around the ship via their own dedicated corridors, separate from the craft’s passenger areas. These passenger areas are split into three classes—economy, coach, and elite—each of which has a distinct architectural style. The classes themselves do not play a functional role in the movie’s plot, but one has to wonder what they mean for the Axiom’s society. Are children born into the classes their ancestors originally purchased, as if into some kind of futuristic caste system? Would the Axiom have its own Titanic moment if a passenger from economy bumped hover chairs with someone from elite? One thing’s certain: The styling of each class is extremely useful for helping viewers orient themselves within the ship’s overall structure as the action moves back and forth along its length.

Our introduction to the passenger area starts with the economy deck, which is compact, angular, and concrete in texture and color. Its palette is deliberately sparse, rarely moving outside the Buy n Large blue, red, and white, and making extensive use of the corporation’s Futura Extra Bold Oblique.

The deck’s design is highly reminiscent of the interior of the Contemporary Tower at Walt Disney World Contemporary Resort, whose A-frame concrete-and-steel structure was so futuristic when it opened in 1971 that it even had a monorail running through the middle. (As anyone who has stayed at the Contemporary can attest, however, its rates can hardly be considered “economy.”)

The coach deck, unlike the economy deck, is curved, eclectic, and spacious, with brightly colored holo-ads scattered everywhere. It mimics Las Vegas’s Strip in gaudiness and style, with artificial neon colors used extensively and every sign encouraging Axiom passengers to spend more money. (How the ship’s financial economy continues to function after a seven-hundred-year flight continues to remain a mystery.)

The ceiling of the coach deck is a gigantic animated screen that can switch between day and night, complete with a BnL-branded sun or moon. The ceiling’s relationship to actual time is somewhat tenuous, as we see when Captain McCrea winds the sky back from 12:30 p.m. to 9:30 a.m. in order to make his morning announcements. In this regard, the ceiling is essentially an amalgam of two Las Vegas landmarks: the painted cloud ceilings of the Forum indoor arcade at Caesars Palace, whose lighting ebbs and changes without ever making it nighttime enough for you to want to stop buying things, and the four-block-long overhead screen of the Fremont Street Experience—the world’s largest video screen—whose 12.5 million LEDs illuminate Vegas partygoers every night. The result is an entirely fake sky for the Axiom’s population, allowing finely tuned control over their artificial environment.

The coach deck leads to the elite deck, whose styling resembles that of a high-class lido or spa. Despite their very different palettes, the coach and elite decks share a curved, futuristic environmental styling that unifies their overall architecture. According to production designer Ralph Eggleston, the architecture of this shared area is inspired by the work of architect Santiago Calatrava, whose signature curved supports and arches can be seen throughout both decks’ central concourse.

The other main influence for the Axiom’s architecture is the design of the Tomorrowland area of Disneyland, in California. According to production designer Ralph Eggleston, during the movie’s production WALL·E’s design team visited an exhibition of Tomorrowland concept art and took inspiration from the designs therein. Perhaps the most obvious of these influences is the presence of a PeopleMover transportation system running through the middle of the club and elite decks, in a style very similar to the PeopleMover at Tomorrowland. (Do check out DaveLandWeb’s fantastic PeopleMover photo page for some great examples of the original in action.)

The evolution of Disney’s PeopleMover concept began with the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair, for which the Ford Motor Company asked Disney to design an attraction to compete with General Motors’ Futurama II exhibit. The resulting Magic Skyway gave fairgoers an opportunity to ride in a driverless Ford convertible—including the just-launched Ford Mustang—through a diorama that transported them from prehistoric times to a futuristic space city.

Following its success at the World’s Fair, the traction system behind Magic Skyway was adapted into a new feature for Tomorrowland’s 1967 relaunch. The new attraction, known as the WEDway PeopleMover, enabled Walter Elias Disney to follow Axel Lennart Wenner-Gren (of ALWEG monorail fame) in naming a futuristic transportation mechanism with his initials. It also provided an ideal inspiration for the Axiom’s central transport system.

The Axiom’s PeopleMover has much in common with its WEDway counterpart. Both are focused on a main circular loading area in the heart of a central plaza, with a long, straight stretch of track extending away from the loading deck. Both give passengers a tantalizing view of surrounding attractions as they are transported from one area to another. Indeed, I am sure Walt Disney would have been delighted to see his dream of future transportation integrated into the Axiom’s space-age environment, especially given that Disneyland’s PeopleMover was a prototype for Walt’s grander vision of futuristic living. Walt planned to build a larger PeopleMover installation as part of his Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow, or EPCOT—a new and futuristic city to be created from scratch at his planned Disney World Resort in Florida.

In October 1966, Walt recorded a short film pitching his “Florida Project” to industrialists and legislators, including a detailed description of EPCOT’s transportation system. In this new city, cars and trucks were to be pushed underground, with the community’s twenty thousand residents instead traveling by WEDway and monorail to work, play, and socialize. The concept images below from Walt’s EPCOT film give an idea of just how much imagination the creative brains at WED Enterprises applied, under Walt’s careful guidance, to everyday living challenges.

Tragically, Walt Disney died less than two months after his EPCOT introduction was filmed, passing away before the pitch was screened and before New Tomorrowland opened to the public. His ambitious vision of a prototype community did not become a reality, but its name lives on in the Epcot theme park (formerly “EPCOT Center”) at Walt Disney World in Florida—although the eventual EPCOT park became more of a permanent World’s Fair than a real-life city of the future. The WEDway PeopleMover did not realize its potential, either: The Disneyland attraction closed in 1995, to be replaced by the faster (but short-lived) Rocket Rods ride, which itself closed in 2001.

Disneyland park-goers can still see the PeopleMover’s abandoned tracks snaking through Tomorrowland, displaying curved, arched supports that Santiago Calatrava would surely approve of. (Thankfully, a PeopleMover can still be experienced at the Magic Kingdom park at the Walt Disney World Resort in Florida, where the Tomorrowland Transit Authority PeopleMover continues to provide a leisurely tour of nearby attractions.)

Of course, the PeopleMover also lives on via the Axiom, whose reimagining of the concept is almost a microcosm of Walt’s vision for EPCOT. Aboard the Axiom, it’s a PeopleMover (not a monorail) that fulfills the role of high-speed arterial transport, with individual BnL hover chairs completing the “final mile” of the journey via preset illuminated paths (blue for humans, white for robots, red for stewardbots). It may not match the scale of Disney’s EPCOT dream, but it’s nonetheless fitting that Walt’s vision of a transportational future made the trip into space.

During WALL·E’s tour of the passenger decks, we discover that the Axiom’s computer is voiced by none other than Alien’s Ellen Ripley. Casting Sigourney Weaver as the disembodied voice of a space-based computer is clearly ironic, especially given her experience with such voices in Alien and Aliens. WALL·E ups the irony by having Weaver narrate not one but two scenes that would feel all too familiar to her xenomorph-hunting counterpart, triggering bonus space-peril associations for Alien fans. (Weaver also plays a disembodied voice in Andrew Stanton’s Finding Dory, aping her narration of nature documentaries.)

Alien and Aliens are not the only sci-fi movies to get a nod from WALL·E. On the Axiom bridge, we meet AUTO, the ship’s autopilot robot. It might be hard to believe just by looking at him, but AUTO is actually an Evil Space-Based Computer. His design is clearly influenced by a certain other ESBC—that central red eye is a direct reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey’s HAL, giving an immediate signal that this robot is not to be trusted.

AUTO’s physical similarity to HAL gives him a practical similarity, too. On the rare occasions we see the world from AUTO’s vantage point, we get an extreme fish-eye view of the surrounding area, just as we did for HAL in 2001. WALL·E combines HAL’s fish-eye view with The Terminator’s red HUD hue, making AUTO’s evil intent doubly clear to any discerning fan of sci-fi.

AUTO and HAL belong to a long-standing tradition of sci-fi automata whose glowing red eye(s) give away their evil nature. They really are everywhere in sci-fi movies—from the Model 101 in The Terminator, via the replicants in Blade Runner, to the evil wriggly thing inserted into Neo’s belly button in The Matrix.

That red glow has its benefits, however. You can always tell when an evil robot has been finally defeated from the fact that its red eye(s) slowly fade to black. The Terminator’s T-800, The Matrix’s wriggly thing, and WALL·E’s AUTO all follow this trope when deactivated.

AUTO may look like the movie’s bad guy, but his actions are simply an example of artificial intelligence following its programming too literally. To understand his motives, we must remember that BnL’s original plan was for its star liners to return to Earth as soon as an EVE probe found proof that life was once more sustainable. Five years after their departure, however, BnL autopilots were sent a directive by CEO Shelby Forthright telling them to keep their craft in space indefinitely, because the cleanup process on Earth was not going to succeed. Six hundred and ninety-five years later, with no subsequent instructions to the contrary, AUTO is simply following this command to the letter, blocking any and all attempts to return to Earth.

In this regard, AUTO is eerily similar to 2001’s HAL, whose murderous tendencies aboard the Discovery were similarly driven by an inability to reconcile a contradiction in his programming. In the movie’s sequel, 2010: The Year We Make Contact, we learn that the basic purpose of HAL’s design was “the accurate processing of information without distortion or concealment.” We also discover that HAL was instructed (via Directive NSD 342/23) to lie to Dave and Frank about the real reason for the Discovery’s mission. After lip-reading that they planned to disconnect him, HAL determined that the only logical way for him to both keep processing and avoid lying was for Dave and Frank to die.

AUTO’s own instruction is Directive A113, whose numbering may sound familiar to Pixar fans. “A113” appears in every Pixar film, from a family license plate in Toy Story to an underwater camera model in Finding Nemo. (Indeed, it’s even in Brave, where the roman numerals ACXIII appear carved just above the front door of a witch’s hut.) The reason for its repeated inclusion is that room A1-13 was the classroom for the Character Animation Program at the California Institute of the Arts, where Pixar alumni John Lasseter, Pete Docter, and Andrew Stanton studied. (This explains why it’s also the number on the door of Riley’s classroom in Inside Out, and on the Scaring 101 classroom door in Monsters University.) WALL·E may be its highest-profile outing, but it’s there in every Pixar movie if you keep your eyes peeled.

The majority of WALL·E’s robots are voiced by Ben Burtt, the Academy Award-winning sound designer and creator of R2D2’s bleeps. AUTO’s voice, however, is provided by MacInTalk, a speech synthesis technology first used to announce the Apple Macintosh computer in January 1984. (You may also recognize MacInTalk as the lead vocalist on Radiohead’s “Fitter Happier,” from 1997’s OK Computer album.)

MacInTalk’s inclusion in WALL·E makes it one of only two Apple voice synthesis technologies to star in a feature film; the other is Siri, who provides the voice for ’Puter, Batman’s high-tech assistant in The LEGO Batman Movie.

Despite the technology’s age, I’m happy to report that MacInTalk voices still ship with macOS today. If you’d like to turn your Mac into an Evil Space-Based Computer, simply open the System Preferences application, select Accessibility and then Speech, and enable the “Ralph” system voice.

In addition to AUTO, there are two more nods to 2001: A Space Odyssey in WALL·E, both of which take advantage of preexisting associations for dramatic or comedic effect. The first is WALL·E’s brief escapade in a LifePod, the design of which seems clearly inspired by 2001’s EVA pods. That iconic ball-like shape immediately triggers an association with interstellar peril, which WALL·E soon discovers is entirely justified.

The second 2001 reference is a knowing usage of Richard Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra, when Captain McCrea becomes the first human to stand up and walk in possibly hundreds of years. It’s an appropriate enough use of the music—2001’s monoliths oversee (and supposedly trigger) several leaps in mankind’s evolution, so it’s entirely valid to hear those famous chords when the captain makes his first steps (even though this is technically a regression, not an evolution).

Of course, WALL·E is not alone in riffing on Strauss’s classic melody. It is similarly parodied in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (as a 2001 monolith turns into a bar of chocolate) and Zoolander (as Hansel considers smashing Mugatu’s iMac with a nearby bone). If that’s not enough, it’s also in Pixar’s Toy Story 2 and Cars 3, plus other animated movies including Kung Fu Panda 3, The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!, and The Simpsons Movie. On the live-action front, it’s in Man on the Moon, Catch-22, Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, Clueless, Turner & Hooch, and Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle, to mention just a few.

Despite AUTO’s best efforts, McCrea manages to switch him to MANUAL and sets the Axiom on a hyperjump trajectory back to Earth. The hyperjump looks exactly like you’d expect, which is exactly like the USS Enterprise engaging warp drive in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Once again, WALL·E is sneakily using prior sci-fi art as a shortcut, re-creating familiar effects so that the Axiom’s quick journey home can be explained without exposition. (It might also account for why everyone aboard the Axiom experiences a brief stint of The Motion Picture’s wormhole effect during the jump.)

As these homages show, WALL·E is not afraid to borrow from its predecessors to gain some free sci-fi association. Indeed, such references are celebrated and elevated, drawing on the production team’s clear fondness for vintage sci-fi to create a movie that is both a love letter to the classics and a worthy addition to the list. WALL·E capitalizes on our existing associations with the future to communicate complex plot points and motives with minimal dialogue and text. It is, to my mind, Pixar’s most realistic vision of an internally consistent world, despite the polar opposites of its Earth- and space-based environments. It’s political and satirical, representing utopia and dystopia with enough humor to poke fun at the downsides of both. In short, WALL·E envisages a future that could so easily be bleak and pessimistic—but is instead inspired by the naïveté of its inhuman heroes to re-create the optimism that took man into space in the first place.

Wow! That was good, wasn’t it? What an amazing article! So amazing, in fact, that you probably want to impulse-buy the Typeset in the Future book it comes from, right this very second. Here are some convenient links to buy it from Amazon or Barnes and Noble, or you can head down to your local bookstore (which it is much harder for me to link to) when the book is released on December 11 2018.

The book also includes an interview with Pixar designers Ralph Eggleston and Craig Foster about the making of WALL·E, plus six more equally amazing movie studies, alongside interviews with Paul Verhoeven (Total Recall) and Mike Okuda (Star Trek). You can read more about it here if for some reason you’re still not convinced.

– Dave Addey

(As with my previous articles, I should note that there are spoilers aplenty throughout the next 5,000 words. If you don’t want to know when Blade Runner’s sole appearance of Eurostile Bold Extended occurs, look away now.)

Blade Runner’s opening crawl is distinctly un-futuristic in its choice of font. It uses Goudy Old Style – designed by Frederic W. Goudy in 1915 – as part of a veritable typographic cornucopia:

Within five-and-a-bit paragraphs, we are treated to several inconsistently spaced examples of small caps (all of which make me think of death talking inside my head), and five — count them! — examples of particularly chunky em dashes. (Thankfully, they do not follow the freaky American style of removing—for no reason at all—their surrounding spaces.)

My favorite aspects of this opening crawl, however, are the arbitrary examples of Mid-Sentence Capitalized Words, as popularized by A. A. Milne and P. L. Travers:

With the opening crawl’s typographic anomalies fresh in our minds, it’s time to meet our first suspected replicant. Leon, a potential NEXUS 6,  is being tested with a Voight-Kampff machine in the offices of the Tyrell Corporation. We know we’re in the offices of the Tyrell Corporation, because the chairs have TYRELL CORP. stenciled on the back of them, in what might be Akzidenz-Grotesk Extended:

As we discovered in both Alien and Moon, omnipresent corporate branding is the single most important sign of a successful international conglomerate.

The Voight-Kampff machine measures contractions of the iris muscle to gauge the subject’s empathetic response to a range of questions. We see a close-up of one of Leon’s green eyes as the test is administered:

This is odd, given that Leon’s eyes are blue:

The Voight-Kampff test is also administered to Tyrell’s niece, Rachael, later in Blade Runner. We see a close-up of one of Rachael’s green eyes as the test is administered:

This is odd, given that Rachael’s eyes are brown:

Thankfully, this mystery is easy to explain: the eyes we see on these Voight-Kampff screens are taken from stock footage by Oxford Scientific Films, and not from an actual replicant. This is almost certainly because the eyes of a real replicant are notoriously hard to film without a bad case of red-eye effect – a fact that Scott struggled with throughout the making of Blade Runner. Indeed, despite the efforts of modern film restorers, even the Final Cut of Blade Runner shows an unavoidable example of this phenomenon the very first time we meet Leon:

The same is true when we meet Rachael (purportedly Tyrell’s niece, but later exposed as an unsuspecting replicant):

The trademark tinge is also there when Pris is reunited with Roy Batty in J.F. Sebastian’s apartment:

Tyrell’s artificial owl provides a particularly glowy example:

Hell, even a top-of-the-range NEXUS 6 like Roy Batty suffers from a bad case of the red-eye:

This problem surfaces time and time and time again throughout the film. Given the otherwise incredible realism of the (entirely animatronic) replicant “actors” in the movie, it’s unfortunate that the producers couldn’t find a way to work around such a simple photographic bugbear.

Perhaps the most inexplicable example of this phenomenon, however, is a blurry background shot late in the movie, featuring central protagonist (and definitely-not-a-replicant) Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford:

How strange! I’m sure it won’t turn out to be significant.

The first time we meet Deckard, he’s sat in the Los Angeles rain, idly reading a newspaper. The headline of this newspaper is FARMING THE OCEANS, THE MOON AND ANTARCTICA, in what looks like Futura Demi:

This isn’t the first time we’ve heard about lunar business endeavors. As we saw in Moon, NASA was accepting applications to mine the moon as far back as January 2014. Things have moved on even further since then, with the Google Lunar X Prize offering $20m to the first privately funded team that can land a robot on the Moon, travel more than 500 meters, and transmit back high definition images and video. By the end of 2015, sixteen teams had registered in the competition, with craft names such as Moonraker, Tesla, Sagan, and Tetris. Indeed, as of when this article was published, the Moon Express and Space IL teams had launch dates confirmed for 2017. The Lunar X Prize means that farming the moon for gold, cobalt, iron, palladium, platinum, tungsten and Helium-3 is a genuine possibility.

Here’s a close-up shot of that newspaper prop, from an on-set photo of Harrison Ford and Ridley Scott:

The subtitle reads WORLD WIDE COMPUTER LINKUP PLANNED, in what looks like Optima Bold. While the idea of a World Wide Computer Linkup might seem passé as we approach 2019, it was still very much unusual in 1982 when Blade Runner was released. Indeed, it wasn’t until March 1982 that the US Department of Defense, creators of pre-Internet network ARPANET, declared TCP/IP as the standard for all military computer networking, pretty much kick-starting what we know as the modern-day Internet of 2016.

Of course, if you’re going to set up business on the moon, you’ll need something a bit smarter than the simple terrestrial Internet we know here on Earth. Indeed, you’ll probably want some kind of Interplanetary Internet. By a strange coincidence, this is exactly what Vint Cerf and NASA have been working on, using delay-tolerant networking to forward bundles of data from spacecraft to spacecraft as and when they come into range. If you’d like to know more, here’s Vint explaining why the speed of light is too slow at a TEDx event in 2011. (We’ll excuse the Comic Sans in his slides, because he did after all invent the thing that’s letting you read this article.)

We see Deckard’s newspaper a couple more times in the movie. He’s reading it again while waiting for Zhora at the Snake Pit Bar, albeit inside-out:

Somewhat unexpectedly, the same day’s newspaper also appears as a makeshift drawer liner in Leon’s apartment:

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. Back at the beginning of the movie, Deckard folds up his newspaper, and buys some tasty noodles from a street restaurant. As he noms the noodles, he’s approached by Gaff, a shady agent of the Los Angeles Police Department:

Gaff takes Deckard back to his car. It’s a Spinner, as indicated by the beautiful insignia on the door:

The Spinner’s landscape-orientation TV shows a display that may be familiar to regular TITF readers:

This ENVIRON CTR PURGE display is identical to the one we saw in Alien, just before the Nostromo exploded :

As if that wasn’t enough self-plagiarism, Ridley Scott also steals a second display from his earlier sci-fi masterpiece:

…which the more observant of you may recognize as Alien’s shuttle disconnect sequence:

Perhaps most importantly of all, however, Gaff’s Spinner features Blade Runner’s only reported instance of Eurostile Bold Extended, brought to you by the letters C, A, U, T, I, O, and N:

…and the number 44:

As the Spinner ascends into the LA rain, we see a particularly unusual piece of product placement behind it:

This is indeed a neon advertisement for popular American food processor manufacturer Cuisinart. Based on the shape of the food processor’s base, and its bottom-right neon-cyan rectangle, the robotic-looking icon you see here could well be the Cuisinart® Pro Classic Food Processor:

Cuisinart are far from the only 1980s company advertised in 2019’s Los Angeles cityscape, however. We once again meet American flag-carrier Pan Am, who in reality are just as defunct in 2019 as they were in 2001:

We also encounter popular carbonated sugar-water Coca-Cola:

…perennial halitosis-mitigator Dentyne:

…extra-terrestrial game manufacturer Atari:

…regularly product-placed watch manufacturer Bulova:

…alcoholic beverage brand Budweiser (no, not that one):

…and genius, irreverent, sexy mythical perfume brand Jōvan:

As Deckard and Gaff continue their flight through the Los Angeles skyscape, a technical-looking message tappity-taps itself onto a screen in Gaff’s Spinner. (Confusingly, this is a portrait CRT display – the landscape display we saw earlier is notable by its absence.)

This being Typeset In The Future, we are of course duty-bound to take a closer look at the on-screen text:

It’s a sign of my mis-spent youth that ALT / VEL / PTCH at the top of the screen immediately makes me think 1UP / HIGH SCORE / 2UP. However, the fuzzy text on the main body of the screen is even more interesting:

After spending an inordinate amount of time cropping, zooming, and enhancing these images, and squinting at them while holding Harrison Ford upside down, I have a theory as to what they mean. Here’s my rough transcription (with “xxxx” meaning “I really haven’t the foggiest”):

MICROPROCESSOR BASED ELECTRONICS PROVE
OUR SYSTEM DOES WHAT NO OTHER INS
TRUMENT CAN DO- IT PRODUCES INSTANT, ON
THE SPOT RESULTS WITH xxxxx xxxx FILM,
xxxx COLOR TRANSPARENCIES FOR BACKLITE

DISPLAYS AND OVER HEAD PROJECTION, 35MM
COLOR SLIDES. 40 IMAGE CLASS MICRO
RELATED AND SEQUENTIAL IMAGES CAN BE RE
CORDED IN ORDERLY ARRAYS, ON A SINGLE
SHEET OF xxxx INSTANT PRINT FILM. THE

It sounds like this text is describing an instant camera / image recording system, in the kind of terminology you’d find in an advertising brochure or user guide. (If any experts in microprocessor based electronics or color transparencies for backlite displays are reading this article, your insight would be gratefully appreciated.)

UPDATE: Thanks to some amazing detective work by Simon Flummox and David Large in the comments below, we now know that this text is adapted from a 1980s advert for the Matrix Color Graphic Camera System by Matrix Instruments. David found the ad in Datamation magazine Vol 26 No. 1 (January 1980):

The full text is a chopped-up amalgam of several parts of the advert above:

MICROPROCESSOR BASED ELECTRONICS PROVI
OUR SYSTEM DOES WHAT NO OTHER INS
TRUMENT CAN DO- IT PRODUCES INSTANT, ON
THE SPOT RESULTS WITH xxxxx 8x10 FILM,
8x10 COLOR TRANSPARENCIES FOR BACKLITE

DISPLAYS AND OVER HEAD PROJECTION, 35MM
COLOR SLIDES, 60 IMAGE xxxxx MICRO
RELATED AND SEQUENTIAL IMAGES CAN BE RE
CORDED IN ORDERLY ARRAYS, ON A SINGLE
SHEET OF 8x10 INSTANT PRINT FILM. THE

The two remaining “xxxxx” words don’t look to match the advert, so I’m not taking a chance. Great work, Simon and David!

Oh, and one final aside: is anyone surprised by the font Matrix Instruments chose for their company logo?

Gaff’s Spinner journey also introduces us to a recurring piece of typography from the movie’s backdrop. The Blade Runner production team re-used city background scenery in different configurations throughout the movie, which is why the glowing NUYOK sign seen here…

…is remarkably similar to the glowing sign for the YUKON hotel seen thirteen minutes later (also known as the temporary home of replicants Leon and Zhora):

Shortly after this revelation, the Spinner lands at an LAPD station:

…which turns out to be a smoke-filled version of LA’s real-world Union Station (for trains, not policemen):

Here, Deckard is briefed by Harry Bryant, captain of the LAPD’s Rep-Detect department, about the replicants he is meant to retire. We’re presented with the serial numbers and details of all four replicants, starting with Leon, who we discover is a combat replicant and nuclear fission loader:

(I really want this typeface to be Caslon, but despite everything else matching nicely, the top of the 6 is just wrong. I can only apologize for the discrepancy.)

UPDATE: Several folks have noted in the comments that this looks a lot like Cheltenham, and I think they are correct.

Next up we meet Roy Batty, the Head Replicant in Blade Runner. We learn that Roy is trained in combat for the colonization defense program, and is a general all-round badass:

Roy is followed by Zhora, who someone at the Tyrell Corporation decided it would be a great idea to retrain in Political Homicide:

Finally we meet Pris, who unifies the sadly-not-as-disparate-as-one-might-hope disciplines of Military and Leisure (and was incepted on the same day as the end of the world):

On the surface of it, the serial numbers of these replicants look easy to decode. The format seems to be:

[N6 for Nexus 6][Gender][Physical][Mental][Month][Day][Year]

For example, Pris’s serial of N6FAB21416 corresponds to:

[N6][Female][LEV. A][LEV. B][FEB][14][2016]

On closer inspection, however, these serial number contains several typographic oddities. I’ll use the Date Field Symbol Table from the Unicode Locale Data Markup Language  to avoid any confusion in the following sections. (If only the makers of Blade Runner had done the same, eh readers?)

The first anomaly is the use of an American date format of [Mddyy] in the serial number, but a British date format of [d MMM., y] for the Incept Date. Surely a serial number, of all things, would benefit from placing year before month, for chronological sorting of SKUs? Even if not, the inconsistency between the two is disappointing, especially for a movie so clearly set in America.

Secondly, why use a single digit for Month? We know that Day is zero-padded, at least going by Roy’s serial number. The lack of comparative zero-padding for Month means that any replicant incepted in October through December will have an 11-character serial, and not a 10-character serial like their colleagues.

Thirdly, and most importantly, the date section of Leon’s serial number is just plain wrong. He’s listed with a serial number date section of 41717, and yet he was incepted on 41017:

Honestly, folks: these are the kinds of details that make or break a movie. Despite the fact that Ridley Scott’s Final Cut of Blade Runner rectified many on-screen glitches, I am sad to report that this typographic error is still awaiting correction.

Following his briefing on the target Replicants, Deckard drives back to his apartment through the crappy LA weather. Indeed, it’s hard to recognize the Los Angeles of November 2019 through Blade Runner’s incessant rain, especially given that it didn’t rain there at all during November 2015. Nonetheless, the city’s residents have found a way to work around the combined smog and rain with ingenious umbrellas, whose handles are fluorescent tubes:

Given the constant rain, it’s surprising that Deckard doesn’t bother to use his Spinner’s windscreen wiper during the drive back to his apartment:

The design of Deckard’s apartment is both classic and oppressive, with its instantly recognizable concrete tiled walling…

…and an impressive balcony overlooking the city:

Like so many of the movie’s locations, Deckard’s apartment is based on a real-world LA landmark – in this case, the Ennis House, built in 1924, and designed by famous American architect Frank Lloyd Wright:

The Ennis House hasn’t just appeared in Blade Runner, however. You may also recognize it as the exterior location for 1959’s Vincent Price low-budget horror classic House On Haunted Hill…

…as the abandoned mansion where Angel, Spike, and Drusilla hang out in Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode I Only Have Eyes For You…

…as a variety of locations from Black Rain, The Glimmer Man, The Replacement Killers, Rush Hour, The Thirteenth Floor, The Rocketeer, Mulholland Drive, and Twin Peaks (according to Wikipedia)…

…and as a villain’s hideout in The Karate Kid, Part III:

Perhaps most famously, however, Deckard’s apartment is the setting for Ricky Martin’s top pop country classic Vuelve:

In fact, let’s take a quick 4m45sec tour of the Ennis House, while an overly-coiffured gentleman warbles at us in Spanish:

Thank you, Ricky, for that beautifully melodic introduction to Mayan Revival architecture.

The repeating interior design of Deckard’s apartment is lifted directly from the Ennis House, and is based on the 27,000 concrete blocks that make up the house’s interior and exterior (as seen on this 1969 elevation):

These concrete blocks have weathered somewhat over the years. Many have been patched up or restored to reinstate the original geometric pattern, as can be seen from the present-day building’s exterior:

There’s surprisingly little of the actual Ennis House in Blade Runner, however. The only two shots of the original house I’ve identified are the Spinner’s on-road approach to the apartment complex:

…which looks like a matte painting superimposed over the top of the house’s front wall:

…and the Spinner’s arrival through the apartment gates:

…which looks mighty familiar from House On Haunted Hill:

The rest of Deckard’s apartment was created from scratch on a sound stage, using replicas of those Mayan concrete bricks with substantially lower and more oppressive ceilings than the original.

If you’d like to explore Deckard’s apartment in more detail, I highly recommend Quentin Lengelé’s Blade Runner 9732, which is an ambitious project to build a realistic 3D recreation of the apartment for exploration with VR systems such as Oculus. Check out this rather beautiful video as a teaser of the final thing:

The level of attention to detail in this video is something we at TITF are more than happy to endorse.

After a brief encounter with Rachael, Deckard is left studying one of her childhood photos. The photo shows a young Rachael sat on the porch of a stereotypical American house:

This is eerily reminiscent of a photo from Deckard’s own collection, seen later in the movie in a frame on his piano:

How strange! I’m sure it won’t turn out to be significant.

During a close-up, we see Rachael’s photo come to life, in a way that reminds me of something I can’t quite put my finger on:

Following some initial confusion about this unexpectedly animated memory, I decided to check in with Blade Runner’s literary origin. It turns out Philip K Dick decided that all photographs in 2019 are holographic, which goes at least some way towards explaining Blade Runner’s brief animated GIF interlude.

Having studied Rachael’s photo in detail, Deckard next leafs through the photographs he collected from Leon’s hotel room:

When Blade Runner was made, there was an obvious and popular way to add arbitrary text to everyday objects such as the photos above. Regardless of whether you were an amateur or a professional designer, your lettering solution of choice would have been Letraset dry transfer:

This fantastic rub-on lettering gave a simple (if slightly imprecise) way to add text to pretty much any surface, and it’s the option that Blade Runner’s design team chose for Leon’s photographs.

However, there’s something… odd about the technical-sounding codes on the edges of Leon’s photos. Let’s take a closer look at their wording:

“HELCLN/IUM”? “VETICA MED/CLN”? Hmm. That sounds… familiar, somehow.

Let’s look again at our Letraset sheet from before, but rather than studying the body of the sheet, we’ll focus on the header and footer instead:

I thought that text sounded familiar:

HELCLN/IUM pt47
VETICA MED/CLN pt47

If I didn’t know better, I’d suggest that someone in the Blade Runner production department had a used sheet of Letraset hanging around, and didn’t want the leftovers going to waste.

In the time that we’ve been distracted by dry transfer lettering, replicant Pris (played by Daryl Hannah) has arrived at a building called “The Bradbury”, in an attempt to win over Tyrell Corporation genetic designer J. F. Sebastian:

J. F. Sebastian’s otherwise-uninhabited apartment is based on the iconic Bradbury Building in downtown LA:

The highly decorative future noir frontage seen in Blade Runner is sadly not the building’s real entrance:

…although it does feature some very lovely Berthold Block Heavy:

The real entrance to the Bradbury has more of an Art Nouveau style to it, and was designed so long ago that the type is probably custom:

The Bradbury’s interior is a beautiful, wrought iron representation of Future LA abandoned industrial chic:

You might recognize this metalwork from the similarly apocalyptic (500) Days Of Summer, in which Joseph Gordon-Levitt fawns incessantly over Zooey Deschanel’s manic pixie dream girl:

You might also recognize it from Oscar-winning 1920s throwback The Artist:

These are by no means the building’s only claims to fame, however. One of the side-effects of being a beautiful building within driving distance of Hollywood is that you get to appear in really quite a lot of movies and TV shows. This is one of the reasons why I know that when J.F. puts his key into the slot to call the Bradbury’s elevator:

…he’s actually sticking his hand into the mailbox at the bottom of the Bradbury’s mail chute.

Directly opposite the Bradbury Building is the Million Dollar Theatre, which exists in real life LA as a real life theatre located directly opposite the Bradbury Building:

Here’s a clearer shot of the theatre’s sign, from later in the movie:

I have not been able to confirm that Blade Runner inadvertently promoted a 1980s gig by Peruvian indie-alternative band Los Mimilocos Mazacote y Orquesta, but I sincerely hope that it did.  (I also hope they played a double bill with famous Mexican crooner Gilberto Valenzuela.)

Back in the Bradbury building, we briefly glimpse a blimp through the building’s beautiful roof, with yet more Coca-Cola promotion on its underside:

This flying advertisement is for the multi-national “Shimago-Domínguez Corporation”, who are surely continuing the international collaboration and all-round good work started by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation (a British / Japanese conglomerate) from Alien, and Lunar Industries Ltd. (a US / Korean mining partnership) from Moon.

This blimp is introduced with different voiceovers in the different versions of Blade Runner, but if you mix them all together, this is the message you get:

A new life awaits you in the Off-World colonies. The chance to begin again in a golden land of opportunity and adventure. New climate, recreational facilities, easy advancement, great pay. Plus, a loyal trouble-free companion, given to you on arrival, absolutely free. Use your new friend as a personal body servant, or a tireless field hand. The custom tailored genetically engineered humanoid replicant, designed especially for your needs.

I don’t know about you, but using a Replicant as a “personal body servant” or a “tireless field hand” sounds a liiiiiittle bit like out-and-out slavery to me. (It also makes it hard to blame Roy and company for rebelling.)

This Shimago-Domínguez advertisement is also eerily reminiscent of WALL·E’s Buy n Large infomercials:

Too much garbage in your face? There’s plenty of space, out in space! […] Spend your five year cruise in style, waited on twenty-four hours a day by our fully-automated crew, while your captain and autopilot chart a course for non-stop entertainment.

In addition to promoting slavery and advertising Coca-Cola, the blimp continues its WALL·E theme with soothing, encouraging platitudes to encourage off-world migration:

With that kind of encouragement, who wouldn’t want to conquer the new world, eh?

Back in his apartment, Deckard plays an A on his piano, while Vangelis plays an A♭:

It’s no wonder that Deckard is keeping his piano-playing simple – the sheet music on his piano is actually scored for guitar:

Update: In the comments below, the fantastically-named Not A Walrus Today has correctly identified this music as the second movement of Vivaldi‘s Lute Concerto in D Major.

After his ineffectual piano playing, Deckard decides that it’s time to study Leon’s photographs in more detail. In doing so, Blade Runner gives us perhaps the Ur Example of popular crime trope the Enhance Button, via the suspiciously amazing ESPER Machine:

This chunky-looking gadget is a voice-controlled photographic enhancer with an almost supernatural ability to follow its controller’s verbal instructions. When Deckard inserts Leon’s photo into the ESPER and asks it to enhance 224 to 176, it diligently enhances 197 to 334 as requested:

Deckard continues to direct the ESPER to navigate around his blurry, out-of-focus photo. He asks it to enhance 34 to 36, and it obediently enhances 197 to 334 as instructed:

The ESPER zooms in further still, focusing on the mirror on the far wall of the next room. As image quality becomes more and more challenging due to distance, resolution, and the fundamental laws of physics, the ESPER’s enhancement algorithm automatically switches from “blurry VHS” to “high-quality film stock”:

Deckard asks the ESPER to enhance 34 to 46. It follows his instructions to the letter, enhancing 197 to 334:

At this point, things get kind of ridiculous. The ESPER Machine zooms so far into the mirror that we can see individual snake-skin pailettes on an item of clothing hanging on a wardrobe on the other side of a room, behind the wall we’re looking at:

After moving left a bit and right a bit and left a bit and right a bit, Deckard asks the ESPER Machine to enhance 15 to 23.  True to its roots, it enhances 197 to 334:

The end result is a close-up photo of replicant Zhora, who is conveniently recognizable due to the large snake tattoo on her face:

I’m not going to lie: this whole scene is spectacularly geographically confusing. By my reckoning, the final photo above is a reflection in a mirror of a reflection in a mirror, although even then I’m not entirely sure.

To try and help, I’ve put together a precise map of how I think the apartment’s layout works, which will hopefully help us all make sense of what’s going on:

Indeed, things got so confusing at this point in the movie that I decided to make an painstakingly-edited recreation of the entire ESPER sequence, just to work out how far we crop, zoom, and enhance at each stage of the machine’s photo-processing. Here’s the entire thing, for your delight and delectation:

That’s right: by my calculations, that final photo of Zhora is a 667.9-times zoom in on the original photograph. It’s no wonder, then, that the image of Zhora that Deckard prints from the ESPER machine is a little bit grainy:

It’s also a completely different angle from the shot we see in the final frame of the ESPER:

Blade Runner is by no means the only example of cropping, zooming, and enhancing in popular media, however. Duncan Robson has kindly created an amazing edit of popular examples from across movie and TV, which I suggest is more than worth 1m43s of your time:

On his way to track down Zhora, Deckard makes a video call to Rachael on a handy “VID-PHŌN” booth at the bar. (The macron above the O draws out the vowel sound to make it sound like “phone”):

In a special guest appearance by OCR-A, we discover that the fictitious 555 area code is still going strong in 2019. (Strictly speaking, only the numbers 555-0100 through 555-0199 are reserved for fictitious use, but Blade Runner, like many other movies, merrily strays outside that range.)

It’s particularly interesting to note that the VID-PHŌN service is run by the Bell System group of companies (shown above using their redesigned Saul Bass logo from 1969). Bell System were also the people behind the PicturePhone video calling service we saw briefly in 2001: A Space Odyssey:

Given their recurring product placement, you might be asking yourself why Bell System have such a monopoly on video calls in science fiction movies. Well: it turns out that the PicturePhone was a real, working video calling service, from way before the days of Skype and FaceTime. In fact, in 1964, two Bell PicturePhone devices made the world’s first transcontinental video call, from Disneyland California to the New York World’s Fair, with remarkably good video quality for the time:

I’m sad to say that despite its technological advancements, the PicturePhone ultimately proved to be a commercial failure, losing Bell half a billion dollars in the process. Nonetheless, it cemented Bell as the de facto provider of futuristic phone calls in the psyche (and therefore the movies) of the 60s, 70s, and beyond.

Now: Dr Floyd’s PicturePhone call in 2001: A Space Odyssey cost $1.70 for a 90-second call. (This is substantially cheaper than the $9-a-minute that the PicturePhone cost when the system first launched.) By comparison, Deckard’s 30-second call to Rachael costs $1.25:

Let’s do the realism math here, to check that this holds up. The events of Blade Runner are set in 2019. Deckard’s 30-second, $1.25 call to Rachel works out at $2.50 a minute. This is substantially more expensive than the $1.33 per minute that Bell Systems charged Doctor Floyd in 2001. However, it’s only a 3.5% call cost increase per year over the intervening 18 years, so it is roughly in line with inflation. Never let it be said that Ridley Scott doesn’t sweat the details.

(The irony for both of these scenes? In 2016, just three years before Blade Runner takes place, a 30-second video call will cost you precisely zero dollars and zero cents per minute. Some things about the future really are hard to predict.)

Deckard tracks down Zhora, and a perhaps inevitable chase ensues. As Zhora exits Taffy’s Snake Pit Bar, she and Deckard run past a half-broken neon Schlitz sign:

This is remarkably similar to the half-broken neon Schlitz sign we see at a different bar when Deckard buys a drink a few minutes later:

Back in the Bradbury, we discover that J.F. Sebastian is in the middle of a chess game with Dr. Eldon Tyrell, head of the Tyrell Corporation:

Roy Batty recognizes the chess game as an opportunity to meet his maker, and gives J.F. some top chess tips to advance his cause. As Batty arrives at Tyrell’s office bedroom office bedroom with J.F., we see that Tyrell’s board features equally intricate figurines, although this time they are carvings of people:

Urban myth tells us that this game is based on the topically-named Immortal Game, as won by Adolf Anderssen against Lionel Kieseritzky in 1851. After a careful study of J.F. and Tyrell’s boards and dialogue, I can confirm that this is indeed the case. Here’s how the final few moves of the game play out, just as they did in 1851:

The Immortal Game is notable in that  Anderssen defeated Kieseritzky despite sacrificing a bishop, both rooks, and his queen. By the time Batty meets Tyrell, he has already sacrificed Leon, Zhora, and two other Replicants in his quest to meet his maker.

Something something significant.

Batty finishes off J.F. and Tyrell, and heads towards the Bradbury for an Inevitable Showdown with Deckard. As the movie draws to its climax, Batty delivers his famous “tears in rain” monologue on a bleak, rain-soaked rooftop. This speech, improvised by Rutger Hauer during the scene’s filming, is universally acclaimed as one of the most moving death soliloquies in movie history. However, as a thing constructed solely from words coming out of a mouth, it is sadly typographically insignificant, and is therefore of zero interest to those of us here at Typeset In The Future.

This is in stark contrast to the neon TDK logo just over Rutger’s shoulder, which I think we can all admit is pretty damned spectacular:

There’s no way I can follow neon of that quality, so I’ll leave you all here with a heartfelt farewell. Until next time: goodnight!

– @daveaddey

(With thanks to @clamhead for the Mary Poppins, and to @kupfers, @marcrouault, and @timmountford for identifying Berthold Block Heavy as the Bradbury entrance’s pseudofont.)

FUN FACT: An expanded version of this article appears in the Typeset in the Future book, available on December 11 2018. You can pre-order it now on Amazon.

We’ll start with some simple sans-serif text, such as this randomly chosen word in Eurostile Bold. So far, so 2016:

Rule 1: First, let’s add an italic slant. We want it to look like the text is stretching towards 2020:

Hmm. It’s still a little boring. Rule 2: What if we make things a bit more curvy in some places, and a bit more angular in others? I hear that’s all the typographic rage in 2035:

That’s much better! There’s still more we can do, mind. Rule 3: How about adding some consummate Vs to a few of the letters? Yeah! That’d be cool!

Hello, 2050:

There’s still something missing, however – we’ve forgotten to take into account the devastating Kern Wars of 2067. Rule 4: Let’s combine a few letters into one, to make sure we’re not violating the Kern Tithe:

Now we’re talking! Let’s end with Rule 5: Remove an entirely pointless and arbitrarily segment of the text. In this case, we’ll remove a horizontal line from the majority of the word:

WOAH. That looks amazing! Who knew 2092 was so easy to reach?

D’you know what –I think we need a Rule 6 too. Let’s add a noise texture, some shamelessly steel-brushed metal, and a bit of moody blue lighting:

Finally, let’s emboss it to within an inch of its life:

…and add a god-damn star field:

BOOM. Welcome to the FUTURE!

Here’s how it looks if you put the whole thing together:

Now. Various permutations of these six rules have been applied in many different movies. Perhaps the Ur Example is Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, which I may have slightly copied in my example above:

Blade Runner is far from the only example, however. The logotype for 2003’s Battlestar Galactica miniseries follows pretty much every rule to the letter (and adds some extruded Eurostile Bold Extended for good measure):

Transformers is similarly all-encompassing, taking the brushed metal effect to the extreme:

Guardians of the Galaxy also uses pretty much every trick apart from the italics:

…whereas RoboCop is all about those consummate Vs, plus the world’s most extreme embossment:

Star Wars, of course, takes Rule 4 and runs with it all the way to the bank:

…whereas The Amazing Spider-Man follows nearly all of the rules (and takes Rule 2 to extremes), although it will be receiving a visit from the Tithe Kern Police for Opportunities Missed:

Captain America: The Winter Soldier really likes applying Rules 2 and 3, plus some of the best Rule 6 you’ll ever see:

Alien vs. Predator is ridiculously italic and metallic:

G.I. Joe: Retaliation uses every trick apart from the kerning:

And WALL·E is all about Rule 2:

Finally: if you have any lingering doubts that these six rules spell FUTURE, here are Rules 1, 2, and 4 in action for the iconic logotype for none other than Back To The Future itself:

Hello, the FUTURE. It’s good to be back.

UPDATE: Several people have noted that I missed pretty much the textbooking-est textbook example of this trope – namely, Star Trek: The Next Generation:

I mean seriously. It even has a God-Damn Star Field in the background. (I swear I didn’t have this logotype in mind when I wrote the article, but boy, does it prove the point.)

FUN FACT: An expanded version of this article appears in the Typeset in the Future book, available on December 11 2018. You can pre-order it now on Amazon.

I’m delighted to say that it is now ready to burst forth from my allegorical chest, and to spatter allegorical typographic blood all over your allegorical faces. Welcome to Typeset In The Future: The Alien Edition.

The opening credits for Alien are nothing short of a typographic masterpiece. You can watch them in their entirety on the Art Of The Title web site, but here’s the general gist: a slow, progressive disclosure of a disjointed, customized Futura reveals the movie’s central theme over 90 seconds of beautifully-spaced angular lettering.

UPDATE: Susan Bradley (and others) have pointed out that this is much more like Helvetica Black than Futura. I’d based my original claim on Art Of The Title’s interview with the creators, despite a mismatch when I checked it against Futura myself. However, after a detailed comparison with Helvetica Black, I tend to agree with Susan. Thank you for the correction!

(Before I show you how it looks, I should provide a sizable caveat: I got a lot of grief following my Moon article for spoiling that movie’s central twist. So, if you don’t want to know the extra-terrestrial nature of the central antagonist in Alien, close your eyes now.)

Here we go.

Can you tell what it is yet?

It’s looking pretty angular.

And beautifully mirrored, at least along the y-axis.

Well, that was unexpected. I’m still none the wiser, mind.

WAIT A MINUTE. I might have an idea where this is going.

Oh, no, I was wrong. Still, that new line is almost certainly completing the middle part of a W, yes? (It certainly looks like two strokes and a crotch, at least from where I’m standing.)

WAIT ANOTHER MINUTE. Crop. Zoom. Enhance.

I hate to say it, but a little bit of the bar on this capital A (for it is he) has been allowed to bleed out into the unfolding titles. Talk about typographic spoilers. Look really closely and you’ll see what I mean:

That’s totally going to become a capital A, isn’t it? God, that’s ruined everything. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to discover that this entire credits sequence is going to end up spelling the word ALIEN:

Right you are, then. Let’s get on with it. (For those of you with your eyes closed to avoid spoilers: you can open them again now.)

After all that Futura-ish beauty, it’s a little disappointing to see a follow-up card introduce commercial towing vehicle The Nostromo with some slightly fuzzy Helvetica:

This title card from Alien is an example – possibly the Ur Example – of a popular sci-fi trope, the Foreshadowing Inventory. Seven crew, you say? Hmm. Seven. Let’s hope nothing disastrous happens to them, one by one. And their course is set for a return to Earth, eh? Well, I’m sure that’s the likely outcome for this particular story.

The Foreshadowing Inventory crops up in other movies too, such as the opening card from Moon:

A crew of one, you say? And there for only three years? Interesting. I wonder if these facts will turn out to be significant to the plot?

A final point on Alien’s Foreshadowing Inventory: hmm. That’s a nice twenty million tons of mineral ore you’ve got there. It would be a shame if something were to… happen to it. (We do like a good bit of typographic foreshadowing here at TITF.) 

Let’s take a look on board the Nostromo. The opening shots of the craft give some tantalizing glimpses of its wall-based iconography:

These icons are the work of cinematic design legend Ron Cobb. He named them the Semiotic Standard For All Commercial Trans-Stellar Utility Lifter And Heavy Element Transport Spacecraft. The production sketches below are from Cobb’s 1981 collected works, Colorvision:

My favorite is #23 – “COFFEE”:

“Semiotics”, of course, is “the study of signs and symbols, and their use or interpretation”. (I could just as easily have called this blog Semiotic-matic.)

You might have noticed that these icons bear a striking resemblance to the rounded rectangles used for modern app iconography. Indeed, design company The Iconfactory has recreated the Semiotic Standard as a beautiful set of iOS app icons. It could be argued that Cobb provided the inspiration for rounded-rectangle iconography some 28 years before Apple made it the standard on the iPhone. (Although tegestologists may well argue their case too.)

A quick glance back over the iconography of Moon shows that (like many sci-fi movies) it owes a large debt to the Semiotic Standard:

On the subject of iconography: the set of Alien was actually built as a single sprawling series of interconnected rooms, just like the set of Moon. Here we have the Nostromo‘s Control Room at the top of the photo, connected to the Central Corridor below:

I like to think that the Semiotic Standard served a practical purpose for the cast, helping them to navigate around the Nostromo as they made their way through filming.

In addition to the Semiotic Standard, Cobb was also responsible for the final design of the Nostromo itself. Let’s continue on our tour of his creation.

The crew are noticeable by their absence at the start of the movie, as reinforced by this Helvetica-monikered EMERGENCY HELMET:

(At least, I say it’s Helvetica – the G is dead cert, but the second M looks more like Futura. Either way, let’s hope there’ll be no need for emergency helmets.)

The Nostromo‘s computers blip into life unexpectedly. You can tell they are the Nostromo‘s computers, because they say Nostromo 180924609 on their boot screen. On this occasion, I don’t recognize the font:

The ship’s registration number is contracted on the next on-screen display:

This screen lists the ship as the Weylan Yutani Nostromo 180246. (Eagle-eyed viewers will have spotted that subsequent Alien films name the company Weyland Yutani, not Weylan Yutani.)

Furthermore, this screenshot shows that the Nostromo has a refinement capacity of “200,000,000 tonnes”, and not the “20,000,000 tons” mentioned in the Foreshadowing Inventory. That’s not just a factor of ten out – it’s also an entirely different unit of measurement.

UPDATE: Several commenters have noted that potential cargo capacity isn’t the same as current cargo, and that the refinery might just be mostly empty. A confession: I realized that myself when writing the article, and was rather hoping that no-one would pull me up for it. Given the audience for this blog, I really should have known better. There’s still the more fundamental problem of tons vs tonnes, however, as I go on to explain…

If you’re familiar with units of weight, you’ll know that a ton is 2,000 pounds if you’re American (known as a “short ton”), or 2,240 pounds if you’re British (known as a “long ton”). Conversely, a tonne (also known as a “metric ton”) is precisely 1,000 kilograms, which is roughly 2,205 pounds.

At this point, you might be thinking: “Wait – why are we talking about units of measurement? Why should I, Joe or Jane Blog-Reader, care about a typographic anomaly in the measurement units of a space-based computer?”

You really should know the answer to that by now. Typography is always important.

Here’s a map of all of the countries in the world that still use pounds as their primary unit of weight:

And here’s a map of all of the countries that don’t:

That’s right – pounds are used by Liberia, Myanmar, and popular space-faring nation The United States of America. And by no-one else AT ALL.

And here’s why you should care. In September 1999, NASA lost its Mars Climate Orbiter craft, ruining a mission that cost over 655 million dollars. The reason for this loss? One part of the Orbiter calculated propulsion in the Imperial system of pound-seconds of thrust, whereas another part used the international standard metric system of newton-seconds of thrust. This caused the Orbiter to gradually deviate from its intended trajectory, and disintegrate in the Mars atmosphere. (And the bit that worked in pound-seconds wasn’t made in Liberia or Myanmar.)

An aside for future-thinking Alien fans: should you ever need to nuke a planet from orbit – it’s the only way to be sure, after all – then don’t worry yourself about the number of megatonnes that your nuke’s detonation will create. Megatonnes aren’t based on any of the units mentioned above.

But enough about massive nuclear explosions – we won’t be needing any of those. Let’s get back to the Nostromo.

The ship’s crew awake from hypersleep, only to discover that they’re not on course for Earth after all. (Damn you, Foreshadowing Inventory!) Star charts are consulted, as they try to work out what’s going on:

This screenshot contains not one but four details of note. The first is some random text on the right-hand monitor screen:

Well, I say random… it may be significant that the text includes the phrase D GILER. (That name might sound familiar.)

The second item of interest is that packet of cigarettes:

Although it’s less clear-cut than D GILER, it’s significant that the actor who played the alien in Alien was none other than 6′10″ Nigerian design student Bolaji Badejo. The similarity of name may just be coincidence, however.

The third item of note is a coffee mug bearing the Weylan-Yutani winged logo:

This logo appears everywhere onboard the ship. Indeed, the Balaji Imperial cigarettes are about the only items that are not corporately branded. Clothing, containers, mugs, even cat dishes all display the corporate logo…

…as do bowls, storage drawers, and water dispensers:

Hell, even the beer is branded:

That’s a 440ml can of Original And Genuine Extra Strong Weylan Yutani Aspen Beer. One thing’s for sure – the Weylan-Yutani Corporation has employee wellbeing as their primary concern. (Yes, just like Lunar Industries.)

The fourth item of note in that screenshot from earlier is the monitor screen itself. A perennial challenge for any sci-fi film is to find a visual style that remains futuristic as technology marches on. The Nostromo‘s production design is a perfect example of used future chic, but shows the challenge of using physical display technology from the 1970s alongside film-based special effects.

Early in the film, we cut from a blurry, low-res shot of an Elite-like descent trajectory:

…to a hi-res animated display of the same descent:

Similarly, when Dallas (the ship’s captain) visits the Nostromo’s master computer (known as “MU/TH/UR”) to find out what’s going on, we cut from a low-res 4:3 CRT display:

…to a hi-res 16:9 text animation more reminiscent of The Matrix:

However, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not the disconnect between these displays that’s at fault. Rather, it’s the presence of those cathode ray tube displays at all:

That curved screen shape immediately shouts “legacy technology”. In 2014, seeing a curved CRT display in a futuristic spacecraft, rather than the ubiquitous flat LCD screens of today, feels somewhat archaic. This was a deliberate choice by the movie’s design team at the time – they chose everyday CRT screens rather than high-tech flat screen displays, to match the rest of the Nostromo’s beaten-up kit – but it dates the movie with hindsight.

Ironically, Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was made 11 years before Alien, and yet has screen technology that looks substantially more futuristic. In the late 1960s, when A Space Odyssey was made, computer graphics simply weren’t good enough to generate the on-screen imagery needed for the Jupiter mission. As a result, all of the screen imagery was hand-animated, and projected onto flat surfaces:

The presence of flat screen displays throughout the Jupiter craft fits 2001‘s polished aesthetic perfectly, and makes the HAL 9000 displays feel futuristic even today.

(Interestingly, the makers of 2014’s Alien: Isolation video game actually reverted to 1970’s video technology to make the game feel more like the original movie. The game’s menu screens were first rendered in software, then recorded on to VHS video tapes, played on a CRT display, filmed, and imported back into the game.)

One final typographic point of note: the on-screen display font for MU/TH/UR appears to be an optically stretched version of City Light:

This is most unusual, if only for being a serif (rather than sans-serif) on-screen computer font in a sci-fi movie.

As the movie unfolds, MU/TH/UR’s behavior reinforces the TITF trend for untrustworthy space-based computers. We discover that MU/TH/UR is a Series 6000:

I’m sure that the 6000 Series has a perfect operational record – at least, going by the Gerty 3000 in Moon and the 9000 Series in 2001. I’d trust both of those computers until the end of my life.

Later in the movie, Ripley interrogates MU/TH/UR to find out the truth about the alien. MU/TH/UR’s response is predictably chilling:

Damn you, untrustworthy space-based computers!

(A final bit of MU/TH/UR trivia: following my Moon post, conceptual designer Gavin Rothery told me that Moon‘s master computer was named “Old Man” – British slang for “father” – as a sneaky tribute to Alien. Nicely done, sir.)

In addition to the CRT displays, there’s a second aspect of Alien’s design that clearly dates the movie to the 70s. For the most part, the movie’s costume design displays a timeless aesthetic for a working interstellar haulage crew:

The exception is Captain Dallas’s jacket, which has the word “NOSTROMO” written on the back in Pump Demi:

Pump Demi was recently voted “Most 70s Font Of All Time” by the International Font Council. That’s not actually true, but it might as well be. It goes to show that it’s very hard to know which aspects of a design will still look futuristic in the future.

Pump Demi is also seen on the crew’s nameplates in the main Nostromo cabin. You can recognize it from its freaky capital Y, even when blurry:

But enough about Pump. We saw earlier how an international mishap with measurement units cost NASA $655m. Alien goes one step further, with possibly the most expensive on-screen localisation error in the history of science fiction.

You’d think that the Weylan(d)-Yutani Corporation, as a large British / Japanese conglomerate, would be familiar with the need for precise translation and localization. However, you would be wrong, sir or madam. Very wrong indeed.

Let’s rejoin Ripley onboard the Nostromo. As the last of her crew-mates are slain by the lurking xenomorph, Ripley realizes that the only option is an Emergency Systems Override to self-destruct the ship. She presses the EMERGENCY button marked PUSH…

…pulls the EMERGENCY lever marked PULL…

…unscrews the EMERGENCY screw…

…unscrews the other EMERGENCY screw…

…pulls two EMERGENCY levers, usefully marked ONE and TWO…

…and finally open the EMERGENCY hatch. (I’m not sure why there are four pulled levers in the background of this shot; Ripley only actually pulls two of them.)

This hatch gives access to the Emergency Destruction System:

Let’s straighten up the screen to make it a bit more readable:

This beautiful (and by the looks of things, hand-painted) display contains yet more typographic foreshadowing. We learn that on activation, the ship will detonate in T minus 10 minutes. Moreover, the Failsafe Cut-Off System will not operate after T minus 5 minutes.

With those surely insignificant facts typographically established, let’s take a look at the scuttle procedure itself. (For the uninitiated, “scuttling” is the nautical procedure of deliberately sinking one’s own ship.)

Perhaps unexpectedly, the Scuttle Procedure instructions are presented in both English and French versions. Being American, Ripley naturally follows the English version. Here we see her tracing the English instructions with her finger:

Let’s take a look at those English instructions in detail:

1. Punch NUCLEAR BOLT CODE No 1
2. Verify BOLT CLAMP release
3. Perform INSERTION of BOLT No 1 to HOLD No 1
4. Remove NUCLEAR HEAD
5. Activate PUSH BUTTON SWITCH
6. Replace NUCLEAR HEAD
7. Verify SECURED
8. Verify DETONATION ACTIVATED
9. Repeat for HOLDS 2, 3 & 4

Ripley wastes no time in punching NUCLEAR BOLT CODE No 1:

…and INSERTing each NUCLEAR BOLT into its corresponding HOLD:

(Okay, so she skips the “verify” steps. But, y’know: lurking xenomorph.)

After the fourth NUCLEAR BOLT enters the fourth HOLD, an Ominous Clock starts counting down to T minus ten minutes:

The Ominous Clock is accompanied by an Ominous Voice, which reminds us that “the option to override automatic detonation expires in T minus five minutes.” Let’s see how that one plays out.

During the next five minutes or so, Ripley heads towards the Nostromo’s shuttle to make her escape, with her cat, Jonesy, in a handy industrial cat box. Somewhere along the way, Ripley encounters the alien, directly between her and the escape shuttle she’s trying to reach:

There’s clearly no way through, and the ship is about to detonate. In her panic, she drops Jonesy, leaving him to his alien fate:

Ripley dashes back to the Emergency Destruction Room, desperately trying to stop the self-destruct process and give herself chance to escape. As she arrives at the Emergency Destruction Room, the Ominous Voice counts down the final seconds to inevitable failsafe cutoff.

29…

28…

27…

Let’s pause that countdown temporarily, and take a moment to put ourselves in Ripley’s situation. There’s an alien xenomorph with acid for blood running around a dimly-lit spacecraft, picking off your co-workers one by one. You’re the sole remaining survivor. Your only form of defense is  a single-canister flamethrower. You have thirty seconds to halt the self-destruct sequence for your spacecraft – and you’ve just gone and lost your cat.

I think it’s fair to say that this is a stressful scenario.

Perhaps this is why, on arriving back at the ship-scuttling instructions, Ripley follows the French instructions with her finger, not the English ones from before:

And this is where it all goes horribly wrong.

Let’s take a look at those French instructions in more detail:

1. Poussez le NUCLEAR BOLT CODE No 1
2. Vérifier CRAMPON de L’ACHEMENT
3. Exécutez INSERTION/BOULON No 1 a la cale No 1
4. Vérifier SÉCURITÉ du SOMMET NUCLEAR
5. Vérifier SÉCURITÉ du SOMMET NUCLEAR
6. Vérifier la DETONATION ACTIVE

Hmm… something something “NUCLEAR BOLT”… something something “SÉCURITÉ”… it certainly sounds plausible. But how do these compare to the English instructions we verified the efficacy of earlier?

For the first three steps, all is bon. But from instruction four onwards, things take a definite turn for the worse. The French instructions don’t mention anything about removing the NUCLEAR HEAD, activating the PUSH BUTTON SWITCH, or replacing the NUCLEAR HEAD. All three of which seemed pretty damn important when Ripley was doing them earlier.

The French instructions do at least remind us to check that things are secured. Indeed, just for good measure, they remind us to check them twice. This is commendable belt-and-braces stuff on an average day, but it’s not really what you want when you’ve got thirty seconds left before inexorable destruction.

In a further example of the famous French passion for safety, the instructions also ask us to verify that the detonation is active (which it won’t be, because we forgot to activate the push button switch). However, they completely neglect to mention that the process needs to be repeated for the other three holds.

In short: this is a localization disaster. I mean, it would be bad at the best of times – but we’ve just lost our cat to a xenomorph. We’re in no fit state to cope with dodgy French.

Thanks to this truly awful piece of translation, Ripley fails to abort the detonation process in time, and the five-minute countdown to total detonation continues:

Although we do cut briefly to a screen that still shows a countdown of over ten minutes:

The five minutes to destruction are typographically uninteresting. Ripley makes it to the escape shuttle with no sign of the alien. She even finds her not-dead cat along the way. With seconds remaining, her shuttle detaches from the Nostromo, blasting away just before either 20 (or 200) million tons (or tonnes) of mineral ore explode into tiny fragments:

Just before the explosion, we see a brief ENVIRON CTR PURGE display onboard the shuttle:

This screen might be familiar to fans of Ridley Scott’s other classic sci-fi movie, Blade Runner, which has a remarkably similar screen onboard a flying police vehicle:

There’s one more typographic anomaly to be found during the self-destruct sequence. Remember when Ripley was punching NUCLEAR BOLT CODE No 1 into that funny-looking keyboard? Well, it turns out to be a very strange keyboard indeed. Here’s the central panel for your closer inspection. I’ve Photoshopped a composite image from several frames, to make it easier to see all of the keys without Ripley getting her hand in the way:

The first key of note is “PRANIC LIFT 777”:

Prana is the Sanskrit word for “life force”. It’s a cosmic energy believed to come from the sun, and to connect the elements of the universe.

We also have “PADME”, a possible variant of Padma, Sanskrit for “lotus flower”:

…and “LINGHA” (or Lingam), a representation of the Hindu deity Shiva:

Lingha is balanced by “YONI”, Sanskrit for “womb”:

Yoni is a symbol for the Hindu Divine Mother, an embodiment of Shakti, the concept of divine feminine creative power. This might explain why we also have a “SHAKTI EXCESS” button on the keyboard:

But perhaps the oddest key on the keyboard is this one in the top right hand corner – “AGARIC FLY”:

Now, Agaric Fly – or Fly Agaric, as it’s more commonly known – is a mushroom and psychoactive fungus known for triggering a hallucinogenic experience:

You might think this is an odd thing to be written on the keyboard of an emergency destruction system. You would be correct.

This might also explain why the key to the left of “AGARIC FLY” is labelled, simply, “TRIP”:

So why are all of these strange references on the Nostromo’s emergency destruct keyboard? Well, according to the Alien Explorations blog, designer Simon Deering needed some complex-sounding labels for the keyboard at short notice. He was reading The Secret Doctrine by Helena Blavatsky, a Russian philosopher and occultist, at the time of filming. Blavatsky’s book attempts to explain the origin and evolution of the universe in terms derived from the Hindu concept of cyclical development. Deering found his inspiration in its pages, and the Nostromo‘s odd keyboard was born.

Back to the action. Ripley is safely on board the shuttle, with no sign of the alien. But wait – just when we think all is rosy, it turns out that the damned thing has also stowed away on the shuttle. Gah!

Thankfully, this shuttle comes equipped with a system that pipes highly toxic and flammable SPECIAL GASES into the main cockpit at the press of a button:

It’s not immediately clear why this is a particularly useful or safe feature to have in a shuttle. Nonetheless, it certainly comes in handy when there’s an alien hiding in the wall.

Ripley starts by venting some Iodine Pentafluoride and Methyl Chloride. This doesn’t seem to have much effect. It’s a whole different matter when she tries the Nitrosyl Chloride, however:

According to Wikipedia, Nitrosyl Chloride is “very toxic and irritating to the lungs, eyes, and skin”. I don’t know whether the alien actually has any of these organs, but he definitely doesn’t like Nitrosyl Chloride one bit, and starts squealing like a frog in a roomful of cats:

(I’m going to ignore the fact that Nitrosyl Chloride gas is actually yellow. It’s working, and that’s all that matters.)

The gas finally forces the alien out into the open. A forward-thinking Ripley (who’s already strapped herself into a chair) opens the shuttle’s exterior door, and blasts the alien into space. Go Ripley!

In her final recorded message before hypersleep, Ripley notes that she is the sole survivor of the Nostromo. What she forgets to mention is that she has not once in the past two hours encountered any Eurostile Bold Extended.

We shouldn’t let this worry us as she settles down to sleep, however. There’s a ton of Eurostile in Aliens, so all will be made right. But that, my friends, is a story for another day.

For now: goodnight!

– @daveaddey

FUN FACT: An expanded version of this article appears in the Typeset in the Future book, available on December 11 2018. You can pre-order it now on Amazon.

Eurostile, and in particular its Bold Extended variant, has appeared in countless sci-fi settings over the years. It’s got to the point where the very presence of Eurostile Bold Extended in an opening title card says FUTURE far more effectively than an expensive effects shot:

Indeed, Eurostile is such a quick way to establish a timeframe that whenever I see it in real life – which happens quite a lot in my adopted home of California – I assume I’ve been transported to some futuristic dystopia, where a local care center feels more like a sinister government facility for scientific experimentation:

Eurostile is most commonly seen in its Bold Extended form, but Regular, Bold, and Regular Extended sometimes crop up as well. I’ve captured (and tried to clarify) as many as possible below.

Date / Location Positioning

When and where are we? If it’s set in Eurostile, we are in the FUTURE, and we are in the FUTURE.

Computers and Screens

If your computer system or TV show needs some futuristic-looking text that’s easy to read in a long-shot, there’s no better choice than Eurostile Bold Extended.

Walls and Signage

Need to write a message on your rocket, lunar base, or rover? You know the font to use.

Movie Posters

Titles and Credit Sequences

Wannabes

These are not the Eurostiles you are looking for.

Any More?

I’ll keep adding to this page as I spot more examples. If you know of any I’ve missed or got wrong, please do mention them in the comments, together with a link to an image if possible.

FUN FACT: An expanded version of this article appears in the Typeset in the Future book, available on December 11 2018. You can pre-order it now on Amazon.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention it originally, but this article contains some pretty massive spoilers about the plot of Moon. In my defense, you’re here to read about typography, and typography is always essential to the plot. Nonetheless, if you haven’t seen Moon, go and watch it first. The future will still be here when you’re done.

I’ll tell you exactly where we are now. We are in the FUTURE; and we are on the MOON.

The searching question above is the opening shot of an infomercial for Lunar Industries. Their moon-based mining of Helium-3 is providing a plentiful source of energy on Earth. (On the evidence of the advert, they sound like a great company to work for. I’m sure they have strong ethical values.)

Sounds like science fiction, right? I’m afraid that’s where you would be wrong, sir or madam. As of January 2014, NASA is accepting applications from companies who want to mine the moon. This film isn’t science fiction – it’s inevitable science fact.

Fittingly, the infomercial finishes with an animation of the words ‘sun / moon / earth / energy / future’…

…and a transition to the Lunar Industries logo:

As introductions go, it doesn’t get more Eurostile Bold Extended than that.

And that’s where I have bad news, I’m afraid. It’s not Eurostile. It’s not even Eurostile’s daddy, Microgramma. According to conceptual designer Gavin Rothery, it’s actually Microstyle.

You’re probably wondering how to tell the three apart, right? Don’t worry – it’s trivially easy, as the big number two below will illustrate. Eurostile is in blue; Microgramma is in red; Microstyle is in green:

I’m glad we’ve cleared that up. (For ease of blog post cross-referencing, I’m going to put my fingers in my ears and continue to call it Eurostile anyway.)

Of course, sci-fi typography isn’t just about the Eurostile, you know. Eurostile has a long-standing competitor; a rival, if you will. And the yang to Eurostile’s tenuous yin is none other than our rectilinear friend, Bank Gothic. Moon uses both fonts in quick succession for maximum futuristic effect.

A clever 3D layout of Bank Gothic Medium is used for much of the film’s opening credits, superimposed in-and-over each of the positioning scenes:

One of these scenes introduces us to the film’s central character. Look! It’s Sam Bell, running on a treadmill to keep fit during his three-year stay on the moon. But what’s that on his t-shirt?

Haha! It’s a meaningless, throwaway gag about running. Because ‘runners don’t quit’, do they? Unless this comedy 80s typography has a deeper, hidden meaning…

One of my favorite things about Moon is its constant foreshadowing of the movie’s central twist. Wake Me When It’s Quitting Time is a pretty damn blatant forward reference to what happens later in the film. (And I hate to say it, type-fans, but that’s not Helvetica on Sam’s t-shirt. It’s Arial. You can tell from the Q and the G.)

This opening sequence is also the first time we discover that the moon base is called ‘SARANG – 사랑’:

This is essentially a duplication – the word ‘sarang’ is an English rendition of the Korean word ‘사랑’, which means ‘love’ or ‘affection’. (‘Sarang’ is also etymologically and graphically close to ‘saram’ or ‘사람’, which, ironically, can mean either ‘person’ or ‘people’.) In either case, it’s an unfortunate choice of name for Sam’s permanent home on the Moon, many thousands of miles away from his beloved wife and daughter.

Next up is Moon‘s title card, an inverted homage to Apollo 8‘s famous Earthrise photograph:

…albeit with more Bank Gothic than the original:

(The gradient fill effect on the MOON logotype is a popular sci-fi trope for adding drama to typography. We’ll revisit this in future blog posts.)

Moon uses an interesting angular typeface for its location-establishing shot:

This typeface is OCR-A, which was designed in 1968 for use in optical character recognition systems. It’s actually an ISO standard for character recognition. Moreover, it looks like THE FUTURE, and so it makes a perfect choice for on-screen interstitial positioning shots. (Matthew Skala has very kindly made a modern implementation of OCR-A available for free on his web site.)

Back inside the base, Sam notices that one of the four HE3 harvesters has a full load ready for collection. The on-screen display is classic Bold Extended sci-fi, with bonus points for yellow-and-white text and barber’s-pole patterning:

Also notable in this screenshot is a juxtaposition between the precision of the harvester’s on-screen display, and Sam’s hand-written customization of the surrounding fascia. This human customization of a clinical surrounding is something we certainly didn’t see in 2001, but it’s a common theme in Moon. Sam’s boredom keeps finding creative and subversive outlets within the strict design confines of the moon base environment.

Sam’s pressurized suit has three fabric mission patches:

Although Sam’s patches follow the Apollo mission patch trend for Bold Extended typography, they are very different from those of the Apollo era. NASA astronauts always had creative input into the patches for their missions. In his fantastic autobiography Carrying The Fire, Command Module Pilot Michael Collins describes the design process for the Apollo 11 mission patch typography:

I also penciled APOLLO around the top of my circular design and ELEVEN around the bottom. Neil didn’t like the ELEVEN because it wouldn’t be understandable to foreigners, so after trying XI and 11, we settled on the latter and put APOLLO 11 around the top.

Sam’s patches are the exact opposite of those from the Apollo era – rectangular rather than round; corporate and branded rather than personal and decorative.

Sam records a message for Lunar Industries central back on Earth. He’s unable to speak to them live, due to an ongoing problem with the long-range comms:

The on-screen interface is once again all about the Bold Extended. One of the buttons to the right of the screen has an interesting label. I wonder what it does?

Sam isn’t happy about the fact he’s been on the base for nearly three years. “I’m talking to myself on a regular basis”, he says. (Be careful what you wish for, Sam.)

Sam’s attempts to customize and personalize his environment continue in the living quarters. He’s keeping count of his days on the Moon with a dry-wipe marker on the bathroom wall. By my reckoning, this is 146 days and counting – not quite the nearly-three-years mentioned in the plot.

UPDATE: Patrick Devine has commented on Hacker News that there are actually 156 smileys, not 146. Turns out I miscounted. Patrick also notes that three years is exactly 156 weeks. Good spot, sir!

It’s not clear whether the facial emotions represent Sam’s mental state day by day. Nonetheless, they are a neat parallel to the simple expressions seen on the front of GERTY, Sam’s AI companion in the base:

GERTY communicates his emotions to Sam via the GERTY Unit Primary Emotional Interface. He has a stock set of emoji faces to draw on, based very closely on the standard emoticons that any Internet user will be familiar with. I’ll reference a few of them throughout this article, along with their official emoji names.

Sam has drawn a window and pastoral scene on another metal wall, and surrounded it with family photos…

…and the functional Eurostile of a harvester status screen is similarly customized with family photos and postcards:

Just readable amongst the photos is a Post-it note detailing Sam’s cheeky plans for starting the day:

07.30: Have a wank

07.32: Clean up mess

07.33: Nice cup of tea and a bickie

Sam might be American, but the film’s director and designer are definitely British. (To explain for Americans: ‘bickie’ is British slang for ‘biscuit’; ‘biscuit’ is British slang for ‘cookie’; and you can work out ‘wank’ for yourselves.)

This Post-it is particularly ironic in light of the quotation we see as the camera pans down the wall of photos:

I’m delighted to report that the card is set in popular sci-fi font Swiss 911 Compressed.

Next up is a gratuitous shot of Sam having a shower. If this isn’t a ‘backside of the moon’ gag, I’ll be sorely disappointed.

I’ve had a closer look, but I can’t see any typography:

If there’s no typography, then I’m afraid we’re just not interested.

After his shower, Sam gets his hair cut by GERTY:

GERTY is using a futuristic vacuum-based device to suck up Sam’s hair and cut it to the perfect length. You can just make out a Lunar Industries logo on the device’s hi-gloss handle:

Here’s how the device looks in close-up:

HANG ON A MINUTE. What’s that written on the transparent plastic tube?

Crop. Zoom in. Move left. Zoom in again. Enhance.

That embossed text appears to say:

http://www.haircut.com

2″ EXTENDER

Is this the Moon production team saying that at some point in the future, haircut.com will be purchased by a futuristic hair-cutting company who make robotic trimming devices?

No, dear reader, it is not. Because that future is already here. TODAY.

It turns out that haircut.com is the present-day home of RoboCut Inc.:

…and that RoboCut Inc. are the makers of the RoboCut DIY:

That’s right – the product you see in Moon is a product you can buy yourself today, for only $59.99 (including free shipping).

Want to know how the RoboCut works? Here’s RoboCut founder and inventor, Dr. Alfred Natrasevschi, to explain:

Haircut completed, Sam expresses his annoyance that LunarSat (a.k.a. ‘long range comms’) still hasn’t been fixed. GERTY notes that it’s fairly low on the company’s priority list right now. His passive role in this scene is fascinating. If you watch Moon after 2001, you can’t help but be suspicious of GERTY, in the same way that Ripley can’t help but be suspicious of Bishop in Aliens after her experience with Ash in Alien. GERTY is a calm, relaxing AI voice with a glowing camera lens and corporate logo on the front. Moon certainly isn’t afraid to play on our expectations. After all, what could possibly go wrong?

Sam listens to a message from his wife and daughter. He can’t talk to them live due to the LunarSat mishap, but he’s delighted to see them nonetheless. Just look at the joy on his face:

No. Don’t look at his face; look at his clipboard. That’s where the typographic interestingness is most likely to be found.

Crop. Zoom in. Rotate ninety degrees. Zoom in again. Enhance.

Hold on a minute – it looks like this clipboard was signed on the 16th January 2008. But that’s not THE FUTURE – indeed, it’s not even after Moon was released!

Moreover, who’s the signatory? It looks remarkably like the name of the film’s line producer. (Damn you, high-definition film releases.)

Later on, Sam watches some TV. Specifically, he watches Bewitched – or as it’s also known in the future, ‘SUPERNATURAL COMEDY LADIES’:

As he makes a cup of tea, he spots a strange girl sat in his chair:

While he’s distracted by the plot, let’s take a look at two typographically-interesting posters in the background:

This poster, with its square iconography and cheery SELECTION EVENT – HEARTY FEEDING – PLEASE ENJOY – ORGANIC SUSTAINANCE MENU, makes you wonder if the Lunar Industries catering team learnt their trade at Aperture Science.

Even more interesting is a sign just visible beneath the pre-packed food boxes:

Soylent. That name sounds familiar. Surely this isn’t the same foodstuff made by the Soylent Corporation in 1973’s Soylent Green? Because if it is, that would be remarkably worrying. Soylent Green is People!

At least we can be confident that this Soylent isn’t made from people. After all, where would you get them from? There’s only one person on this moon base, and that’s Sam Bell.

Sam burns his hand in all the kerfuffle. GERTY fixes him up in the infirmary. Just visible behind Sam’s head is a screen with the comforting advice to “TRUST ROBOTIC ASSIST”:

ROBOTIC ASSIST is the official name for GERTY 3000, Sam’s AI companion in the base (voiced by Kevin Spacey doing his best HAL impression). And why not TRUST ROBOTIC ASSIST? I’m sure the 3000 series has a perfect operational record.

Sam goes to bed. Beside his bunk is issue 15 of Take Off Magazine:

Take Off was a 132-issue aviation partwork published in the 1980s by Eaglemoss. This issue features V-Bombers and Biz-Jets:

Sam has a sexy dream about his wife. It does not, however, contain any typography.

Sam is rudely awoken by his Karlsson Digibell Alarm Clock, which features a classic LCD font. Sam’s future version of the clock has a bonus feature compared to the one you can buy in shops today. That’s right – Sam’s version plays Chesney Hawkes songs.

Specifically, it wakes him up by playing Chesney’s number one hit The One And Only. “I am, the one and only”, croons Mr. Hawkes.

Yes, you heard me right – the filmmakers are foreshadowing upcoming events via the lyrics of a Chesney Hawkes song.

Over food, we see more of Sam’s Post-it reminders:

Water plants!!

11:30 Gaze at earth from window

…and a picture of the Earth, with Wish You Were Here on it. He really does want to go home, you know.

Sam also has an IKEA instruction booklet tucked behind his Lunar Industries sheet. The reasons for this are somewhat unclear.

Sam heads out to retrieve some more HE3 from Matthew, one of the harvesters. He sees a second vision of the mysterious girl, and crashes into the side of Matthew, damaging both himself and his rover. The rover’s emergency sign once again asks him to TRUST ROBOTIC ASSIST:

There’s a clear message coming through from these on-screen text displays: if things go wrong, ROBOTIC ASSIST should be TRUSTed to make things right. Let’s fade to black with that sensible advice in mind.

Fade up from black. Why hello, Sam! You’re looking remarkably fresh-faced for someone who’s just nearly killed himself in an accident. How’s the head? Fuzzy? Tell you what, why not let GERTY run some tests to check for brain damage:

This test is a Concentration-style matching pairs game. (Unlike Concentration, these cards all have Lunar Industries logos on the back.) Some of the card symbols are reminiscent of Zapf Dingbats – such as the HEAVY GREEK CROSS, and a rotated BLACK DIAMOND MINUS WHITE X – but I do wonder if I’m reading too much into things, and the design team haven’t just drawn some pretty symbols in Illustrator. (I had hoped that the asterisk card might be my own personal favorite, the HEAVY EIGHT TEARDROP-SPOKED PROPELLER ASTERISK, but alas it is not to be.)

“Let’s try another test” says GERTY, like some kind of benevolent GLaDOS. The analogy makes me trust him even less.

Shortly thereafter, we overhear GERTY saying something to Lunar Central about “the new Sam”. What’re you going on about, GERTY?

I’ll tell you exactly what he’s going on about. This is a brand new Sam. He’s a clone of the original Sam Bell, and he’s just been woken up by GERTY. This might get confusing rather quickly, so let’s lean on our good friend ‘typographic convention’, and use subscript to refer to him henceforth as Sam₂. Trust me, it’ll make life a damn sight easier once you know where we’re going with this.

Sam₂ spots that Matthew has stalled. He asks GERTY to unlock the doors so that he can go and fix it. GERTY says “I’ll pass on your message”. (This is Lunar Industries speak for “I’m sorry Sam, I’m afraid I can’t do that”.)

Sam₂ has a dream about his wife. This time, it’s not sexy at all – it’s psychologically and typographically disturbing. There’s a scary Sam₁ under the bedclothes, and he works for RANUL SEIRTSUDNI, on the 랑사-GNARAS base:

Lunar Central tells Sam₂ to stay put. GERTY apologies for being under strict orders not to let him outside. He’s acting like some kind of… benevolent HAL 9000. This analogy actually endears him to me slightly. Sam₂ tricks GERTY into letting him go outside anyway. He finds Sam₁ in the rover, and brings him back to the base. GERTY tells him that the person he’s found is also Sam Bell.

GERTICON: OHMYCRIKEYFACE

A considerable amount of plot happens. It’s all fascinating, but if I’m honest, it’s rather light on typographic action. I feel I’d be doing us a disservice to document the whole lot, but I will report an important bit of GERTY dialog when he’s explaining events to Sam₁:

“I’m here to keep you safe, Sam.”

That sounds a lot like the First Law Of Robotics to me. If GERTY is programmed to follow the Laws, his robot AI is about to have some interesting choices to make.

A message comes through from Central to say that the crew of the Eliza are on their way to ‘rescue’ Sam₂:

They look like a friendly bunch, don’t they? The instructions next to their mugshots say:

Lunar Industries rescue crews have your best intentions at heart. Please try not to panic until they arrive. Remain on-station and make sure you obey their instructions no matter how strange they may seem. After all they’re here to help!

What could possibly go wrong with a crew called Rothery, Ward and Shaw?

Sam₂ realizes he must have come from somewhere on the base, and starts hunting around. He and Sam₁ have a fight. Sam₁ looks in a topical multi-mirror. (Don’t worry, that’s definitely Sam₁ in both mirrors. After all, it’s not like there are any more Sams around, right?)

GERTY and Sam₁ have a Big Chat. When pressed for the truth about his wife, GERTY says “I can only account for what occurs on the base”.

GERTICON: NOTHINGTOSEEHEREFACE

After some cajoling, GERTY finally tells Sam₁ the truth. He’s a clone, and his memories of his wife and daughter are memory implants.

GERTICON: SADTRUTHFACE

The Sams find some signal-blocking antennas outside the base. Sam₁ goes back to look at his old video logs. GERTY enters a special password on a Windows Keyboard to unlock all of the video diaries:

Eagle-eyed viewers will notice that the password begins with KLGAN. Unfortunately, the security-conscious Duncan Jones cuts away from the keyboard just before we can hack into his email.

Sam₁ learns that Lunar Industries seem to view the words ‘termination’ and ‘contract’ in much the same way as the Mafia. Sam₂ finds yet more long-range-comms-blocking aerials. He prints out their coordinates on a handy receipt printer:

I very much doubt those are going to become significant later on.

Now: I’m sure you’ve already noticed that these are Selenographic coordinates, as used to refer to locations on the Earth’s Moon. Specifically, the co-ordinates are:

LAT 034°23′01.2″S, LONG 124°56′67.6″E

LAT 121°09′56.2″S, LONG 045°34′56.4″E

We’ll gloss over the fact that one of these numbers has sixty-seven seconds in a minute. However, it’s a little hard to ignore the latitude value of 121°S, given that the maximum value that latitude can take is 90°S at the pole. (Maybe Sam mistyped it due to the stubby fingers you get on space gloves.)

Back at base, the Sams discover a hidden room. Look at that: it’s Sams all the way down!

Trays 0001 through 0006 have already been opened. Sam₀₀₀₅ and Sam₀₀₀₆ (for it is they) decide to open tray 0007:

It’s the small details of this scene that I find most disturbing. Every pre-packed Sam_n has a pre-packed Wake Me When It’s Quitting Time t-shirt. The person at Lunar Industries responsible for this whole macabre set-up not only had the temerity to subject Sam Bell to his own personal Groundhog Day; they also had the gall to leave cynical in-jokes for every iteration to endure.

Once they’re out of the Tunnel Of Clones, Sam₁ asks GERTY why he helped with the password. “Helping you is what I do”, says GERTY.

See, Sam₁? I told you you should TRUST ROBOTIC ASSIST – he’s definitely read the Laws. (Although he may have skim-read the bit about not killing people in a space-coffin.)

Sam₁ drives the rover a very long way from the base, and re-establishes video contact with Earth. He calls his house. Turns out his wife is dead, but his now-15-year-old daughter has a chat with him anyway. She ends by shouting off-screen to her Dad to say that someone is asking about Mom. We hear the distinct voice of a certain Sam Bell in reply. Sam₀ is still alive! (Sam₁ closes the video call device quickly, and looks sad and pensive.)

The known-to-be-alive-ness of Sam₀ gives an an alternative, cheerier way of looking at the pre-packed t-shirt dilemma for the less depressingly-morbid of you. Presumably Sam₀ is complicit in the fact that thousands of Sams are in cold storage on the Moon. If he’s complicit in the scheme, could it be that these small personal details – even that seemingly-sinister t-shirt – have been chosen with Sam₀‘s involvement, as homely comforts to soften the terror of Sam_n‘s reality?

I don’t think that’s the truth of it at all. But if helps you sleep at night, you’re more than welcome to run with it.

We’re back at the base. Sam₁ continues to fall apart. Sam₂ sees Sam₁‘s video call with his daughter, and realizes that he and Sam₁ will be killed when the Eliza crew arrive. He convinces GERTY to wake up a new clone. Let’s call him Sam₃.

This section of the film gives us a rare close-up of the base’s OPERATIONAL NOTIFICATIONS board:

Amongst other things, we discover that Lunar Industries Ltd. is a Registered Company Of The United Kingdom No. 06346944. Delightfully, this is indeed the case. In addition to the scrolling Eurostile, there’s also a Big Countdown Clock (in a pseudo-LED font), reinforcing the time pressure of Eliza‘s imminent arrival. (It was conveniently fixed at 88:88 before the Eliza plot point came into effect.) Notable on both font displays is an illustrative dot-matrix resolution substantially lower than the actual resolution of the fonts displayed thereon.

Sam₁, who is by now in a right state, wakes up to Chesney Hawkes. (See? I told you it was foreshadowing.) He discovers Sam₃ in the infirmary.

Talking of foreshadowing: on the movie’s original one-sheet poster, there are three copies of Sam Rockwell’s name, as shadows behind the main one:

Strictly speaking, this is an accurate cast list. The film now stars Sam Rockwell₀, Sam Rockwell₁, Sam Rockwell₂, and Sam Rockwell₃.

To put it another way – the movie’s poster is four-shadowing the foreshadowing.

Maybe I should go and have a lie down for a bit, and come back when the conspiracy theories have subsided. It’s a shame sci-fi films don’t have intermissions these days. Let’s transplant the one from my 2001: A Space Odyssey post, and go and have a cup of tea while the Sams work out what to do next.

And we’re back. After much debate, it is decided that Sam₁ will go back into the crashed rover; Sam₂ will take the HE3 launcher back to Earth; and Sam₃ will stay in the infirmary to be discovered by the crew of Eliza. He’s still unconscious, so he doesn’t know this yet, but it’s a decision made by a quorum of hims, so he can’t really complain.

Once he’s dropped Sam₁ off,  Sam₂ loads up the HE3 launcher. GERTY suggests turning him on and off again so that he can’t provide any incriminating evidence to Eliza. “I’m here to keep you safe, Sam. I want to help you.”

Sam₂ asks GERTY if he’ll be okay. “Of course. The new Sam and I will be back to our programming as soon as I’ve finished rebooting.”

GERTICON: YAYPROGRAMMINGFACE

Sam₂ replies: “Gerty, we’re not programmed. We’re people, you understand?”

As GERTY turns round, we see that Sam₁ has stuck a KICK ME Post-it on GERTY’s back side:

Sam₂ turns GERTY off. After a short, poignant pause, he removes the Post-it from his back.

GERTICON: REBOOTINGFACE

Sam₂ gets ready to launch back to Earth. At the very last minute, he realizes he can use the harvesters to knacker the signal-blocking aerials, and avoid Sam₃ suffering a similar fate to his own. He grabs the piece of paper with Chekhov’s Coordinates on it:

…and types a long series of numbers into a keyboard with great precision despite wearing spacesuit gloves. The harvester coordinates update. Go Sam₂!

This screen prompts a couple of interesting questions:

1) What’s an ‘OLD MAN OVERIDE’?

2) Is that an infinitely-looping BASIC program?

20 GOTO 10

10 GOTO 20

The Eliza arrives. Sam₃ wakes up and asks GERTY what’s going on.

GERTICON: DONTASKMEJUSTREBOOTEDFACE

Eliza crew members find Sam₁ in his rover. Sam₂ has a psychedelic trip through space. A harvester crashes into an aerial. Long Range Comms finally start working. And if you look closely, you discover that the contents of the portrait-orientation comms monitor is actually being played from a DVD player plugged into a landscape monitor turned 90 degrees clockwise:

All of which is a timely reminder that this frankly awesome sci-fi film was made on a budget the size of a postcard. Which just makes its amazing styling and design all the more impressive. Indeed, Moon is one of my favorite examples of sci-fi storytelling through design – and, to my mind, a worthy successor to Kubrick’s masterpiece.

– @daveaddey

Postscript: Apart from the note about Microstyle, and a nod to the DVD players, I deliberately wrote this post without referring to Moon Conceptual Designer Gavin Rothery‘s superb ‘They Never Went To The Moon’ blog. I much prefer to write these posts as a response to just what I see on screen – it’s more fun that way. You should totally go and read his blog in its entirety, however, as he explains or expands upon much of what I’ve written above. The blog also includes images of many of the computer screens and stickers from around the base, along with Gavin’s original renders for the base design. Good work, sir!

FUN FACT: An expanded version of this article appears in the Typeset in the Future book, available on December 11 2018. You can pre-order it now on Amazon.

Right from the opening scene, we’re treated to Kubrick’s love of bold, clean, sans-serif typography:

This title card is set in Gill Sans, one of the all-time classic sans-serif fonts. Perhaps surprisingly, the zeroes in ‘2001’ appear to be set with the Gill Sans capital letter O (shown below on the left), rather than its zero character (shown on the right):

The film’s opening act is set during The Dawn Of Man. The dawn of man is definitely not set in the future, as indicated by its use of Albertus for the act’s title card:

After introducing us to Albertus, the Dawn Of Man turns out to be typographically unremarkable. So, let’s skip forward a little, and join Dr. Heywood R. Floyd on his Pan Am flight to Space Station 5.

In the first of several subtle inclusions of real-world American companies, we discover that the Pan Am logo hasn’t changed much between 1968 and 2001. (We’ll gloss over the fact that Pan Am went bust in 1991.) The cabin crew have, however, adopted Velcro Grip Shoes to counter the weightlessness of space:

The Pan Am spacecraft’s flight deck gives us our first sighting of Eurostile Bold Extended, in an ominous foreshadowing of the HAL 9000 interface screens we’ll see later on. Presumably the Pan Am craft are  also controlled by HAL-series computers. And why not? After all, the 9000 series has a perfect operational record.

In a subsequent close-up, we see that the craft also features the IBM logo in its pre-1972 version, set in City Medium, as designed by Paul Rand:

There’s no mistaking Eurostile Bold Extended  on the receptionist’s language buttons when the Doctor arrives on the space station. Actually, there might be some mistaking it, because it could just as easily be Eurostile’s precursor, Microgramma. It’s nigh-impossible to tell them apart. Who knows, it could be Microgramma throughout the entire film. Let’s just call it Eurostile and get on with things.

UPDATE:  In response to this article, Erik van Blokland has posted a comprehensive side-by-side comparison of Eurostile, Microgramma, and HAL interface artwork from the traveling Kubrick exhibition. His conclusion: inconclusive.

The Hilton chain of hotels has opened an outpost on Space Station 5. This logo doesn’t match any I can find from their history, but it is very reminiscent of the iconic signage for the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles:

Just like Pan Am, the Howard Johnson’s chain of restaurants doesn’t seem to have changed its logo since the sixties. This is ironic, given that it updated its classic logo in 1998, a year or so before this scene takes place:

Dr. Floyd’s video call to his daughter sees another use of Eurostile Bold Extended. There’s also another real-world company logo, this time for the American Bell Telephone Company. (Their logo was redesigned by Saul Bass the year after 2001 was released.)

Eagle-eyed viewers may spot a logo for RCA Whirlpool (now the Whirlpool Corporation) during Dr. Floyd’s subsequent flight to the Clavius moon base. This logo (and the name RCA Whirlpool) was dropped in 1966, suggesting that this scene may have been filmed earlier in the movie’s production:

The Clavius flight also features Eurostile Bold (not Extended) in the instructions for the ship’s comedy Zero Gravity Toilet. It’s probably very sensible that Passengers Are Advised To Read Instructions Before Use.

Let’s take a brief aside to find out how a Zero Gravity Toilet works. These instructions have been transcribed as best as possible from a HD source.

1. This toilet is of the standard zero-gravity type. Depending on requirements, system A and/or system B can be used, details of which are clearly marked in the toilet compartment. When operating system A, depress lever and a plastic dalkron eliminator will be dispensed through the slot immediately underneath. When you have fastened the adhesive lip, attach connection marked by the large “X” outlet hose. Twist the silver coloured ring one inch below the connection point until you feel it lock.

2. The toilet is now ready for use. The Sonovac cleanser is activated by the small switch on the lip. When securing, twist the ring back to its initial-condition, so that the two orange lines meet. Disconnect. Place the dalkron eliminator in the vacuum receptacle to the rear. Activate by pressing the blue button.

3. The controls for system B are located on the opposite wall. The red release switch places the uroliminator into position; it can be adjusted manually up or down by pressing the blue manual release button. The opening is self-adjusting. To secure after use, press the green button which simultaneously activates the evaporator and returns the uroliminator to its storage position.

4. You may leave the lavatory if the green exit light is on over the door. If the red light is illuminated, one of the lavatory facilities is not properly secured. Press the “Stewardess” call button to the right of the door. She will secure all facilities from her control panel outside. When green exit light goes on you may open the door and leave. Please close door behind you.

I don’t know why Pan Am’s toilet instructions spell ‘coloured’ with a u – or, indeed, why they call it a ‘toilet’, rather than the more typical American name of ‘bathroom’. I also dread to think what a plastic dalkron is, and I’m still not entirely clear when one might prefer systems A or B. But that’s probably for the best.

Let’s move on. Following a brief speech in a moon base, three American chaps take a spacecraft to visit a suspicious-looking monolith. What could possibly go wrong? Either way, their map makes good use of a mix of Eurostile Bold Extended, Futura Medium and something that looks like it’s probably a condensed form of Univers:

Things do, in fact, go wrong. General badness happens. Next thing we know, we’re looking at a title card for Part 3: Jupiter Mission. This title card is set in the other classic sans-serif font – Futura – but with a few idiosyncrasies. The points of the capital N characters have been softened, and the capital M appears to be borrowed from Gill Sans:

Only two of the Jupiter Mission crew of USS Discovery are awake, with the rest still in hibernation. The two crew members spend some time watching a BBC TV show on their eerily-prescient tablet devices. The channel is BBC 12, which is eight TV channels higher than the present-day BBC transmits. The corporate logo correctly uses its 1960s form of Univers in italicized outline boxes. (It was changed in 1997 to use its modern-day Gill Sans layout.)

The tablet is made by IBM, like much of the spacecraft’s hardware. It’s hard to be sure, but I think the tablet is called an IBM Tele Pro (although it could be Tele Pad, but I think that’s modern-day device naming trends influencing my eyesight):

Either way, BBC TV is clearly portrait-only in the future. (The device’s numeric buttons along the bottom portrait edge don’t make it look like it’s meant to be used in both orientations.)

The mission’s hibernation devices use Futura for their numeric and medical buttons, and Univers for their Emergency Revival Procedures:

There’s an unfortunate typo on the very first button, which refers to hypothalamus stimulation as ‘hyperthalamus stimulation’. (The spelling of this word changes throughout the instructions below.)

If you need to revive someone in an emergency, you’ll want to make sure you have several hours available. Again, my best attempt at a transcription from HD source:

1. Set level button for hyperthalamus activation in accordance with subject’s AQX chart.

2. Activate electric stimulation of the hypothalamus for 12 minutes.

3. Set blood sugar enrichment level in accordance with subject’s AQX chart (if secondary level indicated, activate primary level (step 4 below) and hold for 75 minutes, then change to secondary level for 40 minutes).

4. Activate blood sugar enrichment for 110 minutes.

[…]spiratory levels in accordance […]

7. Activate temperature B button to increase respiratory rate.

8. Activate thyroxin control at level 4 for 30 seconds, at level 6 for 30 seconds, and at level 9 for 10 seconds to reestablish normal endocrine activity.

9. When subject shivers vigorously awakening is about to take place. Disengage brain monitor, suppressant connector and [thermolator band?].

10. Immediately upon awakening activate vibrator for 2 minutes.

11. Subject may now arise and undergo normal post-hibernation rousing.

By my reckoning, that’s a minimum of four hours and ten seconds  to revive someone in an emergency. Let’s hope nothing goes wrong for the crew members who are still in the hibernation pods, eh? (I do like 2001‘s use of in-craft typography to foreshadow events later in the film.)

On that theme: I’m not sure about the typeface used for the hibernating crew members’ vital statistics, although it feels like it may be a slightly extended variant of Univers:

However, I do know that this section of the movie contains some absolutely Eurostile-tastic HAL 9000 screens:

We also get a glimpse of HAL 9000’s own logotype, which could be a manually compressed and outlined variant of Univers, but honestly, it’s hard to tell:

During the first EVA, we see that Dr. Bowman’s space suit features yet more IBM equipment:

We also get a close-up of HAL’s telemetric displays, in a beautiful data font that appears in many of HAL’s interface displays (and which I’ve sadly not been able to identify):

You can see this telemetry in action on your own computer in the beautifully-crafted HAL 9000 interface screensaver, which is available from the HAL Project web site.

UPDATE: Heather, in the comments to this post, has correctly identified this font as Manifold from the DSG IBM Selectric Type Element Catalog. Thank you Heather – a fantastic spot!

After Dave returns from his EVA, we get a brief and blurry glimpse of the USS Discovery mission patch on his shoulder:

This warrants a brief mention of the timing of 2001‘s release. It’s easy to forget that 2001 actually hit cinemas in 1968, the year before Apollo 11 first put a man on the moon. The movie’s use of spacesuit and spacecraft typography is particularly interesting in light of the mission patches of the Apollo missions building up to Apollo 11’s historic landing. Here are the patches for Apollo 7, Apollo 9 and Apollo 10:

Does the typography remind you of anything?

Apollo 11 took a slightly different typographic tack, opting for Futura instead of Eurostile, but I don’t think Kubrick would have complained:

Much of the Apollo mission documentation and material also makes extensive use of Futura. The USS Discovery is certainly in good company.

UPDATE: Stephen Coles from Fonts In Use notes that the Apollo 11 mission patch is actually set in Spartan, an American knock-off of Futura. You can tell the difference from the flat (rather than angled) terminal on the 1.

Futura is also used to good effect to warn the Discovery crew about the pod’s Explosive Bolts:

Again, a lovely bit of foreshadowing that still ties in neatly with the overall aesthetic of the craft. (Chekhov’s Typography, if you will.)

Futura also features on the pod communications switches used to cut HAL off from the worried crew’s conversation:

Good lord, is that the time? We should have an intermission!

This time, the title card is Gill Sans all the way. Go and make yourself a cup of tea while the scary music plays.

And we’re back. Frank heads out on another EVA to pop the comms dish gadget back in the comms dish gadget slot. Unfortunately, his pod turns evil and cuts his air supply. Frank spirals away into space. Dave follows him in a pod, attempting in vain to retrieve his body before it’s too late. While he’s doing so, there’s a dramatic…

…in the hibernation pods, which causes the life support machines of the hibernating science crew to start reporting…

…and end up with their…

…which isn’t what they wanted AT ALL.

Still: if it is going to happen, it may as well happen in what is probably Univers 67 Bold Condensed.

Now: if Dave wasn’t out in the pod trying to catch Frank, he’d’ve been able to instigate the four hours and ten seconds of Emergency Revival Procedures. Remember those? Ah well, never mind.

Worse is yet to come. Dave is locked out of the Discovery by HAL. There’s only one thing for it: open the emergency air lock, and fire the Explosive Bolts. Remember those?

Having just about made it back in, Dave triggers the Emergency Hatch Close (which is just next to the Emergency Umbilical Connect):

There sure are a lot of things labeled ‘EMERGENCY’ in Futura on this spacecraft. Perhaps the most notable example of all is the HAL 9000 Logic Memory Center:

Dave removes HAL 9000’s memory. HAL sings a song. The typography might be Univers 67 Bold Condensed again, but I’m not convinced by those numbers:

And, as soon as you can say ‘National Council of Astronautics’, we’re in to Part 4: Jupiter And Beyond The Infinite.

Less-pointy Ns notwithstanding, this title card is Futura all the way:

This final part of the film is visually eclectic, aurally stunning and philosophically challenging. Many thousands of words have been penned over the decades to try and fathom the meaning of the monolith, and the genesis and future of the space-baby. However, none of this act contains typography, and it is therefore of no concern to us. Let’s skip to the end credits.

It’s Futura again, with an M borrowed from Gill Sans, and a W that I don’t recognize from anywhere.

Goodnight!

– @daveaddey

FUN FACT: An expanded version of this article appears in the Typeset in the Future book, available on December 11 2018. You can pre-order it now on Amazon.