Movie-watching for slightly obsessive people

By Britta Gustafson

Many years ago, I spent hours after school reading The Easter Egg Archive, a compilation of hidden details (“easter eggs”) in movies and software, placed by the creators as in-jokes for their friends and other people who pay close attention. OK, there wasn’t a whole lot else on the Web back then, or maybe I just didn’t know how to find anything else. But now, there are lots and lots of websites about obsessive movie and TV details, and many of them are more exciting than finding out that you can play pinball in an ancient version of Word.

If you’re interested in fonts, you can read all about “The Use (and Misuse) of Period Typography in Movies,” from sixties-era typefaces used in forties-era movies to nineties-era typefaces used in fifties-era movies. Well, I think that’s exciting. The same person has also written similar articles about the use of typefaces in Mad Men and in the Indiana Jones movies. You may even be curious, like I was, about the name of the typeface used for the credits at the bottom of a movie poster, or maybe about why the typeface Trajan shows up in so many movie posters.

If you’ve watched a lot of Looney Tunes, you might like The Original Illustrated Catalog Of ACME Products, a huge compilation of screengrabs and descriptions of items used by Wile E. Coyote. I also watched a lot of re-runs of the 1960sa Batman TV series, so I like this collection of the onomatopoeic sound effects from the show.

The “THX sound” that shows up in movie theaters before the feature film is called “Deep Note” — and a person interviewed its creator and found out how it was made: “He said he wanted ’something that comes out of nowhere and gets really, really big!’” There’s also a good description of how the Star Wars sound designer created that lightsaber sound (“They had an interlock motor which connected them to the system when they just sat there and idled and made a wonderful humming sound…”). Another Star Wars special effect is the greeble: “a small piece of detailing added to break up the surface of an object…They serve no real purpose other than to add complexity to the object.”

There are many lists of movie cliches, but I like this one: The Top 100 Things I’d Do If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord. It goes well with this Evil Plan Generator. Now you know everything you need to make a good film or TV series: how to choose the right typefaces, how to form a running gag that amuses small children, how to make the right sound effects, and how to construct the right plot. Yay!