This post was originally published by In A Far Away Galaxy.
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What is the Star Wars crawl font called?
While the Star Wars logo is an iconic design, the famous yellow opening crawl is equally as recognizable as an iconic font.
The original Star Wars font crawl is known as Franklin Gothic but has become known as ‘Univers’.
All six films from the Lucas era use the Gothic/Univers font.
The first three films used sophisticated camera work to produce the crawl.
When The Phantom Menace came along, Star Wars legend John Knoll came up with a new way to get them on screen so they matched the original crawl.
As an aside, Knoll is the gentleman that famously pitched the idea of what would become Rogue One to Kathleen Kennedy!
Did you know that the crawl font was updated by JJ Abrams for The Force Awakens? The style of font that TFA’s crawl uses is called News Gothic.
How could the man be so sacrilegious!?
The original Star Wars opening title sequence designer Dan Perri was quoted about the change saying:
“Oh, Oh my God, that’s way off. I know the New Gothic lines well and I can tell you I used it on Raging Bull because it was from the era, from the ’40s and ’50s. No I would not have used New Gothic on Star Wars.”
We don’t care actually because frankly, I didn’t even notice the first time around watching the film. Perhaps I was too excited to be seeing new Star Wars!
And that’s just it, Univers and New Gothic are fairly similar but certainly distinct. The font change was perhaps a subtle suggestion from Abrams to the viewer that his film was ‘same same but different’.
The use of the original font as a crawl up the screen was actually inspired by the Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon serials which as a whole had inspired Lucas to create Star Wars. George Lucas asked Dan Perri to use the titles of those shows to inspire the crawl.
