Kurt von Stroud: dreamboat

Here's an answer to David's question about the Destination Infinity lobby card names.

A lot of times filmmakers will use fun references for fictitious names. Example: in Monsters Inc., the sushi restaurant is named Harryhausen's after renowned fx animator Ray Harryhausen. It's not that I really mind this sort of thing, but I have to admit I spent a few seconds pondering how that name makes sense for a sushi restaurant. Another strategy would be to create satirical names like they do in The Simpsons—for example, Try-N-Save or Bloodbath and Beyond. Interestingly, in The Simpsons, quite a few names are "peformed" names and are not overtly satirical—for example, Kwik-E-Mart, or the Android's Dungeon.

My preference is for the names to be part of the performance. The names in the lobby card all had a sort of fifties sound to me. Dwight, for example, is one of those names you don't hear much any more. I'm sure that one came from Dwight Eisenhower. Surely too obvious a choice and in that way, a poor "performance." Anna Klein and Kurt von Stroud were supposed to be immigrants. The idea here was that b-movie producers might try to emulate the imported success of Garbo and Bergman. So they cast Kurt, "the Dutch Dreamboat" von Stroud as a lead. Now that I think about it that's probably a German name. Anna Klein was supposed to be German. Corda Delaney was supposed to be one of those names that brings absolutely no image to mind. There always seems to be a name like that in a cast where you can't tell whether it's a man or a woman, a matron or an ingenue, a star or a bit player. I had the idea that the above-the-line positions were all filled by waspish types, hence, Gordon Devane and Harvey Plame. Of course the producer B. George MacArthur would have the most waspish name of all with an added initial, Cecil B. Demille-like. Now that I think about it, MacArthur probably comes from Douglas MacArthur. Another too-obvious choice, the naming performance equivalent of biting your knuckles. "William Stout" is one of those names that sounds pejorative but just sticks. Somehow, I think of the fifties as a time when you could have a name like "Stout" and people would just accept it and not think you're fat. Or maybe it had to do with the fact that the word stout is just seldom used today.

Regalscape comes from the naming conventions of the time when companies generally tried to sound big, monolithic and imperial. So you'd get something like "Royal International Pictures" or "A King-Universal production." Being postmodern, we no longer have names like that. That's how you end up with Pinkberry. Regalvision is of course a nod to the various cinematic strategies used at the time to differentiate movies from TV. Back then, everything really did seem to be a kind of "-vision" or "-scope" or "-rama." I guess Regalvision was Regalscape's proprietary, but soon forgotten anamorphic format. Or maybe it was a cheap way of trying to make b/w films look more colorful. I remember in the seventies, I bought this plastic sheet that you put on your TV screen to make a b/w TV image look like color. I dimly remember that it gave everything a prism-like effect. Speaking of plastic sheets, some of you may remember Winky-Dink, a b/w cartoon where at a certain point in the story, you were supposed to cover your TV with a plastic sheet and then draw on it to help the character get out of trouble.

If the lobby card prop got more screen time, I might have put more care into the names. Actually, I'm still mostly bothered by the type. If I had more energy I'd fix the "o" in Destination which is poorly drawn in the font. Also notice how the "A" is poorly weighted. But that stuff takes too long. I should at least fix the letter spacing since the "N" and "A" are smashed together. The type in the body of the card still isn't great. But part of the art is knowing when to stop.