Movies with non-punctuation symbols replacing words in their logos?
April 17, 2018 7:50 AM   Subscribe

I'm looking to find or generate a list of movies whose official title includes at least one symbol replacing a letter or word. For instance, David O. Russell's 2004 film 'I ♥ Huckabee' uses a heart symbol in its official title. Punctuation symbols like dollar signs ($$$) or other non-letter punctuation does not count. 'I ♥ Huckabee' can't possibly the only one, right?
posted by mediamelt to Media & Arts (21 answers total) 3 users marked this as a favorite
 
What about 61*?
posted by General Malaise at 7:55 AM on April 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


Best answer: The poster for the movie Pi uses the Pi symbol (tough due to non-digital movie theater signs at the time was usually spelled out "Pi")

and not a symbol but the movie Seven is usually written "Se7en"
posted by Captain_Science at 7:56 AM on April 17, 2018 [4 favorites]


Would faux Cyrillic (e.g. a backwards R) or faux Greek (e.g. sigma for E) work? There's some movie title examples there, including MY BIG FAT GRΣΣK WEDDING.

Tbh this probably doesn't count, though, since everyone considers the title to be "My Big Fat Greek Wedding" and treats the sigmas on the poster as a goofy font choice.
posted by nebulawindphone at 8:05 AM on April 17, 2018


The 1996 film of Romeo and Juliet was "Romeo + Juliet."
posted by cranberrymonger at 8:06 AM on April 17, 2018 [10 favorites]


Romeo + Juliet?
posted by JanetLand at 8:07 AM on April 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


I know you said dollar signs don't count, but the dollar sign in Who the $&% Is Jackson Pollock? isn't really replacing "dollar" or "money" so maybe it will work?
posted by JanetLand at 8:09 AM on April 17, 2018


What the #$*! do we know?! (also stylized with a bunch of other symbols, see article)
posted by LobsterMitten at 8:11 AM on April 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


Wait, do you mean to exclude all the punctuation symbols you'd see on a keyboard? Or just to exclude them when they're used as punctuation in the title (like "Airplane!")?
posted by LobsterMitten at 8:16 AM on April 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


How about that movie that is out right now called '(picture of a cock) Blockers'?
posted by bdc34 at 8:45 AM on April 17, 2018 [5 favorites]


$ (1971, dir. Richard Brooks, with Goldie Hawn and Warren Beatty)
posted by ubiquity at 8:50 AM on April 17, 2018


M*A*S*H
posted by SemiSalt at 9:01 AM on April 17, 2018 [4 favorites]


Response by poster: "Wait, do you mean to exclude all the punctuation symbols you'd see on a keyboard?"

This is a good criteria for what I'm looking for - if you can see it printed on the tops of the keys of a standard computer keyboard it does not count.

Someone mentioned to me that 'I ♥ Huckabees' is the only film title with an emoji in it. In theory I guess that might be true, as the emoji symbol was created in 1999 in Japan, before the release of Huckabees - although I doubt Russell would refer to the heart symbol in his film's title as an emoji.

I think MY BIG FAT GRΣΣK WEDDING works as letter replacement part of my question, although in non-capital case form - My Big Fat GrΣΣk Wedding - doesn't look so hot.

Pi is in - based on the keyboard criteria and is a complete word replacement, so there's at least one in addition to Huckabees.

To the best of my knowledge the official title of Blockers is just 'Blockers' despite the insinuation of the marketing materials.

The others are eliminated due to their representation on a standard computer keyboard.
posted by mediamelt at 9:01 AM on April 17, 2018


As far as imdb is concerned, the title of the movie is "I Heart Huckabees". Fox Searchlight, the company that released the film, seems to agree.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 9:28 AM on April 17, 2018 [2 favorites]


There is a TV Tropes page about this. It mostly lists film titles containing conventional punctuation or else films where unusual punctuation was only used in the marketing , but it does mention Muppet★Vision 3D.
posted by honey wheat at 9:31 AM on April 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


Best answer: Oh, upon checking, the official Disney page for the movie I previously knew as Wall-E appears to confirm that the title is WALL•E.
posted by honey wheat at 9:34 AM on April 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


If memory serves (a dodgy proposition), when it was first released, 1971's Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song had dollar signs for the "s"s in "Baadasssss," at least in the newspaper ads.
posted by the sobsister at 9:52 AM on April 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


There’s currently a movie out called “🐓 Blockers”. Every poster and ad I’ve seen for it has the 🐓 there, and to me the title only makes sense if you pronounce it that way, although I’ve only heard people refer to the movie as “Blockers”
posted by Troupe of trained rats at 9:55 AM on April 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


Response by poster: As far as imdb is concerned, the title of the movie is "I Heart Huckabees". Fox Searchlight, the company that released the film, seems to agree.

Certainly there is an agreed upon screen-friendly colloquialism for Huckabees of spelling out the word 'heart' instead of using the symbol - this makes sense for easy searchability etc - but if you ask Russell the official title, the one he chose to label his art with, is the heart symbol.
posted by mediamelt at 10:14 AM on April 17, 2018


https://datasets.imdbws.com/

IMDB datasets can be found here, and I've been banging on them for a while in MS Access to no avail. Maybe someone else can find something, or at least have the patience to run enough update/delete queries to reduce it to something browseable. Good luck and I don't know if there are ANY non-keyboard / foreign letter characters in there. I don't have even one example to look for, eg Pi and Heart Huckabees are listed as such.
posted by turkeybrain at 12:38 PM on April 17, 2018


Do you count Japanese anime movies? Because there are tons of them with symbols.

Black★Rock Shooter (OVA) (2010)
Shin Koihime†Musou OVA
Baby☆Love

I stopped at the 'B's. In particular, Japanese computery-texty has long had the a-z0-9~-+ of anglo, the kana and kanji of Japanese, and a bazillion emoji/symbols/etc. And most everybody knows how to type them.

It's just not that odd in this specific class of 'movie'.
posted by zengargoyle at 1:34 PM on April 17, 2018 [3 favorites]


This is a long shot, but the Jack Webb movie -30- might qualify. -30- is the traditional notation used at the end of press releases and newspaper copy. One could think of it as a glyph unto itself.
posted by Thorzdad at 7:55 PM on April 17, 2018 [1 favorite]


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