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The Incredible Shrinking Idea

oldehamme

Updated: Oct 2, 2024

The incredible shrinking man hides from a housecat

Originally published within "Under the Covers," from Signature Magazine, 3/5/21


Here’s a design parlor game for you: In your mind’s eye, picture the poster from the movie Jaws.

 

Easy, right? Even if you’re one of the three or so people who hasn’t seen the movie, you’ve seen the poster image enough that its recollection is nearly reflexive.

 

Let’s move on. How about the poster from The Godfather? Maybe not as easy, but you probably at least managed to remember the white text against a big black background, even if you forgot about the hand and puppet strings. Or maybe your mind conjured up the somber photo of Marlon Brando that adorns the home video release.

 

Let’s go deeper. How about the poster for Casablanca? I know: You’re thinking, “Something something Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman something…” But are they looking at each other? At the audience? Is he wearing a hat? The details start to fall away.

 

How about Citizen Kane? On the Waterfront? Lawrence of Arabia? Classics, all, but how easy is it to recollect a poster image from each movie? Or do the poster images get invariably tangled up in our memories of iconic moments from the movies themselves?

 

I’m gambling that, if I asked you to recall the poster from the 1957 science fiction feature The Incredible Shrinking Man, you’d draw a total blank. Or maybe you’ll insist that it’s an image of a tiny man being menaced by a giant ant, in which case you’re confusing it with the poster from Them, a 1954 movie in which humanity was, indeed, menaced by a host of giant ants.

 

The point is: You won’t get it right. And why would you? As 1950s sci-fi flicks go, it’s not horrible, but Jaws, it ain’t.

 

Nevertheless, it was this metaphor that sprang to my mind when informed of this issue’s cover story topic: The Incredible Shrinking Magazine. Or The Incredible Shrinking Staff . Initially, I wasn’t sure what angle on consolidation the article would ultimately take.

 

Either way, the success of that headline depends entirely on your ability to connect it to the movie of a very similar title. This is not a deal-breaker in and of itself, as long as the imagery supporting the headline contains references that are universally recognized. But as we’ve established, The Incredible Shrinking Man, for all its charms, simply does not meet that standard.

 

Well, thank Disney, there’s a far more recent movie that does. But before you rush to check our work against the DVD box, tell me: How accurate is our send-up of Honey, I Shrunk the Kids? We obviously changed the gender of the main character, but is everything else true to the original?

 

Allow me to save you a few steps: Nope. And it’s really not even close. In the original poster, Rick Moranis is nose-to-nose with the family dog as his shrunken kids trace a path across the two noses.

 

So we took liberties with the appearance of the main character, the number and placement of the supporting characters, and we eliminated almost half of the original composition. But in another gamble, I’m betting that this bastardization of some uncredited designer’s work still retained enough of the spirit of that work to allow you to summon up our reference. If it didn’t, well, that’s what IMDb is for.

 

In design, pop culture references are a high-wire act: tricky — maybe even dangerous — but thrilling when done right. However, absolute fidelity to the source material is not a prerequisite. In fact, a little dishonesty can be more faithful to the spirit of the original than strict imitation ever could be. For example, Cary Grant never, ever, ever uttered the phrase “Judy, Judy, Judy…” in any film appearance. But that brief snatch of verse encapsulates Grant’s patois more perfectly than any direct quotation from his vast repertoire. Sometimes, a caricature speaks more eloquently than a photograph. 


Cover of the March/April 2021 issue of Signature Magazine

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