Malcolm in the Middle titles
Designed by WunderFilm, the titles for popular TV sitcom Malcolm in the Middle (2000) capture a cross-section of late ’90s pop culture aesthetics: oversaturated colors, rapid cuts, VHS glitches, grunge effects, and a song by They Might Be Giants. The typeface — stretched and distorted throughout the sequence — is FunkyFresh, a 1994 shareware font inspired by the brand lettering of Stüssy, the iconic streetwear of that decade’s semi-rebellious youth.
In the early 1990s, type design hobbyist Scott Yoshinaga drew an all-caps alphabet with a handful of alternates, roughed it up with a photocopier, and then let Fontographer’s autotrace feature work its grungey/bitmappy magic on the outlines. The result is FunkyFresh, a font that has been passed around shareware and free font archives for over 20 years. This sample represents most of the glyph set, omitting just a few punctuation marks.
