Mickey’s Christmas Carol (1983) opening titles
The opening titles to Mickey’s Christmas Carol (1983) use a serif typeface of unclear origin. It appears to be a version of Marquis. Or maybe a different interpretation of the same unidentified historical source, which could be a metal typeface or a lettering model from the late 19th century.
Marquis is shown in the 1968 catalog of Photoscript, a London-based typesetting studio. As one of only a few faces, it’s marked with a copyright symbol, possibly indicating an original design, or an exclusive phototype adaptation. It reappears in the supplement to Phil’s Photo catalog (2nd edition, 1985), now spelled Manquis. In 2012, Claude Pelletier made a digitization named ManquisCP, which is probably based on the showing by Phil’s.
The titling face in the animation featurette is different from Manquis in several details. A is wider and has a cyma, i.e. a sort of wavy, detached swash that helps to texture the whitespace to the left of the letter. The bottom serif in S and the top serifs in M are double-sided, the middle serifs in W don’t meet, the height of the R leg is less suppressed, G doesn’t have a bar to the left, etc. The downward bulge in the bars of A and H can be found both in Manquis and the version used here. This detail references (neo-)Romanesque lettering.
4 Comments on “Mickey’s Christmas Carol (1983) opening titles”
Marquis was designed by Michael Grace for Geoffrey Hart Associates. [Modern Publicity]
I am so grateful to you for giving the name for this kind of decoration here and on Twitter! I’d been trying to figure out if there was a name for this.
Short curls that fill out spaces appear on a few early British Didone display faces and I’ve seen them on carved gravestones as well. Not many specimens show them but this printers’ specimen does. Here it’s adapted to a bold type (at least, I assume that’s what’s going on) and it feels definitely more a cyma than a swash, but also more like just a blob of ink or a glitched punctuation mark. (This 1807 specimen is actually the first digitised specimen known to me which shows bold types, and it’s interesting to see the tropes of the genre starting to form, with some types looking like light fat faces and the bolder ones low-contrast and more like Clarendons, and a mercilessly cropped 'g’ descender that feels very futuristic for 1807.)
This style of decoration makes a great effect on tombstones I’ve seen where the lettering is custom-designed but I don’t think they stayed on printing types. They always remind me of periwigs, or someone with long hair absent-mindedly twisting it.
Thanks for these additional references, Blythwood!
I’ll add here what I also mentioned in a comment to Nick’s photo of the cyma as shown in the Proportion workshop with John Downer for Type@Cooper (alongside a collection of visual examples showing the cyma and similar devices in use).
— Elements of Lettering and Sign Painting. Scranton, PA, The Colliery Engineer Company, 1899 (via Wei Huang)
From the way that at least this author uses the term, it seems that cyma refers (exclusively) to a wavy stroke, and not specifically to its function as an add-on to optimize letter spacing.
— A Textbook on Lettering and Sign Painting. Scranton, PA, International Textbook Company, 1902
I wonder if we can refer to triangular or wedge-shaped interventions as cyma, too, or if we need a separate function-related umbrella term, like “gap filler”.
Similarly, the curly extensions you found in the italics shown by G.F. Harris in 1807 serve the same purpose, but are not exactly wavy lines. They rather resemble pig tails (or should I write ουρά χοίρου?).
I’ve found the historical source of Marquis. It’s a “Modern Pen Alphabet” drawn by Scottish architect Bailey Scott Murphy (1876–1914) that was reproduced in the 1906 edition of Alphabets Old and New by Lewis Foreman Day (1845–1910). It’s included in the 1910 edition, too.
The titles follow Murphy’s original more closely than Marquis does. Maybe the letterforms were directly patterned after this source, or maybe there was another typographic interpretation. The Marquis ID is wrong, but I’ll leave this post like it is, for future reference.