So with all the buzz about the new Geronimo Jackson song being released, and with me supposed to be working on my math assignment, I suppose now’s as good a time as ever to look into the mysterious, psychedelic font.
Fonts are very good clues at telling whether something is authentic or not. You see something in Comic Sans, you know it was made 1994 or later, no doubt about it.
First we have to identify the font. Right away I knew it was Bell Bottom Laser. Unfortunately, there are a lot of ripoffs of pro-fonts floating around the web, and I highly suspected this one to be so. It wasn’t until yesterday that I had the genius idea to plug a sample of Bell Bottom Laser into What The Font and see what expensive font package it threw back at me.
It worked well and came out with Doobie, an exact match for Bell Bottom Laser and for Geronimo Jackson’s “Magna Carta”.
And would you look at that: “Design date: 2006″.
YES! That means the record couldn’t possibly have been made before 2006! Yippie! Geronimo Jackson is a FAKE!
…but wait. It says Doobie was based on two other fonts that certainly were around in the 70′s: Hoopla and Scorpio. Which means… back to square one. A lot of recent fonts are just digitized versions of vintage ones, so Hoopla or Scorpio may very well have been used on a 70′s album cover.
All I can find for Hoopla is this 2000 font, in which I don’t find much resemblance to Doobie. For Scorpio I turn up this font, which resembles Hoopla more than Doobie. I don’t at all think these are the same fonts that the Doobie page was referring to, and thus, until those fonts can be found, we have nothing. Doobie very well may be an exact copy of those fonts, which may have been around in the 70′s.
We run into another problem when I realize that hey — “Lost” has been around for a few years. Maybe the first episode to reference Geronimo Jackson hadn’t even aired in 2006!
So to Lostpedia! “The Hunting Party”, first episode with GJ (and the record) aired January 18, 2006. I very much doubt that Doobie was online, the record was made, and the episode shot in 18 days, considering Doobie’s release year.
And then I realize, hey, I’ve had Bell Bottom Laser on my computer for a long time, much longer than 2006! And so back to the first link to Da Font we see yes, Bell Bottom Laser has been around at least before 2005. Which means Bell Bottom outdates Doobie and something else must outdate them both.
So there we have it. Nothing.
Except if you consider that Doobie was released by Canada Type — and whenever Canada is mentioned on “Lost”, you know someone is lying. Kate “Annie” said she was from Canada, Ethan said he was from Ontario, there have been several fake Canadian passports…
But if you consider that Doobie, released by what seems to be an actual font foundry, is probably not a ripoff of a free version of Bell Bottom Laser. That means they were both directly inspired by the same font, most likely Hoopla or Scorpio. And the fact that Doobie and BBL are nearly identical means they are also identical to the font they were “inspired” by… thus meaning that this early 70′s font could indeed have been used by some early 70′s band.
I still don’t believe in Geronimo Jackson though.
Update: “Not a font”
Some people are saying this isn’t a font, it’s hand-lettered. Obviously that’s always a possibility, but I don’t think that’s the case here. Yes, the A’s look different, the G’s look different. Some fonts offer multiple versions of the same letter, but that’s probably not what happened here because the variations are too small.
What I think has happened is that the letters were warped slightly. Obviously “MAGNA CARTA” has been squeezed down and “GERONIMO JACKSON” has been made into a half-circular shape, which will distort the letters a bit. I don’t know why someone would want to do this, but it’s also possible each of the letters were warped individually.
And okay, okay, you can say all that is crap, and I’d agree with you; it is stretching a bit. But if we assume “Magna Carta” is an actual hand-lettered album cover from an unheard-of band from the 70′s, then why is it that today there exist digital fonts that look exactly like this font? If this isn’t a font and it is unique to Geronimo Jackson, then where did Doobie and BBL get their inspiration from?