As punctuation goes, the colon is mighty powerful.
The vertically stacked dots alert readers that the message to come is really, really important.
For instance:
Martha to prep cook: You're fired.
William Bennett to Vegas dealer: Hit me.
Hollywood to moviegoers: This flick is different, possibly better but likely worse, from others with similar titles.
The colon has Titanic importance in movie title parlance this year. At least nine summer movies, most of them sequels such as Spy Kids 3-D: Game Over to X2: X-Men United, employ the colon for emphasis and distinction. Tough Lara Croft kicks colon in her sequel, going from Lara Croft: Tomb Raider to Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life. And Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl relies on the colon to let us know that the movie is different from the Disney ride - unless we love the ride, and then it's the same.
Nary a dash (too wimpy), semicolon (too misunderstood), slash (too indecisive) or period (too final) appears on the marquee. And the seemingly perfect exclamation point was ruined for movie titles by the goofy spoof Airplane! Once, the exclamation point hollered extreme importance, in triplicate for Tora! Tora! Tora! It now often signifies irony or something silly, as in Three Amigos!
This summer, only the Martin Lawrence-Will Smith franchise Bad Boys is confident enough to boast Roman numerals and no pithy message at all. Depending on how II does at the box office, III might be forced to invoke the colon. Perhaps Bad Boys III: Return to Juvenile Hall.
"You have to go back to the '70s to find heavy use of Roman numerals," says Robert Sklar, professor of cinema studies at New York University's Tisch School of the Arts.
Rocky kayoed the Roman numeral in the '80s, he says. After awhile, audiences didn't know Rocky IV from Rocky VI. Yo, Adrian, which one had the Russian fighter? Which one was Apollo Creed in?
"Once there was a Rocky VI, it kind of made a joke out of the numbering," Sklar says.
So why the colon in 2003?
Chalk it up to merchandising, Sklar says.
"There are so many ancillary products associated with movies now, you need a distinctive title to tell them apart," he says.
With expanded edition DVDs, books, computer and video games, soundtracks, toys, board games and, in some cases, clothes and housewares, all tied to hit movies, something more than 1, 2 or 10 is needed to differentiate them.
"It might be hard to sell a video game or a flashy DVD with Superman 2 (as the title)," Sklar says. Hollywood figures that we figure it's cooler to wear a T-shirt that proclaims Judgment Day or Rise of the Machines rather than the more orderlyTerminator 2 or Terminator 3. There's a fine line between retro suave and out-of-touch dork, and the all-important young adult male demographic decides that.
Two summer sequels, The Matrix Reloaded and 2 Fast 2 Furious, swapped the colon for originality, in title only, some may argue. The Matrix Revolutions will be out later this year, which may be the installment to kick off The Matrix Regurgitated jokes.
Sequels and serials are nothing new in Hollywood. Popular radio and newspaper serials moved easily to the big screen in the 1930s and '40s with, among others, the Blondie and Andy Hardy stories, Sklar says. In those days, the exploits of the main character were reflected in the successive titles. Today, Andy Hardy Meets Debutante (1940) and Blondie Goes Latin (1941) would more likely be Andy Hardy 6: Forbidden Love or Blondie 12: The Real Real Cancun.
The most interesting use of punctuation and syntax ever has to be the Star Wars series, which uses the colon and the dash, then heaps on a redundant "Episode." Maybe creator and director George Lucas subscribes to the notion that a long title, such as Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones, equals a clever movie. Actually, it just ensures that the title will be written incorrectly in dozens of newspapers or truncated by audiences to Attack of the Clones.
It's difficult to know what the next trend in movie titles will be, but we can be certain that next summer, and the summer after that, will be filled with sequels, or "reimaginings," such as Sinbad, The In-laws and The Hulk.
Are Bruce Almighty 2: Heaven Help Us and Charlie's Angels 3: Collagen Crusaders already in the works?
Most assuredly. Maybe summer movies are all more aptly named: Here We Go Again.
THE COLON-IZATION OF THE MOVIES
X2: X-Men United
Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle
Dumb and Dumberer: When Harry Met Lloyd
Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines
Legally Blonde 2: Red, White & Blonde
Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl
