Avatar Changed Its Logo and Font Because of a Saturday Night Live Sketch

Avatar: The Way of Water‘s team saw that Saturday Night Live sketch about the first movie’s font and had to change the font and logo. In a conversation with Entertainment Weekly, the producer of the film admitted that they had a chuckle over the bit. If you’ve never seen the skit, Ryan Gosling plays an exasperated character trying to figure out what the typeface used for the logo of the original movie was. It leads him all over till he discovers Papyrus and is able to rejoice in his findings. The larger Internet found the entire thing hysterical and it serves as high-water mark of modern SNL. Jon Landau, saw the piece and would like you to know the joke isn’t exactly true. Technically its Toruk and that’s a big distinction in the typography world. However, a lot of fans will believe the font is Papyrus until the end of time because of that skit. Check out what he had to say down below.

“Yes, I’ve seen that. Ryan Gosling. Absolutely saw it,” Landau began while referencing the sketch. “It’s fun that it stimulated a conversation.”

“When we realized that the movie was going to expand into a franchise and we’d have other IPs, we went out and created our own font that we’re now using, and we call it Toruk, and it’s available for people to use,” he added. “But the Papyrus font is a fun thing, and I also love the fact that… it was certainly several years after the movie came out, and I guess it illustrated to people who were questioning Avatar’s cultural relevance that it was still part of the culture.”

Other Inspirations For The Avatar Franchise

James Cameron spoke to Collider about the upcoming sequel and revealed that he took a lot of inspiration from another massive franchise. The Lord of the Rings series is still beloved in all corners of the Internet. So, it should come as no shock that the filmmaker saw that success and took some notes. Especially when it came to mapping out the story for his films ahead of time.

“My model was what Peter Jackson did with The Lord of the Rings, which was a crazy bet in its time. And really hats off to that, that they took that chance to launch on all three of those films,” the filmmaker revealed. “But he had the books mapped out, so he could always show the actors what they needed to know about their character arc. So I felt I had to do the same thing. I had to play this as if the books already existed. So the only way for us to do that was to write all the scripts and let the actors read all the scripts and see where their characters were going and what it all meant. Not that that’s actable in the moment, but I think it’s something that the actors could work into their preparation for their characters.”

Do you love that SNL sketch? Let us know down in the comments!