Any colour you like

The subject of this post is, of course, the eighth track off of Pink Floyd's album Dark Side of the Moon, one of my favorite (or favourite) albums of all time. It's more like a transitional track than an easily extractable song -- in fact, I had to play it just to be sure I knew which one it was (and it's playing as I type these words).

That doesn't matter for the purposes of this discussion. The germane aspect of the song is that it was spelled with a "u" in the word "color," the way Brits and Australians spell it, because Pink Floyd are Brits.

Australians don't always spell it that way, apparently.

I've started to notice a real inconsistency as to whether words in titles are given their correct Australian spelling or not when released here.

I saw the latest example of this when going through an email from one of the local video dispensing kiosk companies offering a two-for-one sale this holiday weekend (it's "Cup Day" in Melbourne, a day off from work in honor, or honour, of a horse race). One of the films offered was Fast Color, spelled just like that. As you see in the screen shot above.

As a side note, this is movie I've been looking forward to for quite some time. In my Letterboxd watchlist, which I use to house current year releases I'm looking forward to seeing, it's the oldest title on there, as I first heard about it in 2018 and expected it to be a current year release then. I always like Gugu Mbatha-Raw, and I believe this movie finds her as some kind of indie movie superhero.

Usually -- or maybe, more often than not -- Australians would change the spelling from Color to Colour. A prime example would be the Hollywood movie Neighbors, which here is called Bad Neighbours. As discussed in this post, it acquired the "bad" at the front of the title to distinguish it from a popular local soap opera. And while they were in there anyway, they fixed up the pesky American spelling on the second word.

It's the "while they were in there" part that may actually speak to how this gets handled from a marketing perspective. Fast Color took a rather circuitous route to the cinemas after its festival debuts, taking more than a year to open after premiering at South by Southwest, and in fact did not get there at all in Australia. Because there was no poster to hang in Australian (or perhaps more to the point, British) cinemas, there was no reason to go beyond the existing promotional materials for the movie, I suspect.

That said, on IMDB, it shows Fast Colour as an a.k.a. for Fast Color in Australia, among other countries. Maybe that was just someone at IMDB with a knowledge of how these things work, going through and trying to be helpful.

But even if I have correctly surmised the reason no promotional materials exist with local spellings, it's not quite as clear cut as all that. We need to look no further than the movie I rewatched Friday night, Upstream Color, for an example of how the same exact word was handled differently seven years ago.

Below I have an Australian poster for Upstream Color. You can tell it's Australian because of the telltale blue ratings icon in the lower left hand corner, and also that it is claimed by local distributor Palace Films on the right:

It surely played in the theaters here, though that was just before I got here. The distributors still could have been trying to save money on the promotional materials and just gone with existing ones, except that existing materials do exist with the title as Upstream Colour:

So maybe there's evidence not just of being lazy or saving money, but of actively being okay with assimilating to American culture, in a way the British are largely still resisting. And maybe it goes back at least as far as 2013.

I jokingly like to credit my arrival in Australia with the local popularization of Halloween. When my wife was growing up, kids never trick-or-treated. My kids have gone every year they've been here, but even in those first few years, 2013 and 2014, our neighbors (or neighbours) had no idea how to handle trick-or-treaters. Even now you don't approach a house unless it has decorations of some sort outside, but back then, some were just dipping their toe in the water and would hang an orange balloon outside to indicate they were participating. My wife and I joke about the one house who had participated but then regretted it, and acted as though we were invading marauders, telling us that she had already haphazardly handed out sleeves of cookies and other random broadly defined treats and now had been picked clean. There was a panic in her eyes indicating she expected a real trick to befall her if we left unsated.

Since then, the popularity has exploded in our neighborhood (or neighbourhood), such that we probably saw 300 different trick-or-treaters in our six block radius alone. Some Australians still resent this move toward Americanization, though. My wife saw a father picking up his daughter at school that day and saying to her "We are not going trick-or-treating! That's American and we are not in America!" (The holiday actually has its origins in Scotland.)

Maybe Fast Color is another small example of that. The prevalence of Microsoft and its American-written error messages and menu items is already turning the local S's into Z's (or zeds) among the younger generation, and I'd think that maybe the (superfluous) U's are the next to go.

Hey, if we no longer have the monoculture of experiencing the same limited number of TV shows, movies and music, maybe at least we can all spell things the same way.