From the Archive: ’Everything You Need to Know‘
Opening titles and bumper for the 1993 Comedy Central series ‘Everything You Need to Know,’ hosted by Christopher Hitchens.
Pentagram was saddened to learn of the passing of Christopher Hitchens, one of our favorite writers, essayists and acerbic wits. In one of our first (and little seen) ventures in television graphics, Pentagram, in collaboration with Curious Pictures and producer Billy Kimbell, designed the opening titles for the Comedy Central TV show “Everything You Need to Know”, an overview of world events with an unlikely host in the untelegenic, chain-smoking Mr. Hitchens. Planned as a weekly series, a pilot for the show ran only once in August 1993. Although it was never picked up, it can be considered a precursor to “The Daily Show,” which debuted on the same network three years later.
The titles were meant to reflect the show’s reduction of a vast amount of ridiculous material to an absurd core. The word “earwax” spells onto the screen against a black background, followed more rapidly by a long series of words beginning with the letter “E” and ending with the word “everything.” The process repeats with a series of foreign words ending in “you,” a series of homonyms (knead, knee, neat) ending in “need,” a series of numbers ending in “2”, and a series of pictograms ending in “know.” When the sequence is completed, which takes less than a minute, the show’s full title has been established.
Project Team: Michael Bierut, partner-in-charge and designer. Production: Curious Pictures.