To me the center dent doesn't look as deep as some of the other Indy hats I've seen, both in the film and on here.....
That hat does look great though. Makes me wish I could reach through the screen and grab it right off of Ford's head.
You know, this always strikes me as funny, and very human. Our perceptions of that hat is an odd thing. Part of this is due to the hat changing throughout the film, shallow front dents, then deep front dents, shallow top dents, and deeper top dents. Then you throw in the bulging distressed felt and we immediately want our hat to have reverse taper, while the orignal had absolutely no reverse taper in the pristine condition of a new Raiders HJ.
I have had customers who wanted a blocked in reverse taper on the back, while the film hat never had it!!! But anything less to them would not be a true Raiders hat.
And this brings up something very interesting, at least to me. Individual perceptions of the Raiders fedora, and I think a treatise could actually be writtin on it, as a socialogical phenonoma.
I have said it before, and I will say it again. Overall, we caricature this hat. We see something, and we want it overemphasized, which of course is not accurate. But to a particular eye, it is accurate. Now, this dates back to the day when most of the hats we could get just had too much taper in the hat, the radius on the top that I mentioned prior is not in the right spot, and most of those early hats were just a bit too short. So, we caricatured it(I am as guilty as the next) and started finding hats that were too tall, and we wore them here proudly for years, and few ever commented on the hats just being too darn tall to be accurate. I have lived through all of these perceptions. The latest has been folks who wanted blocked in reverse taper. Well, the original did not have it, but us hatters try to give the customer what they want, while knowing what they are getting us to make is not really an accurate Raiders fedora. So, we try to give them their perceptions.
In the end, the ideal Raiders block shape will give you all of the looks of Indy's hat in the film, but not the SOC look. That look is from sagging and bulging felt, and from a hatter's perspective, it needs to be reblocked to bring back the original shape.
Not all felt will bulge like that, and no real high quality felt will ever pull it off to the degree that we see on the film. You can get it to bulge some, but not as much as I see on the SOC hat. And today, if you find a felt that will bulge like that, it will taper into a cone BEFORE you can get it to bulge. A catch 22.
So an ideal Raiders hat could, with some work, give you the Raven hat, the inside and outside Temple hat, and if the right felt was available, it could even give you the SOC hat, once you sat on it and distressed it.
I never bought into the theory that other block shapes were used in the Raiders film, for the Indy hat. Like the one he wore outside the Temple was different than the one he wore inside. All I see is the same block shape when I look. Along the same lines. I don't see the exercises 3M$ has done either, in arriving at the SOC hat. To me, it just looks like a rabbit hat of a particular felt that has been worn and distressed. I have never been able to see what he sees. I mean, I see what he sees, but other more plausible explanations always occurred to me first. I do think the ribbon on the SOC hat was tightened up some, but it may have come loose in filming and someone just pulled it tight and tacked it back into place. I certainly don't think they engineered this hat to look that way. It just happened!!
In the end, if you take a block shape that is close what HJ used to make the Indy hat(I don't buy into the stretcher deal at all) , and if the felt is soft enough, you will get a pristine looking Raiders hat. It is that simple. The trouble before I made my first block, is no one had a block close enough to replicate that look. Optimo had the closest one, but the radius on top was off. And they were getting 450.00 for a mostly rabbit hat that at that time was a bit too much to pay for most of us. Fedora
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