SpIns: A Love for Logos

What does “SpIn” mean?

Recently, I found out through fellow autistics that “SpIn” is short for “special interest”, which a lot of use to describe the very things we are deeply invested in… Be it movies, TV shows, books, video games, the nature of some every day thing… It is something you have an encyclopedic knowledge of, more so than most folks would care to have about it. It’s like loving something the way your typical sports fan knows all the ins and outs of a football or baseball game… Actually, come to think of it? Why even call these things “special interests” when they aren’t dissimilar to neurotypical people knowing everything about the “normal” or “slightly unusual” things they love?

Maybe it’s because of how we passionately go about it? I don’t know, but I’d like to talk about a SpIn of mine. Over the past few weeks, I dove into some of the things that have stuck with me since I was a young’un and attempted to reason why they would still hold up for 27 1/2-year-old me, and where I draw the line between quality and “I like that because I liked it as a kid”. (I plan to really get into this with a more in-depth Thomas the Tank Engine follow-up post.) Now I want to talk about something that isn’t necessarily designated for a younger audience, something that is actually – in many ways – related to my main passions, and even my profession…

The other day, I spent a considerable amount of time “reconstructing” a logo sequence that appeared at the start of three Disney feature film releases that came out in 1978. Now brace yourselves… This is where I will start to infodump, in true Kyle O fashion. For those immediately doing the math, 1978 was the year Mickey Mouse was going to turn 50, yet didn’t appear to have aged a day since his last major redesign in the early 1950s. Actually, to go off onto a tangent, we barely saw an animated Mickey Mouse between 1953 and his return to the silver screen in 1983’s Mickey’s Christmas Carol. Those few commercials designed by Tom Oreb and the Mickey Mouse Club aside, Mickey barely appeared onscreen, anywhere, during the time period where Disney no longer made animated short films. You’d have a few Donald and Goofy educational pictures here and there, but seemingly nothing with Mickey Mouse. Still, he was the company mascot, and was treated with royalty just the same… As such, Walt Disney Productions created a special intro for this milestone for the character’s 50th anniversary.

Walt Disney Productions never had a proper logo preceding their feature film releases for many decades, simply because for the longest time, they were a production company and not a self-distributing entity. The early run of features and their first few live-action films were distributed by RKO Radio Pictures, and each of the films integrated the RKO logo – an upside-down triangle with a lightning bolt carved into it – into the opening credits sequence, instead of using RKO’s standard logo that appeared at the start of their films. Disney severed ties with RKO in the mid-1950s, and created their own distribution company, Buena Vista. The films still began similarly. The Buena Vista logo was merely a still title card reading “Distributed by Buena Vista (Film) Distribution Co.” Early on, the logo would match up with the movie’s opening credits sequence or would simply be a custom title card. Later on, Disney mostly used a standard card that typically had a black/blue gradient background (later a more blue/turquoise one in the mid-1960s up until 1979), and that would precede the movies. Very humble, just a card saying who distributed it. No flash. Buena Vista looks like it was merely painted onto the surface, instead of there being a font choice.

For three feature films in 1978, Disney created an introduction featuring a stiff, bright red, T-posing Mickey Mouse which rotates, surrounded by strobing disco-like outlines. The Mickey is actually a rotoscoping of an animatronic from a defunct parks attraction known as the Mickey Mouse Revue. There is no movement, the Mickey “statue” of sorts just rotates perpetually. Text appears and proudly announces “Congratulating Mickey Mouse on his 50th Birthday!” while a boisterous horn-and-drum piece plays. Then a rainbow covers the motion graphic, with the words “A Buena Vista Release” over it. Later in the year, Disney took this same rotating Mickey clip, ditched the red, and surrounded it with glowing neon outlines, giving Mickey a sci-fi-like entrance. This became the Walt Disney Home Entertainment/Home Video logo, which is nicknamed the “Neon Mickey” logo by many a Disney fan and logo buff. This is the closest thing that the Disney studio had to an actual animated introductory sequence before they unveiled the iconic Walt Disney Pictures castle logo in the summer of 1985.

The three films in question that contained this special intro were Return from Witch Mountain, The Cat from Outer Space, and Hot Lead and Cold Feet. Their video releases, however, never showed the complete logo sequence. The DVD and Disney+ versions of Return from Witch Mountain completely lack the spinning Mickey and the rainbow BV title card, instead they use the standard gradient Buena Vista title card; this leads one to believe that this film never opened with the 50th Birthday logo. But it did, because the music that accompanied the logo is on the film’s comprehensive 2-disc soundtrack that was recently released by Intrada Records, which was sourced straight from the original masters. The full logo sequence appears on the DVD and Disney+ versions of The Cat from Outer Space, but the fanfare is missing. Hot Lead & Cold Feet‘s most recent home video release (the Western comedy has yet to be released on Disney+) only contains the rainbow BV title card. How come Disney couldn’t restore the complete logo sequences? The answer to that, I do not know, but I attempted to make a reconstruction.

Why? Well, for one, the music that accompanies this logo is actually a little different from the music that accompanied the home video logo. You see, that music – the same composition – sounds rougher and more synthesized…

… while the original recording sounds like it’s a full orchestra production. I had never heard this recording before, nor did anyone who never saw these three movies on their initial theatrical releases. A lot of us Disney fans and logo buffs assumed that the rougher-sounding “Neon Mickey” music played in the background when this logo cued up on theater screens in 1978. So I wanted to sync that original recording up with the logo sequence that can be taken from the Cat from Outer Space DVD/Disney+ stream, and use the music/sounds that played over the BV title cards, to complete the intros… To recreate what these looked and sounded like in theaters in 1978, because all the video releases of these three particular movies don’t do just that.

I lost you there, didn’t I? Was this confusing? It probably was…

One of my big interests is the art of the movie/television production company logo…

Most movies you see begin with a logo for the distributor who released it, and a lot of the time, the studio that was the production company. The logo, often times, is a pretty iconic image. Paramount’s wilderness mountain, 20th Century’s golden monolith, Columbia’s tall lady holding a beaming torch, the Warner Bros. shield, the Universal globe, Disney’s fantastical castle… When it comes to production companies, you have the likes of Luxo Jr. flattening an “I” in the word Pixar, a funny-looking red robot scurrying through tall grass before freezing dead in its tracks, a winding road ending with a lightning strike, and many more. To some, it’s only a logo. It lets you know who made the movie, and that’s that.

For me, a graphic design grad and an artist with a great interest in graphic arts, there is more to that. A logo, like any image in this manner, communicates something. Of course, not every movie made by one company follows a similar mold or is even satisfactory. I don’t expect a particular kind of movie when I see the Warner Bros. shield or the Paramount mountain or even the Disney castle (shocking as that may seem), but at the same time, you know something’s coming. Maybe it truly means nothing, because of the actual filmmakers involved, but to me… It’s a little something extra. Even better is when the film has a VARIANT of said logo that somehow relates to what you’re about to watch. I like a good graphic or image with my movie. Just like how I enjoy the record label on a vinyl LP of what I’m about to listen to. Like I said, it adds a little something…

I’ll use a recent animated movie example, which is a perfect one… Spider-Man: Into The Spider-Verse opens with the Sony logo, the Columbia Pictures logo, the Sony Pictures Animation logo, a Marvel Entertainment logo, and a Pascal Pictures logo. Starting with the tochy lady, all of them glitch and jitter while Daniel Pemberton’s eclectic score pulses, with multiple details and references rushing in and out. At one point we briefly see the Columbia torch lady become the animated Cat Ballou that proceeded the 1965 Columbia film Cat Ballou, and many other things. It perfectly encapsulates the artistic scope of the film and the meshing of universes we are about to see. Things like this give the film more of an identity…

Or how about the long history of variants of the Walt Disney Pictures logo? Both in terms of audio and visuals, there’s a ton of stuff there. Some of my visual favorites include the castle being abducted by a tractor beam at the start of Lilo & Stitch, a grid-like castle in TRON: Legacy, and an ominous Atlantean-looking logo before Atlantis: The Lost Empire. Sometimes the plain logo is used, but with music corresponding to the movie in question, which adds a very nice touch.

When looking at a logo for a decades-old company, it’s fascinating to see the evolution of not only the logo itself, but also of design trends in general. While Warner Bros. always had that badge-like shield for decades, there was a time when they embraced something very out-there and minimalist, like the logo that was designed by Saul Bass that showed up in 1972. Right there, that shows you that the company was willing to forsake their own iconic image for something that was new, exciting, maybe even bold. Television production company logos often did the same as well, such as the infamous 1965 Screen Gems logo. That logo forsook more traditional design schemes, and made a weird-looking “S” out of two symmetrical forms and a dot anchoring them to create the shape. For 1965, not only was its design quite futuristic and odd, but so was the synthesized music that accompanied it. The logo formed the basis for Rodney Ascher’s 2010 short film The “S” from Hell, based on some boomer-aged folks’ childhood fear of this ident. Imagine… Fear of a production company logo.

Though this has long confused many people, the fear is not far-fetched. If logos can communicate ideas and messages, and maybe even stories, a logo can even make a more negative impression on someone at a young age. Being autistic, I often talk about the sensory issues I had as a child. As a very young kid, something so simple on a movie or show or even a commercial could throw me off. Weeks ago, I had written about the classic seasons of Thomas the Tank Engine and briefly discussed how such a stiff, largely relaxing show was perfect for me when I was 5-7 years old. I also pointed out an example of something that upset me *greatly* when I was little to contextualize this, and it was a calm beach commercial that culminated in a scene of a man screaming at the top of his lungs. Hated that! There was also a commercial for SNET (remember when SNET was a thing?) during that period that would end with an out-of-nowhere descending angelic voice saying “S.N.E.T.” For the life of me, I still can’t figure out why such a benign ending to a phone company commercial freaked out the 4-year-old me so badly. Sometimes, it isn’t even a sensory-related thing or an autism-related thing. I’ve read stories from plenty of neurotypicals who have found such things frightening, and that never made me want to ridicule them… But rather, understand *why* they were so afraid. As an autistic man who was once an autistic child (contrary to popular belief, no autistic person ceases being autistic when they turn 13 or whatever) with similar childhood fears, I could always relate. Maybe that’s another post for another day? “Logophobia” has been talked about endlessly since the mid-aughts, but one day I want to add my two cents on it.

Back to logos in general… What else makes them so great? Outside of being iconic graphic imagery and a great source of the history of design trends, I feel that they are also helpful in some cases. It tells you who released what, who made what, etc. That way, when keeping history or discussing something about film, you at least know who released a picture, or a show, or anything for that matter. It’s a minor aspect, because I think at the end of the day most people don’t quite care about what studio made what film (the amount of times I have to clarify what ANIMATION STUDIO made what can be exhausting, though). Good for organizational purposes! For me personally, when it comes to most movies, I’d probably organize them by director or by maybe genre. A lot of my Blu-ray collection is in disarray, so no word on that for now. The animation half of the collection is organized in chronological order, and not by individual studio or filmmaker, since things get a little murky with the latter.

Going back to the whole historical aspect, what I also love about an old logo is that when I’m watching a much older movie, the opening (on in the case of a TV show, closing) logo immediately gives me the context. If I didn’t know the year a movie I was about to watch came out, perhaps that graphic could immediately tell me “Okay, this is from the late ’70s!” While the logo might be one of the more dated aspects of the film in question, that’s what works about it, it tells you what era it is part of. Again, historical context that fascinates folks like me. This brings me to talk about a much-contested practice in the industry known colloquially as “logo plastering”.

This often happens to TV shows… For example, a Paramount show from the mid-1970s that ended with the “Blue Mountain” logo might carry a much later Paramount logo, or even a merger logo, these days. Watch it on television now, you may not get that original logo at the end of the show. The preservationist in me usually isn’t content with that, but I can let it slide because the 1975 Paramount Television logo had two of its own jingles, not music that corresponded with the end credits theme. However, plastering goes wrong when it comes to shows whose credits theme played OVER the closing logos: The last time I caught some classic Nickelodeon shows on television, the current 3D logo replaced the old still logo that appeared at the end of all of their ’90s cartoons. (The most notable of these was the fuzzy-looking logo, which has curiously been nicknamed the “haypile” logo by some out there.) The music that accompanies the 3D logo just drowns out the final bits of credits music that originally played over the still logo. That kind of thing bugs me! I’ll name one example. Hey Arnold!‘s end credits theme is a good bit of jazz, as that show’s whole soundtrack is soaked in smooth jazz. As such, in the earlier seasons, the ending credits theme plays over two logos: One for Snee-Oosh, and then the Nick logo. It fades out gradually. With the 3D logo placed over the old still logo? The fade-out is abruptly smacked off course by the theme that accompanies the 3D logo. Yeah, I’ll repeat… I don’t like that, haha.

Similarly, Disney had a problem like this when it came to home video for many years. Many early video releases of several Disney films – animated and live-action – lacked any title card. No RKO, no Buena Vista… Before I explain further, after Disney split with RKO, all the re-release prints of the pre-1953 RKO Disney movies plastered over the RKO card with a Buena Vista card, and kept the music intact. With any still logo gone, you’d be missing 4-5 seconds of the opening credits music. This was the case with several Disney videocassette and videodisc releases throughout the 1980s. For theatrical re-releases of classic animated films post-1985, Disney would outright replace the Buena Vista card with the Walt Disney Pictures logo and its theme music, a silent BV title card would show up at the end of the movie. (This particular sequencing is notably preserved on the 1990 LaserDisc of Peter Pan, and earlier pressings of the 1992 One Hundred and One Dalmatians videocassette release, among others.) By the mid-1990s, Disney actually committed to restoring most of the old logos to their classic films so that the credits sequences would be intact, though there have always been some little misses along the way (the aforementioned 1978 movies, for starters). In 1994, the then-newest video releases of The Three Caballeros and Alice in Wonderland contained their original RKO title cards, and from there on out, Disney restored most of those older openings. A little reversing there. And yet when you stop to think about it, Walt Disney himself seemed to be all for logo plastering. Could you blame him? After how bad his falling out with RKO was? However, the re-released RKO Disney films bearing a Buena Vista title card still kept the opening credits themes for all of those movies intact. You can see that for yourself on whatever VHS/DVD release has those openings. Some Disney video releases even KEEP the first 4-5 seconds of credits music on certain films, without any title card… Just a blank screen until we see a “Walt Disney presents” card. Currently, Disney seems to have a thing with replacing their old castle logo with the CG castle, that opens another can of worms…

All of this… About maybe a few seconds of a graphic. How such a small thing can be so important in a certain context…

Logos… Small stuff is what us SpInners are here for.