Identity Crisis: Studio Logos and the Evolution of Pre-Title Branding
Our feature presentation hasn’t started yet.
We’re zooming out on a family as the father flips the switch on the box to the desired station and they all gather on the couch with the obligatory bowl of popcorn. We zoom all the way out of their window and pan over to see that it was an apartment about five stories up. Now we’re flying down the main street of what looks to be a model city, presumably about a hundred feet up if it was real. It’s an elaborate scale model, complete with real-looking cars and city buses, a few of which move. The music sounds vaguely like a Danny Elfman composition and it’s impossible not to think of the similar opening shot of the model city from Beetlejuice. The camera zooms over rooftops and then over hills and valleys until it passes over a ridge and pans up to the heavens where a giant metal structure slowly rotating on its side floats at us from outer space. We enter its last letter, which appears to be an “O” and a thousand lights with comet trails zoom past us, illuminating the darkness. The music thumps grander and grander until it bursts into a disco-inspired tune, heavy on horns, letting us know this is an HBO Feature Presentation.
It was a wild thing to watch a movie on TV unedited and without commercial breaks in 1983 when HBO made its debut. But the sequence perfectly introduced the network and what it had to offer to viewers. Out of the domestic settings where people watch TV shows and up from the heavens, home of the satellites that broadcast our shows, comes the Home Box Office, its entertainment magic gifted to the populace, despite cheesily appearing to us like the Star Child at the end of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Company logos of movie and TV studios, production companies and distributors - those little things you see before the first sound and image of the movie - have become more egregious and imposing in the last 40 years. And there are more of them. Some major releases sport as many as six of these logo sequences before the feature even begins, adding another three or four minutes to the running time. If you’re seeing the film in the theater, this is coming after the ad presentations before the lights go down, followed by the commercials, then several long previews, and then the theater announcement reminding you where you are and visually nudging you towards buying concessions. There’s a reason why I arrive at multiplex movies 25 minutes late. It’s so I can walk right in as the film is starting.
A logo need only tell you what companies made or produced the movie. That’s it. Nothing more. There is no need for them to tie in thematically with the kinds of movies the company is associated with or demonstrate how proud they are of themselves. They can suggest some flavor of the company’s offerings. There’s nothing wrong with this. But there’s a point at which it becomes excessive and an audience can typically sense when logos go too far. They should merely be signposts, lasting ideally between 10 to 15 seconds or less. The worst offenders are the ones that work too much on your senses or wear out their welcome and do the opposite of what a logo should do in trying to grab your attention. That’s the movie’s job. Logos are there to be seen, not experienced as if they were cinema. When this happens, they’re not signposts. They’re smug, self-congratulatory displays of corporate arrogance.
Most people are familiar with the logos of the major studios by now but with more and more money being spent on visual effects each year, one gets the sense that studios feel that their logos need to match the scope of the film itself. Outsized productions with outsized egos needing to match them. Universal’s revolving planet logos in its early days were perfect. Look at the intro that opened its shows from 1936-1946. Shimmering, upbeat, promising a gleaming escape. The fanfare promises brassy showbusiness pizzaz:
Frankenstein, W.C. Fields, Bing Crosby, Abbot and Costello and Sherlock Holmes followed this sequence.
The current logo for Universal is a good object lesson about how these studios regard themselves: We’re zooming out rapidly from the Earth’s atmosphere into space, narrowly missing a collision with the “U” in Universal as the letters encircle the Earth. They’re absolutely massive, looking like Michael Bay meteors that could shatter the planet to bits. The major cities on Earth begin to twinkle to the fanfare that sounds like a Valkyrie’s call from Wagner’s Tannhäuser. It’s too much. It attacks us before the film we paid to see can even show us anything. I know that sense-numbing stimulation is what most tentpole movies offer (and what many moviegoers go to movies for), but to do it before the film even starts is pretty disrespectful, not to mention entitled - that they would brand the entire planet with their moniker, remaking nature in their image.
The Drums and Searchlights of Fox, the Roaring Lion of MGM, Universal’s presumed Domination of Earth. The level of hubris is stunning. Disney’s sequence is a zoom out to a view of the Sleeping Beauty/Cinderella castle from a pink and violet sky, in which one can see the “Second Star to the Right,” and eventually a Pirate Ship, a Speeding Locomotive, a network of Villages and Connecting Roads and Shooting Fireworks. It’s all but an ad for the Magic Kingdom theme park.
These logo sequences get longer, louder and more pompous with each new incarnation. I find it fairly comical that they’ve become so expensive and lofty, only to be opening the same stale retreads of shopworn movie materials. The same car chases and fight scenes are taken off the shelf, only now it’s not introduced by Paramount’s Mountain and Halo of Stars. Now the Stars fall from the heavens (outer space again) and run along canyons and bodies of water on their way to the Mountaintop. One star’s point even dips into the water before circling the snow-capped peak. Egregious and overdone. It’s a studio showing off its wealth, reminding you why ticket prices have to cost so much.
When you watch a preview, a credit screen at the end contains a matrix of text with the names of all the major people employed on the movie; supporting actors, director, production heads, cinematographers and other crew. It’s rendered in comically small font and is visible for a fraction of a second. No human could possibly take this information in what is delivered to the audience in the manner of legal fine print or hideous side effects for a new drug. This gives a pretty fair indication of how studios regard all those people doing the actual work of getting movies made. Many of these credit dump screens never last more than a second, and yet Marvel’s display of hubris in their logo lasts more than 30 seconds, citing every major character in their arsenal.
All this conveys one inescapable message, regardless of whether the studio’s marketing people know this or not. It tells audiences that what they’re about to watch is a glossy product purchased from The
Company Store. They’ve not attended a film screening. They’ve purchased a product equivalent to a ride on Space Mountain or the fabled Universal Studios tour, and that this is what movies are - all they can and should be. It’s about branding, bro.
The Amazon Studios logo is even more hegemonic and inhuman. Much like the Game of Thrones title sequence, it shows an entire city unfolding piecemeal in seconds, and within that, the movie theater into which the camera floats. It reads like the theater that houses the artform is just one small part of the landscape Amazon created, sculpting cities and streets in their own image. Your reality means being a guest on their turf. You’re welcome.
As major studio logos go, only Warner Brothers gets points for brevity while suggesting nostalgia for its golden age in minimalist terms. They’ve maintained the zoom-out-on-the-original-studio-lot-and-“As Time Goes By” motif across numerous incarnations. There’s some dignity in this relative level of restraint:
A bit of class goes a long way.
I remember seeing the logos for companies like Mandalay Studios (Donnie Brasco, Sleepy Hollow, The Kids Are All Right), with its bright orange bengal tiger emerging from a black and white jungle clearing and thinking, “Are there tigers and jungles in this bank robber movie I’m about to see?” Jerry Bruckheimer’s company (Pirates of the Caribbean, National Treasure, Prince of Persia: Sands of Time) showed an extreme zoom to the horizon of a country road where an electrical storm was breaking. Again, too much, but a fair summation of what Bruckheimer offered you: a frenzy of special effects.
Equally ostentatious is the logo for the Tarantino/Rodriguez backed Troublemaker Studios (From Dusk Till Dawn, Sin City, Grindhouse), rendered with macho black letters in pickup truck font in front of a wall of fire, presumably from a massive explosion lit by a zippo lighter we hear being flicked at the very beginning. You’re entering a boys club. No girls allowed. Tarantino, who should know better, routinely digs up old Hollywood fodder and items from film history because his own filmmaking is not possible without them. His use of the original Shawscope logo from Shaw Brothers Studios (The 36 Chambers of Shaolin, One Armed Swordsman, Come Drink With Me) for Kill Bill at least has the effect of inspiring curiosity with younger viewers about film culture and film history in other countries.
Shaw Brothers Studios berserk logo from the 80’s
The barbed wire wrapping and tightening around the letters for Twisted Pictures (Saw franchise, Dead Quiet, Repo: The Genetic Opera) and the cranking metal cogs and gears of Lionsgate (made rusted and threatening if it's a horror feature) are also not the way I want to start a film. I am thus starting the picture wrong-footed, with my senses jangled from the get-go. Now the filmmakers are starting from further behind the line. They have to work just a little harder to win me over because their parent company is already chipping away at my ability to pay attention. All this seems inconsequential but it’s not. Not all of us can just look at images passively. This is why I don’t often attend movies that are made to be watched that way.
Generally, the worst offenders are horror-centric studios. They try to scare you with their logos and it only shows the lack of inspiration in their product. Ghost House (The Grudge, 30 Days of Night, The Unholy) and Blumhouse (The Purge, Insidious and Paranormal Activity franchises) may be the worst offenders. Ghost House had a human skull hurtling at you in total darkness, lit from underneath as if with a flashlight and gradually added a haunted house door slamming shut on its own, with the skull peering at you through the keyhole.
The introductory equivalent of running up to someone and saying, “Boo!”
Blumhouse’s all-out assault of a logo may be my candidate for the worst ever. A steadicam pans around a dark room in a haunted house. The camera is shaky and the visuals resemble something from a cut scene in a video game. The camera pans from a levitating rocking chair, to a little J-Horror girl in a dress stalking about the room, to a network of cracks forming in a water-damaged ceiling corner. The images fizzle and blip, as if being seen on a choppy video feed. A man panting and a thumping heartbeat can be heard. What this tells me is that your features will be assembled from these done-to-death elements. These moldy chestnuts. Except that the fizzling images suggest it may all just be a simulation on the fritz, which seems to excuse bad writing in advance. Horror can tap into much more basic sources of fear than what this shows us. These are camp totems, which at this point have become so dull, a company in a display of cynicism of the most simplistic kind can put them on its business card:
Besides, the logos that scared the living daylights out of me were always the ones that were never intended to be taken that way. When I was little, United Artists (Bond franchise, Spaceballs, Moonstruck) took the title of the Scariest Logo I’d Ever Seen. They threw the creepiest succession of piano keys against the deep, guttural moan of a moog synthesizer as its logo slowly rotated toward the audience. Once the strings and then the horns bellow up to their grand crescendo, it somehow seems to get even more scary, as if a horrid, bloody crime is being exposed to a crowd:
Terrifying, no?
But the landscape is not all negative.
Just like their movies, smaller scale independent and foreign productions have found ways for their logos to outshine big studios by doing more with less. All that’s needed is something simple: a sound and an image. The lit fuse for France and Germany’s Wild Bunch (Che, The Artist, Titane) snaking around its letters is all you need. French Studios that have been around for over a century sporting simple images like the chicken and weather vane of Pathé (Benedetta, The Illusionist, The Duke) or the ox-eye daisy of Gaumont (The Intouchables, The Fifth Element, Au Revoir Les Enfants) don’t need to throw their weight around. In a country where final cut is guaranteed to filmmakers as part of the national law, their histories and reputations speak for themselves.
Ditto Japan’s Toho (Godzilla series, Kurosawa films, Studio Ghibli) and Nikkatsu Studios (Seijun Susuki films, Shōhei Imamura films), Russia’s Mosfilm (Andrei Tarkovsky films, The Cranes Are Flying, I Am Cuba), Italy’s Cinecittà Studios (Fellini Films, Gangs Of New York, The Two Popes), and Britain's Film4 (Hunger, Paris, Texas, Last Night in Soho). Tasteful and simple, the emphasis is not on the swagger of the owners. Never the sizzle. Always the steak, which is as free of fat and gristle as possible.
Toho, Mosfilm, Pathé, Film4
My favorite of the more time-honored foreign studio logos comes from India’s RK Studios (Barsaat, Sangam, Prem Granth). The logo features an image from the hit Barsaat (1949) that was inspired by a French painting and altered to look vertiginous and vaguely Orson Wellesian. The RK stands for the great director and performer Raj Kapoor, who founded the company. Preceding the actual logo that opens his extraordinary class struggle musical epic, Awaara (1951), is a stunning image that I was unable to provide here.
It’s a rear view of an old man sitting cross legged, facing a massive sunset partially obscured by a tree. The light pokes through the branches as he recites sutras, making an offering to the Gods. The chiaroscuro lighting with the tree is a kind of aversion of one’s eyes when looking up at God - in this case, the sun. It represents the light of cinema as a holy presence to be experienced in the dark, illuminated by the flicker of a projector. Indian citizens regard watching movies in theaters as sacred experiences, like extended meditations or prayers and I can fully get behind that sentiment.
Raj Kapoor’s Wellesian logo for his RK Films
Some stateside studios have done likewise with their approach to logos, albeit with some inventive touches. Dickhouse Productions, which produces Jackass and Jackass-related projects, still delights me. Their magic Rainbow unfurling to the Bawcawwwwk! of a chicken (or the older one featuring a painted wooden chicken getting “antiqued” with a handful of flour) is the only logo I always laugh at without fail.
I also like the saturated video feed look of the logo for Annapurna Pictures (Zero Dark Thirty, American Hustle, 20th Century Women). I really like the strangeness of the one for the French distributor, Studiocanal (Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Falling Down, O Brother Where Art Thou?). It gives us a comet, a number configuration in the sky to the sounds of tribal chanting and drums that become five notes of an aria sung soprano as points of light coalesce into the company’s name to what I think is the throaty sound of a human snarl. It’s so weird, I can’t fault its aggression:
2 or 3 weird elements in a logo is stupid. 6 or 7 is somehow fascinating
I love the sequence for Scott Free Productions (Gladiator, The Martian, Death On The Nile). A hunched over figure walks with their back facing the audience, the spill of a halo of light around them as if trying to find their way through a pitch-black corridor with only a small, fragile candle. A match is lit and the figure frantically runs away from us. Then the figure morphs and transfigures into what looks to be a crow or a raven and takes flight. The sequence looks like an expressionist painting that was hand-drawn, frame by frame.
The image dances, promising entertainment alive with visual possibility. I could watch a whole film animated this way. It may be no less showoffy and solipsistic than some of the sequences I’ve complained about. But it sure looks stunning. It looks cinematic:
I have to hand it to A24 Films (Moonlight, First Cow, Minari) for their inventiveness. Their main logo is basic, evoking the aesthetic of late 70’s video production. But every so often, they tailor the logo to certain films without overdoing it. Flowers blossom into a pattern that spells out “A24” for Midsommar. A group of livestock seen from above form “A24” with their movements for Lamb. Someone in the company actually goes to the trouble of making a graphic that suits the material. They don’t often do this, perhaps only when they know they’ve got a hit (or something that will get people talking). But it’s a memorable one-off trick, distinguishing the company without putting itself between the viewer and the movie.
A24’s films have a distinctive flavor to them, and if I had to take a stab at any kind of rhumb line in their output, I would say it’s neither thematic or aesthetic in nature but managerial. From many accounts, artists appear mostly to be left alone to do what they do under A24. They trust filmmakers enough to get in line behind them. It feels like support seeing these logos. It looks like a studio that’s trying to be in harmony with its creative talents. More understated than simply adding sunglasses to Columbia Pictures’ lantern-bearing woman or giving her a zombie face lift for a specific feature, A24’s adaptive logos are saying that the filmography - the work - is what our company values above all else, not our legacy or our prestige or our filled coffers. Yeah, we have Oscars, but we are always behind our talent.
There are countless bizarre or creepy studio and distributor logos to be found in the home video category and a ton of overseas ones that I just couldn’t get to here. As wary as I am about this form of Capitalist Masturabation, I’m kind of obsessed with these logos. Youtube has many, many old and bizarre ones waiting to be rediscovered, while the major ones remain mostly boring and arrogant. In its own way, the logo scene is kind of a scaled-down microcosm of the industry itself. Big, extravagant, corporate behemoths asserting their perceived sense of market dominance.
Smaller, catchier up-and-comers beating the behemoths at their own game with ideas and ingenuity because they have to.
My favorite logo ever? One for a fake production company started as a joke in 1986. Rosebud Releasing Corporation was created for the release of one movie: Evil Dead 2. Sam and Ted Raimi, along with producer Robert Tapert (who along with lead actor Bruce Campbell would go on to produce for, of all companies, Blumhouse), bookended their masterpiece with this logo and never used it again. I find it gorgeous, bizarre and scary all at once.
In this 7-second arthouse classic, the petals of a yellow rose open. Nothing wild about that. But the light in the image flickers like a silent feature. The flower is set against a fake sky and its unfurling is sped up in motion. It looks almost animated, both real and unreal. The heavily reverbed sound of a single buzzing fly can be heard, as if the flower had grown from the open wound of a rotting corpse just out of frame below, or we were looking at a fake flower about to explode with bile.
This is where I as a critic must throw up my hands. I cannot for the life of me tell you why I find this terrifying. The fly noise was used in the first Evil Dead film and its repurposing here speaks of the ingenuity of Sam Raimi and his Fangoria-addled droogs, one-offing an image both classical and jarringly fresh that leaves an indelible impression in the mind, thus selling the gifts of their art perfectly:
That’s all she wrote.
Support Lee with Planet Nine below:
