Studio Logos are Part of the Movie Too

Last week, America’s third most prominent idiot son announced that in the wake of Paramount Skydance acquiring Warner Bros. Discovery that the conglomeration will henceforth be known, simply, as Skydance. Even so, American Idiot Son #3 indicated that Paramount and Warner Bros. would still exist as so-called sub-brands, preserving their “distinct identities (and) extraordinary legacies…that have resonated with audiences for generations.” It doesn’t really matter what McDonald’s call its Big Mac, I suppose, so long as it’s good, and if Skydance produces movies under the Paramount and Warner Bros. umbrellas as good as their “extraordinary legacies” imply, that’s what matters. Of course, it’s difficult to picture David Ellison (we will drop the nom de guerre) as some sort of Thalberg-esque steward of creativity, and so more than a Big Mac, I keep imagining Paramount and Warner Bros. becoming the Arch Deluxe. Or maybe Saturn, the sub brand of General Motors that was discontinued in 2010 due to corporate bankruptcy restructuring. David Ellison does not have a face for movies or for radio; he has a face for corporate bankruptcy restructuring.

I know, I know, it’s dumb to romanticize a brand, and there is plenty in the history of Paramount and Warner Bros. to denigrate. I mean, Olivia de Havilland, may she rest in peace, went to war with Warner Bros. in the name of labor while early Hollywood’s anti-competitive practices were regulated courtesy of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Paramount Decree. That is all part of their extraordinary legacies too. But then, Bogey and Bacall are also part of Warner Bros., and when Olivia de Havilland won the right to work with whomever she damn pleased, she went to Paramount and gave, perhaps, the greatest screen performance of all time in “The Heiress.” I don’t want to say things even out, but to borrow the title of a Universal picture, it’s complicated. I have been seeing those studio logos for Paramount and Warner Bros. all my movie-watching life. The moment when a movie studio logo appears, it’s like boarding the plane to fly somewhere new, the moment when you take a second to believe that the movie you are about to watch is going to be a good one. It’s why they will always instill a sense of whimsy in me, and it’s why I have always enjoyed it when movies see them with a sense of whimsy too.

Steven Spielberg famously opened “Raiders of the Lost Ark” by dissolving from Paramount’s artistic rendering of a mountain peak to a real one, a playful touch foreshadowing the entire 1981 action-adventure; no matter how dark it could sometimes get, Spielberg always had a gleam in his eye. “South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut,” which predicted the future, opened with an homage to Spielberg’s magnum opus by dissolving the Paramount logo into the mountain peak of the animated movie’s eponymous Colorado town. And both those movies were hearkening back to the Biblical epic “The Ten Commandments” in which Cecil B. DeMille began not with the Paramount peak but with an image of Mount Sinai before superimposing the Paramount logo over it, which always struck me as something like a concession to any God-fearing folk suspicious of those Hollywood infidels. 

The lamentable 1998 action movie “Hard Rain” turned the clouds surrounding the Paramount mountain peak into dark and stormy ones, complete with thunder and lightning, an effect that did not work quite as well as it sounds. I was always sad that Warner Bros. did not beat them to that punch with “Twister” two years prior. Rather than adhering to the Warner Bros. logo of the mid-90s that featured a blue sky and white cumulous clouds, “Twister” put its logo over a dark, stormy sky, but it should have begun with the blue sky before giving way to the stormy one, just like a May afternoon in Tornado Alley.

“Casablanca” did a nifty cross fade from the familiar Warner Bros. shield logo to a map of Africa while “You’ve Got Mail” fittingly transformed the Warner Bros. logo into a computer desktop icon. No movie, though, ever dressed the Warner Bros. logo up better than “Adventures of Robin Hood” which added a resplendent flourish to its original design, making it look like something you might see unfurled on a banner at Nottingham Castle.

Of course, studio logo tomfoolery was not limited to just Paramount and Warner Bros. “Waterworld” utilized the spinning globe of the Universal logo to simultaneously introduce its foremost plot point of melting polar ice caps. According to Ian Failes at Befores & Afters, this was no simple undertaking, and it was evocative of a movie that was much weirder (in a good way, some of the time) than its stink bomb reputation would suggest.

“Mo’ Better Blues” was released the year of Universal’s 75th anniversary, and for its 75th anniversary, Universal ran through all the logos of its past, making for a slightly longer introduction than usual. And so, in his musical-drama, Spike Lee deployed none other than Flavor Flav of Public Enemy to interrupt the Universal logo run-through to tell Spike to get the movie started. I mean, leave it to Spike to throw a little comical shade at his own financier. Lee was my introduction to the idea that directors are the true authors of their movies and that’s why I have always adored this touch: he is telling you that, yes, “Mo’ Better Blues” is a Universal Picture, but it is a Spike Lee film.

There have been various alterations to MGM’s Leo the Lion throughout the years, none better than 1983’s comedy “Strange Brew.” Hinting at the libation-centric comedy to come, this lion does not roar but belch, as if he’s had one too many, at which point the fourth wall is broken and we realize the movie’s own characters are trying to get the lion to roar. I always appreciated the meta nature of this joke, transforming the studio logo not into some static thing but a living, breathing part of the movie itself. 

“Ghostbusters” and “Ronin” both did something a little similar 14 years apart, just with music. The former put the first spooky notes of Elmer Bernstein’s score over Columbia Pictures’ torch lady, giving her the feel of an eerie apparition, while the latter placed the initial notes of Elia Cmiral’s score over the falling stars motif of United Artists logo. Both were letting you know that the movie was beginning – already. 

What makes Alfred Newman’s 20th Century Fox Fanfare (which is still called that, as far as I know, despite 20th Century Fox now being called 20th Century Studios) so great is that it innately communicates to the audience that the movie is now beginning, as it did with such classics as “Star Wars” and “All About Eve.” Indeed, in his typically theatrical way, Baz Luhrmann brought that to life in “Moulin Rouge!” by using computer graphics to have a curtain literally open on the 20th Century Fox logo while an orchestra in the foreground performs the fanfare. 

Yet, my favorite 20th Century Fox studio logo appearance, appropriately from my favorite movie “Last of the Mohicans,” is one when the fanfare is not heard at all. No, rather than Newman’s famous theme, we hear the rumbling percussion of Trevor Jones and Randy Edelman’s score, immediately evoking a movie of such primal urgency that there is not even a second to waste on a fanfare. And more than that, the percussion in tandem with the familiar 20th Century Fox searchlights manifests the way I have always felt about those studio logos in the first place: they represent the portal to the other side.