Logos… Custom variants of well-known logos…
The Walt Disney studio has a long history of doing this. Disney had signed with RKO Radio Pictures in 1937, who would distribute all of their features and shorts for roughly fifteen years. Before each film (with the exception of the first, Snow White), the RKO logo would precede the opening credits. Each film sported its own version of the RKO card, the variants would line-up with the opening credits sequences or an object in the film. For instance, Pinocchio‘s opening credits are set against a wood background, so the RKO logo is carved into the wood.
In 1953, Walt and Roy O. Disney founded their own self-distribution company, Buena Vista.
Not abandoning a tradition, the new, Buena Vista-distributed Disney movies would open with a title card with its own music that corresponded to the opening credits, and sometimes a special variant. In the 1950s early 1960s, Disney mostly did variants of the BV card…
… but by the mid-60s they mostly used the standard blue gradient one, later a more blue/turquoise-looking one.
Though once in a blue moon we did see some variants. Some notable examples include The Adventures of Bullwhip Griffin, Condorman, and TRON. Disney made one last standard version of this title card in 1979 that looked like this…
With a few exceptions, every contemporary Disney release – film and short – used this one up until its expiration in 1984. Its last appearance would be at the beginning of the original Frankenweenie short. From there, the Buena Vista mention would be saved for the end credits, and usually it was part of the credits, not a separate title card.
In 1985, Walt Disney Pictures finally introduced its first proper studio logo.
It first appeared before the swept-under-the-rug Return to Oz in truncated form, its full form showed up before The Black Cauldron a month later. Five years later, Disney gave it a slightly nicer appearance. That arching line no longer went inside of the “W”…
As expected, we saw a ton of variants of this one…
Some of which lined up very nicely with their respective films, such as this one for Lilo & Stitch…
Pixar got a variant for their films, complete with its own theme…
Disney then introduced a brand new, dazzling logo in 2006. One that was essentially the castle one we know and love… Amped up times eleven.
We’d see a few variants of that one as well…
… But perhaps there aren’t enough variants…
At the beginning of every newer Walt Disney Animation Studios film, minus Frozen, it’s the same deal. The logo is the standard variant, and the standard ‘When You Wish Upon a Star’ theme is used, followed by the Walt Disney Animation Studios logo.
Frozen went against this a bit. Over both logos, we didn’t hear the music/sounds that accompany them, but rather the film’s opening theme ‘Vuelie’. That was a very nice change of pace.
Wreck-It Ralph‘s opening used an 8-bit version of the Walt Disney Animation Studios logo, but didn’t do anything special with the castle. That was saved for the very end of the film, where the castle is taken over by an arcade killscreen. Still a nice little touch!
Pixar’s films? Very few of Pixar’s films have ever done any special variants outside of Anniversary logos, even in the days where they used the old CGI castle logo. Monsters, Inc. had used cut-short versions of both the Walt Disney Pictures and Pixar logos, set to the snappy jazz opening theme of the movie. The Incredibles switched out the music/sound fx for the film’s overture, a wonderful accompaniment. Director Brad Bird’s next for Pixar, Ratatouille, did the same exact theme, using its own theme. WALL-E‘s post-credits Pixar logo has WALL-E himself fix Luxo, Jr.’s light bulb.
Starting with 2008’s WALL-E, all Pixar films opened with the current Walt Disney Pictures castle logo followed by the classic Luxo, Jr. hopping logo. No variants, again, outside of Anniversary-themed ones. (Oddly enough, Finding Dory didn’t have one for the company’s 30th Anniversary.) Will Pixar ever make a new logo? The current one, which is now 21 years old, holds up well in this day and age, and gets the point across. Maybe they don’t need to make a new logo.
Now let’s look at DreamWorks…
DreamWorks tends to vary it up a bit. Early on this was not the case, one notable exception being the Shrek. DreamWorks’ animated films opened with the standard night sky DreamWorks logo that preceded the company’s live-action films.
In 2004, DreamWorks Animation SKG became its own entity, so they created a new logo to open their films. It was sunnier and much more colorful, and some films had standard music while others had their own themes. (For instance, Madagascar uses their version of the theme from Born Free). Other times they’d have even more fun. Shark Tale opens where we see the dangling worm on the moon boy’s fishing pole take a dip into the water. The penguins steal the moon from the boy at the beginning of Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa. Bee Movie has the main character pop the boy’s balloons, Shrek the Third transitions to storm clouds. Monster vs. Aliens had this variant…
Kung Fu Panda then started introducing very, very stylized variants. The whole trilogy has them, in spades…
… and some other recent DreamWorks films had this kind of fun. A new logo DreamWorks Animation surfaced in 2010…
… which too got variants, putting the moon in different locations…
Others played around with the logo itself, like this very pretty one for Rise of the Guardians. Main character Jack Frost sits on the moon. With some films, the main characters sit on the moon instead of the boy.
It’s always nice to see these kinds of things before movies, particularly animated films. While a little change in the logo doesn’t have any impact on the quality of the story and script, I would still like to see this kind of fun before certain animated movies these days instead of the usual, formal introduction.
What do you think?
]]>