Logo Case Study: Walt Disney Home Video (Sorcerer's Apprentice)

By 1986, Disney's initial efforts at cobbling together a dramatic and futuristic logo to appease the sensibilities of the home video age were already starting to look quite shopworn, so they retired it in favour of something altogether sleeker.  Hence, we had the Walt Disney Home Video logo featuring Mickey in his sorcerer's apprentice garb (as seen in the movie Fantasia) and the streak of hot white energy which goes into a swirling frenzy and writes "Walt Disney Home Video" in splashy magenta lettering.

Unlike Neon Mickey, of which I was thankfully spared in my own childhood, this logo I do have a shed-load of nostalgia for, so much so that I always get a case of the...well, not quite warm fuzzies whenever I revisit it.  It's not exactly a "warm" logo and I'm well aware that there logophobes out there who view it being cut from the same demonically inspired cloth as the Neon Mickey logo, and even some who'd argue that it ranks right up there with the Unholy Trinity (S From Hell, V of Doom, Closet Killer) as one of the most horrifying things you could possibly show an impressionable young child.  Personally though, I don't remember ever feeling terror when watching this one so much as sheer awe.  It had a dark and mysterious quality which I always found charming, as if I was genuinely being whisked out of my seat and transported into an exciting and otherworldly new realm.   Which is exactly how I want to feel when I'm about to watch The Rescuers or Sebastian's Caribbean Jamboree (note: we really need to talk about that one some time soon).  In my eyes, they succeeded.

That being said, there are a number of basic ingredients here which I suspect could have just have easily tipped those feelings of awe in the other direction.  Sorcerer Mickey is unquestionably a lot easier on the eyes than Neon Mickey but, as we learned from the DiC logo, there is something faintly eerie about complete and utter motionless (the flashing stars and crescent moon on his hat appear to have been substituted for actual movement, in order to give off some vague inkling of life) and having him shrouded in darkness while the logo starts up doesn't exactly help.  The synthesizer music, while nowhere near as cheap and bombastic as the fanfare from the Neon Mickey logo, still has a distinctly ominous tone, particularly at the logo's opening.  Perhaps it will have additional ill-boding significance for anybody who's actually familiar with Fantasia, where Mickey caused nothing but disaster after donning that sorcerer's hat.  Most striking of all, however, is the overwhelming blackness of the backdrop.  It doesn't feel like a natural darkness - eg: Mickey practicing his magic against a night sky - but rather that Mickey is sitting in some terrible void of nothingness, and that as the viewer moves past him and follows the swirling white streak, that vast, overwhelming nothingness is exactly what they're being sucked into themselves.  So yes, I do understand why this logo brought out such an averse reaction in some.

Truth be told, that overwhelming void always made my hairs stand on end too, although I think that only added to my fascination.  Having this strange but absolute classic of a logo littered all over your Disney viewing experience back in the day always amounted to seeing these weird, dark spots staining the otherwise colourful world of Mickey and co - a phenomenon now so deeply ingrained into my personal nostalgia that no viewing of The Rescuers seems quite complete without it.  Just one of multiple reasons why there'll always be a place in my heart - and on the media unit - for the VHS player.