FACT: The Pirates Are Out To Get You

It's funny how campaigns on the issue of piracy had this erstwhile tendency to be leagues more apocalyptic than campaigns on issues that might strike you as being immediately more threatening. A few years back, we touched on the classic 1990s cautionary fable regarding Rebecca's pirated VHS experience - I'm still not 100% sure what was going on in that film, but I really did get the impression that the world was ending in that closing shot. In 2002, the Federation Against Copyright Theft got even more on the nose with a little piece called "The Pirates Are Out To Get You", the mere title of which says it all. The imperilled suburban innocence denoted by Rebecca's guileless giggling was now but a distant memory; this film might as well have taken place after the collapse of civilisation brought about by the foolish choices of Rebecca's unscrupulous parents, of which Rebecca herself appeared to have a chilling premonition at the end of her chapter. We find ourselves plunged into a burning hellscape, in the company of a pirate who might as well be the Devil himself. They didn't go so far as to give him pointy horns (although that wouldn't have been any less unsubtle), but he's got red-tinged skin and the glow of annihilation in his eyes. In place of his traditional pitchfork, he wields a brand in the shape of an X (for Forbidden!), which is first submerged in flame and then pointed at the camera, aaand it's not my imagination, is it? This anti-piracy film was intended as a parody of the Flaming Carlton Star? I mentioned in my coverage of that logo that the red-hot star-shaped brand was made all the more unnerving for the fact that we never saw the hand that moved it, enabling it to take on an uncanny life all of its own. Thanks to FACT, we get to discover if the alternative - seeing the sadistic thug with a penchant for scorching - is any more reassuring.

In lieu of turning the brute force of his weapon upon the audience, our demonic brand-wielder instead gets his kicks out of torching stacks of VHS tapes, film reels and CDs. A mere touch of the X is enough to engulf them in a flaming explosion that would make Michael Bay proud. The use of VHS makes the film feel curiously behind the times, as by 2002 the public were well along the process of tossing them out for DVDs, and countless VHS collections were meeting similarly miserable fates at landfill sites the world over. Being a VHS aficionado myself, I'll admit that the sight of all those tapes going up in flames makes my heart a little fluttery. (CDs? Torch as many of the snotty fuckers as you like. In this house it's vinyl or nothing.) By 2002, the Carlton Star had also been operation for long enough for audiences to be well-accustomed to kick-starting their watching experiences by having a burning iron shoved in their faces, so the idea was presumably to offer a startling subversion, with the (sorta) familiar imagery directing us to somewhere altogether more unimaginable. This is the Star's corrupted counterpart, signalling a dystopian world in which those pesky pirates, and not the advertisers, call the shots on what we see and hear - that being a slew of explosions and all the tell-tales noises of a society sinking deep into an apocalyptic chasm (sirens wailing, mobs chanting, gunfire rattling), indicating that our video-killer's actions have further-reaching consequences than a few melted copies of Bend It Like Beckham. I like the concept in theory, although it has to be said that the red hot X, in spite of its ability to make everything it comes into contact with to messily combust, lacks the awe-inspiring potency of its inspiration. We're issued a grim warning on the perils of letting the pirates brand us with their mark, yet "Pirates" doesn't make good on the implications of that threat - unlike the logo it's recalling, it never forces the viewer to endure the simulated experience of having the searing brand thrust directly upon them. It certainly puts a lot more emphasis on the fire visuals, making it a full-on nightmare for any pyrophobe unfortunate enough to find this lurking on the copy of Cheaper By The Dozen they rented, but compared to its counterpart, I never feel the creeping paranoia that the X-shaped brand is coming for me. The C-shaped brand (for Copyright!) that ultimately takes its place, once a bucket of cold water has put a stop to the mindless media-burning, is a slightly different story. Despite having just emerged from the same bucket of water that vanquished the X, it too ignites, with enough fury that it apparently causes the screen to burn out. It glows white rather than red, which I guess is intended to signify its purity, but the use of violent imagery to represent copyright is still jarring, meaning that it's not presented as a healing force that will put the world to rights, but an angry and vengeful one that's out to get you every bit as much as those pirates.

The film's most memorable component was its infamously foreboding monologue, which wasn't actually claiming anything that Rebecca's ordeal before it didn't. There, terrorism and organised crime were also said to be the beneficiaries of our dodgy video investments, although their invisibility made them more effective foes; the mere mention of the man at the market was ominous enough in context, but the suggestion that this only scratched the surface of a far more sinister agenda unfolding beyond the eyeline of Rebecca's ignorant parents was genuinely spine-chilling. The tactic was to prompt questions about the hidden costs of piracy and, through the highly emotive figure of Rebecca, what kind of world we were building for our children as a result. In attempting to provide more concrete answers to those questions, "Pirates" ends up feeling a lot more hyperbolic, in no small way because of its exceptionally bombastic choice of visual accompaniment (in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the specific charge that "piracy funds terrorism" had also become an especially loaded one). It was an even more drastic leap from "Daylight Robbery", the anti-piracy film we all got sick of seeing at the start of our tapes in the late 1990s, in which the pirates were represented by a cartoonishly belligerent market vendor who played like a nastier version of Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses. Obnoxious to the core, and not the kind of bloke you'd feel comfortable doing business with, but at least he was only a bloke and not the Devil incarnate, claiming your hard-earned fiver for a barely-functional copy of Trainspotting but sparing your soul. "Daylight Robbery" was a notably lighter kind of anti-piracy ad, its tactic being to present piracy as a particularly loathsome inconvenience as opposed to an all-destroying force, and it found room for humor in its featured scenario (the vendor claims that his trade was "advertised on Crimestoppers"). "Pirates", by comparison, takes the path of excess. The pirates are depicted not as unscrupulous criminals, but as unearthly demons on a mission to set the whole world ablaze, who get one step closer to succeeding every time someone fails to source their copy of Minority Report from a reputable retailer. Its message is conveyed with thoroughgoing seriousness, and yet its hyperbole is so hilariously bald-faced that it ends up getting the comedic edge on "Daylight".

For as much notoriety as its doom-laden monologue amassed, it has to be acknowledged that it is rather clunkily-constructed. There are snippets that work well enough, like the eerie ambiguity in the statement that piracy "will destroy our development and your future enjoyment." Obviously, they're talking about the jeopardy facing the entertainment industry, but after that mention of terrorism it's hard not to get the sense that they're alluding to the possible destruction of society as a whole. But the equation of those two concerns - the repeated criss-crossing between the proclamation that the very worst, most malignant kinds of people stand to overwhelmingly benefit from piracy and the affirmation that the film and music industries have everything to lose - is overall unwieldy (the use of explosive imagery to imply that these two concerns go hand in hand feels especially ham-fisted). It's further weighed down by the surplus of inelegant fire analogies - in addition to the aforementioned "Don't let them brand you with their mark!", there's "Don't let the pirates burn a hole in your pocket!" and "Don't touch the hot stuff. Cool is copyright!" (which immediately contradicted by the image of that C catching alight). You get the distinct impression that several different marketing slogans were proposed and, after a backstage deadlock on which was the punchiest, all of them were tossed into the final script, with the effect that they cancel one another out.

As easy as it is to poke fun at "Pirates" for its intensely over the top tone and production, its crudely nightmarish charm always makes it delightful for a nostalgic revisit. It also looks positively sophisticated when up against FACT's upcoming specimen for 2004, "You Wouldn't Steal a Car" (aka the worst anti-piracy film ever made). All I'll say is that it's impossible for me to watch that one and not hear Tweety Pie's voice echoing at the back of my head. "You wouldn't steal a car..." "Her don't know me vewy well, do her?!"

Logo Case Study: Carlton Screen Advertising (Flaming Carlton Star)

These days I often find myself remarking that advertising is a dead art. Which is obviously enormously hyperbolic of me, but it is the case that a lot of contemporary advertising just doesn't capture my imagination the way it used to. In part, I would argue that this is because we're living in the age of the touchy-feely ad (for which we can thank the root of all syrup-slathered evil, John Lewis), and I do not, in general, care for touchy-feely ads. But I do also have to acknowledge that, yeah, it's probably not a coincidence that the advertising era that made the greatest impression on me was the mid-90s through to the mid-00s, back when I was in the process of coming of age. Of course the ads of the 2020s aren't going to have quite the same magic as they had back then. I became an old fogey, and the world in general lost a wad of its lustre. I'm sure that, in 1996, some codger was shaking their head and muttering about how advertising was so much more epic when they were using iguanas to sell cigarettes, and not maggots to sell booze. All I know is that, once upon a time, watching the ad reel before a movie used to be an integral part of the cinemagoing experience for me. Remember that shrill woman in the car in those cinema sponsorship bumpers (from Volkswagen?) who used to yell out, "We're gonna miss the ads, that's the best bit!"? Clearly you were intended to sympathise more with her husband (who, IIRC, got out and abandoned her with the vehicle in motion in the final bumper) but I privately felt she spoke a lot of truth. Going to the movies and seeing the ad reel was like getting a grab bag of bonus miniature stories before the main feature, some weird, some terrifying, some absolutely baffling. I'd sometimes emerge chewing more upon that advertising than the film itself. But now, while I remain a staunch proponent of the theatrical experience, I often find my feet dragging in the foyer as the ads are about to start. To me, they're no longer an indispensable part of the package, but these annoying things you have to suffer through before the real fun begins - sentiments that I fear are inevitable around the onset of middle age. I'd be curious to know if kids today still get spooked by theatrical ads. Anything can seem scarier when it's magnified and in the dark, and you're susceptible enough to the sensory overload - how else can I explain being so deeply unsettled by an ad about a Lloyds cashpoint that played before Free Willy? Even some seasonal John Lewis drivel that's bending over backwards to give you the synthetic fuzzies might seem utterly horrifying when viewed through the right pair of eyes. All the same, I'd contend that a major reason why cinema ads seemed so much more spectacular in my favoured period had a lot to do with the company they kept back then, when the promos of the advertising companies themselves were epic little serotonin-inducers in their own right. As long as Pearl & Dean keep using Pete Moore's "Asteroid" as their jingle, a sliver of that grandeur may be preserved for future generations. But we've yet to find a worthy successor to Carlton Screen Advertising and their flaming Carlton star, which was as singularly commanding a cinematic visual as they come. Nothing said "You will fucking pay attention to what we're selling!" quite like having a red hot iron shoved in your face. Those were the days alright!

What made the Carlton Star so special? For a start, I can't claim that any other logo enticed me into to role-playing that I'm a criminal in olden times who's been sentenced to branding. That may sound like a strangely masochistic reaction, but I'm not sure what other narrative I was expected to attach to the sequence in question. We see a star-shaped iron being dunked into burning coals, then before you know it the thing's upon you. I can only speculate what infraction could warrant the barbaric penalty of having a star-shaped scar singed onto my face, but Carlton inflicted it on me with every trip to Cineworld. What exactly was the symbolism there? Were creators Lambie-Nairn seeking to convey some sly commentary on how advertising seeks to imprint on and commandeer our psyches? Was it deliberately likening the process to an act of brutal assault, implying that, by violently searing its mark upon us (or at least, giving the impression of doing so) it was laying claim to us, and to the impulses and desires that could be molded to make perfectly obedient consumers of us? This implicit message, whether conscious or not, is echoed in the logo's stinger, which arrived at the end of the ad reel to give the star the final word. This add-on was less dramatic than the main ident, showing only the star-shaped brand still pointed at the screen in a visibly cooler state, but (thanks in no small way to the eerie background drones), felt no less threatening. This was my final ominous reminder, as a branded medieval criminal, that the pain from my punitive burns might eventually lessen, but the mark wasn't going anywhere. The star insisted on lingering. I belonged to it now.

Needless to say, the Carlton Star left a terrifying impression on the fleets of kids who'd trekked innocently to their local UCI to see Pokémon: The First Movie. By the time it started showing up, in the late 1990s, I personally was already old enough and had spent enough of that time hanging out in cinemas to have acquired a taste for their little terrors, so the star was all catnip to me. It worked so well because it was so purely cinematic, assaulting the senses in the way that only the big screen can. It was bold, intense and awe-inspiring, kick-starting our presentation with a full-on demonstration of all that cinema can do; you'd come because you wanted an experience that can only be fully understood on an enlarged canvas, and you got that in spades with this thing. The mere sight of that brand entering those red hot embers was enough to get sweat trickling down your brow. Those burning coals felt so real and so tangible that they might as well have rolled off and set fire to the cinema curtains that were drawing back right as the logo was starting. You could practically smell them. It touched on a whole cavalcade of nerves (the primal fear of fire, the uncanny uncertainty in not seeing who was controlling the iron brand, which might as well be moving by itself, the visual and sonic severity of that climactic sizzle) but that's what made it such a perfect appetite whetter for the journey ahead. When the lights go down, you want to feel a little unsafe,  already on the edge of your seat in anticipation for where the experience could potentially take you. As a counterpoint to its aggressive intensity, it's also a stunningly beautiful logo. That final blend of showering yellows and swirling oranges never fails to make me gasp.

The Carlton Star enjoyed a healthy run, turning up the heat for UK cinemagoers until well into the 2000s. Alas, all good things must come to an end, and the light finally burned out in in 2008, when the UK operation of Carlton Screen Advertising was acquired by Odeon and Cineworld and rebranded as Digital Cinema Media. The Carlton Screen brand (and the star) remained active in Ireland until 2014, when Wide Eye Media (now Pearl & Dean Ireland) took its place. With the Carlton brand now obsolete on both sides of the Irish Sea, it's unlikely that the Carlton brand will be making a comeback any time soon. But like I say, once marked by its searing intensity, there was no way you were getting its imprint off you. Those of us who grew up with the logo will always bear the star-shaped scar somewhere upon our souls.

The logo had another curious legacy (of sorts), in that it was the seeming inspiration behind a 2002 campaign about how piracy would destroy us all. Was it as petrifying as the real deal? All will be revealed in time.

The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald: Scared Silly (aka A Clown Has Feelings Too)

One of my favourite pieces of writing of 2021 was this Vice article by Amelia Tait, which posed the all-important question that might not have been at the forefront of our concerns in the current global climate, but had nevertheless lurked uneasily at the back of our skulls for quite some time - whatever happened to Ronald McDonald? Actually, I suspect that most of us kind of already knew the answer, but there is a fascinating yarn to be unpicked in delving into the specifics of his discreet decline - keeping in mind that, in the latter stages of the 20th century, the burger-hawking clown was on a par with Mickey Mouse in terms of American icons who'd effectively achieved world domination. It didn't take long for the 21st century to start getting rough on the once unassailable brand mascot, with his various McDonaldland cohorts - Grimace, Hamburglar, Officer Big Mac and co - facing eviction from McDonald's eateries and promotions in 2003. For the time being, Ronald himself was left standing, but has been officially retired from McDonald's advertising in the UK as of 2014, while his appearances have been largely scaled back in his native US. It's a significant comedown for a character who, according to a poll cited by George Ritzer in The McDonaldization of Society, was once identifiable among 96% of school children, an honor bested only by Santa Claus (p.8). So where did it all go wrong for Ronald?

As it turns out, Ronald McDonald was a casualty of not one, but two cultural shifts that made a smiling clown an undesirable thing to have at the forefront of your branding. Firstly, over the past two decades we've become a lot more leery about fast food marketing geared specifically and unambiguously toward enticing the very youngest of consumers. Traditionally, McDonald's has always been a family brand, a place you took the kids after swimming lessons when you were too exhausted to cook for them, when you were in another town and your offspring were way too fussy to be up for anything local and unfamiliar, or just when they really eager to get their hands on whatever giveaway was being offered in Happy Meals that week. By all counts it still fulfils all of those functions. But in the mid-2000s, McDonald's underwent a massive image overhaul designed to counteract the tidal wave of negative publicity they had accumulated with Morgan Spurlock's hit documentary Super Size Me and growing concerns about childhood obesity, a somewhat inevitable consequence of years of general indifference toward the messages children were actually receiving in between their favourite programming (I grew up in an era when junk food promotions were not only slapped over every inch of commercial children's media, but could get away with pushing themselves as healthy snacking options, if they were sneaky enough about it). Happy Meals and the promise of free plastic haven't gone away, but McDonald's was toning back on its kid-zeroed marketing, as the emphasis moved more toward courting the next most receptive demographic, ie: students. Secondly, in recent years we've undergone a drastic revamp in terms of how we look at clowns. The general consensus is that clowns are no longer benign purveyors of innocent birthday party capering, but sinister, grotesque deviants who signify something very corrupted in the childhood vista. The 2016 clown invasion and the popularity of the 2017 adaptation of Stephen King's It appear to have cemented this notion in the public consciousness. Coulrophobia itself is hardly a novel phenomenon, but it's only relatively recently that clowns have effectively been ranked alongside spiders and vertical drops as something that people are almost expected to fear by default; nowadays, if you don't have any profound dislike of clowns, you can consider yourself the anomaly. All in all, the 21st century just hasn't been the kindest of climates for a grease-peddling joker.

One of the last notable artefacts of Ronald McDonald's uncontested reign of terror was The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald, a series of forty-minute direct-to-video animated adventures specially created to be sold as add-ons to consumers purchasing drinks and ice creams, beginning with a Halloween-themed video, Scared Silly, in October 1998 (a clip from the series was featured in Super Size Me, where Spurlock incorrectly identified it as a television cartoon). The cartoon was unmistakably the work of Klasky Csupo, the animation studio founded by husband and wife team Arlene Klasky and Gene Csupo in 1982 that went on to become a children's entertainment powerhouse in the 1990s/early 2000s, engineering such hit Nickelodeon shows as Rugrats, The Wild Thornberrys and As Told By Ginger. The studio was also responsible for animating The Simpsons during its first few years of life, before disputes between Klasky Csupo and Gracie Films prompted the latter to switch to Film Roman. Despite the company's ubiquitousness through many a millennial's childhood, in my experience Klasky Csupo are an extremely decisive studio; their output is fondly remembered by many, but just as many others are alienated by their visual style, rating it as ugly and unappealing. Additionally, a high number of millennials report having had their first logophobic experience by unwisely sticking around to the end of any Klasky Csupo production's closing credits and seeing just what horrors were lying in wait - particularly during the studio's peak years when they were using what has been affectionately dubbed the "Splaat" logo. If you think clowns are grotesque, then you should get a load of the nightmarish mouth they had blurt out the studio name, in eerily emotionless, computerised tones, at the end of each adventure with Eliza or Ginger (although it was at least handy for those who, myself included, were unsure of the pronunciation). Put a pin in that, because Klasky Csupo really are overdue their own Logo Case Study on these pages.

Like any Klasky Csupo production, The Wacky Adventures of Ronald McDonald has built up its share of detractors and devotees, with some regarding them as junky promotional tools and others nostalgic essentials - such nostalgia tends to be less prolific than that for KC's Nickelodeon cartoons, however, due to the limited availability of the videos. A total of five VHS tapes were available in McDonald's restaurants between 1998 and 2001, with a belated sixth adventure finally seeing the light of day in January 2003, albeit exclusively through Klasky Csupo's official online store. The series was never upgraded into the DVD age, presumably owing to the decision to retire the McDonaldland characters soon after. I've also not seen a wild amount of evidence to suggest that the videos were sold in many, if any, locations outside of the US (they certainly never made it to UK restaurants), capping their impact even further. Their modern status as animated curios naturally makes them irresistible to me, although I did have another, slightly more esoteric motive for wanting to dust off the series at this point in time. We're currently in the early stages of 2022, a year that has long stood out to me as being of immense significance owing to the fact that it is the year in which Soylent Green takes place. It's been on my mind that I ought to do something to commemorate the Year of The Suspicious Foodstuff, and nothing struck me as more savoury than a year-round retrospective dedicated to particularly strange or unique fast food promotions.

Most of the classic McDonaldland characters appear, albeit adapted to fit the Klasky Csupo visual style. Grimace (Kevin Michael Richardson) looks more-or-less the same (I guess there aren't a whole lot of options when you're working with a giant purple blob). Hamburglar (Charlie Adler), on the other hand, looks nigh-unrecognisable, still favouring the striped convict motif but having swapped out the bulk of his burglar attire for dark glasses and a trendy sports coat, and looking for all the world like an all grown up Rocket Power reject (compared to previous Hamburglar incarnations, who spoke mostly in gibberish, he's also unusually articulate).  Other familiar faces include Birdie the Early Bird (Christine Cavanaugh), a character originally introduced to plug breakfast menu items, and, more nightmarishly, the Fry Kids and the McNuggets. I say "nightmarish", because while I can handle more generic characters like Birdie and Hamburglar just fine, the McDonaldland residents who are meant to be physically comprised of McDonald's foodstuff have always struck me as aesthetically and conceptually disturbing (among other things, wouldn't it make cannibals of them to actually eat at McDonald's?). The Fry Kids are a mild example - in their case, it's not altogether clear to me if that shaggy matter hanging off of them is intended to be off-colour French fries, or if they're just walking puffballs nominally affiliated with processed potato sticks. But those McNuggets...here, they've been given little beaks, wings and combs so as to resemble the farmyard critter they're made of, and I seriously can't be the only person who finds that design choice a bit sick (puts me strongly in mind of Banksy's "Village Pet Store and Charcoal Grill" exhibit). On that note, it's something of a relief that the two burger-headed characters are largely ignored - Mayor McCheese (Bob Joles) makes an appearance in just one of the adventures, Have Time, Will Travel, while Officer Big Mac is conspicuously absent. Oh well, nobody likes authority figures, right? There are also a handful of new characters, the most prominent being Ronald's sardonic talking mutt, Sundae (Dee Bradley Baker - for years, I harbored under the misconception that Sundae was voiced by the same actor who does Squidward from Spongebob Squarepants, but a quick check of the cast list reveals not), and a couple of human kids who are chummy with Ronald, Tika (Jazmine A. Corona) and Franklin (Alex D. Linz).

Each video opens and closes with live action segments showing the familiar flesh-and-blood Ronald (Jack Doepke or David Hussey, depending on what video you're watching) hanging out in his surreal McDonaldland residence. In the first three adventures, he is accompanied by Sundae (actually Verne Troyer, best known for playing Mini-Me in the Austin Powers films, in a Sundae suit), and there's a transitional sequence where Ronald and Sundae take a chute down into the world beyond, assuming their animated forms along the way. I've come across more than one person ascribing a bout of grisly childhood nightmares to the live action Sundae, and that's understandable enough. Because Sundae was a completely original character, his default design was in the Klasky Csupo style, and the efforts to translate that directly into live action aren't the easiest on the eyes (it doesn't help matters that the zipper on the Sundae suit is also very visible across his underside, making it look as though he's recovering from heart surgery). That said, I think the least appealing thing about Sundae visually applies to both his animated and live action forms, which is to say his unpleasant-looking mouth. Freaky pronounced animal lips are a bizarre design choice favoured by Klasky Csupo in general, as evidenced all throughout The Wild Thornberrys - here, they're also seen on a beaver, a sinister talking grizzly who stalks the gang at random intervals during the adventure, a stuffed and mounted swordfish, and those creepy deep fried miniature chickens - but Sundae's a particularly egregious example, what with his bright red lips, the coulrophobic-taunting layer of white clown make-up around his muzzle (albeit only really visible in his animated form) and his distinctly human-looking teeth. Between this and the Splaat logo, I'm detecting that Arlene and Gene have a possible fetish for ugly mouth visuals. Well, good for them.

Scared Silly opens with the revelation that both Ronald and Sundae are connoisseurs of vintage B-movie horror, which is honestly not a bad place to start. The film they're watching, identified by Ronald as Attack of The Dinosaurs, is actually the silent 1925 classic The Lost World, plucked safely from the public domain, and dubbed over with some comically hammy dialogue. Ronald then receives a video call from Tika, who invites him to go camping with her and the rest of the McDonaldland gang in Far-Flung Forest. She later reveals that she's always been too scared to venture into the forest, owing to local lore about it being haunted by a Phantom. The gang make it to nightfall without anything in the way of major incidents, but are caught off-guard in a rainstorm and decide to seek shelter in a suspicious-looking, seemingly abandoned manor that transpires to be riddled with various booby traps, causing the party to become increasingly splintered. What kind of nefarious forces will they discover pulling the strings?

The inevitable deal-breaker with Wacky Adventures for many viewers is going to be the odiously commercial, not-so-ulterior motive behind their productions - there is little getting around the fact that they were 40-minute long advertisements designed to make children hungry for empty calories, and I can wholly understand anybody disliking them on mere principle. The thing is, in an alternate universe where the McDonald's brand never existed and these were entirely original characters having wacky adventures in their own stand-alone world, I could see these titles becoming hot cult classics for their sheer weirdness. If you didn't know anything about McDonaldland and you saw this series, wouldn't this just strike you as the most random assortment of characters imaginable? Approached from that angle, the series offers a pretty enjoyable mix of visual strangeness (particularly in the live action segments) and quirky humor - nothing especially ground-breaking, but they are objectively stronger and more competently made than I had expected, given their dubious origins. And, for as mean as I've been about Sundae's character design, he's actually a pretty funny addition to the McDonaldland roster; his deadpan personality makes him a perfect foil to the perpetually upbeat Ronald. On a narrative level, my only real gripe with Scared Silly is that it could have stood to be at least ten minutes shorter. There is quite a lot of padding, particularly in the first half of the story which has the gang rambling somewhat aimlessly around the forest - it takes them a long time to get into the real heart of the adventure involving the haunted manor. Prior to that, the characters sing a couple of songs (pretty standard, inoffensive children's fare, but 100% filler) and Hamburglar pranks the others into thinking the Phantom has arisen, but all that goes on in the woods that's of any genuine import is its becoming increasingly apparent that a) the gang's every movements are being tracked by surveillance cameras and b) Tika clearly knows more about the situation than she's letting on (for one, she lets slip with Ronald that, contra her claims to have always been too terrified to set foot in the forest before, she actually knows her way around it pretty well). Still, Far-Flung Forest is kind of a screwy place, even before we get to the supposedly cursed section - in addition to that creepy talking bear Hamburglar inadvertently summons, there's an odd sight gag where Sundae chases after a squirrel, only to discover that that squirrel has one heck of an intimidating ally, namely a human-sized, body builder squirrel in army boots and khaki shorts, whom I just know, without googling, must be the subject of a ton of furry fan art.

The second half of Scared Silly is stronger than the first, as it's here that the story becomes focussed on a clearer objective, with the gang entering the manor and, on discovering that they're now trapped there and at the mercy of the so-called Phantom, having to navigate their way through its labyrinth of rooms, solving various puzzles in order to find the correct way out. You could say that it turns into a kid-friendly version of Christopher Manson's Maze, except that here the clues have the benefit of being halfway comprehensible. Characters who get it wrong get separated from the others, as the Fry Kids and McNuggets find out. Through it all, Ronald manages to keep his head, reassured that the manor is all an illusion, that the reality is a lot less nefarious than it seems, and that the gang can get through it with the use of teamwork and co-operation.

The most entertaining scene occurs at the climax, when the remaining characters are confronted by the Phantom, who challenges them to a final game of riddles. As a particularly fiendish touch, the Phantom uses the correct answer to each riddle to suck the losing contestant into oblivion. So, for example, Tika is challenged with the question: "What is it that the more you take away from it, the bigger it gets?" It's a fairly well-known riddle, and I suspect a good chunk of the video's target audience would be qualified to respond correctly, but Tika comes up with a completely different,more smart-alecky answer that, to her credit, actually does fit the criteria of the question: "A restaurant! The more you take out..." (I can't help but feel that this constitutes a slight Freudian slip on behalf of McDonald's, in admitting that their global empire depends on your insatiable custom). The Phantom still isn't having it. "Way too complicated - and wrong!" he bellows, before ejecting her down an actual hole. Next up are Birdie and Hamburglar, who are asked: "What is you can feel outside, hear inside, but never see it unless it's full of dust?" Again, a fairly easy riddle, but the participants once again manage to screw it up by overthinking - Birdie suggests a dust mop, and Hamburglar mothballs. Too bad, the answer was the wind, and they both get sucked away by a tornado. Finally, it's up to Ronald, Grimace and Sundae to turn things around, as the Phantom poses: "What is is that costs nothing, but is worth everything, weighs nothing, but lasts a lifetime, that one person can't own, but two people can share?" My guess would have been "love", but Ronald comes up with "friendship", which wins him the game, much to the Phantom's chagrin. I suppose love can be unrequited, whereas friendship is typically thought of as being a two-way thing (neither is guaranteed to last a lifetime, however), but still, I would argue friendship is a variation of love, so I could have gotten through on a technicality, right?

The twist in the tale is that the "Phantom" is actually a holographic simulation, and that the man (or boy) behind the curtain is none other than Franklin (he will become a recurring character throughout the series, but here the McDonaldland crew are clearly meeting him for the first time). He and Tika have been secretly manipulating Ronald and the gang into becoming unwitting participants in their elaborate room escape game (it also transpires that the McNuggets, of all characters, were in on the deception - as we'll see from the subsequent video, The Legend of Grimace Island, the zombie chickens are easily led). It's revealed that Franklin's father is a scientist who specialises in virtual reality technology, which accounts (kind of) for how he'd even have access to all of this funky equipment. Franklin concedes victory to Ronald, and Tika apologises for deceiving Ronald and the others, stating that she didn't think they could be persuaded to participate knowingly. Fortunately there are no hard feelings; everyone is reunited, and they resume their outdoor camping trip. Scared Silly ends with a live action epilogue, with Ronald and Sundae back in their living room, and Attack of The Dinosaurs II about to start up on the box. Ronald questions the wisdom of watching a scary movie this late at night, but Sundae assures him that he can handle the experience knowing that Ronald is with him. The adventure bows out with a somewhat less wholesome message, where Ronald directly addresses his audiences and makes explicit what blatantly been on the production's mind this entire time - that, next time, he wants to see them "live and in person at McDonald's". All the same, I give Scared Silly kudos for its refreshingly positive outlook on the horror genre, here celebrated as an opportunity for bonding between two friends. The final item on the tape (besides the credits and our good friend Splaat) is a preview for the next adventure, The Legend of Grimace Island, arriving in 1999. I'm assuming that they didn't have an awful lot of finished animation ready at the time, because the preview consists entirely of still images.

Note: efforts to develop the McDonaldland crew into animated characters actually weren't limited to their Klasky Csupo swansong. Everyone's favourite purveyors of 1980s animation, DiC, had already tried their hand in 1990, with a precursor to the Klasky Csupo series, a one-off direct-to-video special entitled The Adventures of Ronald McDonald: McTreasure Island (meaning that you can watch a Ronald McDonald adventure with an even dodgier closing logo than Splaat). Before that, there was an animated short, Ronald McDonald and The Adventure Machine, but that never received a commercial release, having been produced to be shown exclusively within McDonald's restaurants. The best animated depiction of Ronald McDonald, though, would have to be his turn in the 2009 short Logorama, which certainly caters better to contemporary perceptions of the character. Clowns in general too.

Logo Case Study: MTV Films (aka No One Can Hear You Scream)

The MTV Films logo is another that I don't think enjoys half the notoriety it deserves among aficionados of logo-induced terror. I surely can't be the only person whose experience of seeing Beavis and Butt-Head Do America during its theatrical run was somewhat marred by the horror of having a giant astronaut come lurching toward me from the great black abyss right beforehand. I mean, within the proper context, astronauts can be incredibly unsettling, no? There is an element of the uncanny in them - human-shaped, and yet their human features are obscured. You can't see who or what is buried beneath all of that aluminised Mylar. All I know is that this particular 'naut seems to be thirsting for my blood the instant it sets its sights on me - as it drifts serenely on by, already you can see its fingers stirring in your direction. Just when you think it's safely out of range, it moves in very suddenly for the kill. Even this uncomfortably close and personal, when you're forced to gaze directly into this aggressor's non-existent face, still no human characteristics reveal themselves. You see only what's reflected back at you in that monstrous fishbowl - namely, the MTV logo, and what appears to be the astronaut's torso and assorted appendages dangling about beneath them. Except, the way it's positioned, it almost looks as though that could be your torso and appendages spread out before you. Meaning that you, too, are an uncanny space demon floating across the vast unknown? That the two of you have been fused into one horrifying entity? The backwards MTV logo certainly helps fuel the impression that something is desperately askew in the far-out reaches of space.

MTV Productions begot MTV Films in 1996, as the Gen-X baiting media team grew increasingly ambitious about giving their established properties the big screen treatment. Their initial release, Joe's Apartment (a feature length expansion of a short by John Payson), went with a more subdued logo directly acknowledging the company's television origins (in which the MTV "M" was shown filled with TV static, while a chorus of cockroaches screamed on in approval), but by Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (the film that helped shore up their critical and commercial credibility), they'd decided to embrace the full power of the theatrical setting by adopting something of greater visual intensity. The astronaut itself was a familiar image among MTV viewership, it being a nod to the "One Small Step" ident that had featured on the channel at the time of its launch in 1981. Only whereas that ident was colourful and invigorating, mildly subversive in its playful appropriation of an iconic moment in human history while championing space exploration as the heralding of what tremendous possibilities could still lie ahead, the MTV Films logo plunges the viewer directly into the cold, dark horrors of outer space - a formidable vacuum of insurmountable otherness in which even your fellow Earthlings seem to have shed their familiarity. Of course, depending on which MTV production you're watching, the logo might inevitably lose some of its impact if our spaceman attacks to the sounds of "I Want Candy" by Bow Wow Wow. It's at its most effective when viewed in its silent form - or, as in the case of Beavis and Butt-Head Do America, with muted, ominous audio - reminding us of that stark reality suggested in the promotional tagline to that science fiction slasher that everybody knows. Whatever terrors are waiting to greet us out in the atmosphere, whether human or otherwise, are going to strike without making a sound.

MTV continued the astronaut theme into its succeeding logo, which first appeared in 2005, and did little to quell the feelings of astrophobia brought about by its predecessor. Instead of contending with just one astronaut, we now found ourselves face to face with an entire auditorium of the fishbowl-headed devils as they communed for a theatrical experience of their own, complete with packets of zero-gravity popcorn. At least this time, rather than having the astronaut close in us, we begin with an intense close-up and then zoom out, even if it's all to reveal just how frighteningly outnumbered we are. Once again, emphasis is given to what's reflected in their visors and, on this occasion, it's something comforting and familiar - good old planet Earth - but viewed from a startling distance, affirming that we are now out there among the otherness looking in. Since the astronauts are watching Earth, is the implication that our terrestrial lives are all a great spectacle to them? Or are they slowly but surely drawing their plans against us? (Again, you can't be totally certain what's actually lurking inside those suits.)

By 2010, MTV had opted to tone down the uncanniness and re-emphasise the funkier side of astronauts - their next MTV Films logo was a straight-up remake of the classic (and entirely non-threatening) "One Small Step" ident. Then in 2013 they experimented with ditching the astronauts altogether, with a logo instead comprising a montage of various close-up shots of the human eye (possibly to compensate for its conspicuous absence from their logo history up until now). But as we all know, what's old is new, and with that in mind, we should've guessed that, sooner or later, the original MTV Films astronaut would come creeping back to terrorise us in one form or another. As of 2019, beginning with the VOD release Eli, the cycle of interstellar dread has been kick-started for a whole new generation.

A very happy 40th anniversary to you, MTV.

Logo Case Study: Aardman, Meet Pandaman (aka Mommy, What's Wrong With That Man's Face?)

Aardman aren't typically renowned for being the kind of animation studio to propagate childhood nightmares (whether rightly or wrongly), but they made a solid (if largely unsung) contribution to the pantheon of disturbing production logos just around the point that their time in the sun was getting underway. This is what served as the company's logo during its breakout era, between the smashing success of Creature Comforts in 1989 and their initial efforts to ride the shoulders of the Hollywood giants at the dawn of the new millennium. This was the era that gave us the early Wallace & Gromit shorts, Adam, the Creature Comforts electricity campaign and a variety of strange and demented animated pieces from the increasing multitude of individual talent at the studio, and Aardman certainly weren't averse to scaring the wits out of their ever-expanding legions of fans. If you stuck around to the very end of The Wrong Trousers (as I made the mistake of doing), your reward was to be greeted with a smirking claymation face, about which there was something distinctly, unsettling, immediately wrong. I call this one "unsung" because I rarely see it featured in lists of scary production logos, but it passed the test as far as I was concerned.

The face in question had a large dotted bow-tie, a toothy, lopsided smile, and no discernable eyeballs, features that combined to make it look unspeakably uncanny. My initial assumption was that this mysterious figure was intended to be the "Aard Man" referenced in the studio's moniker (in actuality, the eponymous Aardman was an accident-prone superhero created by studio founders Peter Lord and David Sproxton for a skit they made for Vision On). For a while, I was in the habit of calling him "Pandaman", simply because the dark patches on either side of his nose reminded me of the eye patches on a giant panda, and from a distance I presumed that those curious features were supposed to be his eyes. All the same, I never really settled on how to make sense of this face, and it perturbed me so. Something about the smile struck me as downright unwholesome; the apparent lack of eyes gave the form a distinctly inhuman edge, as if some monstrous being had attempted to mimic human form and not quite managed to master the eyes. Instinctively, I always knew that Pandaman wanted to devour me whole; that an encounter with him would invariably result in winding up on the wrong side of those horrifying gnashers. In other words, he was right at home among the studio's output for the era, which was all about giving a beating heart to the weird and the eerie - check out the 2000 VHS/DVD release Aardman Classics to see what a diabolical little chocolate box it was.

Emphasis upon that beating heart, because as with many of Aardman's freakier pieces, its freakiness goes a long way in bolstering its charm. The fact remains that this is a deeply charming logo, although its charms are more apparent in the full animated version than in the still version that tended to bite the ankles of most productions. In the animated logo, we see the landscape from which Pandaman emerges coming together, and it's a green and vibrant land, brimming with all of the hand-crafted warmth one would expect from the claymation legends. As we encircle the plasticine grass, various cranes and pillars in the backdrop end up forming the frame around Pandaman and the Aardman lettering, when viewed from the pivotal angle, while Pandaman's uncanny mug and various two-dimensional clouds on wires drop down from above to complete the image. In a particularly endearing touch, that garish bow-tie transpires to be a butterfly that flutters gracefully toward his shirt. The accompanying music is a tad ominous, but also stirring, as if something wondrous is taking place. A particularly neat variant is featured at the beginning of the 1991 VHS release Aardman Animations Vol 1, which includes time-lapse photography of an animator putting the numerous components into place, before we zoom in and Pandaman gets to work his typically unearthly magic.

So far as I can tell, the Pandaman logo originated from the titles used for Aardman's series Lip Synch, a collection of five short pieces commissioned by Channel 4 in 1989 (in addition to Nick Park's Creature Comforts, by far the most famous and influential of the five, there was also Ident by Richard Starzak, Going Equipped and War Story, a couple of animated monologues by Peter Lord, and Next by Barry Purves, who at the time was working as a freelance animator on various Aardman projects). Each short was preceded by the unnerving image of a mouth appearing in a small beige frame and growling the words "Lip Synch", while one of the red spots from his conspicuous polka dot bow-tie rolled out and created the corresponding lettering. Many of Pandaman's characteristics were carried over from this face, including the bow-tie and the shadowy blotches around the jaws. Given the title of the series, the focus on the mouth makes total sense, although here the frame is so tightly boxed around the feature in question that his uncanny lack of eyes goes unrevealed. Which is not to say that the Lip Synch titles are any less unnerving than the Pandaman logo; the snarling, disembodied mouth is still pretty freaking monstrous, its enormous teeth no less carnivorous, the guttural manner in which it spits out the title appropriately inhuman.

By the late 1990s, Aardman were seeking a new look, and what's interesting is that they did initially appear interested in retaining Pandaman as a long-term emblem and incorporating his terrible form into future branding. The closing titles for the 1998 series Rex The Runt feature a different, two-dimensional logo, in which Pandaman is depicted shouting through a megaphone (although the logo is rendered in such a way as to downplay his monstrous features, so that he just looks like any regular human with a bow-tie). This was not to be, however. Pandaman disappeared shortly after and was long out of the picture by the time Chicken Run, Aardman's first theatrical feature film, debuted in 2000. Aardman presumably wanted their signature image to herald the bold new era they were currently entering, and subjecting mainstream family audiences to the delights of Pandaman in a theatrical setting was possibly deemed a step too far. Instead, he was replaced by a completely new concoction, in which various two-dimensional figures are shown rotating around the gears in a great machine, only to come to an immediate halt when a hand reached in and presses the central figure, a small black box with limbs and a head, and on its torso, a bright red star which was to serve as the company's new trademark going forward. There are few forms less objectionable than that of a star, but also few more generic, and the demented character of Pandaman is very much missed. Not that the gears logo (which itself appears to have fallen by the wayside) doesn't have a likeable ingenuity all of its own - it is, after all, more benign than Pandaman only so long as you don't focus on the tortured faces of the various forms trapped within those rotating cogs. There's a childhood nightmare to be derived from that, I'm sure.

Logo Case Study: Lakeshore Entertainment

The Lakeshore Entertainment logo is a fascinating example of how you can completely alter the tone and character of a familiar logo with a simple tweak of perspective.

Founded in 1994 by producers Tom Rosenberg and Ted Tannebaum, Lakeshore Entertainment Group was behind such films as Box of Moonlight, The Gift and the Underworld series. In its classic form, it's one of my favourite movie production logos, but in recent years has taken a turn down a more skin-crawling alley.

The logo, which shows the silhouette of a boy racing leaping with his arms outstretched toward a shimmering lake, initially existed as a still image, but acquired motion in 1997 with the release of Going All The Way, so that we saw this kid's journey as he hurtles down a boardwalk and into that final iconic pose. The emphasis, carried over from the original still logo, was on that moment of pure anticipation - the euphoric gap between the boy's feet leaving that firm, solid surface and plummeting downward into the waters, when he's hoisted himself up to the absolute peak of his physical capability (make no mistake, the kid is embracing air, not water, it's important that we never actually see the child succumb to the law of gravity). The motion logo adds another dimension, by opening with a close-up of the lake and immediately immersing us in this sparkling, pristine paradise, before pulling backwards to reveal the boy approaching from behind. His shadowy form, coupled with the fact that we never see his face, gives him a slight air of the uncanny, although this is largely counterbalanced by his unmistakably youthful figure, which emits a playful enthusiasm - also important, as by starting with such an immersive shot of those still, unspoiled waters, it's very tempting to interpret the boy's approach as a disturbance, the natural calm about to be completely obliterated by the boy's brand of lakeshore entertainment, as he dive-bombs the environs and fills them up with his terrestrial contaminants. The sepia visuals and soft flute tones, meanwhile, give the scenario a distinctly dreamy, nostalgic flavour, which clues us in that this is not only a perfect, idealised state of prepubescent bliss, but a distant one that continues to fade into memory. That uncanny child is less like a child than an avatar for an off-screen dreamer yearning to connect with that lost, only vaguely remembered euphoria. As the child disappears into this woozy landscape, the final image represents the nostalgic's ultimate aspiration, which is to stop time in tracks and remain frozen in this unblemished state for all eternity. That way, the child gets to experience a perpetual high, impervious to the brutal reality that, sooner or later, everything must come back down to Earth.

 

 

The Lakeshore Entertainment logo that appeared from late 2016 onward, starting with Underworld: Blood Wars, recreates the same basic imagery but somehow managers to completely revamp the whole thing, removing the dreamy, nostalgic aura of its predecessor and making the uncanny element more salient. This is achieved by switching our starting point, so that we begin not with that entrancing close-up of the lake, but down on the boardwalk, so that our first glimpse is of the underside of the kid's feet as he lumbers down the visibly wet wooden surface toward a lake which, this time, remains at a firm distance. The emphasis instead is on how looming and gangling the runner is; as shadowy and obscured as ever, attention is drawn in particular to his feet, which as a result of that uncomfortable opening close-up, seem monstrous (seen below, with audio from the opening to Underworld: Blood Wars, it's even more ominous, since those loud booming noises seem like the trudging noises of his feet hitting the boardwalk). The features of the lake itself are clearer, crisper and more splendid-looking than that sepia dream lake, and yet it lacks the same warmth and presence - it is just a flat backdrop against which our protagonist can flex his spindly proportions. In spite of his lumbering presence, he pulls off a graceful leap at the end, but the closing freeze frame feels carefully choreographed, more like a ballet than an expression of youthful spontaneity.

 

Same imagery; different logo. Compared to the original template, this newer logo offers not hazy escapism, but total immersion in the fundamental freakiness of the human form.

Logo Case Study: Rainbow Releasing (aka If You Want Poetry, Stand And Stare)

If you've ever seen Henry Jaglom's 1995 film Last Summer in The Hamptons, you'll know what kind of shock it throws your way in the opening moments. Jaglom (for this is his production company) takes an unrelenting approach in cold-plunging us into his directorial vision - when you start up the film, you're immediately greeted by none other than Orson Welles' steely gaze staring you down from above a miniature wooden rainbow. The camera zooms in, with Welles refusing to break his glare, and the words "A Rainbow Release" materialise on screen. Fade to black, and we're in that promised summer in the Hamptons. This inexplicable image (to those unversed in Jaglom's filmography, anyhow) is made all the more disconcerting for playing out in total silence. No bombastic jingles here, but what we have is very bit as upsetting. In other words, the ideal logo.

The Rainbow Releasing logo is a particular favourite of mine. It's spooky, striking and above all unique - I don't think there's any other production logo out there that quite captures this one's particular flavour. For this reason, it has built up a fair amount of notoriety among logophobia aficionados, despite its relative obscurity (as far as I'm aware, it appears in only two movies - Last Summer in The Hamptons, and Jaglom's 2001 film Festival in Cannes; if you're familiar with it, then odds are that you're either a buff of logos or a buff of Jaglom). I'll admit that I find that notoriety both totally understandable and a little bemusing. It's an unsettling logo, no question, and the sheer intensity of Welles' stare really is something. But therein lies the mitigating factor - it registers immediately that this is Orson Welles we're looking at, otherwise known as the director of this masterpiece. He has one of the most recognisable mugs on the planet; his stare here may not be the most placating, but you can put a name to it. There's an immediate familiarity about this logo. But there's strangeness too, and I think this is why it strikes a nerve with so many viewers. There is an eerie kind of incongruity to just about every slightest detail. Even the name, Rainbow Releasing, seems at odds with the imagery, the presence of that wooden rainbow notwithstanding. It suggests warmth, vibrancy, effervescence, fun. Which is not quite communicated in what we see in the logo. This thing is certainly enigmatic, but it's threatening.

In actuality, the image in question is a nod to Jaglom's personal roots, for it's taken from his debut feature, A Safe Place from 1971, in which Welles starred as a character known as The Magician. Unfortunately, the film itself continues to elude me, and I have never been able to track down a copy and view it for myself, so the exact context of the scene in question remains a mystery to me. Criterion did release the film as part of a box set called America Lost and Found: The BBS Story in 2010, but not in a region coding that I can use. From what I can tell, it's about a young woman named Noah (Tuesday Weld) living in New York in the early 70s, caught up in some kind of love triangle and attempting to reconcile herself with her childhood innocence. As for Welles The Magician, he's possibly supposed to be an imaginary friends of hers. On their website, Criterion describe the picture as a "delicate, introspective drama, laced with fantasy elements." I have to admit that, on paper, the entire thing sounds absolutely fantastic. Tuesday Weld, Orson Welles and Jack Nicholson in a movie in which fantasy and reality are repeatedly mingling, so that you can't tell what's real in the context of the picture and what's not? I would watch this thing in a heartbeat, if I could just get hold of it. Unfortunately, people in 1971 felt very differently. Jaglom's debut endured a critical savaging, cinemagoers ignored it, and the film has largely languished in obscurity ever since, although Criterion's more recent recognition might be the first step in rehabilitating its tattered reputation.

Welles himself had of course been deceased for ten years by the time that Jaglon appropriated his likeness into his production logo and inducted him to the logophobic canon, so he never knew about this fantastic little footnote in his legacy. As with Ubu the dog, we have that uncanniness in being confronted with a motionless image of a dead being - there's some movement at the beginning, but the bulk of the logo is comprised of an uncomfortable close-up with a single freeze frame. Once again we have that focus on inertia, and the distillation of life to static image, only here we have the added malaise of the undead image gazing back, as if regarding us with a kind of other-worldly presence from beyond the grave.

What makes the logo particularly inspired, though, is the balance it strikes between charm and menace, between the whimsical and the downright uncanny. It's surreal enough to play like a disturbed dream that's flirting dangerously close to crossing over into nightmare territory, or an attempted retreat into a would-be reassuring memory that's taken on an unwelcome life of its own. Which may well be appropriate, given the source. Weld's character in A Safe Place is out to recreate the safety of her childhood (hence the title) and I couldn't tell you if she finds it with Welles and that box from which he produces his wooden rainbow, but I certainly don't think that Jaglom's audience finds it within the isolated space of the logo (it's been pointed out that the arched arrangement of the "A Rainbow Release" lettering does not quite sync up with the shape of Welles' wooden rainbow, adding to the off-kilter feel, although I understand that this was modified for its appearance before Festival in Cannes). What it captures, and captures beautifully, is a kind of disturbance lurking beneath the surface of the image, so that we have the feeling of being profoundly unsafe without being able to pinpoint what, exactly, is so vehemently wrong. After all, there should be nothing inherently unsettling about the sight of Orson Welles holding up a rainbow, but by focusing on the discomfiture of a single, frozen moment, Jaglon manages to bring out the ominous, creeping tension that exists only in the scene's hidden cracks.

That summer in the Hamptons wasn't any safer.

Tex vs Homer: A Showdown In TH\

We recently touched a bit on the THX logo and their somewhat spotty history of intermittently bringing in popular characters to weather the trademark terrors of Deep Note. I couldn't walk away from that without acknowledging that there is another trailer out there in which The Simpsons once again showed their twisted affection for THX iconography. The catch being that this one wasn't an official promo, but a queer little thing lurking deep with the crevices of the DVD release of The Simpsons Movie. It didn't play in theatres, and to see it all (before multiple uploads made their way onto YouTube) required some nifty manipulation of the DVD menu. If you ever found yourself curious as to who would win in a fight between Homer Simpson and Tex the THX robot...you got your answer right here.

How do you access this on your Simpsons Movie DVD? From the main menu, select Language Selection, then navigate left to English 5.1 Dolby Digital, and then left again. You should now see a red vertical bar besides the Language and Audio title. Select this and you're all go.

The trailer goes to lengths to stress, in its disc presentation, that it's merely a parody and that THX had no involvement. There, it's accompanied by the following disclaimer:

Spoof Trailer Disclaimer
The THX sound process was not used in The Simpsons Movie or on this disc.

Still, even without the disclaimer, there are ample clues as to the unauthorised nature of the promo. A number of wily tricks have been deployed to keep the THX lawyers at bay, notably that the THX lettering has been deliberately rendered incomplete, with the X short of its upstroke (Tex himself, though, has been quite faithfully recreated, albeit in 2D). Also discernible is the total lack of Deep Note, which has been replaced with a striking yet considerably less discordant sound. This Not-Deep Note actually sounds quite agreeable to my ears, with less of the sensory assault factor, and when Tex activates the blue lighting (a nod to the original Tex promo from 1996 - see below - although there Tex turned on the lighting when the THX logo needed repairing, not after), I think the whole transition looks rather pretty. It says "dramatic" without resorting to any of the characteristic THX aggression, and I can't help but feel that this could have been quite splendid if developed into a legitimate theatrical promo. The visual and audio disturbance is nevertheless enough to send Homer into a fervid rage, for it's at this point that he vacates his hammock to pursue the hapless robot and pound him into a metallic heap, a cascade of cartoon violence that seems drolly at odds with the beguiling character of the sound. Seeing Homer reduce the inoffensive Tex to a pile of dented scrap metal is certainly disconcerting, but can you imagine how much more traumatic it would have been if this were an official THX trailer, and we witnessed Homer beat up Tex to the bowel-mangling sounds of Deep Note? I suspect it would have looked as if that nightmarish leitmotif was activating Homer's inner Cujo, compelling him to tear that robot limb from limb less out of vengeance for disturbing the peace than by his being possessed by that hellish noise and having no choice but to carry out its diabolical machinations.

(Note: another nice nod to the original Tex trailer are the hammering sounds when both Tex and Homer are off-screen. Obviously, we have the disturbing implication that Homer is beating Tex with his own severed limb, but it also recalls the hammering noises made when Tex disappeared from view in his own promo.)

The obvious question posed by this fake trailer is why does it even exist? A parody such as this can exist purely for amusement purposes, of course, but I find it strange to think they would have gone to the trouble of animating this sequence simply for it to be squirreled away as a hidden extra on a home media release. Surely there is more of a backstory here? Is it at all possible that it was salvaged from proposed plans for an actual theatrical promo that wasn't given the go-ahead? I've no idea, but I have to wonder how thrilled THX would have been either way about the prospect of seeing their beloved mascot get slaughtered like that. We can only hope that someone out there in that ominous black/blue void was merciful enough to carry out a few repairs on Tex himself after Homer was done pounding him.

THX: When Shrek And Donkey Were In Too Deep

The late 1990s and early 2000s saw a heck of a lot of bile in the Disney-DreamWorks relations. Much was made of the rivalry between Antz and A Bug's Life in 1998, when two suspiciously similar-looking films in which the hero was a non-conformist ant were released only a couple of months apart, and Steve Jobs and John Lasseter were both quite vocal in accusing Jeffery Katzenberg of foul play. The enmity really reached its peak in 2001, however, when Shrek and Monsters, Inc found themselves squaring off in a less direct but equally cutthroat grudge match. Back then, the war for Hollywood animation dominance was still waging. 2000 had yielded no clear winner, just one drop-out in the form of Fox Animation Studios, who formally shut down that summer following the box office troubles of Titan A.E. DreamWorks Animation had a mixed year - Chicken Run was a hit, and got their short-lived collaboration with Aardman off to a deceptively good start, but the traditionally animated The Road to El Dorado wasn't nearly so fortunate. Disney's year was overall respectable but worryingly ho-hum for the animation studio that had dominated the preceding decade - Dinosaur, their first predominantly CG animated feature, did not perform atrociously at the box office, but still fell well short of the studio's expectations (for how much they had hyped the bloody thing), while the lacklustre performance of The Emperor's New Groove signaled that the Renaissance era of the 1990s had just about run out of steam. Pixar, meanwhile, did not release a feature film that year, but the strong response to Toy Story 2 at the tail-end of 1999 suggested that their future still was sunny. 2001, on the other hand, saw the balance tip drastically in DreamWorks' favour. The box office success of Shrek was earth-shattering, and with Disney's traditional animation department having struck out with Atlantis: The Lost Empire, all eyes were now on Pixar's Monsters, Inc to redress the balance and defend Disney's throne. Adding to the fire was the uneasy knowledge that both films would ultimately be going up against one another the following year for the first ever Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. There was less of the really overt bitterness we saw with those ant movies, but the knives were out nevertheless, and the above THX logo, in which Shrek and Donkey offer their own reinterpretation of Deep Note with bagpipes and a kazoo, wound up paying the price.

The Shrek THX logo was originally intended for theatrical distribution in late 2001. Previously, THX were generally not in the business of doing crossovers with popular characters - there was that Simpsons variant we touched on last time, although the circumstances behind that one were a bit exceptional. And when THX agreed to a collaboration with DreamWorks Animation featuring the jolly green ogre who had recently taken the world by storm, they had unwittingly stepped into a war zone. According to this article, THX expressed nothing but enthusiasm for the logo until roughly a fortnight before it was expected to debut, when they decided, seemingly quite out of the blue, not to use it. THX's last minute u-turn led to speculation that Disney and Pixar had successfully coerced THX into ditching their adversary's promo. And while both Disney and THX denied this, this article gives you a very strong flavour of just how vitriolic the rivalry was between the studios at the time. Part of the problem, it seems, is that the Shrek logo would have debuted alongside the theatrical release of Monsters, Inc, which "coincidentally" happened to synchronize with the home media release of Shrek. Pixar weren't overly keen on the whole notion of sleeping with the enemy - particularly where the enemy might have ulterior motives for climbing into bed with them. The Shrek logo does not explicitly plug the DreamWorks film, but it's plausible that Pixar saw this as a sneaky attempt to steal or at least diminish their thunder. The formal reason for their abandonment of the promo, as given by THX manager Monica Dashwood, was that THX realised they had made a mistake in attaching themselves to a specific film, which was ultimately seen to deviate from the company's key objective: "We're about film presentation in theaters." They couldn't be seen as playing favourites, in other words.

And so it was that the Shrek variant was held hostage for a period, although evidently it didn't stay locked up forever. It seems that it was approved for theatrical distribution alongside Shrek The Third (2007) in the UK, and I'm going to assume other locations. So what happened to reverse the logo's fortunes, then? Maybe the vitriol between Disney/Pixar and DreamWorks was simply cooling over at that stage, and Pixar felt less reason to feel threatened by DreamWorks. Or maybe they were happier with DreamWorks promos when they stayed on their own turf. It seems that this wasn't the only change of heart that THX had on the matter, for despite Dashwood's comments on the wisdom of attaching themselves to a specific picture, they did later go back on that and put out another logo variant featuring characters from Blue Sky's 2008 film Horton Hears a Who! A Horton/THX crossover does not, in itself, seem like the most outlandish of ideas, given the subject of the film, but it raises questions as to how serious THX ever were about this particular policy.

The great, lingering question, of course, is how much of that trademark THX terror is retained when you have the warmth and familiarity of the Shrek and Dr Seuss characters trotting across the ominous black void? As long as there's Deep Note, there's deep despair - although the Horton logo is probably one of the least scary THX variants, thanks in part to how Horton's laughter obscures the initial portion of Deep Note, and the reassuring wink he shoots at the camera, which really takes the sting off. With the Shrek logo, I think the presence of that kazoo actually makes it all the more ear-piercing, even if it pays off with the final punchline.

Also, just what does Donkey say at the very end of this logo? Most sources have his closing words down as "Chill Shrek", which I suppose is more plausible, although first time I saw it I could've sworn he said, "See a shrink."

Logo Case Study: THX and Deep Note (aka The Audience Is Subliminally Seduced)

In their quest for an indelible earworm, media production logos have yielded some seriously ear-splitting leitmotifs throughout the decades, but few with more willful intention of wreaking havoc on the audience's lower intestines than that accompanying the THX logo. Here we have one of the most notoriously discombobulating logos of all time - the black screen and imposing THX lettering (George Lucas understood intuitively that there was something highly arresting about that specific sequence of characters) always seemed formidable enough, but key to the logo's nightmarish allure was its characteristic sound, otherwise known as Deep Note. Deep Note, the brainchild of Lucasfilm's James A. Moorer, was not designed to make your theatrical outing a pleasant one. Rather, it was conceived with the purpose of unsettling you and making you really feel the raw intensity of the experience, so that you were acutely aware of just how small and fragile was your shuddering form in the face of this all-out sonic assault. You found yourself gazing into the dark abyss and hearing the harrowing cries of your fellow damned. In terms of pure apocalyptic savagery, I personally happen to think that the frugal nastiness and confusing imagery of the Genesis Home Video logo still has it beat, proving that all the grandeur and technological advancement in the world will not guarantee you a place at the top. But I am certainly not one to deny the hypnotic fury of Deep Note. Make no mistake, it's a close second.

The first time I personally remember encountering the THX logo was on the VHS for the movie Independence Day (1996). Even on the small screen, it hurt. I remember finding the highly unpleasant noise it emitted to be leagues more terrifying than anything within the film itself. Much like The S From Hell, the THX logo inspired such strong aversion among legions of moviegoers the world over that THXphobia has become a phenomenon unto itself. Just how do you even begin to describe a sound as painfully unnatural-sounding as Deep Note? It seems futile to even try, but here's how the official description has it:

"The THX logo theme consists of 30 voices over seven measures, starting in a narrow range, 200 to 400 Hz, and slowly diverting to preselected itches encompassing three octaves. The 30 voices begin at pitches between 200 Hz and 400 Hz and arrive at pre-selected pitches spanning three octaves by the fourth measure. The highest pitch is slightly detuned while there are double the number of voices of the lowest two pitches."

This bombastic logo's unrelenting aggression was all just a particularly ruthless means of ensuring that you knew damned well that everything you heard on your theatre excursion you owed to the motion picture quality certification system developed by film-maker George Lucas and audio engineer Tomlinson Holman in 1982. And what better way of celebrating optimum sound technology than by slaughtering the audience's hearing capacities in the process (an irony that Tiny Toon Adventures had fun with when they parodied the logo in the 1992 movie How I Spent My Vacation)? I've heard it said that THX stands for Tomlinson Holman's eXperiment, although it is blatantly a nod to Lucas's debut feature film THX 1138 (1971), which in itself touches on another, more subtly unsettling component of the logo that gets overall less attention compared to the terrors of Deep Note - namely, why are we being confronted with those specific letters? Is there some deeper significance that's perhaps passing us by? No one has ever quite settled on a definitive answer regarding what the title (and protagonist moniker) THX 1138 actually means, and we've heard quite a bit of conflicting information over the years, so some element of that mystery is inevitably carried over into the logo. If the IMDb trivia page is to be believed, then "George Lucas apparently named the film after his San Francisco telephone number, 849-1138". Apparently. The idea is that the T, H and X correspond to letters found on the buttons for each of those numbers, although it would be only one of several possible combinations. Any reason Lucas picked those in particular? On an interview for the DVD release Reel Talent, Lucas claimed that he was drawn to this sequence because he found the symmetry to be aesthetically pleasing. Screenwriter Walter Murch, however, offers a more tantalizing explanation on the film's DVD commentary, when he shares his interpretation that THX was coding for SEX, which seems less far-fetched when you consider that THX 1138 is set in a futuristic world where sexual intercourse is strictly forbidden. I hope that Murch's explanation is correct, because it amuses me so much so much to think that we spent decades cowering in fear at what was actually a proxy for the word SEX in big bold lettering. Did Wilson Bryan Key ever have anything to say about THX, I wonder?

THXphobia became such a pervasive facet of the theatre-going experience that it was inevitable that fear of the logo would permeate popular culture. Odds are that you're familiar with the Simpsons episode, "Burns' Heir", in which the patrons of the Aztec Theater are subjected to a fairly faithful recreation of this very logo (fairly - the screen is white, which isn't quite as ominous), with all kinds of enamel-shattering, skull-rupturing, ceiling-stripping results (the final punchline being that even Deep Note doesn't go deep enough for Abe). It's a powerful (if obviously exaggerated) representation of the kind of effect this logo would have on a crowded auditorium, in that you really do feel as though the world is toppling down around you. THX were flattered by the parody (possibly because anyone who's still alive at the end erupts into a flurry of cheers), and adopted it as a legitimate trailer for a period in the mid-90s, albeit with souped up animation, as seen above. (Incidentally, Siskel and Ebert: The Movie, which received Two Thumbs Up from Siskel and Ebert, is one of my favourite Simpsons visual gags. Sad that no such event occurred in our own timeline.)

Long before The Simpsons took it on, the THX logo made its grand debut before the premiere showing of Return of The Jedi in 1983 - in its original form, it was known as "Wings" (named after the 1927 silent film, not the Paul McCartney band), although the "Broadway" variant (see top of page) represents the logo in its most familiar form. There have been many, many variants on the THX logo over the years, one of the most infamous being "Cimarron", which was first seen alongside the theatrical release of the movie Willow in 1988. Only (just to prove that the above Simpsons moment wasn't totally devoid of realism), it was recalled in 1992 due to complaints from cinemas that it was causing their speakers to blow. "Cimarron" later returned with a new sound arrangement by composer James Horner; the original arrangement is currently still lost to the public, so one can only imagine what kinds of gut-twisting horrors it contained, but various efforts have been made by logo cognoscenti to reconstruct it. "Cimarron" actually starts out innocuously enough, with some lovely noises from an orchestra getting into gear, but IT'S A TRAP! The second that conductor's baton comes into view, the whole world suddenly explodes in a terrifying supernova and we find ourselves being sucked through a vortex into oblivion, with nothing but dead space and a suspicious stand-in for the word SEX looming in for a lethal collision. This one's definitely a lot showier than the classic version on the visual front, but I think I prefer the brutal, nihilistic simplicity of the Broadway variant.

In the latter half of the 90s, THX made an effort to become a notch less threatening, when they adopted a mascot in the form of Tex the robot, who was created by John Lasseter of Pixar fame. Still, an innocent-looking CGI robot will only take the edge off so much, even when he's goofing around with one of those moo boxes. If you ever found yourself morbidly curious enough to want to know what Deep Note would sound like if rendered through a herd of demonically possessed cattle, then Tex gave you your answer.

On a closing note, at some point, I really do want to talk in more detail about THX 1138 itself. Firstly, because I think it's Lucas's best film (no Star Wars devotee, I). But also because the credits go backwards (down, not up), and in a strange, muted way I've always found that to be every bit as disconcerting as anything about Deep Note.

Logo Case Study: Sit Ubu Sit

Fear works in mysterious ways, and some instances of logo-induced cold sweats are somewhat easier to rationalise than others. If you squint, then it isn't hard to suppose why The S From Hell, the fiendish combination of abstract, alien animation and the screechiest, tinniest synths around should have inspired such unbridled terror among a young generation of unsuspecting Monkees viewers. But how about a logo pivoting around a tender moment of heartfelt bonding between an endearing pet and their doting owner? Can that too be transformed into the building blocks of a few extraordinarily uncanny nightmares? Oh, logophobia finds a way. Here we have the case of Ubu, the frisbee-toting Francophile labrador. Our ears told us that he was a good dog, but our eyes sure as heck didn't see the evidence.

Ubu Roi the dog (so named for the Alfred Jarry play Ubu Roi) was the beloved companion of television producer Gary David Goldberg, whose credits include such series as Family Ties, Brooklyn Bridge and Spin City. In 1982, Goldberg formed his own production company, Ubu Productions, named in honor of his faithful pooch, and Ubu's likeness graced the ending of all associated programs. The image, which showed Ubu standing in a park with a frisbee clasped between his jaws, was taken at the Tuileries Garden, near the Louvre Museum in Paris, while Goldberg was embarking on an extended hitch-hiking trip across Europe with Ubu and wife Diana, a journey detailed by Goldberg in his 2008 autobiography Sit Ubu Sit: How I Went From Brooklyn To Hollywood With The Same Woman, The Same Dog And A Lot Less Hair. The Goldbergs, both card-carrying members of the 1960s hippie movement, had set out on the trip when Richard Nixon's being voted into office left them feeling alienated by the shifting cultural mood of the US, a disillusionment which Gary was later able to convert into prime-time mirth when he returned and created Family Ties, the early 1980s sitcom that gave a pre-Back To The Future Michael J Fox his big break. Apart from those select European motorists who had the privilege of having Ubu ride upfront with them back during the Goldbergs' days of wanderlusting, the world knew the dog as only a static image that appeared at the end of Family Ties and successive productions, accompanied by a disembodied voice (courtesy of Goldberg himself) commanding the dog to sit, and subsequently praising him just before the dog barked in affirmation. In an interview given by Goldberg in 2007, he explained what the image of the frisbee-gnawing Ubu, by now a familiar icon to anyone who paid heed to the chattering cyclops over the past two and a half decades, had always signified to him personally:

"We were hitchhiking up to Brussels and Diana had snapped that picture. I just thought, you know, I want very little distance between who I was that day and who I am now. I just don’t want a lot of distance there. So it was really nice to have that logo to always remind you who you are."

No doubt that there is an awful lot of love in that logo. And in theory it's all very charming. The man was so infatuated with his dog that he not only named his production company after him, he immortalised him in a logo in which he informed the world what a great dog he was. In practice...it's a little spooky. I think the eeriness of the logo is rooted in the disconnect between what we hear and what we see. Ubu is depicted as a motionless image; ergo he does not actually obey the commands of the offscreen Goldberg (who praises him regardless). The sounds suggest life, motion and interaction, but the visuals give us only inertia, and that leaves us with this unsettling, almost sickly sensation. Ubu's apparent disobedience has provided inspiration for parodies, including an episode of Robot Chicken in which an offscreen Seth Green loses his cool with the unresponsive dog and puts a bullet in him, followed by the sounds of a dog whimpering.

It will not surprise you to learn that Ubu is by now long dead, having passed away in 1984. He enjoyed an enviable afterlife in this production logo, but perhaps there is something vaguely haunting about it too. Much like Sassy the cat, doomed to hang in there in her nightmarish struggle against gravity for all eternity, Ubu remains suspended his is state of inertia, and by extension disobedience, subject to the commands of his master but unable to act on them. We have only the image of a deceased dog, so stiff and stationary that he might as well be a work of taxidermy, and the sounds of a loving moment of interaction between master and pet that once might have been. There is no starker reminder that Ubu is gone and haunted images are all that remain. Time has distilled Ubu, the dog who once hitch-hiked across Europe and played frisbee outside the Louvre, to a flat image and robbed him of his ability to demonstrate that he is indeed a good dog. But maybe there's something heartening about it too. After all, the disembodied voice of Goldberg doesn't care whether or not Ubu can actually make good on his commands to sit. He loves him regardless. Ubu is a dog with absolutely nothing that he needs to prove.

Goldberg himself passed away in 2013, aged 69. So this truly is a haunted logo. We have an image from a bygone era, set to the sounds of two departed souls interacting as they would have done some time long ago. Goldberg said that he set out to preserve a sense of who he was on the day that picture was taken and to stay connected to it no matter where he ended up in all subsequent chapters of his life, and that moment continues to echo within the collective psyche of a generation of TV viewers. But of course, we're only onlookers. We can't actively participate in the moment. All we can do is filter it through our own (slightly nonplussed) cultural memories, and bask in the uncanny knowledge that, for decades, our prime-time viewing habits were haunted by the lingering presence of a spectral labrador with the unsettling inability to ever lower his behind.