Logo Case Study: DiC "Kid In Bed"

Now seems as good a time as any to take an in-depth look at the television logo which, as I mentioned in my review of the Rodney Ascher film The S From Hell, most confounded me in my own childhood years.

For Xmas 1990, my parents gave me a VHS tape which was deceptively titled Sylvanian Families: The Movie.  In actuality it was not a "movie" at all, but seven back-to-back episodes of the US Sylvanian Families TV series (not to be confused with the British stop-motion series Stories of the Sylvanian Families which ran around the same time).  Even at that age, I was savvy enough to recognise that a back-to-back marathon of self-contained TV episodes is not the same thing as a feature film.  I was also savvy enough to know that the word that flashed up on screen if you played right through to the end of the tape was a bad one that I would certainly get into a lot of trouble for saying in adult company (unless it were followed by a Whittington or Turpin).

If you stuck it out to the very end of the tape, you were rewarded with an odd sequence involving a kid's bedroom, a sleeping beagle and a giant celestial sea urchin who spawns the letters "D-i-C" against the night sky, at which point a disembodied child's voice can be heard uttering "Dick!", with the cheery enthusiasm of a youngster who knows just what kind of power they're wielding on the edge of their tongue.  Terrifying it wasn't, but I recall nevertheless feeling strangely unsettled by that sequence.  The eerie motionlessness of the opening image, coupled with us subsequently assuming the perspective of an unseen presence crawling across this random kid's bedroom, was just the slightest bit unnerving, and that was before we even reached the climax, where they flashed that word up in big bright letters for my impressionable young eyes to see (the spelling was a little off, of course, but I'm not sure that I appreciated that at the time).  It was a freaky experience.
 
The notion that a bunch of innocent-looking VHS tapes from the late 80s/early 90s were looking to indoctrinate children into the joys of cursing by inserting title cards with random expletives at the end would no doubt be the ultimate wet dream of a few moral outrage lobby groups, but naturally there was no such conspiracy.  DiC was merely an acronym, and stood for "Diffusion Information Communication."  I've also since been informed that, technically, the correct pronunciation is "deek", but I can say in all honesty that I always read it it as "dick" and that's exactly what I heard back then.  Of course, DiC started life as a French animation production company, before a former Hanna-Barbera writer, Andy Heyward, founded its American arm in 1982 and found great success with a little cartoon called Inspector Gadget, so perhaps they weren't quite so receptive to the implications of the acronym in English.  Of course, any animation buff worth their salt already knows the story that, elsewhere in the industry, the acronym was said derogatorily to stand for "Do It Cheap", due to the aggressiveness of the company's cost-cutting production policies.

The "Kid In Bed" logo I saw at the end of Sylvanian Families: The Movie had first come into use in 1987 and, DiC cartoons being as ubiquitous as they were in my childhood, I would encounter it in a few more places and eventually grow somewhat accustomed to it.  Earlier versions of this logo used a variation in which the company name is chanted by a choir instead of a lone child, but this is the one that proved most prevalent.  Evidently someone somewhere did feel a whole lot of affection for that logo, because it stuck around for the entirety of the 1990s, and we were into the 2000s by the time DiC started phasing it out in favour of a sickeningly garish, oh-so-very-00s "Incredible World of DiC" logo (which retained the awkward disembodied kids' voice).  Kind of sobering to think that the beagle seen on the bed would have been long dead by the time they finally pulled it.

Ignoring the awkwardness and unintentional hilarity of the company name for just a moment, the entire sequence is cheesy as sin, the only genuine vulgarity afoot being in the sheer chintziness of it all.  I mean, I can see the relevance of a child's bedroom for a company that specialised in making cartoons for the very young - obviously, DiC were keen to equate their entertainment with the world of childhood dreams and fantasy, and showing a child surrounded by all manner of material comforts, not to mention man's best friend, was presumably intended to conjure up cosy feelings of warmth and security.  But let's face it, the basic set-up is incredibly twee (it looks, for all the world, like the mise-en-scène favoured by a 1980s Steven Spielberg wannabe), and it's mainly thanks to that unfortunate-sounding company name that the logo gains any kind of additional off-the-wall value.  That disembodied voice chanting "dick" or "deek" is really what pushed this thing over the edge into becoming a such classic childhood curiosity, but there are other elements that stick out as odd or off-kilter - the "star" which becomes the dot in the DiC logo's "i" looks absolutely hideous (more like an albino sea urchin, as I alluded earlier), and watching the sequence now, I find myself getting strangely hung up on whether or not the beagle's eyes are open as we fly past it.  I'm not sure I like the notion that the dog was watching us the entire time.

Now that I think about it, the opening sequence to the Sylvanian Families video also made me feel uneasy, albeit for entirely different reasons.  Was I the only one bothered by the fact that the Woodkeeper appears to kill a boy in the opening credits by dissolving him into that stream of sparkly energy - which subsequently dissipates when the main titles appear?  That kid has just been wiped out of all existence.  Did nobody else have the exact same concerns while watching this sequence?

Oh, and another side-note: for our questionable Wikipedia information of the day, their article for Sylvanian Families currently states that Dan Castellaneta provided the voice of the show's main villain, Packbat.  There are just two problems with that:

1) Dan Castellaneta's name does not appear in the end credits (see above).

2) Packbat was so blatantly voiced by Len Carlson.  I mean, come on.