Not quite as infamous as The S From Hell or the Viacom V of Doom, this logo from Disney's early dabblings in home media entertainment has nevertheless proven to be a fixture of the darkest, most heavily-repressed recesses of many a logophobe's soul - indeed, no retrospective on the most terrifying media logos of all-time seems complete without a nod to the freaky neon Mickey who appeared at the start of the original clamshell VHS release of The Devil and Max Devlin. It's recognisably the company's signature character, but no more reassuring for it.
I was born in the mid-80s and didn't acquire my first Disney VHS until 1990, by which point Disney had moved onto the Sorcerer's Apprentice Mickey logo (which many found to be equally troubling, although we'll get to that in due course), so naturally I missed out on this one. I have little reason to believe that it wouldn't have psychologically scarred me to the moon and back, however, what with its blaring, over the top fanfare music and gut-churningly nasty Mickey Mouse silhouette, which looks all poised to lunge from your television set and drag you back into the plains of Disney Hell. Clearly, Disney were going for exciting, bold, dramatic, maybe even a little futuristic with this logo, but instead they had every child who expected something safe and innoxious retreating to the bathroom in terror. (To anyone who'd argue that the "Pink Elephants" sequence in Dumbo, one of the first Disney animated classics to receive the home video treatment, is actually a lot worse, I'd counter that that sequence is a beautifully animated, bedazzling marvel to watch, which does not apply to the above logo).
The Neon Mickey logo had its origins in the Mickey Mouse Revue attraction which opened in Magic Kingdom in 1971 and was later relocated to Tokyo Disneyland in 1983, and which consisted of numerous animatronic Disney characters performing together as an orchestra. Conducting the motley team of musicians was an animatronic Mickey, and it's his garishly-rendered silhouette you see rotating in the Walt Disney Home Entertainment logo. To be honest, having glanced at images of the original puppet I'm not sure which of the two I actually find the least palatable to look at - there's something about the knowing gaze of the animatronic Mickey which bugs the snot out of me, but then I was never one to get on especially well with those kinds of animatronic renderings of beloved characters. Let's just say that they're both extremely abhorrent and that I for one am grateful that Sorcerer Mickey came along and saved us all.
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