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.
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