Logo Case Study: Misc. Mimsie

MTM Home Video 

Just to prove that not everything is doom and gloom down here at The Spirochaete Trail (and because, god knows, after two consecutive apocalypse-themed entries and another one about a dead cat, I could use a little lift myself), here's an MTM logo featuring Mimsie the kitten in healthier, sprightlier days (albeit posthumously, as Mimsie herself was four years deceased by the time this particular variant appeared).

After years of licensing their productions to other companies to distribute on home video, MTM Enterprises finally established their own home media unit in 1992 (round about the same time that International Family Entertainment were in the process of getting their hands on them) under the moniker of MTM Home Video.  Now whenever you purchased a VHS of Hill Street Blues or Newhart, you were treated to a brand new logo variant where, instead of just one insanely adorable dose of Mimsie mewing, you got two, thanks to the power of rewind technology (thanks to the power of freeze frame technology, you might also be able to pick out a few images of Mimsie for use in creepypastas).  I can see more than a smidgen of freakiness potential in the sudden switch to black and white and the high-pitch backwards squeaking during the rewinding portion of the sequence, but overall it's hard to get too unnerved when it's sandwiched between two heavily saturated slices of pure, unadulterated cuteness such as this.  Really precious.

 Carlton Your Doorman

MTM's only foray into a fully animated production was a one-off half-hour special dedicated to the perpetually off-screen doorman from their 1974 sitcom Rhoda.  To fans of Rhoda it would have been a fairly big deal as it provided the first in-person glimpses (albeit in animated form) of a character who in the series proper was only ever heard talking across an intercom (imagine if Frasier had followed suit and given Maris her own cartoon special after that series wrapped).  As in Rhoda, Carlton's voice was provided by Lorenzo Music, most famous for voicing Garfield in numerous 1980s TV specials and the 1988 series Garfield and Friends.

Carlton Your Doorman aired on CBS on 21st May 1980, picked up a Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Animated Program and then promptly disappeared off the face of the Earth.  If MTM intended this special as a pilot for a possible primetime animated sitcom then nothing came of it (although it is fascinating to contemplate that an attempt was made to revive the genre long before The Simpsons pulled it off in 1989) and the special has apparently never been re-aired in the US (judging from the "Yorkshire Television" ident in the clip below, however, it evidently received an additional airing in the UK).  Carlton Your Doorman now enjoys something of a legendary status among animation fans, who regard it as a "lost" special (which in this case simply means that anyone who fortuitously happened to get the full special on tape isn't being very forthcoming in uploading it to YouTube).

As of now, the special survives in the form of tiny bits and pieces, including the opening clip below and the custom MTM logo variant, in which Carlton's cat Ringo is seen filling in for Mimsie.  The gag here being that Ringo is everything that Mimsie isn't - he's big, scruffy and violently-tempered, and to make matters worse he won't even meow on cue.  Damn cat indeed.

 

Side-note: should Carlton Your Doorman ever show up in its entirety, I'll happily review it.  I've been making the same promise about Fox's failed pilot Hollywood Dog (1990) for a while now.

Logo Case Study: Alas, Poor Mimsie

When the series finale of St. Elsewhere, fittingly entitled "The Last One", aired on May 25th 1988, viewers were hit with a double whammy of strange and unsettling surprises.  The first and most infamous of these was that bizarre twist ending involving Tommy Westphall's snowglobe, which gave rise to the Tommy Westphall Universe Hypothesis, when it suddenly became fashionable, around the dawn of the new millennium, to speculate that around 90 per cent of US television was nothing more than an idle daydream inside the head of a fictional child.

The nastier and, in my opinion, infinitely more fascinating of these surprises occurred after the story itself had ended, during the closing credits, where somebody had evidently figured that a particularly memorable way of hammering home the finality of that ending would be to kill off Mimsie, the much-beloved MTM kitten.  Hence, we have what may just be one of the most freakish, outrageously morbid end-credits sequences in television history.  Sweet little Mimsie, who'd previously always rounded off an installment of St. Elsewhere by appearing in a surgical mask, was here seen unconscious and hooked up to a bleeping electrocardiogram, while the show's regular closing theme played softly in the backdrop.  Admittedly, that announcer did take the edge off the sequence somewhat, talking over Mimsie's final moments in order to plug Eric Roberts in To Heal A Nation and Late Night With David Letterman, but he had quietened down by the time that distessing flatlining became audible, and stunned viewers watched in silence as Mimsie used up the last of her nine lives.

Actually, if word of mouth is to be believed, this wasn't the first time that Mimsie had met a disturbing end in a series finale.  Short-lived 1970s sitcom Texas Wheelers allegedly concluded with an animated Mimsie stepping out from behind a wagon wheel and being shot dead, although the evidence has yet to make its way to YouTube (in the meantime, I'd be tempted to dismiss it as an urban legend, although this Chicago Tribune article from 1985 seems pretty convinced that it happened).

Established in 1969 by Mary Tyler Moore and then-husband Grant Tinker as the production company for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, MTM Enterprises selected Mimsie (in reality a rescue shelter cat adopted by Moore) as its mascot in a playful nod to the MGM lion.  A winning blend of wryness and sheer adorableness, the logo enjoyed a long and prosperous run over the following three decades, as MTM Enterprises expanded its list of productions/distributions and found ever-more charming ways of tweaking Mimsie's appearance order to personalise it for each show (for Hill Street Blues, Mimsie was decked out in a police cap, for The Steve Allen Show, the cat wore Allen's trademark glasses, etc).  It was a non-stop parade of all-out, irresistible cuteness (that alledged Texas Wheelers ending notwithstanding) so it's no surprise that when that St. Elsewhere closer came, everybody was left completely gobsmacked.  Whose particularly deranged idea was it to kill the little mewing angel?

Of course, the closing to St. Elsewhere didn't actually signal the end of Mimsie's career - her likeness continued to grace variants of the MTM logo well into the 90s, including the MTM Home Video logo that appeared on VHS tapes in 1992, until the company became defunct in 1998 - but Mimsie herself passed away in 1988, soon after that final episode to St. Elsewhere aired (she was 20 years old, which sure as heck isn't a bad age for a cat).  As deeply unsettling a stunt as that final St. Elsewhere variation may have been, there is something strangely poetic about the manner in which, by lingering extensively upon the last moments of waning life in an infirm animal, it encapsulates a sense of time sadly but inevitably running out.  I tend to think of it as less a morbid means of deliberately toying with its viewers' emotions than as a poignant reminder that all things must reach their natural end.  It's a total oddity, even by the standards of weird and disturbing media logos, but it's not without its elegiac merit.

To my understanding, the "flatliner Mimsie" variant isn't featured in re-runs of "The Last One", although some report it showing up on the official VHS release of the episode (if anyone who owns a copy would like to confirm this, it would be very much appreciated).  You can watch it in full without that pesky announcer here:

A Short Vision (1956)

A Short Vision, the work of Hungarian-born animator Peter Foldes and his British spouse Joan Foldes, may just be the most most celebrated animated film of all-time upon the subject of nuclear apocalypse; it is undoubtedly the most notorious.  Even The Big Snit and When The Wind Blows, for all their merits, can't quite boast that they traumatised an entire generation simultaneously in a precise sitting.  A Short Vision did exactly that, gaining special notoriety when it received its US television debut on the May 27th 1956 episode of The Ed Sullivan Show.  Sullivan introduced the film (then broadcast in black and white) as the Foldes' speculation on "what might happen to the animal population of the world if an H-bomb were dropped."  He advised that its content might be upsetting to younger children, reassuring them that they were "not to be alarmed...it’s a fantasy, the whole thing is animated", a statement which I'm sure merely piqued the curiosity of the younger members in his audience.  Sullivan also warned about the grim tone of the film, which proved to be no overstatement - anyone who assumed that "animal population" and "animated" meant that they were about to see a bit of Porky Pig-style capering was in for one hell of a rude awakening.  Although many were inevitably distressed by the film, Sullivan was widely applauded for his audacity in screening it, and the response proved so overwhelming that the short was shown again on the June 10th 1956 broadcast of the show.  This time round, Sullivan was much more forceful in his warning that the film might not be appropriate for younger viewers, here flat-out suggesting that they leave the room while it played.  This article on Conelrad Adjacent provides an astonishingly detailed account of how the film came to be screened on The Ed Sullivan Show and of its subsequent impact.

Sixty years on and A Short Vision has lost none of its potency.  The film, depicting the movements of an unidentified object (ominously referred to only as "it") which appears "unnoticed and uninvited" in the night sky and unleashes all manner of horrifying devastation upon the Earth below, is still shocking, and leaves the viewer with a gut-wrenching sensation which lingers long after its final harrowing moments.  On an aesthetic level it's an absolutely gorgeous film, consisting of numerous striking and richly-detailed images (many of which are entirely static, with animation consisting of simple dissolves), the haunting beauty of its visuals counterbalanced by the ferocious bleakness of its narrative, in which a first-person narrator (voice of James McKechnie) relates his chilling vision of nuclear apocalypse.

As noted in the Conelrad article, Sullivan's synopsis of the film as being about the effects of a dropped atomic bomb upon "the animal population of the world" is a trifle misleading, as the actual content of the Foldes' vision is far broader than that, extending to the total annihilation of ALL life on Earth.  Nevertheless, the terrors of the impeding catastrophe are conveyed most extensively through the reactions of four animals whose nightly routine of eating and avoiding being eaten is interrupted by the threat from above.  Two nocturnal predators - a leopard and an owl - are so overcome with fright at the realisation of what is approaching that they release their prey - a deer and a rat, respectively - and the four of them take cover in mutual fear of something far greater than all of them combined.  It is in these simple, frightened creatures that the viewer attains the bulk of their emotional investment - the film has no use for anthropomorphism, but we have no trouble in empathising with their desperation as they attempt to flee from an approaching object that they intuitively know to be terrible, our sympathies mingled with the horrific understanding that their instinctive impulses will not protect them from a threat of this magnitude.  The leopard, owl, deer and rat signify the innocent victims of warfare, utterly helpless in the face of an impending disaster beyond their control and, indeed, their comprehension, while in the primal conflict between predator and prey, nullified here by the arrival of an external force that poses an equally devastating threat to both, we see echoes of the human conflicts that have presumably given rise the creation of "it", and of the fragility that unites all living beings, no matter what side they stand upon.  The uneasy truce between predator and prey in the face of total annihilation is a reminder that nuclear warfare is an enemy to all; in Sullivan's words, that "in war there is no winner."

By contrast, the humans of A Short Vision appear painfully oblivious to the aerial invader, the majority of them caught off-guard and sleeping soundly in their beds as it passes directly over them.  There is a definite sense here that human apathy or indifference has been a factor in beckoning "it" into being; even the minority of humans who have their eyes wide open to what is about to strike them - the "leaders" and the "wise men" - do so too late, and all of them, whether they have seen it coming or not, are now bound to the same gruesome fate.  In addition to conveying the inertia of a human population who would sooner shut out the threat than react to it at all, the images of sleeping men, women and children relate something of the basic vulnerability of the human body; in their motionless, unconscious state, these figures seem frail and defenceless, and this too arouses our sympathies and our horror.

The vulnerability of the human body is evoked to a more overtly horrific extent in the film's climax when the dreaded explosion finally occurs, giving way to its starkest and most notorious sequence - a close-up of a human face as it slowly disintegrates, the eyeballs liquefied and the layers of skin torn back to reveal the skeletal framework underneath.  A less bloody but equally shocking sequence shows a young woman who is catapulted rapidly through the processes of aging and decay, until she too is stripped down to nothing more than skeletal remains.

Many analyses, the aforementioned Conelrad retrospective and the BFI commentary upon the film included, like to make a point of the fact that, as the film itself technically makes no explicit references to nuclear war or weaponry, the entire notion that "it" signifies an atomic bomb comes down to pure assumption on the viewer's part.  Indeed, there is nothing in the film's dialogue to directly indicate that we are witnessing a nuclear attack (as opposed to the apocalypse in a more general sense, or even an attack from extraterrestrial forces), although the insinuation is certainly present in the mushroom cloud imagery seen during the explosion, and in the implication that humankind could have potentially averted disaster if it had acted more swiftly.  That we never get a clear, close-up look at "it" adds superbly to the menace it exudes; it is simply a dark, distant shape of no particularly discernible form (in the early stages of the film it seen to morph continuously from one shape to another) and it carries a convincingly ominous and hauntingly alien air.  We recognise intuitively (much like those animals) that "it" does not belong in this world, and that its very presence threatens to tear the natural order to shreds.  As animated antagonists go, "it" simply doesn't get enough accolades.

The most devastating moment of A Short Vision occurs at the very end of the film when, following the complete obliteration of life on Earth, we are suddenly teased with the vague possibility of renewal.  A small glimmer of hope appears to have survived in the form of a flame which continues to flicker when everything around it is gone - save "it" itself, that is, which begins to circle the flame and, in one of the film's most surreal moments, is seen to transform into a moth.  At this stage, the "it" suddenly appears a lot less menacing - no longer an indistinct, alien form but a familiar and pathetic little creature that seems oddly compelled toward its own destruction.  "It" flirts with the flame until it too is consumed and, with that, the flame finally loses momentum and peters out, leaving only oblivion in its wake.  It is a hauntingly understated epilogue, coming in after the dramatic spectacle of the world being annihilated before our eyes, illustrating the finality of the devastation and snuffing out any lingering hopes of redemption that the viewer might still have.  In is in this closing void of blackness, and not the images of gruesome bodily horror that precede it, that A Short Vision deals its most withering blow, leaving the viewer with a deadening sense of emptiness and loss, in mourning for a cartoon Earth which seemed so rich, so vivid and, above all, so powerless in the face of its impending destruction.

Logo Case Study: Genesis Home Video "The Four Palm Trees of the Apocalypse"

Is there a media logo out there that's so unspeakably horrifying it could send even the Unholy Trinity (The V of Doom, The S From Hell and The Closet Killer) scurrying back to the portals of Hades from whence they came in an ungodly, squealing panic? Absolutely there is, and I've made a special point of saving up the case study for this most nefarious of logos for October 31st, when I figured it would be most within its element.  Meet the Genesis Home Video logo, otherwise known as "The Four Palm Trees of The Apocalypse", otherwise known as "Music To Make Flocks Stampede". This is my personal pick for Most Terrifying Logophobia-Inducer of All-Time.

Genesis Home Video was, as the moniker implies, a VHS distribution company, and was active throughout the late 1980s. Sadly, I've not been able to piece together a whole lot of background information on the company itself, but there are a couple of websites out there with comprehensive image galleries showcasing its catalogue of titles (check them out at VHSCollector and at critcononline). Schlocky, low budget B-movies very much appear to have been the name of their game, with obscurities such as Night of Horror (1981) and Cataclysm (1980) making up the bulk of their offerings, along with 1970s exploitation fare like Cain's Cutthroats (1971) and the occasional mainstream Hollywood production like Long John Silver (1954). It all sounds delectable as sin to me, and there's a lot in there I would happily devour if copies of their releases weren't so tricky to come across.

So what is it about this logo, precisely, that compels me to deem it the absolute worst of such an all-round horrifying list of contenders? Everything. It's a work of pure and utter ghastliness from top to bottom. Anyone who purchased a schlocky horror title from Genesis Home Video hoping for a vulgar thrill certainly got their money's worth just from this logo alone.

The GHV logo constitutes such an appalling mishmash of wierdly unearthly components that it's difficult to know where to begin in unpicking it, so let me start by trying to outline what I think was the intention here. We see the silhouettes of four palm trees against a blue backdrop with a pinkish glow toward the bottom, accompanied by some indistinct rumbling noises that I assume are meant to represent the sounds of distant thunder. A pink sphere appears in the sky and rises upwards, rendering the background paler and pinker as it goes. I think that the pink sphere is meant to be evocative of a rising sun, but the sheer shoddiness of the animation makes it difficult to say for certain. The background darkens and the words "Genesis Home Video LTD" gradually become visible. As the sphere rises, the rumbling noises are slowly drowned out by a heinous concoction of high-pitched ringing noises, which run on ad nauseam, before finally the whole thing dissolves into a lava lamp soup of green, purple and yellow splodges, and the words "The Next Wave In Entertainment" appear on screen. The intended symbolism is easy enough to decipher. Palm trees = chic, exoticism, glamour, thunder = powerful, awe-inspiring, and that cacophony of diabolical high-pitched, tinitus-inducing ringing noises = uh, well, you got me there. I don't know what that's in aid of.

Now let me tell you what I actually see when I watch this logo. I see the silhouettes of four palm trees against a blue backdrop with a pinkish glow toward the bottom (and something about ENTERTAINMENT written underneath it, although it's been very clumsily cropped), accompanied by some indistinct and highly ominous rumbling noises that sound, for all the world, like the beach is under an air raid attack. The shot pans upwards and I see a giant pink marble appear in the sky, accompanied by the most ear-piercingly diabolical ringing noises you're ever going to hear. It's these noises, I think, that enable the logo to transcend the would-be hilarity of its tacky aesthetics and enter into the realm of the apocalyptic nightmare, for they give off the eerie impression that something truly cataclysmic is being dropped from above (I have an A-Bomb in mind, myself). The ringing runs on for what seems like an eternity, as if purposely designed to make your blood run cold, and to transform any dogs you might happen to have there with you in your living room into savage, flesh-ripping monsters. The pitch then starts to lower and, just as you fear that the thing is gearing up to launch an all-out assault upon your bowels, judgement finally arrives from above and melts down everything in existence into a garish, radioactive ooze. The old world is gone, now The Next Wave In Entertainment slithers in to assume its place.

In the end, the Genesis Home Video logo is such a perfect blend of cheap graphics, garish colours and inexplicable background noises that the result is a glorious display of utter grotesqueness.  Objectively speaking, absolutely nothing about this logo works - it's poorly animated and laughably executed, and the accompanying sounds are so hideous and strange that one can barely comprehend what effect its producers were even going for. And yet, each of these failed elements adds immeasurably to the overall aura of dread and unease, as this hopelessly unrefined sequence, through only a few crude visuals and a chaotic barrage of sickening noises, somehow manages to convey the horrifying sensation of the world blowing up all around us. It's a terrible logo in every sense of the word; needless to say, I'm completed enamored with it.

Coca-Cola - Swimming Elephant (1994)

CocaCola (9) - Swimming Elephant - 1994 from The Britvic Education Trust on Vimeo.

Earlier this year, the world bid farewell to Rajan, the last of the ocean-swimming elephants of the Andaman Islands, India, who passed away sometime in the nocturnal hours between July 31st and August 1st 2016 aged 66.  One of several Asian elephants utilised by the timber industry and trained to paddle from island to island in the 1970s to assist with transporting logged trees, Rajan became the last left standing when logging was banned on the islands in 2002 and most of his brethren were sold and shipped off to the mainland.  Rajan ultimately landed upon the Havelock Island in 2004, where he spent his retirement years when his owner could no longer afford to manage him.  Instead, he was taken in by the Barefoot Resort, his ocean-loving antics swiftly making him into a popular tourist attraction and, once the video evidence had made its way to YouTube, a web sensation.  Clearly, he was one of the world's most celebrated and unconventional pachyderms, and he'll certainly be missed.

Long before YouTube elevated him to superstardom among the social media crowd, Rajan and his chums had already received worldwide exposure through their appearance in Jacques Cousteau's 1991 documentary film, Andaman, les îles invisibles.  A far more curious component of their legacy arrived in 1994, when a swimming elephant became the unlikely star of a commercial for Coca-Cola.  One which I recall having a distinctly ambivalent relationship with as a child - at the time, I got a definite skin-crawl sensation whenever this advert was played, although looking back now I'm not sure if I can quite put my finger on why.  On the one hand, the spectacle of an elephant gliding through the depths of the ocean could hardly fail to mesmerise, the hefty giant of the animal kingdom suddenly appearing to defy gravity and become impossibly light and aerial.  It's an irresistibly astounding sight, yet one which also carries shades of the surreal, and perhaps it was all just a tad too freaky for my ultra-sensitive tastes back then.  More likely, it was the jerky movements of the animatronic trunk, which surfaces toward the end of the ad and makes off with a sunbather's Coca-Cola (albeit not without offering consolation in the form of a handful of peanuts, the obvious elephant currency), which really got to me - it looked stilted and alien, and I think I was all too aware of the dissonance between the real-life elephant photography which made up most of the ad and something clearly being operated by a human hand.  For whatever reason, I enjoyed a bizarre love/hate relationship with this wholly innocuous, if exceedingly quirky commercial, meaning that I was as strangely fixated with the imagery and scenario as I was totally unnerved by them.  I never forgot this ad (no wordplay inten...oh, screw it), and I look back on it with endless affection now.

The swimming elephant commercial was the work of Minneapolis-based advertising agency Fallon McElligott and made its grand debut during the 1994 Wimbledom Finals on NBC.  Scenes involving the sunbather and the creepy elephant trunk puppet were filmed in Thailand and spliced with original footage of the swimming elephants in the Andaman Islands.  In a contemporary article published the Chicago Tribune, Coke spokesperson Bob Bertini revealed that the original plan had been for the elephant to deliver the beverage in question to the sunbather on the raft, but it was ultimately decided that the scenario would have more resonance if the elephant, with whom the viewer has spent the better part of the commercial's running time, should be the one to make off with the spoils.  He also explained the intended link between the product and the peculiar scenario, which apparently foxed a few critics - obviously, there was the entirely straightforward matter of catching the viewer's attention with a memorable image (Bertini cites, vaguely, "a TV nature show" as the inspiration, possibly referring to Cousteau's film), but the idea at heart was that this elephant so craved Coca-Cola that he was willing to go through highly unusual lengths to obtain it, even if that meant traveling stealthily underwater and swiping it from unsuspecting sunbathers.  Really, it's the additional detail that the elephant bothers to leave any form of compensation at all on the raft, when it would have made for a serviceable enough twist if he'd simply flat-out stolen the cola, that pushes this ad into that whole extra level of quirk.

Although the above Vimeo-hosted video shows the version of the ad with which I was personally most familiar, the original version was a minute long and, there, the beverage pilfered at the end was a bottle of Diet Coke.  Watch it below:

Old Fangs (2009)

Old Fangs from adrien merigeau on Vimeo.

Old Fangs is a short film directed by Adrien Meirgeau and Alan Holly and produced by Cartoon Saloon, the Irish animation company most famous for the feature films The Secret of Kells (2009) and Song of The Sea (2015) and the children's TV series Skunk Fu!  It tells a story of estranged family relations and the challenges of confronting a past from which one has long since distanced oneself, using the anthropomorphic scenario of a young wolf venturing into the forest in order to reunite with the brutish father he fled from many years ago. 

The opening images of the film show a car traveling through a misty landscape; only after we see a nondescript finger fiddling with the radio controls is it revealed to us that the occupants are animals.  For the early stages of the film, Old Fangs plays as an increasingly perturbing mystery, the purpose of the characters' journey being divulged only very gradually as they press ever further onward.  We see this trio of animals - wolf, fox and Siamese cat individually - laughing together at a service station and might initially be inclined to assume that we are witnessing three friends embarking on a carefree road trip.  Our only hint, at this point, of any potential trouble waiting further down the road is in the uneasy stillness of the wolf character as his two companions are casually savouring the cool breeze blowing through an open car window.

As the surrounding scenery changes from open fields to houses and telephone wires to finally a dense wooded area, whereupon the characters leave their car and trek cautiously into the forest, there is a genuine sense of journeying into the dark unknown, the anxieties of the fox and cat aligning with those of the viewer.  Only when the wolf, upon reaching a pond concealed in the depths of the woodland, reflects that, "It hasn't changed at all...only it seems so much smaller," does it finally become apparent that he is returning to an old childhood haunt.  The characters continue their journey and, with night now having descended upon the forest, at long last happen upon what they have been searching for this whole time - a solitary house located within the forest clearing.  At this point, the fox and the cat retreat into the grasses and their lupine comrade is left to complete the last leg of his journey on his own.  The final piece of the puzzle (or the particular puzzle which opens the story, at any rate) clicks into place when the young wolf warily opens the door of the house, and greets the occupant with a tentative "Dad?"  There is now little remaining mystery as to the nature of the preceding journey; instead, it becomes a question of what past events have led to the estrangement between the old and young wolf and, more pressingly, what will happen next?

Right from his introduction, the older wolf has a foreboding presence that clearly distinguishes him from the trio of cautious travelers.  All four animals are anthropomorphised, yet he is given an obviously more bestial look, with his gargantuan form and lack of clothing.  In some respects, he resembles the archetypal "Big Bad Wolf" of fairy tale notoriety and yet in many shots he appears so monstrous and grotesque that he is scarcely recognisable as a wolf - our very first glimpse of the character shows a close-up of his snout exhaling cigarette smoke in a manner which gives him an almost draconic air.  Naturally, he completely dwarfs his son, to the extent that it is challenging to consider them as being of the same flesh and blood.  The older wolf embodies the wilder, more brutal lifestyle which his son has long-since deserted, a disconnect emphasised in the implication that the younger wolf has abandoned his carnivorous roots; upon the table are the remnants of a prey animal's entrails, which the older wolf picks up and angrily asks the younger wolf if it disgusts or frightens him.  He then imposes a test upon the younger wolf, commanding him to assume his image by sharing in his smoking habit.

Although some viewers deem the ending of the scenario to be incomplete or anti-climatic, to my mind it is perfectly done, as the fox and the cat, once again mirroring the anxieties of the viewer, express concern that the situation will turn ugly, only for the door of the house to open once again and for their friend to wander silently out, apparently without incident; as he rejoins them, he imparts simply that his father, "wasn't really pleased to see me", and they begin their journey back out of the forest.  It is an outcome that subverts viewer expectations, with the failed reunion between father and son ending not with heavy drama but with an understated disquietude, hinting at deeper and unspoken pains which simply cannot be brought to the surface.  It is only after the younger wolf has left the house that we see any hint of vulnerability from his father; his eyes are widened, as if he too is left shocked and hurt by the outcome.  It is in this wide-eyed expression that we finally see some resemblance between the father and son; it recalls the startled expression worn by the younger wolf as he first set eyes upon his father's house.

We also here get some inkling of the mother wolf's role in this equation, with a subtext about domestic abuse suggesting itself as smoke rises from the older wolf's cigarette and is seen to obscure her image in a family photograph.  She is scowling, as if staring accusingly back at him, perhaps betraying her dissatisfaction with the relationship.  As the younger wolf treks back through the forest and is haunted by a series of flashbacks recalling how, as a small cub, he would observe his father hunting, we see the mother wolf sitting silently upon the sidelines, her unhappiness muted and in the backdrop, but nevertheless evident.  Ultimately, we learn that it was the mother who led the younger wolf in the abandonment of his father (by which stage the gentle regard shown by the younger wolf toward a ladybird, in contrast to the ruthlessness with which his father hunts down and slaughters a deer, had illustrated how far apart they were already growing).  Overwhelmed by his memories, the younger wolf begins to run in the present too - for the second time in his life, he finds himself fleeing from the wilderness that he now knows for certain he can never be a part of.

One aspect of Old Fangs which stands out as particularly wonderful is its striking and extremely effective use of colour.  Throughout the film, the various stages of the younger wolf's journey is illustrated through dramatic changes in colouration which perfectly encapsulate the mood of each sequence.  As the trio of travelers head through the outskirts of the forest, the dominant colours are warm, glowing reds and browns, which gradually give way to darker hues as they get deeper into the forest and the last rays of evening sun begin to lesson.  As they approach the clearing and find themselves outside the house of the older wolf, this changes to a cold and ominous dark blue.  By stark contrast, the interior of the house is a glaring and unnaturally bright yellow, which further emphasises the imposing presence of the father wolf, and also the passionate, fiery tensions which lurk beneath the surface of their uneasy reunion.  Obviously, these changes in colour mark the temporal stages of the young wolf's journey, with day transforming into night, until finally he ends up in the artificially-lit milieu of his father's home.  But they also symbolise his emotional journey, and the increasingly harrowing turmoils of having to delve into his past and confront the source of those anxieties.  In the young wolf's initial childhood flashbacks, the dominant colour is green, with its obvious symbols of youth, freshness and springtime.  In later flashbacks, we see that autumn browns have crept into the picture and are becoming ever more prominent, indicating loss of innocence and the gradual decay of the young wolf's relationship with his father.

It's a tiny quirk of the film, but I do ponder the significance of the young wolf's companions being a fox and a cat, two fellow predatory animals, instead of two herbivorous species, as an obvious means of further signifying the young wolf's disconnect from his carnivorous origins.  Perhaps, alternatively, they indicate a disconnect from the dense wilderness in which the older wolf is most at home, with the cat suggesting domestication and the fox adaptability to more urbanised environs.  In that sense, they are signs of just how far the younger wolf has come in order to revisit his father, and how far away he initially fled to get away from him.  Moreover, they are indicators that, no matter how troubled or haunted the younger wolf might be by his past, he has friends and will never be alone in the world.  The same cannot be said for his father, who ends up condemned once again to his solitary lifestyle, having twice been deprived of the son whom he so desperately wanted to mold in his own image.

The final images of the film show the older wolf inside his house, huffing with anguish and shedding endless tears; a reminder of the pain that exists upon both sides of the broken relationship and a further hint of the terrible vulnerabilities lurking beneath his brutish exterior.  We sense that there is a far bigger story here to be explored, but Old Fangs wisely keeps things as understated as possible, giving us only bits and pieces and allowing the atmosphere of each individual scene to divulge as much or as little as we need.  It is a haunting conclusion to a beautiful and harrowing film, one which offers no easy answer to the issue of estrangement, taking us simply on a journey into a unsettling world where the traumas of past events continue to cast long and threatening shadows over the present, and the two wounded souls at the centre of the story are left to discover that they are beyond all reconciliation.

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.

Logo Case Study: The Ladd Company "Tree of Life"

Let's begin our roundup of case studies on individual production logos with a love letter to possibly the most genteel and non-threatening logo of them all, The Ladd Company's "Tree of Life".

Founded in 1979 by a trio of disgruntled ex-20th Century Fox executives - former Fox president Alan Ladd, Jr and his buddies Jay Kanter and Gareth Wigan, The Ladd Company is best-known for producing the Ridley Scott sci-fi classic Blade Runner (1982), along with historical space drama The Right Stuff (1983) and the first two entries in the Police Academy series, and for handling the US distribution of the Best Picture-winning British flick Chariots of Fire (1981).  For its first five years of existence, The Ladd Company had an exclusive distribution deal with Warner Bros, but a string of financial failures (aside from Chariots of Fire and Police Academy, The Ladd Company couldn't claim many runaway box office success stories) led to a breakdown in their relationship in 1984, after which the company faced nearly a decade of stagnation while Alan Ladd, Jr had his hands tied up working with MGM/UA.  In 1993, Ladd signed a new production deal with Paramount which, while fairly short-lived, enabled The Ladd Company to get their fingers in yet another Best Picture-winning pie with Braveheart (1995).  Soon after, The Ladd Company went quiet yet again, but had another fleeting re-emergence in the mid-00s, its most recent production being the Ben Affleck-helmed Gone Baby Gone (2007), which was distributed by Miramax.

For their logo, the company chose the rather striking image of a magnificent green oak tree which, in the animated version accompanying their productions, materialises onscreen against a white (or, in some variations, black) background from the top down in the manner of an early computer graphic, while a stirring John Williams fanfare plays in the backdrop.  This simultaneous evocation of artificiality and nature makes it an uncannily apt tone-setter for the themes explored in Blade Runner, but what is it about this digitalised oak that makes it such a universally appealing symbol to front just about any picture?

When asked about the significance of the logo in an interview recorded in the Sarasota Herald-Tribune, October 19th 1979, Ladd was fairly vague on the matter: "...you can say it has a tie to the tree of life. Trees grow. Trees live. Trees do all kinds of things."  Wigan's response was equally vague, but a lot more tongue-in-cheek: "They do everything movie companies do, except make movies.  They last a long time. They're living things. They're strong. They provide protection.  And fruit.  And growth."

As arbitrary as their reasoning might sound, Ladd and Wigan were definitely onto something in recognising the conciliatory power of the tree as a symbol.  There is something about the sight a majestic spreading oak tree that speaks directly to our most basic of emotions.  Trees are nurturing.  They provide oxygen, food, shelter and the building materials of civilisation.  They represent life, longevity, nature and durability.  The "tree of life" to which Ladd refers is a recurring feature of many world religions and mythologies.  Seeing this familiar form etched into being in The Ladd Company logo, it relaxes our senses and tells us that we're in good hands.  It's calming, reassuring, pleasing to the eyes and ears - in other words, it's everything that the Screen Gems logo isn't.  I feel quite confident, therefore, in declaring The Ladd Company's "Tree of Life" logo to be the Anti-S From Hell.

Oh, and incidentally, I do have a review of one of The Ladd Company's lesser-known films in the works right now.  Stay tuned.