The pre-recorded eye

Logomania!

I have a few fetishes, like cars from the 1940s (maybe you've noticed). Obsolete technology is definitely one of them. Fortunately I have the bliss of YouTube (which is also full of crap - maybe you've noticed that, too?), from which to make gifs. I've made thousands of them, literally,                 but one of my chief obsessions is old TV and movie logos. These giff up real good because they're so short, and lend themselves to the endless-loop format. I've pulled out some of my all-time favorites here. In some cases here, I cheat a bit and include TV show beginnings and endings that are just too good to leave out.

This fierce-looking ABC logo lights up from below, but it looks as if someone is manually raising a curtain on it. Either that, or they're using a flashlight. REALLY old shows had captions and titles that looked like they were on a long roll of paper or canvas that was rolled up and down like an old window blind. 

I LOVE DUMONT. I love everything about Dumont! I even love the low-tech-sounding name. Clips from this defunct network are few, because almost everything went out live back then, but a few kinescopes were made. We still have kinescopes: what this means is that people just make a video of what is on their TV screen. This gets 50,000 views, no matter how shaky the picture or how crappy the content. I don't know why this is, because I get 5 or 6 views at best for videos I spend hours on. 

But never mind. I love Dumont!  I have milked the few available clips for all they are worth. Here the Dumont logo seems to fall down violently with a big clunk. No doubt it was just a piece of cardboard that somebody dropped by hand.

Oh, this is weird. It's a version of the militaristic ABC logo attached to an old circus show, but this time a FACE pops up in the middle of it. Who IS that, anyway? (Why should we care? Imagine how long he has been dead.)

This is the famous ender for a well-known TV show. I have always loved its elegance, the silken heart, and the way the beautiful script writes itself. The CBS aperture/eye is a nice touch. It's spooky, as if you are going right inside it.

I don't know much about this. It was in one of those compilations. I wonder if it isn't a radio thing that someone has tinkered with to make it look like TV. No kidding. I saw a beautiful Buick thing that had a bright light flashing on and off all through it, like a strobe light, no doubt to make it look more "vintage". It ruined it, basically. Leave it alone, people. A masterpiece is a masterpiece.

This is more of a show title than a logo, but it was too good NOT to include. I love the distortion that indicates the degeneration/decay of the film, and the titles are definitely printed on a roll of something that is being cranked. The sponsors go on and on (and WHAT is Double Danderine?), and then comes the title, Okay Mother, starring Dennis James, who is nobody's mother.

This appeared at the end of very early Popeye cartoons. Only a few of them, the ones from the mid-1930s. When my kids were pre-teens, we were "into" Popeye and videotaped them from a show that aired them very early in the morning. If we saw one that had the pen-and-ink logo, we tried to "freeze" the tape on it with the VCR. I don't know if we ever succeeded. It is, of course, easy to freeze on a DVD of it, or even a YouTube video. 

I think of it now, and it gets to me. We watched St. Elsewhere together, and a few other things. Mad About You was another one. I remember they called it Love Sucks. They were about the same age then as my granddaughter Caitlin. For reasons unknown - for no reason at all that I can figure out - she will no longer give me the time of day. She will no longer say hi to me, or look at me or acknowledge me at all. I feel as if I am not even there. 

I don't get it, but it breaks my heart. Only a few years ago, we used to watch old commercials together - hours of them, it seemed. I was hopeful that she would share my love of the vintage and the obsolete.  I still have DVD boxed sets of old ads that we watched when the kids came here for sleepovers. For a couple of years we made YouTube videos together, which was one of the best times of my life. Sometimes I honestly wonder if she sees me as being too out of step with technology to bother with. Has my love of the obsolete made ME obsolete in her eyes?

But I digress.

I love the Pathe rooster! I didn't even know about it until relatively recently. I may have seen it on a logo somewhere, but I had no idea there was one that flapped around while standing on the world. It's pretty bizarre.

You have to watch this for a while for the payoff, but it is well worth it. Obviously this is very early TV, right around the turn of the '50s.  Kinescopes always seem to wobble up and down. (Come to that, so do those abominable videos that get tens of thousands of views.) You can tell someone is filming the monitor, which is the only way they could keep a record of shows. Obviously this is one of the earliest TV incarnations of the comic legend.

I don't think this needs any comment at all.

I just like this one.

Oh, now this is weird, and a recent find. Carl Laemmle (and how I hope I am spelling that right) was a Hollywood producer, but I had no idea he put his smiling face on things. This may well have been from the silent era.

This Universal logo showed up seemingly hundreds of times in compilations, with that wonderful grindy motor-sound that I talked about. This one was likely silent, but it is very elegant.

This is long, but yet another example of the classineses of those Universal titles. They had all the others beat. 

This might just be my favorite. It's startling and unexpected to see that Pathe rooster popping out of the Warner Brothers logo (which zooms out until it is right in your face). I had no idea chickens were so important to the film industry.

But there is one more I want to tack on. This is so strange that it doesn't fit anywhere.

These are from an unsold pilot for a game show (Pass the Line) from 1954. It looks like it was made on a budget of about $25.00. I might try to post it elsewhere, in case someone is interested in 27 minutes of agony. 

It makes no sense whatsoever. Someone, some kind of "artist" (in this case, the host's next-door neighbor) draws a picture. For some reason, it has to be in just ten lines. The first panelist has to copy it. The next panelist has to copy the copy. And so on. No one knows the point of this. It's one big muddle. At the end, the host exhorts the folks at home to "join right in", which is hard to do when you don't know what the hell is going on. The only thing that makes it interesting is that Jonathan Winters shows up. He has no idea what is going on either. But the end credits, again on cardboard, are fascinating. They are a whole new definition of "crawl".

Why was I always so terrified as a kid?

This is why. THIS would come on TV, probably when I was about 3 or 4 years old. Though I now think it's quite beautiful and use it as one of my signature gifs at the end of posts (and that's what those are, folks, in case you're thinking they're totally irrelevant), it petrified me then, because I had no idea what a logo was - or a network - or, frankly, even a peacock. I was a toddler, for God's sake, I was barely out of diapers, and permanently confused.

It's a strange sort of thing because it totally runs counter to the ugly, primitive-looking logos you saw for the other networks (and I have a gif for that!). It has a severe, harlequin-looking aspect to it and is quite complex, and when it goes from stark black-and-white to colour, you just don't expect it. It jumps off the screen, as they say. Someone designed this back in 1957, someone with real talent, and NBC then proceeded to dumb it down for the next 60 years. It's still used, only the peacock has something like four colours. Oversimplification. 

Like 95% of households in the '50s, we had a black-and-white TV, so what was the point of a colour logo anyway? And yet, and yet. The slightly disturbing quality of this early logo is what makes it so effective and such a piece of art. But it still creeps me out big-time. 

And the music, my God, the MUSIC on this thing - it still makes my guts cringe. It just scared me then. It wasn't friendly. At all. It didn't make you want to watch the show. It made you want to run screaming out of the room. It has a big gong and evil upward glissandi on dark woodwinds and a sort of dissonant non-melody that doesn't belong on TV at all.  I had not heard the music since probably 1957 or 1958, I had forgotten it even existed and had pushed the whole nightmare into the back of my head, when I stumbled on it on YouTube, and my God! I cannot even tell you how strange I felt. I was rocketed back in time, and let me tell you, it was not a pleasant feeling to suddenly find myself getting smaller and smaller and more and more frightened. 

Most of the "scary" logos on YouTube (and there are many compilations, all of which I watch obsessively late at night) really aren't that scary. If you turn the sound off, they aren't scary at all. The music is the main element of terror here - it's all hair-raisingly aggressive, with loud percussion like somebody hammering on railroad spikes, whining synthesizers, etc. In many cases it's more like noise. Why did they do this? You can look away - easily - but you can't keep sound out, even if you stick your fingers in your ears. This is why ads in general are so repetitive and shrill. Also why I find gif-making so comforting, because there is no sound involved at all.

BTW, this is the peacock logo only a few years later. It has been made a damn sight friendlier, with blurring Venn diagrams of colour rather than that odd black-and-white abstract net, and completely different music, with bubbly arpeggios on a clarinet and cheerful trills on a flute. All the threat has been removed. Gone is that King of Siam severe, exotic quality. But the final splash of pigment, the startling, paint-brushy effect at the end is still there. 

But look you here! as the ghost said to Scrooge. OK, it's fatter, has a shorter neck, but doesn't this partridge just a LITTLE bit resemble the NBC peacock without its tail feathers? It's facing the same way, it has a similar doohickey on top of its head, and - well. It could be I'm reaching here. But what network WAS that show on anyway? (frantic interval while she goes on Wikipedia - watch this in the interim!):

(gasp, gasp) I'm back. No, no, I was wrong, The Partridge Family ran on ABC, not NBC, and yet, here it is, this weird resemblance between the peacock and the partridge. Maybe it was one of those unconscious things (I don't mean as in knocked out), i. e. the artist or animator borrowing the image, or even sending it up: a fat, tailless NBC peacock equals a partridge! Any show that gave the world both David Cassidy and Danny Bonaduce has a lot to answer for. So I'd say stealing a logo is the least of its crimes.

Badda-boom: Here is the logo NBC uses now. Compare and contast. At least the music doesn't scare me.

More logos, late at night

 

The RKO Radio Picture logo is significant mainly because it told us we were about to see a picture with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in it. It's too bad we don't have that compelling morse code beeping in the background. Someone finally deciphered what the morse code stood for. No, not something indescribably filthy! It just says "A Radio Picture".

Nice early Warner title, if a bit static. I wish they'd stuck with this one - I never liked that obnoxious WB logo thrusting at us, which went along with the equally-obnoxious "doyyyyy" of Bugs Bunny cartoons.

This is the best CBS eye "aperture" logo I've been able to find. Not the greatest, but the few others I've found are closely attached to end credits and can't be isolated. These gifs don't make themselves, you know, and some of them take a long time.

One of the strangest logos I've ever seen: a real find. This is why I keep chopping my way through bad copies of bad logos late at night, because once in a while I garner a gem like this one. I've always loved the Pathe rooster because he seems to take an iconoclastic stand against roaring lions and all that MGM spectacle crap. Give me a crowing cock any day.

The NBC logo: strangling the peacock

This is the kind of thing that used to scare the hell out of me when I was a kid. And I don't know why, except that I was maybe three years old and both fascinated and repelled by the strange black box that appeared in our house at just about the same time I did. You would think that I, being a vid kid, would be completely unfazed by its beeps and crackles, but no. It was all so smudgy and black and surreal, and when I see one of these things today it calls up a lot of feelings from extremely early childhood, if not infancy.

The first TV logos were ugly, mainly because nobody knew how to design them. This one is crazy because it seems to be showing sound waves like lightning-bolts going INTO a microphone, and smooth waves going out. Then there's some sort of an image like a telephone pole with more jaggedy lines coming out of it. 

Though it's TV, this looks like a logo for a radio station, and indeed the late 40s - early 50s was a  time of bridging two media that were far more different than anyone knew. At first it was just slapping some pictures onto the sound track, much the way silent film directors (Harold Lloyd?) grafted sound tracks onto movies. I remember "The Jack Benny Program",  in which the radio superstar came out in front of a curtain to introduce the show to a studio audience, followed by a program that would have been completely understandable even if you kept your eyes closed. It wasn't until Sid Caesar and Uncle Miltie and those other falling-down weirdos came along (Ernie Kovacs?) that all the visual possibilities of the new medium began to bloom.

For some reason, NBC logos seem to show more imagination than most (though the CBS eye with its opening-and-closing aperture wins points for sheer creepiness: more about that later). This is a pristine version of the first peacock symbol used by NBC, and by far the most beautiful. Its gracefulness and complexity make it a moving work of art. It has a sort of art deco/harlequin/stained glass pattern which at the very end bursts into multicolored flaming torches. Too bad hardly anyone saw it, because no one had "living color" in 1957. Over the years the peacock was dumbed down until it had only six "feathers" and didn't really look like a peacock at all.

I'm not sure what they're trying to do here, making a shooting-star image turn into the peacock logo. It simply doesn't work. To me it resembles nothing more than a Lucky Charms commercial, with its magically delicious, chemically-neon-colored rainbow. (If you can read what's above the shooting star, you're doing better than me. I'm dying to know what it says. Almost looks like "did you know", but not quite.)

This one is about as bizarre and ugly as it gets. Why is this strangely-colored blob floating around in water? It looks like a cake of soap, then a second blob melds with it in a sort of psychedelic Peter Max way. The different colors of the spectrum melting together? But the peacock DOESN'T HAVE the different colors of the spectrum any more! It's a dumbed-down kids' rainbow thingie, and besides, what IS that shit in the background, I mean in behind the halves of the bird logo? Looks like a giant turd to me. The more I look at this, the more it looks like an amateurish stop-action thing, the kind a kid would make on their ipod. Claymation!  Gumby's worst nightmare. Great works of art like the original NBC peacock logo should NOT be tampered with. It's like using a roller to paint over a Van Gogh. 

All this was stressful enough to drive me back into the vaults. I've been nosing around in the YouTube catacombs all afternoon (I told you I have no life!) looking for signs of the awkward transition from radio to TV, and at one point I noticed that one of the announcers kept looking down at his script. Obviously cue cards and prompters didn't exist then - nobody had even thought about it. Nobody knew how to look the camera in the eye without eye-bouncing or zombie-staring. New medium? What are you talking about?

The grainy surrealism of early TV, especially the really wonky wobbly stuff from the 1940s, appeals to me. This dreamlike running-man image was sucked out of a very strange blooper compilation from the early '50s, in which a quite-drunk woman, after repeatedly fluffing her line in a comedy sketch, said (I quote), "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck." This brought the production to a stunned standstill. The broadcast was going out live and nothing could be done about it. There were some guffaws from the crew, but if a studio audience was there (which there usually was), they were too traumatized to laugh. The surviving kinescope really should have been burned, but was probably hidden away somewhere for the stag reel they showed at Christmas.

Most early TV show openings aren't too memorable (with the exception of Car 54, Where Are You?, which I will deal with in another post), but I Love Lucy trumped them all in sheer elegance. The opening and closing segments had to be redone for syndication because they originally featured animated versions of Lucy and Ricky - smoking. Whatever the brand was - Phillip Morris, I think, with that horrid little dwarf. Whoever designed this version, the one everybody remembers, was an artist, contrasting the bold  letters of the title with the luminous silver heart nestled in what looks like folds of silk. (Come to think of it, that's pretty sexy.) The closing crawl lasted a full minute, during which we were treated to the roomba-roomba-roomba of Desi Arnaz's conga band. 

And this is sheer class: the deft Desilu signature in bold script, followed by that spooky CBS "eye" that sucks you right into the past. Or into eternity. Whichever makes most sense to you.

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