#scary logo

[sys-soft]

The logo man himself

[logosnstuff]

🇺🇸📺📼

[lightningabovefirebelow]

The Viacom “V of Doom,” but the infamous V is replaced by the Haunted Astolfo Bean Plushie and “A Viacom Presentation” is replaced with “You’re Gay.”

[sys-soft]

MTV_

[logosnstuff]

🇦🇺📺🎞

[logosnstuff]

🇬🇧🎥🎞

[oneofthosebrainthings]

Starry Night

Far above the silhouetted skyline, a brilliant light shoots across a starless sky. Suddenly, the star bursts with a deafening snap, echoed by a discordant tone. The synthetic bell tolls for thee and heralds nothing but destruction. Somewhere in the night, a madman erupts with uncontrollable laughter. The heavens broadcast their warning beneath the horizon, which reads-...

Damn, I forgot.

One late night, I couldn't pull myself away from the computer. I was surfing the internet aimlessly, and after a long train of websites and thoughts I was reminded of my early phobia. I Googled Night Court and eventually found a YouTube link to the end credits, including the final logo. The production company was called Starry Night Productions. To the right of the video clip on my screen was a list of related videos with titles like “Top 10 Scary Logos from Your Childhood” and “The V of Doom.” I found dozens of videos with compilations and explanations of negligible three or four second animations set to music that somehow left an impact on tiny minds. Each of these had hundreds of comments telling stories similar to mine, many of them with some version of the phrase “I thought I was the only one!” Of these collections, nine out of ten logos seemed entirely benign to me, but some had a weird musical chord or odd silence that I could imagine my toddler self finding threatening.

Elsewhere on the Web, there is a Scary Logos Wiki, which categorizes them by scariness levels from “Low” to “NIGHTMARE,” and in 2010, a short documentary called The S From Hell debuted at the Sundance Film Festival. The S from Hell refers to the red and yellow Screen Gems animation that followed most TV shows kids watched in the 60s like The Monkees and The Flintstones. The filmmakers interview people who were afraid of the Screen Gems logo as kids and attempt, with good humor, to explore the reasons why anyone would be frightened.

I was fascinated with all of this, and started wondering what made these miniscule film segments so unnerving. All I can really think of is that when you're a little kid, everything you see is explained to you in detail. Your books, toys, and television shows are designed to teach you to make sense of the world around you. New objects and concepts are slowly introduced by a helpful puppet or cartoon character. Everything is literal so that your brain, which is learning how to interpret input, doesn't consider everything a threat, as if you were still an unevolved beast in the wild.

These logos are designed to grab your attention. Therefore, they are frequently louder than the rest of the program, and include bombastic noises like synthesizers, often playing two or more notes that either clash in a chaotic manner, or are played in a minor key, both signifying unease to the subconscious. The sounds are played over an abstract visual representation of a corporation that a child's brain isn't developed enough to analyze or understand. My theory? A television logo is a child's first introduction to the surreal. Does that mean that it's unintentional art? I don't know. It's late. I'm going to bed now.

[logosandlogos-blog]

The other day, a post on my weirdo wiki food blog Wikipedia Microwave got me thinking about the odder details of my early childhood. My mind works in mysterious ways, turning tangent into tangent until I end up either being a passenger in a car hurtling down some of the scariest single track roads of the North Shropshire area while babbling manically about The Avengers or, alternatively, looking up YouTube videos of things which scared the shit out of my as a kid. Both of these things happened today, but the less said about my little journey the better (it wasn't bad but it wasn't very interesting either).

Like many British people in their early twenties, I spent my early years in a subdued world of John Major, cloudy skies and videos of BBC children's programmes. All of these things made some impact on me but apart from my political views and depressive tendency, perhaps the biggest thing to emerge from this period was a terror of the BBC logo. It was bad enough in still form, three sloping boxes drawn by the hand of a madman, underscored by three bland, basic stripes in different colours and looking every bit the epitome of late modernity's souless corporate 'aesthetic'. But when seen in motion, this logo unleashes a sadistic amount of horror. As seen in the YouTube video I've attached, the coloured lines intersect, drifting along the little line assigned to them but not remotely deviating from it, the picture of obedience. Then, the logo sits there, staring at you like an axe-wiedling maniac who hates you and your loved ones. The music doesn't help and while it isn't as obviously menacing as those fucking boxed letters, it is mournful at best. Put all of this in front of a sober dark background and you have the most terrifying introduction to Postman Pat I can imagine.

When the BBC changed to three upright boxes at some time in the late 1990s, I was the most relieved little boy in Britain.