There are some movie logos—all old, none in use anymore except for nostalgic reasons—that I love so much I never want the movie to begin. While not literally true, this lie does speak an emotional truth. Movies give us more than entertainment. For movie lovers, the whole process is charged with romanticism in the same way that we take delight from the littlest things our loved ones do… the way they wear their hat, the way they sip their tea. These incidentals are the first things we love about someone and what continues to haunt us long after the party's over.

I think my first logo, the spark that started my flame, was Fox’s. That big 20^th Century Fox carving, with those search lights shooting up into space, looked like the top of the Empire State Building. Maybe I thought it was the building those movies came from, I can’t even remember. All I know is, I desperately wanted to climb up and lose myself between those numerals and letters, an ant among giants. The logo has aged well over the years and filmmakers have incorporated it into the features. Hal Needham raced a couple of cars around it in The Cannonball Run (1981) and Tim Burton laid a lovely snowfall over it in Edward Scissorhands (1990).

When I began to watch the old Universal classic monster movies, I became an aficionado of the studio logo as it changed over the decades. I have a soft spot for the old airplane-circling-the-globe version that prefaced Dracula (1931), Frankenstein (1931) and The Mummy (1932), to name but a few; it’s simple yet elegiac and brokers in the very wanderlust that draws us again and again to the movies.

Yet as fond as I was of that original design, I liked the replacement, too… Alexander Golitzen's revolving Art Deco globe (photographed by John Fulton), which was put to use after Universal was passed to new owners in 1936. Over the decades, this logo would be trucked out for modern movies set in that era, such as The Sting (1974).

I even liked the later, color Universal logo put into use after the merger of the studio with International Pictures Company, which graced films from 1964 on. There was something awesome about the look of the Earth, something kind of gritty, even dirty… you had the sense of space chunks revolving around the planet as if the world we were seeing had just been belched out of The Big Bang and was spinning in the vacuum of space, ripe with possibilities. My sense memory of seeing this version of the logo is hardwired to crime thrillers and adventure tales, although the same logo prefaced love stories and comedies, too. It's literally awesome. I can't work up much enthusiasm for the new Universal logo, which is so full of itself with its thousand-points-of-light effect. It's cold and corporate and probably wowed the PowerPoint audience who thumbed it up. Feh.

Coming in a strong third, after 20^th Century Fox and Universal Studios, was flinty little RKO Radio Studios, which I learned about from King Kong (1933). I just loved the look of those sound waves radiating off the tower. I had the logo on a navy blue tee shirt when I was in college, one I’d special-ordered from the back pages of American Film magazine. It was my signature shirt and I wore it proudly until I made the romantic choice to give it to a girl who was leaving school to move to Florida. She kept it as best she could but the Tampa humidity took its toll and the shirt began to deteriorate. There was talk of preserving it in an air-tight memory box but like the independent studio itself my RKO tee couldn’t last and now exists, like all good things, only as a memory.

To be continued…

PS: While this post was percolating in my brainpan over the last month or so, a like-minded thread sprouted up at the Mobius Home Video Forum.