I'm having a field day with this topic!
Rising Sun Ranger said:
Does my avatar scare anyone? :laugh:
It does look nifty, but I remember it being really spooky when I was a kid. You can find it (minus the music) at the end of
Brian's Song!
But for me, the absolute King of all scary logos (and perhaps
all of my childhood fears!) is the classic
20th Century Fox logo! The one from the 1950s-70s! It looked like a huge robot monster with an ominous slanted "0" for an eye, and that fanfare sounded like a roar! Sometimes, I have a chilly feeling when seeing the dark night sky, afraid that it would fade in like a ghost and watch over me!
It's not as bad when seen on a small screen, but on the big screen, that's the greatest fear I had! The only two times I ever had that experience were
Star Wars (when it first came out) and
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (in 1993, though I had seen it before on video)! When I went to theaters as a kid, I always used to hide before the movie began!
Other scary logos for me include:
-The Hanna-Barbera logos from the late 60s/early 70s (with that creepy, tingling music!), one with red & blue lines coming together, and (the scariest one) one with an orange H-B crashing into the camera! It's just so claustrophobic, for some reason! It's like a wall is flying after me in the dark to crush me!
-Anyone remember WAAAAY back up to the mid-80s, when
The Flintstones closed with the
OLD Screen Gems logo? With all these lines cluttering the camera and bouncing around, with that scary fanfare (and the announcer says "This has been a Screen Gems Presentation!")? Looks like a synapse that you'd have in a dream!
-The old PBS logo from 1971 to the early 80s. That was really creepy!!! Electronic-spooky! I even did a recreation of it in Flash.
-The closing logo for Mr. Roger's Neighborhood. The one after the closing credits, which had a painting of Trolley. The music really scared me!
-Even scarier, remember those stills at the end of Sesame Street? ("Sesame Street is a production of . . . the Children's Television Workshop!") The stills of a bulby-eyed Oscar holding the crude CTW logo was VERY scary!
-I even remember the old logo for the ABC
4:30 Movie (the cameraman silhouette thing)! I thought that thing was a monster (like a cross between Hedorah and the 20th Century Fox logo), only this time, it was moving! Sort of. It may be creepy, but I'm actually more okay with it now.
I might have been creeped out by the original Viacom logo (not the "V" one, but the "pinball" one; I caught it at the end of stuff like
Josie and the Pussycats,
Gargoyles and
Mad Monster Party?), the later AIP logos, and to a much lesser extent, the Rankin/Bass logo (which only delights me now).
But do I want these logos to go away forever? Hell, no! Call me crazy, but I'm basically the Edgar Allen Poe of scary logos. They haunt me, even in my sleep, but they inspire me, as you'll later find out (it's part of my REKIRA project).