WingNews logo WingNews
top | item 44744454

How was the Universal Pictures 1936 opening logo created?

535 points| azeemba | 7 months ago |movies.stackexchange.com

73 comments

order

roughly|7 months ago

Someone once described the secret to making magic as putting in far more effort than any reasonable person would, such that no reasonable person would think you'd done it the hard way.

wcarss|7 months ago

It's also (approximately) Lawrence of Arabia; at least the same principle.

Lawrence puts out a match with his fingers as a showy trick. Someone else tries it, and cries out that it hurts, then asks what the trick is. He replies, "the _trick_, William Potter, is not _minding_ that it hurts."

yard2010|7 months ago

I would cut my own finger if it's not from prestige.

:)

genter|7 months ago

Penn & Teller, although someone else might've said that before them.

rwmj|7 months ago

Reminds me a bit of the BBC 1 ident from the 1960s-1980s, which was a physical model that was broadcast live (not even recorded!)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noddy_(camera)

It was replaced with a custom-built electronic system which was itself pretty crazy. One of the COWs came up for sale a few years back:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Originated_World

netsharc|7 months ago

Wow! There's a look of the Noddy at the end of this video: https://youtu.be/agKiATDgdBs (as well as what the broadcasted video looks like before it).

Funny how there are other frames like "Temporary Fault", that the camera can point to to inform the audience if there's a problem.

The Wikipedia page also mentions how they added "Colour" to promote the fact that colour service is available, and how people were choosing to remain in B&W because the licence fee for colour TV is higher. Meanwhile in 2025 I'm still using 1080p instead of 4K monitors because theye're good enough.

stavros|7 months ago

How does this article not include a video or photo of what the logo actually looked like?

AnotherGoodName|7 months ago

Doctor Who's original 1960's intro is in a similar vein of "wait a minute, how'd they do that in that year?". This predated any commercial synthesisers and was mind blowing for its time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75V4ClJZME4

https://www.effectrode.com/knowledge-base/making-of-the-doct...

zahlman|7 months ago

The theme is much more subtle and complex than my mental model.

I can recall in an electronics lab in university, we had just built the first prototype of input and output stages for an amplifier, and hooked it up to a function generator playing a sine wave and probably a simple paper-cone speaker. The system had fairly heavy hyperbolic distortion (as I expected from following along with the textbook)... my lab partner (who up until that point I'd thought of as not especially bright, relative to the standards of the course) listened a bit, grabbed the frequency knob, identified a few pitches, and then started playing the main melody of the Doctor Who theme entirely by ear. (And of course I provided a vocal bass line accompaniment, almost instinctively.)

scottmcf|7 months ago

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop was just incredibly innovative. I spent a long time learning about them and their techniques as a music student.

sitkack|7 months ago

> Composed by Ron Grainer, realized by Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

evaXhill|7 months ago

Considering the breakdown of all the elements that went into it and the meticulous attention to detail, it’s not surprising that the creation of this logo took around half a year to complete. Golitzen really embraced the Art Deco movement and was also a storyboard artist for NANA in 1934, but its hard to find any illustrations online, what i can find is a mention of his name in a MOMA art/cinema expo from the late 70s https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_327139.pdf

SoftTalker|7 months ago

The original HBO "Feature Presentation" intro was shot with minatures and similar sorts of effects, all before digital/CGI existed or was feasible. There's a documentary about it on YouTube

https://youtu.be/agS6ZXBrcng

LargeWu|7 months ago

There used to be real craft, based on the physical world, in creating that movie magic. It took a lot of knowledge about different stuff - materials, photography - to create this.

crazygringo|7 months ago

What do you mean, used to be? There still is, more than ever.

You might be surprised at just how many modern effects are still practical, not digital.

Octo-Shark|7 months ago

There's a studio here in Brussels that is similar to the one I work in. Very clever and genuinely nice guys I like to chat with from time to time.

I was surprised how they did the Logo for Arte a few years ago. https://youtu.be/gEWWo5VCQ6A

qingcharles|6 months ago

Amazingly McDonald's just went full practical on their new McDonaldland commercial, which is wild considering how many elements it combines. I have a feeling they did this as a pushback to everyone complaining about everything being made with AI.

Here's the making of:

https://xcancel.com/HuinGuillaume/status/1955301767740096659

(could only find it on X)

dylan604|7 months ago

It strikes me as funny, because I've been around movie magic for so long, that the wizbang grafix abilities of today have nearly erased from memory the knowledge of practical FX. I do miss the extra features of a nice DVD release with a bunch of BTS clips that showed the various movie magic to make the final version. I'm guessing studios enjoy not paying for all of that now that everyone streams everything and has no time for ancillary content.

The Columbia logo is another one that has been updated over the years. I've seen writes up about refreshing it back when it was an edit bay ruled by tape based playback. Each layer of clouds was on a separate tape all played back in sync to generate the final comp. Further back, it would have been separate film strips.

mistercow|7 months ago

> I'm guessing studios enjoy not paying for all of that now that everyone streams everything and has no time for ancillary content.

Is it that, or is it just that they realized that that stuff is easy material for promoting the film, so they just let various media produce free content about it and put stuff on YouTube?

serf|7 months ago

related aside : the 'This Island Earth' MST3K is a great episode, which apparently features a part of the effect.

'This Island Earth' is great all by itself if you're into campy early-ish scifi.

evan_|7 months ago

"This Island Earth" was featured on MST3K: The Movie!

When "Universal International" appears on screen, Mike Nelson quips "Doesn't the fact that it's universal make it international?"

slg|7 months ago

It is interesting to see a post like this at the top of HN considering the vibe here lately.

The popularity of this post seems to show an innate understanding of the value of investing a lot of thought and effort into creating a piece of art. When you do that, the process of its creation becomes part of the art. There is something incredibly human about creating art like this. We have been doing it for tens of thousands of years. "Wasting" time meticulously carving things out of stone or mixing paint to use on our cave walls. It is an inherently human thing to do.

And yet browsing HN most days gives the impression that many tech folks see that truly as time wasted and instead just want to give some black box a prompt and have "art" spit back out at them. I just don't get it.

nancyminusone|7 months ago

Posts like this are the only reason I come here. I've never been employed as a programmer or software engineer, have never been to California and don't care much about startups.

The "other" category here is pretty wide though.

DrewADesign|7 months ago

It’s also interesting that it’s commercial art/design, which many tech industry denizens view as some disgusting malevolent force in the world. I’d argue the tech end of advertising, which props up a pretty huge part of tech, generally, has been a whole lot more concerning than the visual end of it for a couple of decades.

autoexec|7 months ago

> There is something incredibly human about creating art like this.

There's also something a little sad in that it's just one more artistic work created as an ad. Advertising has been one of the few ways artists have been able to actually make money in this world. So much of the artistic creativity and ingenuity of humanity has been funneled into outputting lies, manipulation, and corporate promotion. I have to wonder what artistic works we'd be able to talk about if these artists were able to make a living creating something other than marketing/propaganda.

I suspect that AI means fewer artists working on ads and it'll probably be a while before companies get sick of just regurgitating the history of artistic talent fed into their models and start employing artists again to make something new.

Findecanor|7 months ago

I think the reflection of the letters must also have been a separate shot with no gap in-between the letters and the globe. Otherwise you would have seen the backs of letters on the left and right through the globe in the final sequence.

linotype|7 months ago

Side note: highly recommend MST3K The Movie, which features the classic movie “This Island Earth”.

CGMthrowaway|7 months ago

I love practical effects in cinema