Saturday, April 26, 2008

More geekiness, and a request

Warner Bros.' logo for cartoon shorts,

TCM is playing the 1935 James Cagney movie G-Men tomorrow at 6:00 AM ET. The very first thing I noticed about it is that it was a re-release print: it had a newer logo on it. (There was also a framing story in the version TCM showed that looked as though it had been tacked on after 1935.)

Many of you who have watched enough movies will recognize the classic Warner Brothers logo, with the WB shield against a backdrop of concentric circles, which would be a deep red for movies in Technicolor. (It's similar to the one above, which was used for WB's cartoons.) However, that logo was not being used in the mid-1930s: instead, WB movies had an opening shot with a cloud background, and the WB shield "flying" in. Unfortunately, the Internet image searches I tried didn't yield a copy of this logo, and WB's website insists on torturing us with Flash, so there was no way I could find it there. (I don't think they'd have it there, anyhow; the site is about driving business, not the history of the studio. By the same token, when I looked for the old Universal logo, I couldn't find anything of worth on the Universal website.)

So, I've got a few questions:

1. Does anybody know a URL that's got a good shot of the older WB logo?

2. WB's first Three-strip Technicolor movie was God's Country and the Woman, released in January 1937; this should still have the older logo on it. Is that opening scene also in Technicolor?

3. What was the first WB movie to use the newer logo?

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