My favorite vanity-card clips are the ones that appear at the end of episodes of Battlestar Galactica (the new one), wherein executive producers David Eick and Ron Moore kill and mutilate one another in a variety of amusing ways.
Net surfing at work is being particularly stubborn today, so forgive me if one of the links posted already has this. I’d really like to find out who is behind my most favorite logo/vanity scene ever.
It starts on what looks like a desert highway, in very gritty, almost grayscale tones. The viewpoint zooms along the highway for just a few seconds as a tree appears along the road in the distance. Then, baM! lightning hits the tree and the whole scene freezes.
For the life of me I can’t remember what company name appears after all this.
I don’t know why, but this particular scene always gets me. It’s… almost disturbing. I love it.
Anyone know what I’m talking about?
That’s Jerry Bruckheimer Films (video here, after the Touchstone vanity). A scaled-down version appears in the various CSI credits. Significantly, after the dead tree is struck by lightning, it immediately blooms into full health, implying the power of God/Bruckheimer can bring life, I guess.
I loved that little bit of humour, too, but in the interests of nitpicking, it was Tara, not Willow doing it. 
The searches I have tried on this have led me to believe/suspect the composer of the New Line logo theme was Michael Kamen and it must have been on a DVD’s commentary track where I heard that he had that distinction. Aside from liking quite a bit of Kamen’s music, this particular theme is well past annoying to me. Childish, even.
It’s clearly a play on Jean-Luc Godard’s classic Bande à part, surely an influence on Tarantino.
How about David M. Kelly’s “You Stinka!” (said by the old lady whose rocking chair was toppled)?
Steven Bochco had a violist playing.
Mandalay (which always reminds me of Van de Lay Industries “and you want to be my latex salesman!”) starts with the tiger jumping through the jungle and becoming the drawn logo.
Is it Working Title that shows the sketch of the concentric circles over top two axes? like on a blackboard or drafting table?
My brother and I would compete over who could name the production company first In fact that opening moment, especially if it’s a classic one with a fanfare, is the best. The whole unseen movie stretches before you and has the potential to be so great…
Those are some hilarious clips! I love The Exorcist especially.
I’ve always heard the UBU sequence as “Sit Ubu Sit. Good Boy. Bark.”, never “Sit Ubu Sit. Bark. Good Boy.”
Both have the same music- they’re divisions of the same company.
Before they came to be a WB/CW affiliate and were an independent station, WPIX in New York had a stick figure “ll” (11, but without the pointy bits) in a circle. It wasn’t until I read it in a book that I realized the 11 was meant to mimic the shape of the World Trade Center.
Gulf + Western owned Paramount, not Warner Bros.
I could probably describe a lot of logos. I could probably do all of the Universal logos used on film without looking at a website like the one I linked to:
Black and white “A Universal Picture” with airplane
Black and white “A Universal Picture” rotating around globe with stars
Universal-International (Doesn’t the fact that it’s universal make it international?)
Panning from the universe into the globe with “UNIVERSAL”
Same logo, but with byline “AN MCA COMPANY”
75th anniversary logo- mix of all logos except U-I leading into CGI globe
Normal CGI globe without “75th ANNIVERSARY” byline
New CGI globe with lights and John Williams fanfare
2002 ET variant- new CGI globe with E.T.'s bicycle
New CGI globe with “www.universalstudios.com” (current version)
There are a couple of other variants on TV and direct-to-video films as well. For many years, the TV unit of MCA was called Revue Studios, and Universal’s television logo in the '70s and '80s used a shortened version of the Revue jingle (a number of variants- the jingle was always in the key of the theme song which preceded it).
A Channel 11 commercial from the 1980’s featured a panaramic view of the NYC skyline, stopping at the Twin Towers, which then turned into the 11-with-a-circle-around-it logo.
Before Don (?) Simpson died, weren’t there two trees when it was Simpson/Bruckheimer? Or is that just something my brain made up?
Yes, except it’s “Good dog.” woof
I remember it as two lightning bolts.