Updated Warner Bros. logo

[cajunaggie08]

https://www.fastcompany.com/90429745/warner-brotherss-new-logo-and-brand-are-a-glimpse-at-the-future-of-entertainment

 

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[The_Admiral]

Art Deco Minimalism, design as buffet table if I ever saw it.

[SFGiants58]

#BringBackSaulBass

 

[Dynasty]

The old one was kinda dated, but it's been around for so long, it feels almost iconic.

 

Why are so many corporations nowadays making their new logos blue and white? Is this just a trend now?

[chcarlson23]

I think it's fantastic. I mean a little gold would have been nice, but otherwise, it's a solid update. 

[IceCap]

7 hours ago, SFGiants58 said:

#BringBackSaulBass

 

Ah, I see you too are a man of culture.

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

I usually like the ditching of bevels, shadows, and other aspects of faux-3D.  And I like it here, too, as there should definitely be a 2D version of the WB logo.

 

But this is one case where I don't hate the 3D stuff.  I hope that the company finds applications for both versions of the logo.

[pianoknight]

On 11/14/2019 at 6:51 AM, SFGiants58 said:

#BringBackSaulBass

 

 

As a kid, I hated the Saul Bass logo because it represented some of the most terrible Looney Tunes cartoons.  The 1940s-1960s were the golden era of cartoons.  Once you got to the late 60s and into the 70s, the animation got lazy, the sound effects were odd and unmatched to the action, and the plots were generally more absurd and surrealist. 

 

 

Even beyond Looney Tunes, this same trend of sloppy cartoons continued into Tom & Jerry, as well as other series.  When I was young I had no idea about studios or designs, so I just sort of associated the Saul Bass logo with crappy cartoons. 

 

 

[Ferdinand Cesarano]

1 hour ago, pianoknight said:

 

As a kid, I hated the Saul Bass logo because it represented some of the most terrible Looney Tunes cartoons.  The 1940s-1960s were the golden era of cartoons.  Once you got to the late 60s and into the 70s, the animation got lazy, the sound effects were odd and unmatched to the action, and the plots were generally more absurd and surrealist. 

 

. 

 

The logos that were used in the 1960s, after Warner Brothers closed its cartoon division and contracted out the production of cartoons, were these:

 

 

               

 

 

 

 

 

Even the opening theme music is demented!  And the music in the cartoons is generic.  No more of the Carl Stalling masterpieces or the great Milt Franklyn pieces.  Instead, the music credited to Bill Lava consisted of one or two different tunes, repeated for all cartoons.  Yuck.

 

The Saul Bass logo came out in the 1970s, and actually coincided with a kind of revival of the Warner Brothers cartoons.  New linking material was produced for the Saturday morning anthology shows and the primetime specials, and eventually for the movies beginning with 1979's The Bugs Bunny / Road Runner Movie.  While the standard of production wasn't up to that of the golden age of the 1940s and 1950s, neither was it as bad as the nadir of the 1960s.

 

 

1 hour ago, pianoknight said:

Even beyond Looney Tunes, this same trend of sloppy cartoons continued into Tom & Jerry, as well as other series.  

 

It sure did.  The 1970s and 1980s were a time when cartoons really hit the skids artistically.  The decline had begun with the introduction of "limited animation" in the 1960s; but some of the cartoons produced with that technique (Yogi Bear, the Flintstones) had charm.  But, by the 1970s and 1980s, cartoons were garbage, being mostly full-length ads for products such as G.I. Joe dolls.

Then in the 1990s John K. saved the day with Ren and Stimpy; and Steven Speilberg restored all the old cartooning standards with Animaniacs.

[The_Admiral]

I had a big boxed set of Looney Tunes tapes that I would watch at my grandparents' house. Whenever cartoons had the weird Warners logos, especially the triangles and semicircles, even then I knew they would be bad. 

[pianoknight]

Yeah, I guess in my mind I was conflating the abstract Warner logo with the Saul Bass one.

 

 

 

I suppose the inverse is true, though, which is perhaps why my child brain make that assumption.  The classic WB logo generally meant cartoon greatness.  Anything that wasn't a Shielded W-B was almost guaranteed crap.