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Same Film Different Warner Bros. Logos.

Bombers B-52 ( 1957 ). Far top poster from Belgium and just above is from France. Next door neighbours but different logos. Just goes to show Warner Bros. logos with different styles were used in various countries around the world in the same period of time. The U.S.A. poster logos for Bombers B-52  ( and the aka posters titled No Sleep To Dawn for the same film ) are the same as those printed on posters in Belgium and the French style the same as Australia, Germany and Mexico.


Comments

  • The variations in a logo's design, by country (yet for the same film) were also done by some of the other major studios, as well, with Universal immediately coming to mind.
  • edited June 2016
    The corporate identity book didn't always get followed in different countries. Sometimes the local company would basically say 'that logo is crap we will do our own'. And they did.
  • @David- so your saying that the "branding" of corporate identity that so any many large companies, small business & municipalities attempt to create today, was not necessarily controlled by movie distributors during the 20s-90s as closely as we may think, leading to small variations in movie logos?  :pensive:

  • All the Warner Brothers logos were authorised logos. The difference was that certain countries decided to use different styles of official logos at varying times over the years. It is as simple as that. 
  • By "authorised logos" do you mean there was a standard set that was distributed to countries/printers during the time frames you discuss? 

    Do we have any access to which logos were, available to be used? 

    Or is info that you've pulled from examining different printer logos? 
  • During last century Warner Brothers logos changed style many times, with styles originating from the U.S.A. Warner Brothers head office. The different ''official'' styles can be tracked down on the internet. Each countries Warner Brothers branch head office would have received the new logo information as it became available. It would appear then that each country had the option whether to introduce the new logo on advertising material or continue using their current or even earlier  logo material. All the information I have based my findings on have come from many years of extensive research.
  • Very interesting info! Makes me wonder if/how many documents have survived that detail the many changes. Thx Lawrence. 
  • I can tell you that after years of experience in a corporate enviroment companies did not always follow the head/home office directive for many reasons. Some as simple as the local head honcho just didn't like what was being sent down the line. Others might be things such as clashes with local industry, colours or culture and so on. 

    I cannot say if this is the case for each variation of the WB logo but it is possible.
  • edited June 2016
    Found this interesting read, the most important statement I feel is the one "Filmmakers have always been encouraged to tailor the logo to suit the tone of their films" which if true just goes to show that in fact the corporate identity/logo may only existed at head-office or inter-company level but otherwise it was left to the those holding the crayons and sketchpad.


    The Surprising History Of The Warner Bros. Logo

    Proving that great design is both timeless and infinitely adaptable, the Warner Bros. logo has had hundreds of different iterations over the years. Here are some of our favorites.


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    • p19341937p

    The Warner Bros. logo has always had the same basic premise: It's a shield floating in the clouds stamped with the initials W.B. Everyone knows it, and looking back at old Warner Bros. movies, it's tempting to say that it basically hasn't changed over the years: The emblem you see at the beginning of a movie today seems virtually identical to the one you would have seen 60 years ago.

    Or does it? In actuality, over the last century, the Warner Bros. logo has seen a surprising number of design iterations that has resulted in literally hundreds of different logos, and a fantastically comprehensive gallery shows what has changed over the years, and what has not.

    The original Warner Bros. logo

    The first Warner Bros. logo hails all the way back to the 1920s. As seen in films such as 1927's The Jazz Singer, it establishes the basic motif of the Warner Bros. logo for the next 90 years: a shield with the initials "W.B." stamped on it. Yet unlike future iterations, the original logo crushed the studio's initials into the lower third of the shield, so as to reveal the company's Burbank film studios.

    There have been more than 200 variants in the last 15 years alone.

    Through the 1920s and 1930s, the W.B. initials eventually grew to take over the rest of the shield, and by 1935's Captain Blood, the Warner Bros. logo had settled into a more elongated but otherwise similar version of the design it has used, with small iterations, for the past 80 years. But there are exceptions. In November, 1966, Jack Warner sold control of Warner Bros. to Seven Arts, Inc. The studio was then renamed Warner Bros.-Seven Arts. As seen in films like 1968's Bullitt, this logo—coincidentally, the studio's seventh major logo variation—kept the shield and Warner's initials but dropped the B, opting instead to have the W's ascender bend into a 7.

    The Kinney Services logo looks almost like the logo of a gas station, not a motion picture company,

    This design lasted only four years. In 1970, Kinney Services bought Warner Bros. and changed the logo to resemble almost a gas station's version of the historic mark: a beveled W and B over a crimson shield with gold outlines. Time Warner seems to want to expunge this logo from the historical record. Although it was originally seen at the beginning of 1971's Dirty Harry and A Clockwork Orange, in recent DVD and Blu-ray releases, the company either replaces it with its current logo or edits it out of the film entirely.

    Filmmakers have always been encouraged to tailor the logo to suit the tone of their films.

    After an eight-month return to the classic Warner Bros. logo, Saul Bass was hired in 1972 to rebrand the famous film studio. It's easy to see why Bass's design—very much of its time and slightly, well, Nazi-like—was quickly phased out by the mid-1980s in favor of the classic Warner Bros. logo. Even so, it has always been my personal favorite. I'm not alone: Ben Affleck and Steven Soderbergh opted to use this Warner Bros. logo at the beginning of their respective films, Argo and Magic Mike.

    Saul Bass's mid-70s redesign of the Warner Bros. logo.

    Which brings us perhaps to the most noteworthy thing about the Warner Bros. logo: Filmmakers have always been encouraged to tailor it to suit the individual tone of their films. The first stylized Warner Bros. logo appears as early as 1938's The Adventures of Robin Hood, in which the shield is rendered as if it were a royal crest. In the late 1990s, with the rise of CGI, stylized use of the Warner Bros. logo exploded: There have been more than 200 variants in the last 15 years alone. Great design is timeless, but it's also adaptable.

  • Great read, David. Guess at times some "artistic liscense" was allowed/strict adherence certainly not followed. Also, am
    guessing this makes using logos to identify releases- outside of the US more so- becomes even more complex. 
  • edited June 2016
    No logo was ever so altered so as to not what studio had released the picture, overseas or otherwise. (unless another foreign distributor may have also added their "seal of excellence."  :D 
  • What we need to remember are the different styles of logos used on Warner Brothers film apposed to posters. Different story altogether. 
  • edited June 2016
    Very true. And as this is a movie poster forum, and not a pure film forum, I guess I just assumed that is what was being talked about.


  • Sorry but I did start the thread off by talking about film poster logo usage but I understand it would be easy to get sidetracked along the way with a different type of media logo information supplied.

  • Still, it goes to show that the logo was not so controlled by HQ.
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