Stories behind famous movie production company logos!

Sometimes there is more than meets the eye. This can be said for a few logos used by the following famous production companies today:

DreamWorks

The little boy fishing on the crescent moon is actually a painting of Steven Spielberg’s son. The logo was originally supposed to be CGI but later they decided to paint it instead.

MGM

It is commonly believed that the lion used in the original MGM logo killed it’s trained just days after filming. This is fortunately not true but one fun fact is that there were 5 different lions used for the MGM logo over the years. The first lion, “Slats,” was filmed in black and white during the silent era and eventually had the roar from the 2nd lion, “Jackie,” dubbed onto his video. The third lion “Tanner” was the first lion to ever be filmed in colour.

Columbia Pictures

It is widely disputed who the Torch Lady model was for the original Columbia logo in 1924. The top three contenders seem to be showgirl Claudia Dell, bit-actress Amelia Batchelor and extra Jane Bartholomew. The original logo was a painting and it seems there is really no proof as to who it was as it was never officially documented. On another note, did I hear the beginning of Spice World at the end of this logo?

Paramount

This is the oldest Hollywood surviving logo. Paramount released the design in 1917 and the number of stars around the mountain were the number of contracted stars that the company had at the time. Originally, there were 24 but later on it was reduced to 22. Two well-known stars that were contracted by Paramount were none other than Elvis Pesley & Mae West. Today the stars don’t have the same symbolic meaning. When the logo was redesigned they were kept to keep the tradition alive in memory.

TriStar Pictures

The idea for the 1984 pegasus logo came from founder Victor Kaufman’s family’s love of horses. The original TriStar horse played a part in the movie The Electric Horseman in 1979. This horse was in fact a dark brown but was transposed white to better suit the look of real pegasus in the wild ;).