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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.
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.
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.
TO SUIT THE TONE OF THEIR FILMS.
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.
FILMMAKERS
HAVE
ALWAYS
BEEN
ENCOURAGED TO TAILOR THE LOGO
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 Clockwo ɬ