for those about to rock

P.ublic B.roadcasting's S.cary

oh, the places you'll go when boredom spurs you on to plumb the limitless depths of the internet.

there's a whole gaggle of clips you can find on youtube that feature old logo sequences, particularly of the interstitial kind that run at end of television programs.

in and of itself, that's hardly remarkable; the web's littered with vestiges of pop culture's past that have no significance beyond the simple fact that they existed, and which get thoughtlessly tossed off like waste bound for the slag heap. however, this particular strain of videos merits pause, for they owe their notoriety not just to naked retro obsession, but to their capacity to terrify.

that's right. as the below clips show, these tiny 4-5 second clips of corporate logos and station call letters are SCARY.

i've got my own overwrought theories on what makes them frightening (as far as the examples here go: the viacom logo presentation jostles lingering fears of mutually-assured destruction left over in the collective unconsciousness from the cold war; the pbs logo suggests something sentient but inorganic, a la hal from 2001: a space odyssey; the paramount television one is, well, ok, that's just coming to kill you), but at the very least, it's hard to deny that there's something vaguely disturbing about many of these old logo sequences.

the number of comments you see online attesting to that inarticulate terror is staggering. hell, the viacom logo's scariness is widely-acknowledged enough to have earned the nickname 'the v of doom' (in fact, if you search "v of doom" on wikipedia, you'll be automatically directed to the viacom entry; if that's not enough, check out its entry in the urban dictionary).

it's a phenomenon. and, like any phenomenon that gets its start on the web, it's spawned parodies and parodies of the parodies. the one i've included as a final video here is basically slaying a boogeyman.

posted by jomilkman @ 8:47 AM