VID

The Vzglyad And Others TV Company was founded in Russia in 1990. The founding committee, mainly composed of Vlad Listyev, Alexander Lyubimov, and Andrej Razbash, were looking to make the company vanity plate as "shocking and menacing" as possible. This was attributed to how the fall of the Berlin Wall had occurred only months before, and the company wanted to create a distinct, blunt image before the rest of the country.
When it came to designing the logo, Listyev and his wife visited the Museum of Eastern Culture, hoping to find something strange as inspiration. His wife suggested the face of a Taoist philosopher's statue, but the museum denied them access to it. She was sure to take one good picture of it before they left, and later, the group modified the mask with CGI to appear angrier and more menacing.
The original vanity plate is fifteen seconds long, and was used up until the mid-nineties. A black line slides into the screen, making mechanical positioning noises, before starting to drill into the screen. A ball that looks strangely like a hole bounces off the line and into the screen. There are several circular wipes before the angry mask fades over black, followed by "BИD", which translates to "VID". The five note synthesizer track that plays during the mask's entrance has since been nicknamed the "Nightmare Chords", due to the abundance of young children whom saw the logo and were disturbed by it.
It was reported in 1993 that a ten-year-old boy named Ivel Isyanov had an epileptic fit due to the circle wipes. Isyanov recovered soon enough after being hospitalized, and when asked about his fit, he claimed he'd long been terrified of the vanity plate. It was one night that he'd finished watching a game show and decided to face his fears by focusing intently on the whole video sequence. Isyanov was recorded as saying that he'd been "entranced by the ball", and when the transitions had happened, he begun to have an attack. He claimed that the mask stared at him as he writhed on the floor, "damning" him, but when asked about that statement years later, Isyanov insists he was overacting as a child. In 1994, a six-year-old girl named Elza Romanov had a similar epileptic fit because of the logo, but unfortunately, suffered long-term brain damage. It was in 1999 when the logo was finally cut down to just be the mask fading in from black, out of concern for more epileptics.
Vlad Listyev, whom was responsible for the logo in the first place, became head of the Russian network First Channel in early 1995. He had become withdrawn and paranoid that year, to a point where he abruptly ended a dinner party by screaming at his wife that there was nothing wrong with him. On March 1st, 1995, he attended a company meeting before going straight home to his apartment, eyewitness accounts reporting that he repeatedly looked over his shoulder going to and getting out from his car. Listyev's wife and a few of his coworkers came home to find he'd had been brutally murdered in the living room. After what little investigation was accomplished, it was determined that one of Listyev's business rivals had put a hit on him, with speculation that it could also have had to do with the angered Museum of Eastern Culture. His murderers and the people who sent them were never found.
Regardless of the surrounding controversy around the VID Mask, it has been adopted as a a bit of a mascot by the company, and was used in less-threatening vanity plates after 2002. The VID indent has since become an internet meme in Russian online communities.
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