Golden Book's Logo History

1st Logo (1985-1996)

Nickname: "The Turning Golden Book, not turing"

Logo: The screen is divided into two parts horizontally: the top half is black and the bottom half is a lilac-sea green gradient. We see a book with its bottom side facing us, on the bottom half of the screen. As we zoom out it opens up and the pages turn, while a yellow pie-shaped sun flies up from the book, whose pages rise up and turn yellow. As this happens, the background becomes completely black. The pages and sun turn golden (or at least a cheesy recreation) as a golden rounded rectangle border zooms out and encloses the elements, with a space left where a ray of light wipes "GOLDEN" in a Serif Gothic-like font below it. The rounded rectangle "morphs" into a TV tube as "GOLDEN" zooms out to make way for "BOOK" which is wiped on similarly, and "VIDEO" which zooms out below that, with a shadow effect. The logo shines several times.

Variants:

On Campfire Thrillers, after the logo is completely formed, the black background fades to a darkened sky background seen in the film's opening sequence, with the logo superimposed over it. When the logo and music ends, the logo fades out and the video's opening titles start over the sky background.

In most cases, the "shining" part of the logo plays at the end, without music.

At the end of Three She-Ra: Princess of Power Stories, the logo fades in from a distance, slowly zooming up to the camera, and the color is bronze gold. Once it has practically overtaken the entire screen, it fades to the "She-Ra" logo zooming up, which stops and "shines" once it has come to a huge size. After that, it fades to the "Princess of Power" logo zooming in and shining, and then it fades to black. This was also seen on Three Hugga Bunch Stories, but only the Golden Book Video portion was shown.

On the release Three Fairy Tale Classics, the standard "shining" end variant is seen, but the logo spins into view from a far distance before resuming like normal once it is at the correct size.

On the original issue of the 1986 Golden Step-Ahead video Know the Alphabet, the full opening logo is seen at the end of the video after the credits roll with the 1986 theme music, rather than the standard "still" closing variant. The full opening logo was also seen at the end of the 1986 video Get Ready to Read, but silent.

On some 1985 video releases, a different animation was used sometimes, which is described as the second logo.

FX/SFX: The book, the sun, both of them turning yellow, the background becoming black, the border zooming in and later morphing into a TV tube, the rays of light wiping in the words, the shining.

Music/Sounds: There were 2 majestic synth fanfares used on this logo.

The first is a modified stock music track from the KPM music library entitled "Prestige Logo (a)" by Paddy Kingsland, with extra looped synthesizer effects added to the final note to fit the duration of the logo.

The second fanfare is similar but an original composition with a different key, sounding somewhat more elaborately-produced.

"Prestige Logo (a)" was used up until mid-1986 (most likely due to music rights issues) and often featured the second logo at the end of the video; the second fanfare was used from late-1986 to 1996.

Music/Sounds Variant: An abridged version of the logo is used which plays a variation of the last few notes of the 2nd version music, and the GoldenVision logo follows it.

Availability: Uncommon. Seen on Golden Book Video releases from the era. It's still saved on copies with a print version of the logo which uses a different yet similar font for the words. Some early 1990s releases had the trademark Golden Books Spine which was used on all later releases. One video with this logo on it is the animated HBO special Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No-Good, Very Bad Day. It can also be seen on some DIC video releases, including earlier releases of Madeline and the 1989 video Little Golden Book Land: The Great Harbor Rescue. It also appeared on video releases of the rare anthology series A Bunch of Munsch. All videos with this logo are now out of print, but can be sometimes found wherever used videos are sold. This was also oddly found on the Scholastic DVD release of Commander Toad in Space.

Editor's Note: This logo has some pretty cool animation effects and is rather good for its time, and is sure to be memorable to children growing up with Golden Book's VHS releases of the 1980s and 1990s.