Audio-visual identity databases? Logo remakes? A T.A.T. communications company? My friends, these are all part of the biggest niche in Internet history, production logos.

Yes, there really is an online community for everything, and yes, production logos have a community. In this entry, I will try to explain most of the major aspects of this community. Starting with the one and only...

Audiovisual Identity Database

The Audiovisual Identity Database (AVID) documents production logos, station IDs, warning screens, clip-on IDs, and describes their visuals and audio in detail. In short, they're basically a production logo Wikipedia.

Brief History on the Audiovisual Identity Database

The Audiovisual Identity Database originally started out on Wetpaint (later Wikifoundry) as the "CLG Wiki" (named after the Yahoo "Closing Logos Group") and was intended as an alternative to "KRS Logos", one of the earliest documented websites that described production logos.

In May 2020, Wikifoundry booted the wiki and it found a new home on Miraheze, but on September 2022, the biggest event in the wiki's history happened, the wiki was put under new management and after general consensus, the wiki was rebranded to the Audiovisual Identity Database.

Logo Remakes

Amateur logo remake

Logo remakes are the process of taking a production logo and attempting to recreate it in Blender (most are made in 2.79, but some have been made in 2.8x and onward). Two notable people who make these are Plasticity and PajamaFrix, as both of their remakes tend to be extremely accurate to the original logos.

T.A.T. Communications Company

The 1979 production logo for the T.A.T. Communications Company is most likely the Internet's wildest goose chase, with 15 years of finding the thing, only a partial finding before getting cut off by a CBS station ID has surfaced.

The T.A.T. Communications Company was Norman Lear's production company, it rebranded to Embassy Television in 1982, and it later got purchased by Coca-Cola (who also owned Columbia Pictures at the time), and in 1987, the company rebranded to ELP Communications and became an in-name only unit of Columbia Pictures Television.

Given that the shows Lear produced (i.e. The Jeffersons and One Day at a Time) were very popular at the time, it seems like the whole thing should have been surfaced by now, but the whole thing about this logo being lost is that newer negatives of these shows are replaced by the logos for the aforementioned Embassy, Columbia Pictures Television, Columbia-TriStar Television, and as of 2002, Sony Pictures Television.

I personally think that the full logo might have a very small chance of being found, since, again, the shows it appeared on were very popular at the time, so people most likely would have recorded airings of the show onto a VHS tape, but that's just my theory.

"Scary" Logos

This is going to be a long one.

Scary logos originate from a wrestling forum of all things, where some user asked if either the 1976 or 1990 Viacom production logos frightened them as a child, the general consensus was that the one from '76 was the frightening one, with this forum cementing it's legacy as the "V of Doom".

In the early days Wikifoundry "CLG Wiki" era, there was a section called the "Scare Factor", which had a ranking system which ranged from "Low", "Medium", "High" or "Nightmare", with Nightmare being the highest rank. Not only was it childish, they were poorly managed, with some of them being notably based on the editor's POV, the Scare Factor (and the similar Cheesy Factor) were retired and replaced with an "Editor's Notes" section (which, per my suggestion, later became the far less biased Legacy section after the AVID rebrand).

Yeah, almost NONE of these logos are scary unless you're a five year old who gets startled easily, the only one of these logos that actually IS scary is Horror Factory Entertainment's 2015 production logo, and THAT logo was practically cheating by having a literal jumpscare (btw content warning for that logo if you're curious: skinless creature, that is all).

Peter Rodgers Organization

This is an easy one to explain, the Peter Rodgers Organization will take down a majority of uploads of their logo, as a result this logo is NOTORIOUSLY hard to preserve online. I have a genuine question to ask: WHY?

It's literally just your PRODUCTION LOGO of all things, not even DISNEY has copyright THIS strict, it's not like people are uploading a full episode of The Rifleman, so I must ask again... WHY?

Well, I'm done rambling about crap nobody cares about. Thanks for reading and stay tuned for more entries!