RKO, erasing a Major

 Who today is actually influenced by the production company when choosing which film to see? The star may be a decision factor, or the director, or simply the subject matter.
In the thirties and forties, moviegoers were going to see an MGM picture, a Fox movie, etc. They knew they could count on a certain quality, a distinctive look, a familiar sound, the same actors from one film to another, down to the same facilities in the theaters since the studios owned them. There was no internet to follow a particular director's filmography, but you could be sure to catch every film made (and advertised) by a specific studio.

And these studios are not necessarily the same ones that rule the world of cinema today. No Dreamworks, no Touchstone, Tristar, Sony, etc.
Some are still around but hardly matter compared to today's giants like MGM, some gained prestige and importance over time like Universal and Columbia (once considered almost poverty row), and some remained with more or less success like 20th Century Fox, Paramount and Warner.

But one of the most important studios actually vanished from sight in the fifties. Radio-Keith-Orpheum pictures or RKO was one of the majors then and they produced wonders such as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers's musicals, great Alfred Hitchcock movies like Suspicion and Notorious, Citizen Kane, King Kong, Clash by Night, The Thing from Another World, They Live by Night, It's a Wonderful Life, Cat People, etc.

Producer Howard Hughes took over the studio in 1948 and drove it to bankruptcy in less than 10 years. Today, a RKO company still exists and produces some films (see their website) but it is only a shadow of what the firm once was.

Pinocchio

One of the most lucrative deal of RKO, though, was the distribution of all Walt Disney films since Disney did not own a theater chain. Being the pool of artist that it was though, the company designed special logos inspired by RKO's official ones. They were integrated in the main and end titles of each film. This posed quite a problem when Disney decided to create their own distribution company in the fifties (Buena Vista). When films from their catalog were re-released, they tried to erase every trace of these logos by any means possible.

Peter Pan

Original 1937 Snow White titles

New 50s Snow White titles

 It usually meant replacing the footage by a plain Buena Vista credit, but in the case of Snow White, for instance, the RKO credit was in the middle of the main title sequence and the original artwork had been lost, so that a complete new main title had to be made. This new title is quite likely the one you've known until quite recently.

Cinderella

This replacement practice is still in order and was used throughout the film's home video history. Cinderella on VHS was simply cut short so that the logo wouldn't appear and the first few bars of the Cinderella song were also cut. On the DVD, they reinstated the music but still replaced the image with a nineties Walt Disney Pictures logo sped up.

Fantasia

The first DVD edition of Alice in Wonderland simply had black footage over the first few seconds of film.

Alice in Wonderland

Dumbo

Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs

Fortunately, Blu-ray came along and some of these beautiful images were restored for their Hi-definition debut. Original logos were reinstated for Snow White (and complete main title sequence), Pinocchio, Fantasia, Dumbo, and Alice in Wonderland. I was hopeful that the studio wanted to restore all titles that way and was bitterly disappointed that Bambi came with the same Disney logo replacement.

Bambi

That's all for today folks!