Speaking in Celluloid Tongues

WORDS Matt Mckinzie VISUALS Graysen Winchester

I have a bad relationship with old Christmas cartoons. It has nothing to do with the holiday itself; in fact, some of my best childhood memories are associated with Christmastime. Put on It’s a Wonderful Life or Elf or It Happened on Fifth Avenue, I’ll gladly watch. But never, ever, put on one of the “Cartoon Classics.” I must clarify such a moniker: the “Cartoon Classics” do not include How the Grinch Stole Christmas or A Charlie Brown Christmas or Mr. Magoo’s Christmas Carol. Yes, these are all “classics,” but when I write “Cartoon Classics,” I refer specifıcally to the stop-motion animation specials that play on ABC Family every year, the ones most people have stashed away in their cupboards in dusty VHS slip cases. The big ones are Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, Santa Claus is Coming to Town, and Frosty the Snowman; A Year Without a Santa Claus (featuring the Miser Brothers), The Little Drummer Boy, Rudolph’s Shiny New Year, and Nestor, the Long-Eared Christmas Donkey are also included in the batch. I must also clarify: I have no qualms with the cartoons themselves, and their pop culture longevity (despite their antiquity) wholly validates their timeless entertainment value. They’ve been embraced across generations, passed down like family heirlooms among the progeny, a connecting line through our diverse holiday t r a d i t i o n s . M y parents w e r e kids when those specials fırst premiered on television, and made sure to imbue my formative Christmastime experiences with that same media. I still get nostalgic thinking about winter nights in our den, sitting on the forest green carpet that smelt of Nonnie’s cigarette smoke, gathered eagerly around our bulbous Sony TV (before the advent of flatscreen) as Mom would pop in our Frosty VHS. From a sea of static, our favorite characters would emerge — breaking into song, fıghting yuletide foils, fılling that tiny basement with unbridled joy. Eventually, Frosty would fade to black.

Our beloved characters would disappear into a noiseless abyss, and an empty void would materialize, bordered on all sides by a blue banner.

That was the cue to plug my ears, to shift my eyes to the green grain of the carpet even as I yearned to uproot myself and race out of the room. Beyond eyesight and earshot, a twangy guitar broke through silent airwaves,

followed by woodwinds, shrill like nails on a chalkboard, as strange shapes (in various shades of blue) forming an abstract “R” and “B” burst onto our TV screen without warning. Just as abruptly, the words A RANKIN/BASS PRODUCTION followed, before the jingle slipped into a minor key, purply and thunderous, propulsive as it hurtled into a black fadeout, our den engulfed in darkness. Thinking about it still gives me goosebumps. Thus, I wasn’t terrifıed by the cartoons, but rather, the production company logo that followed them. The mixture of discordant sounds and strange iconography, that unlike the cartoons themselves had not aged well since its late-60s inception, was abrupt and sinister, startling to my naive brain. Mix it in with worn-out VHS static, casting strange light across dark basement furniture, and you get a nightmare scenario for the senses. Looking back on this experience as a 20-year-old, it seems silly. A 5-second corporate logo, scary? A graphic and some font, really the stuff of nightmares? I can now watch the RANKIN/ BASS logo without fear, and yet hearing that jingle and seeing those shapes still puts me back on that basement rug, three-years-old, paralyzed and petrifıed as fıve seconds of arbitrary fılmic madness played out on screen before my tiny ears and unexpecting eyes. For the longest time, I thought I was alone in my phobia. Fast forward ten years. Suddenly, I’m 13 years old, it’s Christmastime again, and while I don’t feel the need to turn off ABC Family in the living room, hearing that damned logo thunder in our TV speakers still lights a fıre in my stomach. Joan Didion once said, “I’ve always found that if I examine something, it’s less scary.” That December, I became Didionesque in my pursuit of this fear: to stare at it, untangle it, grapple with the enigma in order to free myself of its domain. It began with Google searches. “rankin bass logo scary” “rankin bass logo creepy” “old TV logos nightmare.” Scattered keywords to get me somewhere, anywhere, beyond my solitude. Then came the Wikipedia pages, YouTube videos, and Reddit threads. Suddenly, I had found my kindred spirits, all of whom shared the same fear of the RANKIN/BASS logo growing up, for all the same reasons. Many commenters had actually been children when the specials fırst premiered, beginning in the late-60s. As one blog post read: “For those who don’t understand why this is scary...the ‘70s were a scary time for kids!! You had a big man

in a bear suit threatening nightmares if you left a campfıre burning... You had a lady who could see and name all the children in the world through a ‘magic mirror’... Then the logos right before you go to bed! They’re like the Boogeyman’s letterhead!” Another commenter reckons with the logo’s jingle in technical terms, by way of explaining its “scare factor”: “It’s the harmonies and the flute, mainly... the abrupt, staccato F major 7 chord: F,

A, C, and E.” Another post reads: “Many of the logos, such as RANKIN/BASS, came at the end of prime time shows before kids went to bed...the fanfare and odd logos triggered a feeling of fınality in the child watching it.” Finally, this simple, yet completely validating assertion: “This scared me so bad when I was little. Up until recently I thought I was the only one.” Finally, I could understand my fear, and for the fırst time, I wasn’t navigating it alone. A year later, a documentary called The S from Hell premiered at

Sundance, further substantiating my childhood phobia with an examination of the eerie

Screen Gems production graphic (which played after TV shows like I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, and The Flintstones), broadcast during those same years as the RANKIN/BASS logo, and similarly discussed in the aforementioned Reddit threads and YouTube videos. But what are the broader implications of this fear? What does its unspoken ubiquity reveal about how we, as a collective viewing culture, consume media starting at a young age? Of course, the scare factor of these late-60s logos (three are discussed at length in online forums: the RANKIN/BASS logo, the Screen Gems “S from Hell,” and

Viacom Productions’ “V of Doom”) is directly tied to their sociological imagination. Counterculture reached its acme at the turn of the decade, chiefly responsive to

a Vietnam war draft targeting the baby boom generation, and broader systemic inequities and injustices pertaining to race, gender, sexuality, and class. Mass media reflected the chaos-catharsis mélange: music became increasingly avant-garde, big-budget movies adopted jarring arthouse techniques (look no further than Easy Rider’s cemeteryset acid trip), and television found itself catering to myriad, fractured demographics: teenagers fıghting the hegemonic culture, their shocked parents clinging to a Levittown image and value system, young children lost in the disarray. Amid the broader societal unrest, sound designers and engineers began experimenting with new instruments never before heard, as well as old ones brought back into the mainstream echelon after a half-century of jazz, swing, rockabilly, and big-band radio-play. Suddenly, synthesizers, woodwines, and flutes were jetting out of America’s TV speakers without warning. Graphic design was in a similar period of innovation, and during the late-60s went through a kind of “puberty” — illustrators and font-makers stuck in antiquated, mid-century tradition while simultaneously charging ahead into space-age modernity. From all of this, what do you get? TV logos comprised of strange text and eerie sounds, all wrapped up in an era’s awkward moment of transition and reckoning: inexplicably odd semiotics radiating from America’s television screens as a kind of microcosm of the broader sociological “growing pains.” But as a child of the 21st century, wouldn’t there be some distance between myself and this specifıc context? Sure, the logo hasn’t changed since the late-60s, and it hasn’t aged particularly well either — its music and graphic design still ooze commodifıed counterculture-era zeitgeist. Even so, having not grown up in the ‘60s and ‘70s, I did not have to fıeld the kind of sociocultural distractions delineated above... ...or did I? Born at the dawn of the new millennium, my perspective as a youngster (like all Gen Z babies) was marred by the external-world leitmotifs of the Internet and the War on Terror, and as I came of age, mass shootings and police

b r u t a l i t y. Technology and mass media concurrently blossomed, in accessibility and exceptionality, at a rate never before witnessed, and as I write now, we roam about the broader capitalist-globalization superstructure, inseparable from our heart ratetracking cellphone-wristwatch composites and in-home computer pods that respond to arbitrary vocal cues: always on, always listening. Pervasive media tactics influenced by (and inextricable from) external-world disarray and collective societal fears (as witnessed on full parade in something as seemingly innocuous as the RANKIN/

BASS TV logo amid Woodstock, Manson, Altamont, and Nixon), are now part of our normalized, dayto-day discourse. In the throes of fear and fascination on that basement carpet, perhaps I w a s feeling those multigenerational reverberations rooted in my parents’ upbringing. Their experiences as children of the counterculture era, watching RANKIN/BASS Christmas cartoons, or Viacom and Screen Gems TV shows, manifested in the genetic footprint, shaping my media consumption as a child of the new millennium. Here I make a subjective assertion, spoken in abstraction. Perhaps this is not the case for everyone who witnesses these old TV logos, yet who still experience a timeless reaction of aversion. Is it, then, our primal response to capitalism and consumer culture? A repulsion at the sight of corporate gain tacked onto something as innocent as a children’s cartoon, permanently coloring our formative viewing experiences with unnatural money system

motives? If so, will all entertainment logos age this way? Will our children shudder at Universal Pictures’ 2012 100th Anniversary fanfare, or the sights and sounds of NEON and A24? One thing is for certain: I wouldn’t be where I am today without that RANKIN/BASS logo. It constituted one of my biggest and most inexplicable fears as a youngster, but it made me realize, at that tender age, how deeply visualaudio media shapes its viewers: scarring us, inspiring us, and forcing us to reckon with ourselves and the world in which we live. It is the early stimulus that sets the stage for every stimulus to come. Now, at 20 years of age, I make fılms. No longer a phobia, RANKIN/BASS nonetheless fascinates me, as fear melted into intrigue, and eventually, into my obsession with the power of the moving image. I fınd now my life is defıned by those same signifıers that once frightened me: I see in aspect ratio, I breathe videocassette static, Tri-X fılm rolls are consumed like fruit rollups for the soul. Such a way of life must be attributed to the visceral horror RANKIN/BASS lent me as a three-year-old. For always, those small screen scaries play impetus to the careful deliberation behind every aesthetic choice I make — as an artist who will forever speak in celluloid tongues.