Logo Joke / Paramount

You know... rings.

Paramount Pictures' logo jokes often involve their familiar mountain cross-fading into another object (usually another mountain), or another object replacing the stars that encircle the mountain itself. Paramount's logo sequence is also known for having no fanfare and little sound effects, which also gives them an opportunity to put sound effects over the logo or add a fanfare specifically for the movie.

The logo itself has changed its surrounding environment over the years, from a simple mountain surrounded by stars to include a lake (1986), a twilight sky (2002), and a mountain range/forest (2011).

Animation

• In The Busy World of Richard Scarry animated series, the Paramount logo morphs into a mountain in Busytown from behind which the Applecopter flies out.
• In the Paramount-produced show Duckman, the episode "Inherit the Judgement: The Dope's Trial" has Duckman reveal that he won his court case because a higher power was on his side. The camera pans to an animated Paramount logo, complete with fanfare. It can be seen here.
• The Itsy Bitsy Spider: The Paramount logo is part of the landscape. As seen here.
• The Little Prince (2015): For its international release, the sky around the Paramount logo glows bright-yellow as the stars reach the mountain, and there are several larger gold stars that come into focus as the sequence ends.
• Popeye:
  • At the end of the 1951 cartoon Alpine for You, after Popeye punches Bluto, Bluto slams into a mountain peak, forming stars around the mountain. After that, "A Paramount Picture" appears over said mountain, closing the cartoon, seen here. This joke was preserved on the AAP prints.
  • Popeye, Little Lulu, and Little Audrey also had their own special "Spinning Star" openings, where stars from the logo would zoom in with the characters' headshots.
• South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut: The logo crossfades to an identically-shaped construction paper mountain behind the town of South Park, Colorado, seen here. This version was cut from international prints of the film, as Warner Bros. handled distribution outside of North America, a product of Viacom and Time Warner jointly owning Comedy Central at the time (the 1998 logo appears normally here). This was the North American debut of the 1999 enhanced Paramount logo. Internationally it first appeared on The General's Daughter.
• Team America: World Police: The Paramount logo animation plays backward before stopping at the clouds, which cover the screen as the camera zooms back to segue into the opening credits.
• Paramount Animation debuted a logo in 2019 (though it only debuted in 2020 with The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run) that featured a young tween girl (named Star Skipper) skipping a stone across a lake, which turns into a star and flies across a mountain forest area, before finally revealing the mountain logo complete with greenery. It can be seen here.

Films - Live Action

• The Absent-Minded Waiter: The film is set in a restaurant. The famous Paramount mountain cuts to the opening shot of the movie: a little heap of mashed potatoes on a plate, shaped like the Paramount mountain. A chef then squashes the potato mountain with his thumb.
• Alfred Hitchcock films:
  • Psycho: The logo is divided by bars to match the opening credits, seen here.
  • Rear Window: The logo appears on closing window blinds at the end, seen here.
  • Vertigo: The logo is in black-and-white, contrasting the film's color format, seen here.
• Alfie (2004 Version): The entire logo sequence is colored in pink.
• Babylon (2022): The logo is the 1920s version, in keeping with the film's era.
  • In the trailer, the stars in the Paramount logo are snorted off as if they're cocaine.
• The Bad News Bears Go to Japan has Mount Fuji as the mountain.
• The Beautician and the Beast: After the logo sequence is finished, the text disappears and the same mountain becomes the first shot of an animated sequence setting up the events of the film.
• Bob Marley: One Love: The logo takes on the Rastafarian colors of red, green and gold.
• Chinatown opens with the 1930s logo.
• Coach Carter: The logo briefly changes into a drawn version on a notebook.
• Coming to America: The camera zooms into the mountain - and then over it, with the fictional African country of Zamunda appearing behind it, seen here. In addition, the usual orchestral score is replaced by a rendition of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight".
  • The sequel Coming 2 America repeats this joke with the 2012 Paramount logo, except that the camera moves across the right slope of the mountain.
• The Core: As the logo finishes, the camera zooms into the mountain before diving into the core of the earth.
• Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves: The weather in the logo is snowy, and the lake is frozen, setting up the movie's opening in Icewind Dale.
• Event Horizon: After the logo finishes, the text disappears and the camera flies past the mountain and into a black hole in space as the opening credits roll.
• The trailer for Everybody Wants Some!! features the end of the 1980-era Paramount logo, but with the Viacom byline in its contemporary font, making it almost indistinguishable from the studio's current print logo (the film itself has the stock 2016 logo sequence).
• Exit Through the Gift Shop: As seen on the poster, guerrilla artist Banksy's vanity production company is Paranoid Pictures, whose logo is very similar to Paramount's.
• Four Brothers: Snow blows around the mountain, and causes the logo to become more and more obscured.
• Friday the 13th (2009): The logo is tinted blood red.
• The Geisha Boy: Jerry Lewis is seeing the sights in Japan - at Mount Fuji, he does a double take as stars surround it like the studio logo.
• G.I. Joe: Retaliation: The stars fly up to the logo with the sounds of the deadly firefly drones used by the Cobra soldier Firefly.
• The Godfather: The "Coppola Restoration" releases from 2008 onwards replace the original Paramount logos with a sepia-tinted version of the 2003 logo.
• The Greatest Show on Earth: The logo is superimposed on a wheel decorated in circus colours.
• Hard Rain: The logo forms amidst a huge storm.
• Indiana Jones: The Paramount logo is the version used in the 1950s. It also fades into something different with each film into the opening shot...
  • Raiders of the Lost Ark: ...a mountain in South America.
  • Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: ...a relief carving of a mountain on a gong (the gong being struck is an additional homage to the Rank Organization).
  • Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: ...a mountain in Utah.
  • Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: ...a molehill. It also featured the same variant as Zodiac, which featured the Viacom byline.
    • For Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, the last few seconds of the 2022 revision of the 2012 logo was used. However, the 2015 Lucasfilm logo fades to a door lock in a shape similar to the logo instead.
• The Ginger Rogers musical Lady in the Dark opens with the Paramount logo set at night, in the dark. At the end of the film it's seen at dawn, having come into the light.
• The Last Airbender: The Paramount stars are accompanied with splashes of water and "hit" the logo, causing it to freeze. The Nickelodeon Movies logo afterwards is on fire, and gets covered by earth.
• The grindhouse film Mad Heidi, which parodies Swiss culture, has a parody of the Paramount logo, using the Swiss mountain the Matterhorn and Swiss cheese rounds for the stars, as seen here.
• Nebraska! opens with the 1953 Paramount logo (although this time with a Viacom byline).
• Overlord: The logo is in greyscale, and the standard fanfare is replaced with the sound of bombs falling and a clip taken from U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's speech on D-Day ("We will never surrender..."), reflecting the themes of the film.
• Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones: As the logo forms, the screen begins glitching and tearing, similar to a VHS tape.
• Rings: The ring appears during the Paramount logo, which then turns into an airplane TV screen, as seen here.
• Road to Utopia: Bob Hope and Bing Crosby are sledding through the Klondike countryside and enjoying the scenery, when something catches Bob's eye:
  Hope: Hey, get a load of that bread and butter!
  (Cut to a shot of a snow-covered mountain)
  Crosby: Bread and butter? That's a mountain!
  (The "Paramount Pictures" logo suddenly appears in front of said mountain)
  Hope: Maybe a mountain to you, but it's bread and butter to me!
• Scrooged: Amid holiday caroling in the background, the camera zooms past the logo and into the sky to focus on a star above a bed of clouds.
• Smile (2022): The logo flips upside down to form a smile motif.
• Soap Dish: White circles fill up the frame once the logo finishes.
• Stage Struck: "THE END" is in a white script with the "T" and E" in fancy lettering. After a few seconds, the "A Paramount Picture" pseudo-logo is seen on a light red background. Later versions of this logo can be seen on Redskin (1929), Applause (1930), Follow Thru (1930), Hollywood on Parade No. A-8 (1933), and Ain't She Sweet? (1933). They can be found on this YouTube channel.
• Star Trek:
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation: While this never happened in the show proper, it was planned to have the logo morph into the Starfleet insignia.
    • The Star Trek: The Next Generation "Rascals" features a Periodic Table of Elements with made-up elements, one of them being "Paramount". It even has its own entry on the Star Trek Wiki.
  • The teaser trailer for Star Trek: Insurrection begins with the logo before zooming out as the mountain becomes part of the horizon of the planet Ba'ku.
• As pictured atop this page, Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) and its sequel replace the stars with Sonic's gold rings and uses an orchestral version of "Green Hill Zone" from the Sonic games, which makes up the first part of the former film's music piece entitled "Meet Sonic (Before We Start I Gotta Tell You This)". For the latter film, the Viacom CBS byline and trademark icon are removed.
  • The first film uses the ring's sound effects.
• Sullivan's Travels: The logo appears as a seal on a package; said package contains a book featuring the film title/credits.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows: The logo is tinted green and the stars are replaced by ninja throwing stars. The Viacom byline and registered trademark icon were removed.
• The Ten Commandments: The logo is cued over an image of Mount Sinai, rather than the usual mountain, seen here.
• Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life: The Paramount and Mutual Film Company logos appear as images that float on the surface of the ocean and dissipate soon afterwards.
• Transformers Film Series: The live-action films have the normal logo but with the sounds of a robot transforming, seen here.
  • Dark of the Moon has the logo pan upwards to a space vista, seen here.
  • The Last Knight has fireballs soar over the logo into a medieval battlefield, seen here. The print logo is also used in the start.
• A Very Brady Sequel: The mountain in the logo transitions to an actual mountain in California.
• When Wings received a new soundtrack in 2011, it also had a montage of Paramount logos in reverse-chronological order added to the opening, starting with either the 2010 revision of the 2002 logo or the "100 Years" version of the 2012 logo.
• World War Z: The logo has a darker color scheme and is accompanied by the sound of what appears to be a falling missile, while there are muted sounds of war in the background.

Nickelodeon Movies

For many years, it was actually the norm for most of the Nickelodeon Movies to have a different logo joke for each movie.

• Harriet the Spy has a rhino running across TriStar-esque clouds and stumbling over some movie set props of them, before crashing into the screen and hanging on to the Nickelodeon logo.
• Good Burger: A cup gets filled with an orange milkshake, then drives around like a race car until it stops, spills over to reveal the Nickelodeon logo.
• Snow Day: A man is shoveling snow in front of his house with his dog when a giant ball with the Nick logo crashes on top of his house, startling the man and his dog.
• Rugrats movies:
  • The Rugrats Movie features Slap T. Pooch from the Oh Yeah! Cartoons short What is Funny? messing around with an orange speck before a giant foot steps on him, leaving behind the Nick logo.
  • Rugrats in Paris has one similar to the Snow Day one, except the man is now stereotypically French, he is raking leaves instead of shoveling snow, and it's clearly set in France with the Eiffel Tower in the background. Also, after the full logo appears, his dog comes back to bark.
  • Rugrats Go Wild! (as well as Hey Arnold! The Movie): The logo is set up like two planets, to homage 2001: A Space Odyssey, followed by a sneeze turning it into the logo.
• Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius has Goddard following the Nick ball as it bounces around, then projects the Movies ball alongside it.
• Clockstoppers has the Nick movies logo swaying around like a pendulum in a grandfather clock to emphasize the film's theme on time.
• SpongeBob SquarePants movies:
  • The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie has a colorful explosion, then a blue sphere (possibly a shout-out to the Nickelodeon Pinball logo), a rose blooms as an orange blimp flies through it, followed by kaleidoscope view of goldfish and finally has the Nick bubble and the Movies bubble floating to place in the orange sea.
  • The Sponge Bob Movie Sponge Out Of Water: The logo rises out of the ocean, covered in kelp and coral.
  • Though The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run introduces a new standard Nickelodeon Movies logo featuring SpongeBob (only his arms and legs are on-screen), later releases such as PAW Patrol: The Movie and The Loud House Movie would reveal Sponge on the Run to have an audio variation all along: SpongeBob is fully voiced in Sponge on the Run, but mute in other films.
• The logo before Nacho Libre zooms around a wrestling ring, then zooms in on a wrestling bell painted like the Nickelodeon Movies logo, which rings twice.
• Hotel for Dogs: The Nick splat transitions into a sun, segueing into the film.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem: The Paramount logo shifts from its usual art style to the film's sketchy one as the stars arrive at the mountain. Nickelodeon Movies uses a shortened green slime variation of the then-standard logo used in 2008-2009 on The Spiderwick Chronicles, Angus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging, Hotel for Dogs and Imagine That, even retaining the 1984-2009 Nick logo. This is worth noting that Nick updated the logo, while retaining its wordmark, on March 4, 2023.

Other

• From the late 1990s to the early 2000s, Cartoon Network had weekend "Cartoon Theater" broadcasts of animated films, with animated introductions and bumper sequences that spoofed studio logos. One Paramount-styled intro/bumper presented the mountain in its glory... until it falls over, revealing itself to be just a wooden stand, and one star drops off. It can be seen here.
  • Some of Paramount's animated films, including Charlotte's Web, were actually shown on this package.
• The Simpsons: The Canada-set episode "The Bart Wants What It Wants" features the Canadian Paramountie Studios, which has a Paramount logo using a Mountie hat in place of the mountain.
• As of 2022, modern Star Trek shows have had their own Vanity Plate where the main ship of the series flies through space, leaving a light trail forming the shape of the Starfleet logo. Additionally, elements of that series will appear in the background, such as the spikes of Tars Lamora for Prodigy or a nebula shaped like a Koala for Lower Decks^note This references a running gag in that show about a giant Koala holding the universe on its back..
  • The Series Finale of Star Trek: Picard swaps out both the ship (replacing the Titan-A with the Enterprise-D and the background elements (replacing the Shrike with a Borg Cube and adding other Borg signifiers, including replacing the fanfare with their Leitmotif) from the version used in the rest of the season.

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