With regards to a retooled [=DiC=] vanity plate minimizing its spookiness...not likely. This troper only ever saw this logo after 1990, and was still scared to death of it. And forget the S from Hell and the V of Doom, all this troper needed as a child to send him running in to bedtime was the Vin Di Bona Productions logo at the end of AFV. And, of course, things got worse when it started popping up in nightmares. Yeah...this one was quite the logophobe as a child. Honorable mentions go to the PBS "faces" logo and the original version of the NBC peacock--other tropers may have had the boogeyman or what have you in their closet, I had the original NBC peacock in mine.

Suddenly, {{Vulpy}} feels not so alone. They all scared him as a child. No word yet on whether or not the trauma accounts for his sudden lapse into a ThirdPersonPerson.

NightmareFuel is the 1989 PBS ident (rotating glass layers) for me. I mean it looks cool and all, but the SoundTrackDissonance really gets me.

In amateur filmmaking, everybody has a vanity plate. My video teacher had one involving a factory of cats. This troper thought that having a long, overelaborate vanity plate was a waste of an audience's time; when it came time for me to make one for a student film festival, I simply had a CG image of a multicolored hairball appear for a few seconds.

This troper agrees with you, especially when there are several of them and they're hard to skip over when watching the movie on DVD.

This feline at heart troper doesn't really watch TV much, but her cat appears in one, even though it only appears in her short films; Her vanity place is of Diamond beeping the horn in the car. It's rather cute.

This troper is delighted that these relics are being unearthed on youtube and elsewhere. And that's because she's not disturbed by the logos anymore (because, you know, she's has common sense now), but still gets associative little shivers from watching them. Oddly, looking at these is a helluva lot of fun. However, looking at them for over and hour can be psychologically risky, to a point. Those creepy things (music, too) will flash in your brain when your the least prepared, or the moment the lights go off. Brr.

This (other) troper agrees with the above, but hey, we were warned...

This troper finds it quite fascinating that because he ''did not'' watch ''any'' TV as a child, he can barely imagine these ever being scary.

Troper's Note: To the person who decided to take two already creepy plates (VID Mask and Viacom V of Doom) and make it into a crossover-screamer... thanks for contributing to my insomnia for the next MONTH.

Seconded. Single most terrifying thing I've ever clicked on in a Nightmare Fuel page, ignoring the warnings...

This troper has never been afraid of any logos as a kid...except for the Aniplex logo; as seen at the end of FullmetalAlchemist. The dark nature of the logo and the rather unsettling digitized voice saying the company name was a bit creepy to me, although I admit that later in the series, once it started getting further into the territories of HighOctaneNightmareFuel, it really took an edge off that logo for me.

I just realized what makes some logos so scary. Most of them contain the following tropes:

An "eyeball". The logo looks like it's staring directly at you. (PBS, Screen Gems).

A dark background, either black or a muted, dark color. (WGBH, [=DiC=], Screen Gems, VID)

Rough animation. (Screen Gems (both the "S From Hell" and the "Dancing Sticks" logos), VID, NET/PBS, WGBH)

The company's name in all-caps. (too many to list)

A rising crescendo or a ScareChord for background music.

The logo appears to be zooming in.

As little text as possible. Too much text looks human and reassuring. Same thing if there's too much going on.

Now, imagine what would happen if a particularly evil production company decided to combine every last one of these tropes into one logo, and ramp them all UpToEleven?

Why is the V of Doom (Viacom) scary? It's symbolic (at least for YouTube users). There's a giant V zooming in looking like it's going to kill you...like how Viacom would pull your videos off YouTube and maybe delete your account.

This troper, as a small child, was positively terrified of the sound that accompanies the Dolby Digital logo at the start of movies . With the lights dimmed and that sound coming from all directions, it's a wonder I wasn't scarred for life. I watched a lot of Pixar movies back then, so I guess the cute hopping lamp guy softened the blow enough for me to escape with my sanity.

The Reeves Entertainment drama masks shown at the end of the Nickelodeon shows ''What Would You Do'' and ''Wild and Crazy Kids'' seriously freaked me out. Unlike most people, the 1971-84 PBS logo and the 1980's CTW logo didn't scare me at all.

This tropette used to be scared shitless of the 1984 PBS logo. Whenever she was watching ShiningTimeStation at her babysitter's residence, she would run into another room to "protect" herself from that logo when it came on as soon as the closing credits for that program were over. She even had nightmares about it!

The PBS Kids "Cartoon P-Pals" logo from 1993-1999 used to haunt my dreams until I was about 8 or 9 years old. Much of the blame lays on the fact that the logo starts right the fuck out of nowhere, the way the P-Pals were animated (I used to think that yellow earring on the blue P-head with the red hat was his other eye) and especially the dreaded music, a loud 90s style techno beat with bass and drums. But what really set me off was how the P-Heads shouted "THIS IS P-B-SSSSSSS!!!!" over the music. Sometimes when I couldn't sleep, I feared that the logo would come out of the TV and torture me to no end. Making it worse was the fact that at the end of many PBS Kids shows from this era, it came right after the "Merging CPB Circles" logo, another one that gave me nightmares, mainly because of the way the announcer said, "Funding for this program was made possible by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and by the annual financial support of Viewers Like You", and the fact that the "Viewers Like You" text was written in a rather scary font (sometimes said text would zoom in to the middle of the screen, making it even scarier to someone only about 4 or 5 years old).