The Case of the 1986 WDHV Logo Music...

More talk about a 33-year-old logo...

I think just about every American, no scratch that, person around the world born in the 80s and early 90s has at least seen the 1986 Walt Disney Home Video logo...


And yet its theme, a 14-second piece of synthesized music that's just as long as the logo intro itself, is something of an enigma.

What is this music? Why didn't Disney use it anywhere else in the mid-to-late 80s? Where did it come from? Was it originally music that was sitting around in their library? Or was it a piece of library/production music sourced from a label like DeWolfe, KPM, Bruton (where the 'Great Ovation'/Feature Presentation jingle came from), etc.?

As far as I know, it was just a piece of music that was given to one of the animators that worked on the logo, one Hal Miles.

Now, what's the deal with the alternate version of the music that plays on a series of bumpers that appear at the end of the 1992 VHS of One Hundred and One Dalmatians?


Were there alternate takes of this jingle? Was this piece of music much longer? I always wondered about this, and it appears that someone tried to see for themselves... By meshing this music with the 14-second logo music proper:


While I probably wouldn't have blurred out the announcer voice, this edit job does give a decent idea of where the Dalmatians bumper music begins and ends.

If that's the way the original, longer recording went, it makes sense that a few seconds were chopped. Disney's home video logos of the era were roughly 16-18 seconds tops, so the edit makes sense. The instrumental verse, if we can call it that, is divided into two parts in this theoretical extended version. It looks as if Disney chopped off a bit of the first verse and just used the rest, because the first verse doesn't really have a definitive end. It just tapers off into the second.

Again, this is all based on this YouTuber's attempting constructing of a theoretical, longer WDHV logo jingle...

Now, why, 6 years later would Disney use this piece of music for the Dalmatians VHS? Maybe they planned on using it for bumpers/title cards, maybe not. No other release has this music, though similar title cards to the ones on Dalmatians appear on other 1992 releases, they simply just use the Feature Presentation music or no music at all.

We've already talked much about this logo in detail, but I recently uncovered something else that explain the logo music's origins...

The following is a song by the band Barclay James Harvest. This English band was one of many progressive rock acts, a prevalent subgenre of rock music through the late 1960s and well into the 1970s. Like most prog-rock bands, BJH swapped complex arrangements and themes for poppier sounds and simpler lyrics during the late 70s and early 80s. Such is the case with this song, 'Life is for Living', from their 1981 album Turn of the Tide.

Listen to this and tell me if it sounds similar to the WDHV logo music or not...


I don't know about you, but I think the overall beat, and especially the choruses, are very reminiscent of the 1986 Walt Disney Home Video jingle.

But why in the world would a composer at Disney lift from a random, out-of-the-way album cut from a band that didn't make much of a mark here in the states? (Only one album and one single of theirs both barely charted in the early '70s.) Well, you never know. Some folks have peculiar interests, like you, and I! Maybe it just so happened, that a composer at Disney or the composer of that piece was a BJH fan with a particular fondness for 'Life is for Living'. There is something very Disney-esque about its tone and lyrics, anyways...

Or maybe I'm just reaching. Listen to the song, you decide...