Incomplete Anniversary Logo

It's been a long time since I posted on here...

Recently, I discovered something about the 1978 Mickey Mouse 50th Birthday/Walt Disney Home Entertainment logo...

A little background for the uninitiated...

Mickey Mouse turned 50 years old in 1978. Walt Disney Productions created an introductory logo sequence celebrating the superstar's birthday, composed of what appeared to be a rotoscoped Mickey Mouse animatronic from the defunct attraction, the Mickey Mouse Revue. A spinning model of Mickey was surrounded by strobing lines, giving the logo something of a disco-like effect. Text would say "Congratulating Mickey Mouse on his 50th Birthday!"

Then, a rainbow background covers the image, with text in the middle red bar saying "Buena Vista", with "A" and "Release" above and below, respectively. Buena Vista, of course, was Disney's self-distribution company. Disney formed Buena Vista Distribution in 1953, and used the name up until 2007, changing it to "Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures".

Only one film seems to bare this complete logo sequence... The Cat from the Outer Space. The early aughts DVD release and the Disney+ version of this 1978 live-action comedy contain the spinning Mickey and the Buena Vista card. However, there is no music accompanying the spinning Mickey.

It is presumed that a piece of music did play with that logo... After all, an Italian re-release print of Peter Pan from the late 1970s has music accompanying the spinning Mickey: It is the same music that plays during what this logo evolved into... The 1978 Walt Disney Home Entertainment logo.

... Yet, that music is not present on the Cat from Outer Space DVD or the Disney+ version.

A 1993 VHS release of the studio's 1978 Western Hot Lead and Cold Feet contains only the rainbow Buena Vista title card, ditto the film's 2004 DVD release.

What were the other new Disney feature releases of 1978?

There was Return from Witch Mountain, the sequel to Escape to Witch Mountain. Most home video versions of this film open with a standard gradient Buena Vista logo with the accompanying score.

Recently, Intrada Records released an album of Return from Witch Mountain's soundtrack, whose music was composed by Lalo Schifrin, best known for the Mission: Impossible theme tune, among several other film scores. This extensive 2-CD set opens with a track called "Main Title - Pt. 1 '1978 Mickey Mouse Birthday Logo (Buddy Baker)'". Of course, it makes special of Buddy Baker, who scored several other Disney features during this period.

Now, someone on YouTube synced this very track up to the Walt Disney Home Entertainment logo, and it sounds much clearer and cleaner than any other version of this logo...

Intrada's page says this is a new master, and it is in stereo, recovered from the original 8-channel session elements. The page also says that this logo indeed played before Return from Witch Mountain in theaters.

So with all of this, we have solid proof that the 50th Anniversary logo DID precede Return from Witch Mountain in theaters, despite the home video releases not having it whatsoever. This also proves that this music was much cleaner-sounding in the past, and that something had happened to it when applied to the Walt Disney Home Entertainment logo later that year. Some kind of glitch? Processing error? Was the track run through something to make it sound like that? Who knows. Maybe it's a rough synthesized recreation. A remake track, essentially... Which would beg the question, why didn't Disney just use the original version meant for the anniversary logo?

What we have here is an incomplete logo...

The DVD and Disney+ versions of Return from Witch Mountain open with a standard Buena Vista card. The 1986 video release doesn't contain an opening title card whatsoever, par for the course with '80s Disney video releases. Where does the standard BV come from, then? A European print of the movie? Was there a re-release of it that is barely talked about? If the latter, then the film having that Buena Vista card wouldn't make sense, because a theoretical re-release in the early 1980s would've swapped out the spinning Mickey/rainbow BV card with the metal lettering one that Disney used from 1979 to 1984. Interestingly, the early video releases of Hot Lead & Cold Feet use this very logo at the start of the film, but with no accompanying music... This indicates that Hot Lead was re-released sometime, somewhere. Or some of its international releases occurred well after its US debut. Maybe this is the case with Return from Witch Mountain. Perhaps a European print, the movie could've debuted somewhere well after it came out in the US. It being from a UK print seems to be a dead end, because the UK release of the movie was on November 2, 1978, right smackdab before the day of Mickey Mouse's 50th Anniversary - November 18th...

It is very possible that someone at Walt Disney Home Entertainment did some plastering, and substituted a standard BV card for the 50th Anniversary logo. Which doesn't make sense, considering that the Cat from Outer Space DVD preserves it, but without the music. Sometimes Disney could be very inconsistent with logo preservation...

Hot Lead and Cold Feet has yet to be released on physical media again, or on Disney+. It remains to be seen what is used on that print of the movie. Knowing Disney, they will probably port over the transfer from the early aughts DVD release.

As for other 1978 releases, well... Those are largely shorts and featurettes, plus re-releases of older titles. It is unknown if the summer 1978 re-release of The Jungle Book used the anniversary intro, or if the Christmas 1978 re-release of Pinocchio did. The featurette that accompanied the Pinocchio re-release, The Small One, contains a standard BV card. It is currently unknown if it ever had the anniversary opening, which could be plausible because mid-December 1978 isn't far off from the anniversary date. There was also a re-release of The Love Bug in 1978, did that ever use the anniversary intro?

So, we're left with...

• Video releases of 1978 films that don't show the 50th Anniversary intro in its complete form, or at all.
• A fully-recreated version of this logo that appeared on several home video releases from 1978 to 1986, with a now laser-neon spinning Mickey AND seemingly re-recorded theme music.
• A soundtrack CD with the original version of the accompanying music.

We have the pieces, at least, and we can make our own edits...