I went to Disneyland and was reminded that, like most children of the '80s and '90 and probably even today,

I grew up knowing that this word was "Disney", but not really understanding why;

This is not a "D". And this isn't really a "Y". It's like "Gisnep".

Why? Well, John,

I had some coca-cola and opened way too many tabs on my browser and have done a lot of research.

I found this story to be very weird. So your first g- Wow my hair!

Your first guess is that it's Walt's signature, right?

and yet, here's Walt signing his name on an episode of "What's My Line?"

And that doesn't look familiar.

But it turns out that Walt Disney had lots of signatures. Some of them resemble the Disney logo,

Some of them do not, but none of them have a "D" anything like the loopy "D".

I can imagine this constant innovation on his signature in two ways:

It may be just another manifestation of his perfectionism,

which was well known, or it may be a man who was pretty obsessed with his own name.

But before we go any deeper into this,

we have to discuss something else very weird about the "Walt Disney Pictures" logo.

For almost 50 years there wasn't one. Every movie had a different treatment for the title card.

There was a Disney signature that with slight variations showed up repeatedly, originally not as a logo but as a signature after a statement thanking the staff in 1937's

"Snow White and the Seven Dwarves". That signature was last used as a title card in "The Rescuers", in 1977,

but it was never identical to a previous usage, making it decidedly not a logo.

The graphic design nerd in me feels like this must be an intentional choice because it was very

contrary to how every other movie studio was doing things.

It's almost as if Walt and the Walt Disney Company wanted there to be a perception that this was a person

presenting it, rather than a corporation.

So the name is the brand, not the branding. Here is a man you can trust to make children's content.

Savvy. After "The Rescuers", "the Fox and the Hound" used a nondescript serif font almost like a palate cleanser

before 1985's "the Black Cauldron" launched with the now familiar

loopy "D".

This was one year into Michael Eisner taking over as CEO and becoming the first person to run Disney

who was not a Disney family member.

Now, there are a number of Disney designs that look similar to this final incarnation that, I

imagine, will be in use until the universe ends. There's this from a 1950s Peter Pan board game,

which matches the Disney logo almost perfectly.

except for that "D"! And then there's this signature, an actual Walt signature that contains lots of the elements:

that W, the looping T, the big circle on the I, even the quick and intense return on the S, but that D though!

Where did it come from?

Well, the closest I could find is in the final end card of "The Aristocats" which came out in 1970.

Maybe importantly, this was the first movie Walt Disney Pictures released that Walt himself did not work on.

It's on the screen for like three seconds.

But it's clearly as close as we get to the loopy "D" before

the early 80s, when Disney launched its home video division using this familiar logo type as the title card,

but in the box art...

the loopy "D"! Soon that logo type with the Cinderella castle and shooting star would become the first

actual logo of Walt Disney Pictures.

So, somewhere, someone, behind the scenes, in the early 80s, decided to make that little "D" loop into a

big bold spiral. They pushed that so far that the first letter in one of the most iconic brands of all time

doesn't read clearly as a letter. Under Eisner's leadership, this clean and

playful logo type became the logo type for the entire studio, and then a Disney Channel, a Disney World and

the Disney Company as a whole.

And it's easy to make it read more clearly, as London-based illustrator Pencil Bandit made clear with these modified versions.

But that's not what they wanted. Almost all of this logo type was taken directly from one of Walt's many signatures

except for its most bold, iconic and confusing choice.

But because Disney is all about magic and magic can be lost when you find out how it's done,

we probably will never find out how this happened or who did it.

Maybe that's for the best. John, I'll see you on Tuesday