The Bubble Factory

Background
As part of Seagram's buy-out of MCA in 1995, the latter company's president, Sidney Sheinberg, along with his two sons, Jon and Bill, started a Seagram-financed production company called The Bubble Factory as part of Seagram's buy-out of MCA in 1995. It did not use a logo until 1996 when Flipper was released. Two years later, the company was divorced from its MCA parent-company Universal Pictures (now a division of NBCUniversal), in the wake of a string of box-office failures. The company now releases films very sporadically.

(May 17, 1996- )


Nickname: "Exactly What It Says on the Tin"

Logo: On a background of moving clouds, we see a picture of a large quirky-looking building with a pipe sticking out of the roof, sitting on a grass plain. Behind the factory is is a large yellow circle, which has the words:

THE

BUBBLE

FACTORY

in dark red with a white outline, and with the "B", "E", "F", and "Y" larger than the rest of the letters. Bubbles flow out of the factory pipe and crowd the screen.

Variants:
 * On 4:3 full-screen prints of films, the logo is choppier, and sometimes in open matte.
 * At the end of Slappy and the Stinkers, the print logo is seen on a black background.

Trivia: The Nostalgia Critic lampooned this logo in a skit from his review of A Simple Wish. In the skit, he plays the executive at a literal bubble factory (mentioning how Build-a-Bear Workshop had great success in financing Terminator 2: Judgement Day) who chooses to finance a "Mara Wilson fairytale" instead of a "movie about the sinking of the titanic".

FX/SFX: The cloud background and the bubbles.

Music/Sounds: An lighthearted horn-and-chime theme that sounds quite similar to the 1993 Columbia Pictures logo music. If you listen very closely, you can hear the sound of the bubbling when the bubbles are flowing out of the pipe.

Music/Sounds Variants:
 * In rare cases, the opening theme of the movie is heard.
 * On some films, the theme is re-orchestrated.
 * That Old Feeling used a jazzy rendition of the jingle.

Availability: Current. Seen on films from the company, such as The Pest, A Simple Wish, McHale's Army, For Richer or Poorer, and Flipper (the first movie with this logo), among others. Most recently, this logo was seen on Made in Brooklyn, Creature and What Lola Wants.

Editor's Note: None.