Charter Entertainment

Not to be confused with Charter Communications.

Background
Charter Entertainment was a genre and low-budget division of Embassy Home Entertainment. In 1986, The Coca-Cola Company sold Embassy Home Entertainment to Nelson Holdings International and NHI later shut down Charter when Nelson Entertainment reissued a number of Embassy/Charter releases.

(1985-1988)
Nickname: "The Color Bars"

Logo: On a black background, we go through 9 bars which are in various shades of green, blue, and purple. As the bars spin around (like in the first Vidmark logo), a 3-D steel gray "CHARTER" in Haettenschweiler font, appears from the bottom of the screen and covers the top seven of the bars as they stop moving. A steel gray rounded rectangle with a black border appears and the gray dissolves to reveal "ENTERTAINMENT" in the same color. The rounded rectangle turns deep cerise afterwards. The logo "shines" a little before fading to black.

FX/SFX: The bars spinning and the shining, which are all CGI (and looks rather similar to the CGI in the 4th Embassy Home Entertainment logo).

Music/Sounds: A warm synthesized six note piece, ending with a synth strumming sound when "ENTERTAINMENT" appears. Interestingly, Hanna-Barbera Poland and Tokyo Movie Shinsha also used this theme, sans the synth strum sound. This is actually a piece of stock music called "Music, Billboard #2" from Sound Ideas Series 1000 sound library - it can also be heard in the video game Worms Armageddon as a victory fanfare.

Music/Sounds Variants: Sometimes, on some tapes, the music fades out early.

Availability: Seen on tapes by this company from the era, such as The Terrornauts, The Quest (1986), Kiss of the Spider Woman, Crimewave, Bombs Away, Keeping Track, God Told Me To, Ghost Fever, Cross Country, Came a Hot Friday, I Was a Teenage Zombie, Slaughterhouse, Rolling Vengeance, Fair Game, Toby McTeague, Hot Rod, The 2nd Best Secret Agent, among others. You can recognize them by a huge Charter logo at the top of most of their tape covers (though 1988 reprints of certain tapes only have a small print logo on the bottom of the cover). It was also seen on the 1985 U.S. re-cut of The Plague Dogs, however, the DVD releases of the film from Trinity Home Entertainment and Phase 4 Films delete this logo. It makes a unexpected appearance on a recent TCM broadcast of Git! (1965), before the 1996 Columbia TriStar Television Distribution logo. More recently, it was spotted on an airing of J.C. (1972) on the same network, where it appeared before the SPT logo.

Editor's Note: None.