Jaws opens with the Universal Studio logo of a globe slowly spinning in space, one of a handful of instantly recognisable symbols that have heralded Hollywood movies over the decades. There was a time when a studio logo acted as a genre shorthand. The Warner Bros shield accompanied by its brash fanfare meant crime and film noir, Bogart and Cagney; the MGM lion was a sign of classy musicals and sophisticated comedies; RKO's bleeping radio mast introduced Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers or Tarzan; Paramount's snow capped peak meant Mae West or the Marx Brothers; Columbia's robed lady with a torch was a curtain-raiser to many a cliff-hanging serial; and the sweeping searchlights of Fox's towering gold letters were a prelude to infant phenomenon Shirley Temple (or, to more recent audiences, a Star Wars crawl).
Appropriately enough, Universal had long been associated with monster movies, although it was unlikley that a mid-Seventies audience would remember the golden era of Karloff, Chaney and Lugosi. If anything, the spinning globe was something they would have associated with television shows like Colombo and Marcus Welby M.D, where the young Spielberg cut his directorial teeth. They might too have made the connection between the studio and its infrequent box-office hits such Airport, The Sting, American Graffiti and Earthquake.
By 1975 the Universal logo had gone through a number of changes: from an unconvincing model globe being orbited by an unconvincing model plane against a background of clouds, through an art-deco glass ball, to the more familiar variant of Planet Earth in space. In its mid Seventies incarnation, the globe floated in bands of pale cosmic dust and was overlaid with the studio's name in large letters of scrubbed gold. Both image and text slowly come into focus as if the projectionist is making a final adjustment before the picture starts. Unlike other studios, which played fanfares against their logos, this later Universal ident was enveloped in the silence of space.
For Jaws, a sound effect was added to the image. Whether natural or electronically produced, it's suggestive of whale song or a submarine's sonar, and has an other-worldly quality to it. Perhaps it's a residue of the director's initial ideas about the music score - ideas that he had had before hearing a note of what John Williams was proposing. On the Inside Jaws documentary Spielberg describes how he had been expecting music that was both weird and melodic and suggestive of what he calls "inner space." The sounds continue as the logo is replaced by a black screen and fade out as the music and the main credits begin.
Today it's commonplace for studios to add little visual or aural metatextual flourishes to their logos, a trend that Spielberg helped kick-start with his knowing Paramount reference at the opening of each Indiana Jones movie.
