Palace Pictures

Background

Palace Pictures is a historic genre movie distributor founded in 1981 by Stephen Woolley and Nik Powell. Palace initially focused exclusively on releasing cinema on home video through their subsidiary Palace Video before going into theatrical distribution and releasing children's material on home video.

Palace's most famous acqusision was Sam Raimi's The Evil Dead, which was given a simultaneous theatrical and home video release in 1983 and became the biggest selling movie on home video that year. The main reason for its popularity was due to Palace's battle against the BBFC to keep the film on store shelves after it was deemed a "Video Nasty" by the UK government, a term used for various unclassified movies (mostly in the low-budget horror genre) deemed for their violent nature.

Palace Pictures declared bankruptcy in 1992, and their founders have since moved on to other sides of the film industry.

Logo (1985-1991)

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Visuals: In a nighttime environment, there is a palace with the text "PALACE PICTURES" in front of it, emitting a large light. As the light dies down, we see that the palace has a bit of a purplish color to it. Then, the pillars near the palace begin to glow yellow as the palace loses its purple color in favor of a balanced tone, as a shooting star streaks behind it. Then, the text "PRESENTS", in a curly font, glows onto the palace and dies down. As it fully appears, the rest of the palace fades out and becomes a silhouette.

Technique: Cel animation.

Audio: A humming sound, followed by a whirring 3-note synth theme with a whoosh as the shooting star appears.

Availability:

• Seen on tapes and movies released by the company, mostly after the Palace Video "OR ELSE!" warning.
• It is seen before and after trailers (and promos), including the trailer for High Spirits, which can be found on the film's DVD release.
• It also appears on the 1990 UK VHS release of Granpa as well.