PAP Video (Greece)

1st Logo(?)

(1986?)

Nicknames: "Stolen Countdown", "Failure Countdown", "The Final Papdown"

Logo: After about a half second of black screen, the logo begins as a yellow "starburst" zooms away from the front of the screen and appears smaller, a trail made up of three lines showing the zooming effect. Quickly, viewers can see a white line coming diagonally from the top right corner and hitting the starburst just before a giant letter A appears. The A zooms in, starburst now out of sight, and the trail it leaves causes the A to appear rainbow before it "hits" the screen and is revealed to be white. Two letter P's zoom in the same fashion and appear on either side of the A, spelling PAP. The word "VIDEO" zooms in and appears slightly smaller beneath PAP, and as it zooms in, a chunky red outline fades in behind the words. The area surrounding the words fills in as a white box, and the rest of the background is still black. If you look very closely, you can see small frame (which appears to be a faded red or orange color) forms around the white. Soon after that, the logo gives way to a hefty wall of shaky, white Greek warning text on a black background.

FX/SFX: The zooming of the starburst, the white line flying in, the zooming of the words, the forming of the red outline, the filling of the white background, the forming of the small frame.

Cheesy factor: Just about OFF THE CHARTS! The music is a direct ripoff of an existing, popular song, showing a real lack of originality. The effects look very cheaply done, viewers have no idea if PAP is an acronym or the proper name, and the logo overall is just very cold and uninviting.

Music/Sounds: An over-saturated snippet from the song "The Final Countdown" by Europe. It sounds a bit distorted and off.

Availability: Likely found on Greek tapes of the time.

Scare Factor: None to medium. The sudden zooming may startle some, and the cheap look may be scary. Although the stolen music might cause some laughs.