2. Founded in 1912 by Carl Laemmle, it is one of the oldest American movie studios still in continuous production. On May 11, 2004, the controlling stake in the company was sold by Vivendi Universal to General Electric, parent of NBC. The resulting media super-conglomerate was renamed NBC Universal, while Universal Studios Inc. remained the name of the production subsidiary. Current logo
3. The concept for TriStar came about in 1982 when Columbia Pictures (then a subsidiary of Coca-Cola), HBO, and CBS decided to pool resources to split the ever-growing costs of making movies, creating Nova Pictures as a joint venture. Their first production, released in 1984, was The Natural , starring Robert Redford. During this venture, many of Tri-Star's releases were released on VHS by either RCA-Columbia Pictures Home Video (now Sony Pictures Home Entertainment), CBS/FOX Video (now CBS Home Entertainment and 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment), or HBO Video . Current logo
4. Paramount Logo from 1923-1941 The logo began as a charcoal rendering of the mountain ringed with twenty-four superimposed stars. In 1953, the logo was redesigned as a matte painting. In the 1970s the logo was simplified and the number of stars was changed to twenty-two. The logo was replaced in 1987, Paramount's 75th Anniversary, by a version created by Apogee, Inc. with a computer generated lake and stars. For Paramount's 90th anniversary in 2002, a new, completely computer-generated logo was created. Current logo
5. The studio, founded in 1919 as Cohn-Brandt-Cohn Film Sales by brothers Jack and Harry Cohn and Joe Brandt, released its first feature film in August 1922. It adopted the Columbia Pictures name in 1924 and went public two years later. In its early years a minor player in Hollywood, Columbia began to grow in the late 1920s, spurred by a successful association with director Frank Capra. Current logo
