You Don’t Know Where That Bear Has Been

As a young television viewer, I initially had access to only three channels — NBC, ABC and a very fuzzy feed of Fox. Eventually, my parents sprung for a satellite dish and this enabled me to see all manner of programming inappropriate for someone my age. Included in my young education of violent, sexual, violently sexual and otherwise disturbing movies was stuff like Lawnmower Man, Halloween 4, strange British sitcoms, the Rocky Horror Picture Show for some reason, and episodes of Dirty Pair, all of which I thought were AWESOME because I didn’t know better. Also on this list is the 1981 movie Heavy Metal, the first adult cartoon I’d ever seen. I loved it, and just this weekend I re-watched it to check the accuracy of my memories of its greatness.

In case you’ve never heard of Heavy Metal, have a look at its poster, which communicates all you need to know about the film’s theme and general imagery.

Overall, Heavy Metal wasn’t as bad as I expected it to be, and at times I actually thought it was about as cool as it seemed when I was a kid. Perhaps more than anything else, I found myself surprised by the quality of bands supplying music for the soundtrack — Blue Öyster Cult, Stevie Nicks, Cheap Trick, Grand Funk Railroad and Devo, just to name a few. Certainly not the screeching, thrashing kind of music the name Heavy Metal suggests.

Along the lines of music, I noticed something else, too. In “Den,” one of the film’s vignettes, a bare-chested barbarian dude must rescue a soon-to-be-sacrificed maiden from an evil cult. The ceremony is led by an evil queen — also bare-chested, of course — and her outfit get-up has a familiar-looking symbol blocking the view of her hoohah.

(image has been modified to prevent you from being scandalized.)

This was the best image of the ceremonial thong I could find, but I think you can make out enough detail to note how much it looks like the Radiohead “evil teddy bear” logo.

Right? Like, normally when confronted by an alleged pop culture connection like this, I’d say “Oh, those look similar, in a general way.” But these two look similar to the point that I’d actually bet that Heavy Metal influenced the Radiohead logo. I wish I could find out for sure, but my attempt at research yielded only that the bear logo was designed by Thom Yorke and artist frequent Radiohead collaborator Stanley Donwood. Beyond that it’s hard going, since any search terms that could lead me to an answer — “heavy metal,” “radiohead,” “queen,” etc. — also turn up thousands of shitty music sites. All I can say for now is that it doesn’t seem out-of-the-question that Yorke or Donwood would have seen Heavy Metal and used it as inspiration, given its status as a cult film existing at the exact intersection of music and weird art.

I guess I can just hope that someone Googling their way here might be able to point me in the right direction.

Previous assertions of my visual literacy:

• An analysis of the cover of the first-ever graphic novel
• Strange cabinet art on the old-school video game Ladybug
• Marion Davis is funny, sad
• The worst ad campaign for a luxury hotel ever
• A close reading of a packet of sweetener
• How does this fox make you feel?
• And a whole bunch of other stuff