Today we kick off a new series here on the Siser blog. Every Thursday we’ll be throwing it back to logos from the good old days in movie and TV history. Let’s begin, shall we?

In the 1988 Eddie Murphy movie “Coming to America“, Eddie’s character, Prince Akeem moves to Queens New York to find his bride. While in New York, Akeem decides to take a job to be more like a regular American. He gets a job at a McDonald’s knockoff restaurant called “McDowell’s”. McDowell’s has pretty much everything in common with McDonald’s…

“Look… me and the McDonald’s people got this little misunderstanding. See, they’re McDonald’s… I’m McDowell’s. They got the Golden Arches, mine is the Golden Arcs. They got the Big Mac, I got the Big Mic. We both got two all-beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles and onions, but, they use the sesame seed bun. My buns have no seeds.”

If we want to create a throwback shirt or possibly a costume, we need to start by creating the iconic logo. In the Coming to America movie, you’ll notice that the logo isn’t consistent from the signs to the window decals to the Big Mic boxes.

I decided on this image of Eddie and Arsenio Hall against the outside window of McDowell’s. You can see in the 1st image, that the perspective is skewed. I straightened out the image in CorelDraw and digitized one half of the golden arc and flipped it to make the other side. If we scale it down and overlay it on the smaller M in the background, it fits perfectly. The font I used is called “Kartika”. It’s slightly different than Arial bold. I simply broke the text apart and arranged the letters to match the lettering in the window.

That’s all I needed! The resulting file was sent to the cutter and cut in Siser EasyWeed Yellow, Black and White. And there you have it! A great looking throwback design!