DEANAMATRONIX

Now, I don’t know whether someone close to Garth had exploded – whether it was a colleague or a pet – but you could tell that scene meant a lot to him. There were tears on set.

Ubiquitous within the bone marrow of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace, DEANAMATRONIX is a company responsible for the SFX, prosthetics and makeup on the show, and appear in the opening credits to every episode.

Obviously they’re shit because the whole premise is that it’s set in the 80s and the 80s were shit, but this is further compounded by its association with Dean Learner, Marenghi’s moralistically dubious publisher and friend, played to perfection by the effortlessly excellent Richard Ayoade. The special effects are frequent and shoddy, including broccoli fingers, poorly suspended flying stationery and – notably – a giant eye with a massive erection that somehow impregnates a male patient.

The logo is an amalgamation of several different things that may not make sense to you. Welcome to this website. I wanted to step forward from the 1980s fractionally and not go too overboard on that, and for some reason in my head I envisaged curved lettering. Initially I went for everyone’s favourite on-demand video streaming service but felt that that it was a little too minimalistic and modern for what I was trying to achieve. Then I realised that what I was *actually* thinking (re: the curved lettering) wasn’t anything to do with that, rather a green version of the old Star Wars lads. Meh. Fuck it. Let’s combine them, why not?

Another aspect of it that even I, the creator of the work, find incredibly tenuous is the memory of a sci-fi horror book by Stephen King’s front cover that was overbearingly green. I don’t know. Sci-fi. Horror. Equals green, right? And Garth Marenghi is a horror writer too, see?

‘Step forward from the 1980s’ he says, with references to a film released in 1977 and a book published in 1987.

Probably booking myself into an asylum after this one but thanks for being here while I had my freedom. Unless I’m already locked up when you read this. In which case, fuck off, I guess.