Marshall and the Movies

You are probably questioning my manhood after two straight factoids have been about “Eat Pray Love,” but this has very little to do with the actual movie.  This factoid deals with the first ten to fifteen seconds of the movie – the Columbia Pictures logo.

For years, I’ve wondered, “Who the heck is that lady?  What does this logo even mean?  Why the heck is this stone-faced lady standing on a pedestal holding a torch significant in the slightest?”  After “Eat Pray Love,” I decided it was time to do some searching.

Here’s what Wikipedia had to say (and all those scared of the site, this sentence had four references):

Columbia’s logo [is] a lady carrying a torch and draped in the American flag (representing Columbia, a personification of the United States.

I would never in a million years have guessed she was holding an American flag.  Maybe we would get that if we saw some color other than blue!  Most American flags don’t have that much blue on them, and there would be starts all over the blue area.  There’s always the possibility that the flag is big enough that all we can see in the logo is blue space between stars.  But that flag would have to be as big as Rhode Island!  The logo designers back in the 1920s really should have thought that through.

So who would have thought the lady in the Columbia Pictures logo is quite the patriot?  Have any great enigmas like this puzzled you for years – and have the answers surprised you?