Happy birthday, Universal Studios!

I missed this by a day, but I wanted to make note of it anyway: Yesterday, April 30, was the 100th anniversary of the founding of Universal Studios.

If you’re like me, you grew up watching Universal Studios films on TV … and of course in theaters, but TV was where the Universal logos — the old propeller plane flying around the globe, the shiny glass letters, the earth coming into focus in a field of stars — were so familiar.

In front of everything from the classic Universal monster films of the 1930s to the TV dramas of the 1960s and 1970s, the logos were like the first notes of an overture to some of us little geeks. Remember the in-jokes about visiting the Universal Studios tour at the end of “Animal House?”

And god help us, but my friend Jim and I even had our own obscure private jokes about the studio. Carl Laemmle, who founded the studio in 1912, was nicknamed “Carl Schlemiel” by the two of us. Why? Beats me. But we found it infinitely funny.

So here’s a moment to note the 100th anniversary of Universal. What would my childhood have been like without it?