The Pre-History of the RDA Logo from James Cameron’s Avatar

I’ve been spending some of my free time researching the logos created by the artists at Weta for their various sci-fi movies. Today I took a good look at Avatar, and noticed some discrepancies in the RDA logo, as shown in the film versus what’s shown in production materials.

Here’s the RDA logo as we all know it: Four dots, “RDA” and the full name underneath it.

Here are two pieces of production / pre-production art: A prototype RDA dogtag and the concept art for the BushBoss flamethrower:

As you can see, the RDA logo seems to have some text below the full name.

I hypothesize that this is seven characters of Japanese (or Chinese, or Korean) text.

Typing “Resources Development Administration” into Google Translate gives us 6 characters in Chinese and Korean, but 7 in Japanese.

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