At the beginning of “Wonder Bar,” a not-good 1934 entry into the otherwise deliciously precode, Busby Berkeley musical, we get a shot of the neon sign of the titular and punny Parisian bar, which then morphs into its name in other languages—including Chinese:

Sometimes these old movies do this OK, sometimes they just toss up some squiggly lines that look Chinese and say, “Sure, why not?” and, at first glance, this looked like the latter.  I mean, at top, we have the “da”/big/大 “ radical with a ”ko“/mouth/口” in there, and the bottom looks a bit like “dian”/store/店,“ which is part of jiu-dian or bar/hotel, but that ain't jiu or 酒 above it. 

Or is it? It's actually not far off. Then I looked up how to say ”wonder" in Chinese. And here's how you'd write it out in traditional or non-simplified characters:

奇異酒店

Qi-yi jiu-dian! Fantastic/odd pub/hotel! It fits! The jiu is slightly off but not by much, and maybe that's how they wrote it then? Or the best they could do with neon Chinese?

I just like that some craftsman on the Warners lot, in the midst of the Great Depression, for two seconds of screentime that 99.99% of the audience couldn't read, worked to get it right. Restores a bit of my faith in humanity.