For most cinephiles, yellow text on a black background takes them back to one place—The Star Wars movies. Yellow prominent text crawling against the backdrop of pitch black and John Williams’ score—that’s how the first Star Wars movie opened, which became the identity of the Star Wars movies. While the world was familiar with space stories in both comics and movies, Star Wars was the first of its kind space adventure on the silver screen. Thus, for Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope (1977), context was as important as the narrative. Voice-over was an obvious choice to quickly bring viewers up to speed, especially kids for whom reading the moving text might be quite difficult, and so 20th Century Studios even tried to replace the text with a narrator, but director George Lucas wanted something different…something that would also set the tone for the narrative visually. “But they’re [kids] going to have to learn to read sooner or later. Maybe Star Wars will give them some incentive,” was Lucas’ defense for the crawling text, as he shared in J.W. Rinzler’s book, The Making of Star Wars: The Definitive Story Behind The Original Film. In this article, we’re examining the origin of the iconic Star Wars opening crawl, which begins with “In a galaxy far, far away…”The Origin of Star Wars It’s no secret that Star Wars was inspired by the legendary Flash Gordon comics series by Alex Raymond (1934-1947). Lucas had grown up on Flash Gordon, and after he...
Published By: NoFilmSchool - Today