Star Wars opening crawl
The crawl text, which describes the backstory and context of the film, then recedes toward a higher point in relation to the screen and with an apparent effect of disappearing in the distance.
Lucasfilm President Kathleen Kennedy indicated in an April 2023 Entertainment Weekly interview that "the crawl's coming back" when asked if it would return for the upcoming movie focused on Rey.
When the text has nearly reached the vanishing point, it fades out, the camera tilts down (or, in the case of Episode II: Attack of the Clones, up), and the film begins.
In the "fullscreen" (4:3 aspect ratio for standard-definition television) versions of the films, the full lines of text are cut off on the sides until they have scrolled further onto the screen.
[3] The development of the opening crawl came about as part of a collaboration between Lucas and the seasoned film title designer Dan Perri.
Perri, who had previously worked on Close Encounters of the Third Kind and The Exorcist, suggested that they take inspiration from the 1939 Cecil B. DeMille film, Union Pacific, whose opening credits are shown distorted by a sharp perspective and rolling along a railroad track towards a distant vanishing point.
One of the earliest iterations of the opening crawl is evidenced in storyboards drawn by the production artist Alex Tavoularis, depicting the title “THE STAR WARS” as a three-dimensional logo.
[6] Perri also designed a logotype, consisting of block-capital letters filled with stars and skewed towards a vanishing point to follow the same perspective as the opening crawl.
Rice, inspired by historical German typography, produced a bold logotype using an outlined, modified Helvetica Black.
[2] The 2004 DVD special edition versions of the original trilogy were later updated with computer-generated crawls as part of their restoration and enhancement.
[11] In fact, Rogue One retains "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...", but then immediately cuts to the opening scene with no crawl.
The original text, used in the rough cut he showed to friends and studio executives in February 1977, appears in the Marvel Comics adaptation of the film.
