No, it isn’t some kind of weird dance. The “Star Wars crawl” refers to the opening three paragraphs of a Star Wars movie that fill you in on where the movie is starting.
Along with the 20th Century Fox fanfare, the green LucasFilm logo, “A long time ago…” opening, and the great big yellow STAR WARS, the crawl is one of those iconic aspects of the movies. But for Star Wars: The Clone Wars, the upcoming animated full-length feature coming to theaters August 15, 2008, there won’t be any familiar crawl.
Looks like George Lucas has opted for something that he feels suits a TV format better, since the Clone Wars movie is a prelude to the upcoming television series.
“Because we originally developed this as a TV series, George felt that the crawl wasn’t going to be effective as a way to introduce the audience to the TV series,” director Dave Filoni told MTV. “He wanted it to be faster and he wanted to do it visually.”
So instead of seeing the crawl, we’ll be getting a 1940’s-style newsreel introduction, complete with a 1940’s-style radio announcer. In fact, Filoni and the rest of the team apparently used a style similar to that seen in the movie Starship Troopers.
“We kind of borrowed from old serials that would have like the little circular wipes and show you what Flash Gordon was up to the last time you were at the theater and we did it in a more traditional sense,” Filoni said of the change. “The narration also is kind of a nod to old newsreel footage that you could see during a war, where they would update you on where the allies were at and their battle against the axis.”
It’s probably good news, considering the slow speed of the crawls we’ve seen for movies. TV is a much shorter, faster format, and hopefully these quick newsreel type intros will work well.
hmm i’m not sure how i feel about this. the clone wars cartoon show didn’t have a crawl either. right?
Every year George Lucas makes me less of a Star Wars geek.
Every year George Lucas becomes less of a Star Wars Geek, and more of a Star Wars Profiteer.
Down with fascists! We need a revolution. For far to long has our beloved galaxy caught in the grasps of Lord Lucas, the destroyer of dreams. We have suffered much, no longer do we want the action figures, the lunch boxes and the fast food endorsements, we just want what is ours, Star Wars to be FREE!
George Lucas remains a master of a tightly controlled system where a fictional universe is carefully rendered in a “universe” of digestible media formats.
You don’t see the Star Wars crawl with every video game that comes out, and this is fine.
By saving the star wars crawl for the real movies, George is preserving the specialness of the real movies. People take heart: he’s not watering down the Six Episodes by over miscegenation with these non-episodes.
Actually, you do see the Star Wars crawl on pretty much every Star Wars video game they make.
Since the TV series is more serialized than the movies, it would make even MORE sense to use the crawl, since it’s a hallmark of the old serial shorts that Star Wars is copying.
Lucas makes one bad decision after another.