The combination of dry line reads and white-on-black title cards have been clocked at killing enthusiasm in 32.83 seconds. And the worse part? The opening crawl in the final movie was the improved version where they added a narrator to read the text out loud after test audiences complained that the opening was too wordy. Probably the worst filmic offender of all: Uwe Boll's film adaptation of Alone in the Dark delivered its entire backstory in a fade-in-fade-out series of title cards that took almost seven minutes of screen time as warned above, it's dull enough to kill most viewers' enthusiasm for the film about ninety seconds in.Joel Robinson riffed, "You sure Lucas was the first to do this?" The Phantom Creeps, a serial starring Bela Lugosi as a Mad Scientist used the same fading away from camera opening crawl.The exposition that follows the credits is presented as a standard title card. 1939 film Union Pacific uses this style but only for the opening credits, in a sequence superimposed over railroad tracks going off into the horizon.The 1980 sci-fi spoof Galaxina opens like this for exposition rather than gags so it's not particularly funny.In the Thumb Wars parody, the spacecraft involved in the opening battle sequence end up crashing into the text which of course is still floating through space ahead of them.In the Star Wars spoof Spaceballs, as the expository scroll is disappearing into the distance, a small line of text suddenly appears at the end: "If you can read this, you don't need glasses.".(It does provide written exposition as the movie starts, just not in scroll form or with the bombastic theme.) The Opening Scroll is apparently only going to be used for the numbered Episodes of the Skywalker Saga. Solo: A Star Wars Story also averts it, solidifying a precedent for the Anthology films to lack the scroll.Rogue One notably averts it, however- which might thematically make sense if only because its events are directly referenced by the very first employment of this, in A New Hope.note Although the first one needed Brian De Palma to rewrite it to be the classic it is. The most famous example is undoubtedly Star Wars, whose "into the screen" scroll spawned a thousand spoofs and imitators.Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe-both dating from 1940-use this trope at the beginning of each episode so the viewing audience can catch up with the plot. As noted in the trope description, the use of this trope in Star Wars and the other films in the franchise was a Shout-Out to the old Film Serials that served as inspiration to George Lucas.
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