Structure
The opening of each film begins with the scrolling text, "A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away...." in blue, followed by the Star Wars logo over a field of stars. The logo then moves away from the camera and subsequently, the text begins with film's episode number and subtitle (with the exception of original release of Star Wars – see below) followed by a three-paragraph summary of the events immediately prior to the incidents of the film. The text scrolls up and away from the bottom of the screen towards a vanishing point above the center of the screen in a perspective projection. Each piece of scrolling text ends with a four-dot ellipsis, except for Return of the Jedi which has a three-dot ellipsis. When the text has nearly reached the vanishing point it is faded out and the camera tilts down through space to a ship or planet. Episode II: Attack of the Clones is the only film where the camera tilts up after the text.
Two typefaces are used in the text, both in yellow: News Gothic for the episode number and main body of the text, and Univers for the title of the film. Several words are in all-capital letters to stress their importance: "DEATH STAR" in A New Hope, "GALACTIC EMPIRE" in Return of the Jedi, and "ARMY OF THE REPUBLIC" in Attack of the Clones. Each line of the text spans the width of the screen when it enters from the bottom. 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. As a result, by the time the full lines are visible, the text is much smaller and harder to read. In addition, the viewer also has less time to read it.
The animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars is the only theatrically released Star Wars film that does not feature an opening crawl, but instead features a narration of the past events over several clips.
Read more about this topic: Star Wars Opening Crawl
Famous quotes containing the word structure:
“... the structure of our public morality crashed to earth. Above its grave a tombstone read, “Be tolerant—even of evil.” Logically the next step would be to say to our commonwealth’s criminals, “I disagree that it’s all right to rob and murder, but naturally I respect your opinion.” Tolerance is only complacence when it makes no distinction between right and wrong.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 2, ch. 2 (1962)
“I’m a Sunday School teacher, and I’ve always known that the structure of law is founded on the Christian ethic that you shall love the Lord your God and your neighbor as yourself—a very high and perfect standard. We all know the fallibility of man, and the contentions in society, as described by Reinhold Niebuhr and many others, don’t permit us to achieve perfection.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“Agnosticism is a perfectly respectable and tenable philosophical position; it is not dogmatic and makes no pronouncements about the ultimate truths of the universe. It remains open to evidence and persuasion; lacking faith, it nevertheless does not deride faith. Atheism, on the other hand, is as unyielding and dogmatic about religious belief as true believers are about heathens. It tries to use reason to demolish a structure that is not built upon reason.”
—Sydney J. Harris (1917–1986)