Film Notes

Look at the state of that inside cover!

The original 'Crawl' from Flash Gordon, 1940!

Watch it on YouTube (Many thanks to Dan Pollard for finding it for me)

The famous 'crawl' - depicted here, doesn't really become any more exciting when crudely drawn in felt-tip pen does it?

My son who also loves Star Wars (age 4), watches the opening crawl with mounting boredom, irritation and finally anguished tears.

"Oh, oh... here it comes!" he says, as one crawling paragraph drags to a finish.

Then another begins, "Ohhhhh! No, not more!" he groans.

I've grown accustomed to skipping it.

If memory serves correctly, George's original intention was that his Sci-Fi film would be a homage to - or even a remake of the Flash Gordon serials he'd watched in the cinema every Saturday as a boy. The scrolling crawl would seem to be direct taken from the 1940 films.

Art Notes

I'm pretty sure that there's no hyphenation on the crawl in the film. But then, being professionals, I expect the crawl people actually planned out the flow of the  text.

You know, planned it.

Now I suppose I COULD HAVE lightly sketched it in, in 4H pencil, got it right, marked-in horizontal lines with a ruler, then carefully felt-tipped-in the text and rubbed out the pencil once the felt-tip was dry...

But: nahh. Too much effort!  Get the "writing" done, and then it's "space-ship time. Whoo-hoo!"