Another Saul Bass, Grand Prix. There’s a great Maurice Jarre theme, too, but it plays as an overture before the credits.
Check out Bill Hickman.
Another one:
It takes place a few minutes into the movie, but the title sequence for, “Guardians of the Galaxy 2” was a lot of fun, with Baby Groot dancing around while the rest battle a giant monster.
Delicatessen (1991)
To clarify: yes, the title sequence from the movie The Pink Panther led to a long-running series of cartoon shorts. But, the animated shorts were originally created for release in theaters (as shorts shown before feature films), starting in 1964. NBC started showing the shorts on Saturday mornings in 1969, and the later shorts in the series were specifically create for television.
Serenity had an awesome credit sequence, though it was actually an AWESOME film sequence with simple text credits displayed while it played out, so I’m not sure if this qualifies.
But still, AWESOME
What, no Watchmen? Perfectly set the tone for the movie.
That was actually Steve Stevens, who primarily played with Billy Idol but has done extensive session work over the years with Michael Jackson, Robert Palmer, and others.
Aside from Star Wars (already mentioned), I’ll add Raiders of the Lost Ark:
Raiders of the Lost Ark
LOVED THIS SO MUCH!! The whole first set of scenes with the chilling music, unknown jungle landscapes, creepy distant screams, Indy’s trademark hat in the silhouette, then the whip comes out and we see Indy in full view, all with music from John Williams - it’s PERFECT.
A moment I’ve always enjoyed:
The Great Muppet Caper as Fozzie and Kermit watch the names appear:
“Wow, a lot of people worked on this movie.”
“Nobody reads those names anyway, do they?”
“Sure. They all have families.”
They did a similar kind of thing with the Columbia logo (or whoever uses the lady with the torch these days) at the beginning of Bladerunner 2049, where she flickered like a faulty hologram.
There’s been some great suggestions in the thread so far! My own suggestion is Watchmen - I’d never seen the “Living Photograph” effect before and thought it was a superb way to do the titles for that movie.
I find that pan/scan can ruin intro sequences when the films are shown on the telly.
Good ones for me are The Seven Year Itch with the little boxes opening up; and The Good The Bad and The Ugly with the guns and cannons blasting the credits off the screen.
As I remarked in the other thread, Fahrenheit 451 has a credit sequence that’s the flip side of the one for the Magnificent Ambersons – the credits are Spoken, not written, as is appropriate for a film about a post-literate society. The credits are announced over a montage of television antennas on rooftops.
The only change you’d have to make today is that instead of aerials, you’d have a montage of satellite dishes and cable boxes.
And, just as the 1956 Around the World in 80 Days has a long and wonderful animated Saul Bass sequence, the film also opens with a wonderful Saul Bass sequence.
And the original was in the ultra-wide-screen Todd-AO process, which needed a special theater to appreciate. Much of the opening , however, was deliberately “squished” into normal film ratio in the center, partly because the archival footage was in that aspect ratio, and partly to emphasize the wonderfully wide image you had in the rest of the film.
I thought of that one; the animation is incredibly primitive, but it kinda works for that movie, and the music is fucking brilliant.
Interesting. I too thought of “The Good, The Bad and the Ugly.” Nothing sophisticated about that sequence at all, but there’s definitely something memorable about it. It strikes me as being cool, though, much like how The Velvet Underground were cool in a low-fidelity kinda way.
And don’t get me started on the music. That movie came out a half century ago and pop culture still uses the ‘whistle’ part of that theme as a sort of now-enters-the-bad-ass reference.
Wow.
It’s a slight hijack but the original idea for The Naked Gun came from the TV show Police Squad! The movie just carried that joke forward, hilariously so.
An especially funny touch was announcing the "guest star" ... who would get killed off in the credits. Watching them ham it up and milk every second of screen time is priceless.John Belushi filmed one of those sequences a short time before he died – they removed it before it aired and it has apparently never been seen.
Looking at this stuff, I don’t think you could do this kind of comedy today. Like Blazing Saddles.