Bothe the opening and closing credits for The Kids Are Alright are an ideal way to introduce the main characters and close out the show.
I thought the opening sequence of Severance couldn’t be beat (seriously, it’s amazing. Music, art style, choreography, everything.) But now I think Peacemaker is giving them a run for their money. People doing goofy dances and playing it totally straight just hits the spot for me.
and it is a thoroughly goofy dance. Especially Cena doing it.
I’d nominate the opening sequence of Batman: The Animated Series for the music, the action, and the way it succinctly encapsulates the essentials of Batman (normal human with superior skills and gadgets who loathes criminals).
Superman (1978)
The opening of the movie screen curtains, the sound of a projector whirring to life, a title card saying JUNE 1938, and a little girl opening up an issue of Action Comics. As she reads from the comic book, the panel of the Daily Planet building dissolves into a B&W live-action shot as it passes over the building, past a full moon The screen widens past the curtains as the names on the screen elongate toward you. The opening score by John Williams. The eye-catching graphics. After this five-minute title sequence, you almost don’t need to see the movie.
This was already mentioned upthread, but I’ll also give it a vote. I once watched this in the front row at a theater, and it just blows you away. The transition from a narrow screen movie of a kid obviously reading a comic book while lying on the living room carpet to the change from the drawn planet atop the Daily Planet to a “realistic” rendering of it to a wide-screen view of the stars is impressive. But then you also get hit by the fanfare of John Williams’ score (virtually all Superman cartoon, TV, and movie themes are fanfares) and the R/Greenberg slit-screen credits, and it’s really impressive, and you finally get to Krypton.
My only complaints are that the “wonders of space” that you pass on your journey through the stars are a lot less impressive than the star births and exploding galaxies that Stanley Kubrick came up with for 2001: A Space Odyssey a decade earlier. And that the corona around Krypton’s red sun shouldn’t look like dry ice smoke. Fix those and it would be perfect.
(And, of course, the first spoken lines in the movie, if we ignore the kid’s voice reading the comic, are “This is no fantasy,” spoken by Marlon Brando. Great stuff.)
I think not many people remember the REAL original trailer for the 1978 Superman, which had no actors and no scenes from the movie. R/Greenberg associates reportedly took footage of the twilight sky taken by an airplane (and intended for use in Ice Station Zebra) and added the names of the actors appearing in the film, rendered in that 3-D style by the slit-scan process , so that they looked like the lettering on the cover of the Superman comic book, and ended with a slit-scan image of the “S”-shield logo as it appears of Superman’s chest. It was so unlike anything seen before that it blew everyone away.
“Slit-scan” was the process used to film the “trip” sequence at the end of 2001, then used for the ABC Movie of the Week opening. Here are some images from the opening credits, and if you scroll down you can see the teaser trailer I’m writing about:
The opening credits of T2: Judgement Day
It looks like they intentionally rehearsed the dance(s) just enough to get the choreography down but stopped short of getting it polished. I think it’s kind of brilliant, and really on theme for the show, which is largely about muddling through things with a marginal level of competence.