Star Wars Opening Crawl

About

Star Wars opening crawl parodies refers to parodies of the opening sequence featured in the Star Wars franchise which features a prologue slowly scrowling up towards the top of the screen before dissapearing into the horizon.

Origin

The original sequence first appeared in Star Wars,^[1] the first film in the original Star Wars trilogy, which was first released on May 25th, 1977.

One of the earliest parodies was featured in The Bugs Bunny/Road-Runner Movie, which was first released on September 30th, 1979.

Spread

In 2008 one of the first Star Wars crawl generators, which allowed fans to enter any block of text to create the crawling effect, was created by Brent Budden.^[5] However, the generator’s popularity led it to be taken down shortly after its release due to copyright concerns. In August of 2010, LucasFilms^[4] released an official crawl generator users could utilize on their website.

On December 16th, 2010, BoingBoing^[11] posted an image of a dress printed with the Star Wars opening crawl.

On May 19th, 2013, coder Tim Pietrusky^[6] created the original opening crawl using HTML and published the code on his blog. Several sites covered Pietrusky’s code including Gizmodo^[7] and BoingBoing.^[8]

On May 28th, 2013, YouTuber Jon Hamblin^[10] uploaded a video titled “Shakes Wars – Star Wars opening crawl in Shakespearian language,” which he explained he had edited the language of the original crawl to appear Shakespearian. As of September 2014, the video has gained over 280,000 views.

On September 25th, 2013, redditor Join_You_In_The_Sun posted an image^[9] of a handmade gown with the Star Wars opening crawl printed on it. Within a year the image gained over 1,000 points.