The beginning titles or opening titles (in Belgium as well as beginners) are in the movies, television series and video games the text that appears at the beginning, showing the title of the production, and the names of the main actors and crew members. Movies often mention the name of the production studio and, if it is a filming, the original medium on which the story is based. This text is often accompanied by the title song or other music. Especially in television series, but sometimes in movies (such as James Bond series films), the beginning titles are often accompanied by a short movie (either a combination of footage from the series or a specially recorded movie). In that case, an intro movie or leader is also mentioned.
The beginning titles play a less important role today than the final titles, but until the seventies it was the other way around. Originally, it was customary that the beginning titles already mentioned almost the entire cast and crew. For that reason, the beginning titles were often combined with the opening scene of the film. For example, in the movie Once Upon a Time in the West, the beginning titles last for fourteen minutes but overlap the introscene. In the 1980s, the listing of role-roles and information about the crew shifted increasingly to the caption. George Lucas is often seen as the director who contributed greatly to this change. His Star Wars films contain at the beginning only a mention of the film title, but none of the names of the film crew or actors. For Lucas, however, filmmakers already experimented with an introduction in which only the movie title was mentioned, or sometimes even with movies without any form of starting titles. A well-known early example is Citizen Kane of Orson Welles.
It's not rarely that directors experiment with the beginning titles. For example, the film Fahrenheit 451 from 1966 does not contain any beginning titles with text: all names and the movie title are read by a narrator. The comic movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail shows a lot of affairs in the beginning, such as a dialogue between two employees and names of fictional members of the film crew.
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