# Star Wars Opening Crawl The Star Wars Opening Crawl is the yellow, tilted block of prologue text that scrolls into deep space at the start of every Star Wars film, first shown in May 1977. Parodists began riffing on it within two years, and by the 2010s it powered a genre of fan generators, HTML recreations, printed dresses and Shakespearean rewrites that turned the crawl itself into a remix template. ## Origin The original crawl was written for Star Wars, released May 25th, 1977, and set the template every later film in the series copied[1]. One of the earliest screen parodies followed just over two years later in The Bugs Bunny/Road-Runner Movie, released September 30th, 1979, which opened with a Looney Tunes-styled scroll in the same tilted yellow lettering[4]. The meme in its modern, user-generated form only really took off once fans could make their own crawls without editing video. In 2008, developer Brent Budden built one of the first web-based Star Wars crawl generators that let anyone paste in text and watch it scroll; the tool was pulled shortly after launch over copyright concerns[5]. - **Platform:** Film (1977) / Web generators and HTML clones (viral spread) - **Creator:** Lucasfilm (original crawl); parody format is community-driven - **Date:** 1977 ## Overview The Star Wars Opening Crawl is the three-paragraph yellow prologue that tilts back into a starfield at the top of every Star Wars film, opening with the words 'A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away....' before the story text scrolls up and vanishes toward a vanishing point[1]. The look, the Franklin Gothic yellow type, the pale blue subtitle, the black space background and the perspective tilt, is so specific that swapping in any other text instantly reads as a Star Wars joke. Parodies keep the visual grammar intact and change the words. Common variants rewrite the crawl in a different register (Shakespearean English, corporate memos, terms of service, a boring day at the office), retell a non-Star Wars story in the crawl's mock-epic tone, or use the format to deliver a punchline that only lands once the reader finishes scrolling. Because the effect is easy to reproduce in code, the crawl also became a favorite tech demo, most famously Tim Pietrusky's pure HTML and CSS recreation[2][3]. ## Frequently Asked Questions ### What is Star Wars Opening Crawl? It is the tilted, three-paragraph yellow prologue that scrolls up the screen at the start of each Star Wars film, and a widely reused parody template fans fill with their own text[1]. ### Where did Star Wars Opening Crawl come from? The original crawl debuted in Star Wars on May 25th, 1977, and an early screen parody followed in The Bugs Bunny/Road-Runner Movie on September 30th, 1979[1][4]. ### What does Star Wars Opening Crawl mean? Beyond the in-film prologue, the term refers to any parody that keeps the yellow tilted-text look and swaps in new writing, from Shakespearean rewrites to office memos[9]. ### How do you use Star Wars Opening Crawl? Fans typically feed custom text into a crawl generator such as Lucasfilm's official Crawl Creator or Tim Pietrusky's HTML and CSS clone, then share the resulting video or web page[6][2]. ### Is Star Wars Opening Crawl still popular? The parody format is a classic that is still reused in web-dev demos, craft projects and video edits, with the Pietrusky HTML build still copied years after its 2013 release[3][8]. ## References 1. [http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Opening_crawl]() 2. [http://timpietrusky.com/star-wars-opening-crawl-from-1977]() 3. [http://gizmodo.com/awesome-guy-re-created-star-wars-opening-crawl-with-htm-1329482373]() 4. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7X1MI7GmpnU]() 5. [http://www.popcornmonster.com/2010/08/08/lucasfilms-official-star-wars-crawl-creator/]() 6. [http://www.starwars.com/games-apps/star-wars-crawl-creator]() 7. [http://boingboing.net/2010/12/16/star-wars-text-crawl.html]() 8. [http://boingboing.net/2013/09/16/star-wars-opening-crawl-in-htm.html]() 9. [https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/star-wars-opening-crawl]() 10. [https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1n473m/star_wars_opening_crawl_dress/]() --- Source: https://meme.com/memes/star-wars-opening-crawl Published by meme.com — The Internet Meme Library