Once we did that, I shot tests for weeks and weeks and weeks,” says Perri. I went through 20 or 30 or 40 different type styles before I settled on one. “He liked the idea, but then I had to start shooting and testing and setting type. Perri came up with the idea of the crawl when he saw the 1939 film Union Pacific (see below). The Buck Rogers films and all the serials from the ‘ 30s that he was using for inspiration.” So I was constantly going out there with new ideas, and he would tell me to look at certain films. “Everything I showed him, he didn’t like. I didn’t think anything of it,” says Perri. “I had no idea what he was doing, so it was just this stupid space film. Perri would drive to Lucas’ Van Nuys office and wait for hours for the director to have a few minutes to look at (and reject) his latest attempt.Īt the time, Perri and many 20th Century Fox executives did not realize Lucas had a world-changing hit on his hands. It was just months before the May 1977 release date, and Lucas was under immense pressure to complete the film. It took a lot of work to earn Star Wars creator George Lucas’ stamp of approval for the opening titles. Perri has not seen Rogue One or a Star Wars film since the original (“There are too many things to do and there are too many film out there to see,” he explains). The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.The filmmakers have said Rogue One doesn’t feature a crawl because its story - about a group of brave Rebels who steal the plans for the Death Star - actually comes from the original crawl Perri created. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information. Of the eight films in the "Star Wars" franchise, he only ever saw the first one.Ĭopyright © 2016 NPR. MARTIN: Still, Perri is pleased his design has had such a long life, or so he hears. PERRI: It's a religious experience for them. MARTIN: Perri says the filmmakers have made a big mistake if they wanted to keep the diehard fans, like David Greene, happy. It's important to the hundreds of millions of people who will see it. PERRI: It's such an iconic image that it certainly should have been there. This was the first "Star Wars" film without it. GREENE: And now we have the new "Star Wars" film, "Rogue One," a massive blockbuster. And people wait in long lines just to meet me and get my autograph and take a picture with me. He never imagined that the simple tilted text would become iconic and turn him into his own kind of "Star Wars" hero. MARTIN: It took him three painstaking months. MARTIN: It was a time so long ago that Dan Perri, who designed that sequence, didn't use a computer.ĭAN PERRI: We had to rig a camera that was on a track and rolled toward the artwork that was on a six-foot-long piece of cardboard. A long time ago, in 1977, this music called viewers to a galaxy far, far away.Īnd with that symphonic adrenaline rush came the famous Star Wars opening crawl - those soaring, yellow letters that drew us into a universe beyond our imaginations, the text scrolling out through an endless field of stars before disappearing into all eternity.
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