A main title in its best form is like a prologue to a movie. Ideally, it sets you up for the emotional content of the film and gets you excited about it.

Kyle Cooper, title designer, Rango, Tron: Legacy, Ironman, and Spider-Man 2.

How did we get from here…(View Dr. No opening credits from 1962 below.)

…to here? (View Quantum of Solace opening credits from 2008 below.)

If you’re in Los Angeles this summer, enjoy a little bit of hedonistic nostalgia at LACMA (LA County Museum of Art). To honor James Bonds’ 50^th anniversary on the silver screen, the museum is running all of the movies. Also, in conjunction with a former employer of mine, the Loyola Marymount School of Film and Television, the museum has created a video exhibit that loops all 22 Bond opening credit sequences continuously, 14 of which Maurice Binder created.

Charles Taylor wrote about Binder in the July 29, 2002 issue of Salon magazine: “His title sequences are three-minute refutations of the laws of gravity: Figures jump and bounce and run through the colorful voids, or simply luxuriate in midair as if the atmosphere itself had become the most inviting bed in the universe. The sequences are a distillation of the films to color and movement and sex…They move with a deliberate and luxuriant sensuality, drinking in all the nudie cuties prancing and posing through them. It’s pure sex, both hot and cool, urgent and deliciously slow, celebrating both pursuit and release. The sequences are so rich, the atmosphere so thick, you begin to feel as if you could walk up the aisle into the screen.”

So go and enjoy! And notice the changes in actors, “Bond girls,” costumes, music, VFX, and editing styles.

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