Credits. They’ve always been the dullest part of a movie. They’re of little use besides re-learning the name of a character you might have forgotten over the course of the movie. Few people are interested in knowing the names of anyone besides the star and co-star, and even then these names are usually false. Vin Diesel is not Vin Diesel. These are stages names. I often wonder what happens when they use their credit cards and the name written on it is completely different.
Then there’s the nicknames inserted into the names themselves. You’ll find these in the crew section. “Robby ‘Pony Boy’ Benson: Special Effects,” or “George ‘Slippery’ Elwood : Catering.” Having your name on the big screen is the biggest reward for your hard work in producing a movie, but no one outside your friends and family remotely care. They’re just waiting for the two-minute extra-footage coming after the credits. It’s so common place that it’s expected these days. Every action, sci-fi or comedy has to have it. Some will stay through the entire credits and see nothing. Others will leave as the credits begin and then kick themselves later for not seeing Samuel L. Jackson as Nick Fury say two lines of dialogue. Oftentimes, these extra scenes are completely pointless. Take many of the Marvel Comics movies released lately. As I just mentioned, there was the Samuel L. Jackson appearance in Iron Man, but then Iron Man appeared at the end of the Incredible Hulk. These appearances are supposedly setting up an Avengers movie, which will likely not relate in any meaningful way to the previous movies that spawned it, making these scenes meaningless. Especially the one that appeared at the end of Wolverine, where it shows him drinking in a Japanese bar and little else. If you’re going to make people sit through five minutes of credits with bad music by Nickleback playing in the background, at least give them something to go home with.
Others are more gracious. The Naked Gun series inserted little jokes into the credits. Monty Python jokingly had false credits with bizarre comments about moose and replayed the credits at the beginning and end of the Holy Grail. Cannonball Run was probably most memorable for the bloopers it showed during the credits, and movies like Talladega Nights show and Old School show extra scenes as the credits roll.
Foreign movies are the worst, however. Their credits usually begin in earnest before the scene is even set. There’s little to do but sit there helplessly as minutes tick by. Some can last up to ten minutes, plus there’s little to discern them from the end credits, making you wonder if you arrived late at the theatre.
Then there’s TV shows like The Simpsons, where the opening credits usually last close until the second commercial break. I think I was five minutes into the episode once while the credits were still popping up. You’d think after 20 some odd years of being on the air that people would have become familiar with their names. The only decent idea TV has had in a long time is to start playing the opening to the next show while the credits for the last show are still playing. I don’t know why this hasn’t been implemented across the board. A TV show is 22 minutes long. About two minutes of that is credits. Less bang for your buck.
Worse yet are video game credits. Some games give you the option now of viewing the credits separately in the opening menu, but others force you to sit through them at the end of the game. You’ve spend 30+ hours plowing through a game, and after the final boss battle is over, you get to sit there for an insane amount of time and wait as it runs through the Japanese Game Tester credits. The ending to most games is usually a let down, so many people
will sit through the entire credits to see if there’s an extra scene explaining the plot holes. There rarely is. If there is another scene, it usually just raises more questions, like the one at the end of Final Fantasy VII. You can’t just turn off your game system either, because you may have to see if you can save your game at the end and replay. If not, you’ll end up at your last save point, which is usually right before the final battle that you barely scraped though by the skin of your teeth. Going through it again will only bring you the same reward: watching the credits. I usually go and make a victory sandwich while I wait.
Unlike movie credits, however, you’re not watching game credits on a DVD, or VCR. You can’t just pause and point to the screen and say to someone, “There’s me!” if you worked on it. No, you have about 1/2 a second to see your own name. Plus you can’t just skip to it, or fast forward. You have to play the ENTIRE GAME. If you’re the one who developed it, you’re probably sick to death of it after testing it for 1,000 hours. You might never see your own name on screen.
It’s funny how much more acceptable it is to make someone sit through the “credits” at a live performance, like a play or a concert. It’s far more intimate than it could ever be on screen to have the singer introduce the roadie. You might run into them after the show and go, “Hey, you, I know you!” That’s never going to happen with a movie. “Hey, you! You were Carnival Extra #3! I hardly recognize you with a face!”
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