20 Best Movie Taglines Of All Time
4. Star Wars
The tagline: ‘A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...’
Few sentences in movie history carry as much resonance as the ten-word effort that has introduced each Star Wars adventure since the very first way back in 1977.
You know what’s coming after those static light-blue words: the resplendent Star Wars logo, heralded by triumphant trumpets and succeeded by the receding crawl that clues you in to the events about to unfold.
And in the case of The Phantom Menace, the crawl, detailing as it did a dispute over the taxation of trade routes, immediately clued you in to the idea that the prequels might not be worth the wait.
Perhaps Lucas should have again consulted fellow filmmaker Brian De Palma, who on watching an early cut of A New Hope told his friend Lucas that the meandering opening crawl was “gibberish” that “went on forever”.
De Palma helped Lucas wrestle the first crawl into shape, but it’s probably fair to say even he would have struggled to spin gold out of The Phantom Menace’s ill-conceived opening.