A STEP-BY-STEP GUIDE TO ASSEMBLING THE PERFECT TV CREAM FILM

2 - THE TITLES

So we come to the opening credits in our self-styled Ideal Film, and what we're looking at specifically here are proper animated title sequences to live action films, the sort you never seem to get at the pictures any more - perhaps it's considered too cute, too cheesy or not bombastic enough. More likely they just can't be arsed. Back in what even Humphrey Lyttleton has now started calling "the day", however, cartoon titles were plentiful and peachy.

Of course, none of them were as good as, say, the self-drawing boat- nosed Derek Fowlds that heralded another round of Yes, Minister, the demented "John Humphrys lays waste to the British Isles operating the brain of a giant stone crocodile with shadow transport minister as comedy henchman" intro to On the Record or the mighty "walking cheese slices in scuba gear ruthlessly spear multilingual foreign words" end sequence for Jeux Sans Frontieres. Film titles, blessed as they are with a relatively captive audience, don't have to work as hard as their broadcast brethren to generate the requisite "What's going on? What is this programme? Fish? Steak? Surf 'n' turf?" curiosity. But freed as they are from selling the film, they still have to build up anticipation (oh, and, er, tell you who's going to be in the thing, but that's by the by), and animated titles tend to do this job better than most.

Obviously, we can't get far in this field without dealing with the title bloke everyone knows by name, Saul 'I did that shower scene, I did, that was me' Bass. And, fair dos and that, we can't argue with the 'father of modern graphics' plaudits perennially heaped his way, but for some reason most of his work evokes admiration rather than enjoyment for us. There are three types of Bass title sequences. First off, you've got the Hitchcocky abstract stuff, as exemplified by Vertigo's quease-inducing op-art Spirograph epilepsy diagnosis test from hell. Then there's the Uncomfortable Lumpy Body Parts aesthetic, which runs from Anatomy of a Murder through Man With the Golden Arm to The Satan Bug, with bits and pieces of human anatomy rendered all angular and ugly as if hastily torn out of an old exercise book cover by a nervous one-armed serial killer who can't do hands properly. These are what Saul's famous for, and, well, they undoubtedly do their job in setting up the disturbing atmos for those films, but us being cosy sherry and lardy cake types, we want a bit of warmth, a bit of comedy, a bit of fun in our title sequences.

Fortunately, the Basster doesn't disappoint here, and we call as Exhibit "Wahey!" his masterful cartoon prologue to It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World, which takes the classic animated title cliche of "let's have an object that features in the film's title and have lots of... stuff happen to it" and applies that UPA-style flat, biscuitty drawing style, with immaculate comic timing to boot (and, of course, it's all timed, as is the film proper, to match up with the Sgt. Pepper's album, it is it is IT IS). Better yet, though, is the suitably epic "who was seen in what scene" end credit sequence to Around the World in Eighty Days, a Todd-AO-tastic six-minute whimsical delight which does a "you have been watching" in collage form, representing every actor in various ways, some logical (Niven's a top-hatted clock on legs, Robert Newton a sort of moustachioed Sphinx) to the bewildering (Cantinflas a Prisoner-esque scrawled penny farthing? Shirley MacLaine a bit of blue seaweed?) It got cinema audiences to actually sit through the credits (the ones who hadn't left during the actual film, at least) and remains the best thing about the whole money-bloated effort.

Moving more into the abstract camp, we briefly pause to doff our caps at the feet of optical printer junkie Pablo Ferro, who liked nothing more than to fiddle about with the credits themselves, be it for the stylish cutaway reveals of Bullitt, or the daft nipple- obscuring antics of Barbarella. Then of course, there's his bitty windmill accompaniment for The Thomas Crown Affair, which we like to think of as a knowing advance warning about the over-enthusiastic split screen antics lurking within the film proper. He also invented the "grainy newspaper photo-montage" look for '64 Sean Connery also- ran Woman of Straw, which was subsequently ripped off by just about every '70s cop show, and that manic "war of the flags" opener for The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!, which subsequently gave us a migrane.

Chin-supportingly admirable as that all is, abstracted op-art and 'colour field' goings-on don't generally do it for us (you don't eat popcorn in an art gallery, do you? Or prune and macademia loaf at Warner Village?), so back in the world of easily-digestible cartoon metaphor, we find Maurice Binder, he of the loopy multi- coloured Arabesque titles, backing The Hollies (and an in-character Pe'er Sellers) with minimal anthopomorphic fun for largely awful Italian crime caper After the Fox, and kick-starting some post- Sellers astro-rodent action for Mouse on the Moon. Of course, Binder's name is inextricably linked with the ladyshape-happy credit rolls for *that* gentleman spy series, but we have to say they're not our cup of tea at all, maybe because they've been a hoary old running joke since we were too young to work out why Mr Kidd and Mr Wint were such good friends, but possibly because - well, national institution or no, it's just one gag done over and over again, isn't it? And this game's all about eye-grabbing innovation. Imagine if John Humphrys' crocodile was given a series of blockbusters of its own. Actually, that'd be fantastic, what are we talking about?

And they don't come spikier than Ronald Searle, whose spindly hockey stick-wielding horrors heralded the start of nearly all the St Trinians films (thus being, by definition, the best thing in most of them by miles) as well as, of course, providing the exact level of ramshackle ricketiness for Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines - all biplanes tied together with loosely-knotted twine and stovepipe-hatted officials running about pointing swords in the air - perfect. (Actually, there *is* a spikier cartoonist than Searle, but sadly Rowland Emmett's association with the cinema was limited to making Dick Van Dyke's zany gadgets in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, and not doing scratchy inkathons). While we're mentioning old Punch cartoonists, we can't forget Larry's illustrious illustrations that started off many of the mid-period Carry Ons, while Eric Rogers and his orchestral associates parped merrily away and the title captons wrung as many punning alternative titles out of Talbot Rothwell's head as they possibly could.

Terry Gilliam graduated from cartoons to actual shouting through a megaphone at proper people, but nostalgia and expediency saw him return to the scissors-'n'-rostrum stomping ground for the Python film titles, best of which has to be Life of Brian's fantastic mock- biblical granite cascades, although that was sadly marred by a) the intricately detailed action becoming all but insdicstinct on the small screen, and b) a truly terrible Shirley Bassey parody theme song. Still, points aplenty for the trumpet-playing arses. And while we're no fans of boring Beatles wibble-in Yellow Submarine, we do love ex-Sub alumnus Jack Stokes' cheap 'n' fearful astronaut credit sequence (backed with the strains of Julie Driscoll) to summer holiday afternoon-occupying sci-fi silliness Moon Zero Two.

Obviously, Disney's live action output purloined a bit of animated chutzpah from the department across the corridor, inevitably setting the hapless junior viewer up for a fall when the amusing cartoon opener to, say, The Million Dollar Duck, quickly gave way to acres of Dean Jones being drearily zany. In fact, we're struggling to think of a Disney which didn't produce this feeling of annoyance and faint despair at the point where the cartoon representation faded into the overlit mugging faces of the actors proper, be it the slightly queasy Bagpussian rag doll shenanigans of The Parent Trap, or the proto-Hitch-Hiker's wireframery of The Black Hole, Maximilian notwithstanding.

Our top title tradesman has to be Canadian contrarian and Droopy impersonator Richard Williams, who started off in front-of-house terms playing about with baroque sixties lettering for the likes of What's New, Pussycat? (luminous Vegas-style psychedelia almost as loud as Tom Jones' blaring vocals), Casino Royale (endless list of directors documented in baroque Rubber Soul-meets medieval manuscript lettering with suspect-looking prehensile protrusions) and er, Prudence and the Pill (chunky, wibbly cartoon Deborah Kerr reclines under a duvet made from bubble font letters). Clearly, it's the Pink Panther films (blimey, doesn't Sellers crop up a lot in this article?) for which he's most famous, though he oversaw only the thrid and fourth, the original and Shot in the Dark being overseen by the character's creator Friz 'Isadore' Freleng, and the later ones by Art 'Baggy pants and the Nitwits' Leonardi. All good stuff (and in many cases pissing on their accompanying live action content from vertiginous heights) but Williams is our man. You don't have to be a keyframe counter to be amazed by his superhumanly fluid cartooning, and cartoons these are - no half-arsed scenes of the inspctor using the letter Y as a martini glass here, just full-on running up and down stairs and getting shot in the face action. You barely notice the credits themeselves, which technically is a downside, but we don't care. Best of the bunch has to be the multi- film cliche parodython that opened ...Strikes Again.

But that's the title sequence everyone always picks anyway, and we wouldn't be giving value for money if we left it at that. Going by the criteria we've laid out somewhat arbitrarily above, is there a set of film titles that truly has it all - spiky animation, winningly obvious metaphoric representations of the film's title, luridly-coloured cod-psychedelic zooming about, an attempt to summarise the film's plot in three cartoon minutes, hyper-zealous split screen malarkey *and* a belter of a backing tune, all giving the insurmountable feeling that the following film can't possibly live up to what's just introduced it? Step forward the mighty Rentadick. No, really, the title sequence to this misbegotten David Paradine comic brownfield is great, and has all those elements in spades - a kaleidoscope of collages from penny dreadful comics of hanged men segues into a bit of multicoloured abstract slurge, before a load of straggly cartoons attempt to quantify the woeful Chinese espionage 'plot', while Dave Dee and the King's Singers unleash a storming version of A Policeman's Lot (with 'bawdy' lyrics, yet) that builds into a mental acapella free for all by the end of this epic rostrumfest. We love every second of it, and the next time Channel Four have a 4AM hole to plug with it, we strongly recommend you give it a taping. Just the first three minutes, of course. We wouldn't really recommend the film itself.

Spirographic terror with the op art stylings of Saul "scared yet?" Bass.

"I can do fun, too!" The lighter side of Bass.

Pablo Ferra ensures you enter this manic sub caper with the same migrane as the characters.

Stupidity on an epic scale from the Gilliam school of stonewashed cutouts.

Richard Williams is one of the greatest animators of all time, but here's his golden creative rule in action - "If in doubt, draw the client".