What's In A Title?

A hell of a lot! So many movies can only be remembered through the songs which inspired their catchy titles: others can only be remembered by a catchy line delivered just at the right time during said flick!  A third category of films can only be remembered entirely due to their extremely (sometimes ridiculously so) easy to remember titles: and those are normally the one-word titles! But that's another story, as you will see in the following video, when that ebony guy from Yahoo, Yo, asks peeps around on the street about the ORIGINAL titles of some of the most famous movies of all time - just to see if the peeps can catch on which famous flick it can possibly be...



Remember the uproar over the choice of ''Phantom Menace'' for the Star Wars first prequel? Lucasfilms' pick seemed odd and unexciting to the geeky masses that had been waiting for it for what seemed like eons...! And yet, and yet - IT PERFECTLY FIT THE DAMN BILL!  Of course, if you know me, you already know that I personally have at least two alternate titles that perfectly describe this one as well: it's either ''the clones of Jesus and Satanas widely misused'' or ''George Lucas' Attack On Revelation'' - but that's another story...  The point is... (And, yeah, I do have one!) that a title is just that: what follows is the actual meat of the entire construct! All you want is something that gets the ball rolling at that point - and gives at least one single hint about what it might all be about!

From titles we can easily go into labels too: for this industry is chock-full of them, for every single artisan that works in it, all the way to the more technical functions, of course!  ''Get a grip'' has taken on such comical proportions on some filming sets: only in Hollywood...!  Let's limit ourselves to the overall label here, though, which would also be the entire industry's ''title'' in fact: they call them ''the movies'' overall - period!  Some use alternate words such as ''flicks'' or ''features'' are frequently used, but th most popular and widely-recognized since the dawn of this entire industry remains ''the movie''.

Me? I still remember that ''movies'' used to be called, for a very brief transitional time, ''talkies'' - and, quite sincerely, both ''titles'' are anemically pathetic! Diluting the product so much that they are called simply ''films'' for short (short of filmography - duh) is equally atrocious.  What they are is the Seventh Art: motion pictures! Is that so hard to remember? Well, if ''Pretty Woman'' and ''Good Fellas'' is tough to recall, you surely have got a problem pal! Especially if, in your view, these two titles do not seem to fit like a glove both motion picture productions in question, too...!

Next time we'll embark upon the ever-so touchy subject of ''sub-title'' - no, not the ones that translate the dialogue for you on the bottom of the screen (usually with typorama extras!) no! Rather, we'll explore those ''second titles'' motion pictures get from time to time (just not Phantom Menace anymore!) and we'll analyse what's best for the motion picture industry from there (okay, I'll go with ''movies'' for short - happy?!?) - because, let's be quite frank now: the last movie/flick/feature that was popular and actually bore a long title was 1963's  It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad World - and gee, that was a long, long, long, looooong time ago now!

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