This weekend's editors' picks was the brainchild of yet another interesting board meeting at FTTW headquarters.

Ok, it was an email thread between the editors. And we stole the idea from another one of our writers. But it was a good one!

Best opening lines to a movie.

Now, I know the other editors will probably pick more than one and I was tempted by Apocalypse Now and The Jerk and Fear and Loathing, but those who know me well will not be at all surprised by what I ended up choosing. For there can be only one great opening line. And it is not spoken.

Let it be written:

A long time ago....in a galaxy far away....

For a person who grew reading both fairy tales and science fiction, that was a line that sucked me in immediately. What followed in that opening crawl was more than enough to whet my appetite. But when that Star Destroyer swallowed up the scene to really start the movie.....I was hooked.

Maybe that's not so much an opening line as an opening sequence, but it was the "long time ago" thing that really sucked me in.

Many, many years later, my kids got hooked in by the same line (I had to read it out loud to them every time we watched the movie). My son memorized the whole thing and anytime I asked him "what do you want to do today?" he would say "Restore freedom to the galaxy!"

His inherited Star Wars obsession was cute til he peed in his Millennium Falcon.

Got a favorite opening line?

M

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