Curious Similarities

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

What do Pod People, Cave Dwellers, Godzilla vs. the Sea Monster,  and Stranded in Space all have in common?


An opening and closing credit sequence which, though vaguely genre-connected, has nothing to do with the actual content of the movie, is blurry, and has a similar strain of music.

What does it mean? What is this conspiracy? What otherly production and distribution force is behind these credit sequences? Do you think that stringing enough of them together and adding dialouge by playing "Dark Side of the Moon" backwards at 1/2 speed would result in a complete movie?

[BEERxTaco]

I think it means they were all re-released by Film Ventures International and they had to write new credits and new titles and they had to make up completely unrelated stuff to play behind them.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

But, why?

[Thom_Serveaux]

In a misguided attempt to make them seem more cutting edge, avant guard and less lame.  or like Comedy Central, it was  a cost cutting move designed to save them the expense of re-mastering the whole shebang and maybe deny some of the people who were really responsible for these masterpieces from receiving due credit and/or financial remuneration(residuals, etc)

[Steve-O]

There's a quite interesting interview with a former employee of FVI at badmovieplanet, as well as a later reader-submitted Q&A.

According to the Q&A, the foreign titles were changed in order to make the movies sound more exploitative, and were sometimes changed again later to maximize the moneymaking potential when a film was re-released in new regional markets.  The employee wasn't sure why they used footage from other films, though.

If I were to venture a guess, I'd say that the group that redid the credits sequences were independent from those importing the films, and perhaps they had to produce the sequences without access to the actual film.  Still, you'd think it would be easier to just do white text on a black background.  Weird.

By the way, the incomparable Satellite News reveals this little tidbit:

Q: I've noticed that the FVI movies would show clips of entirely different movies during their title sequences?  Has anyone ever figured out what movies they were?

A: So far three have been identified. They used clips from a movie called Galaxy Invader for the titles to Pod People. They used clips from a movie called Prisoners of the Lost Universe for the credits of Stranded in Space. And clips from Son of Godzilla was used for the opening credits of Godzilla vs the Sea Monster.

[Fuzzy Necromancer]

Very informative. ^_^ I thought they had just filmed the credit sequences as credit sequences.

What does FVI stand for?

[Tarantulas]

Very informative. ^_^ I thought they had just filmed the credit sequences as credit sequences.

What does FVI stand for?

Film Ventures International