Commentary &Illustration 20 Oct 2009 07:48 am
Not Paul Julian’s Wild Teen
- Here are the scenic art that makes up the title sequence to Roger Corman’s film, Teenage Doll. I would be posting this as a Paul Julian title, as many ardent fans credit the titles. But they’re wrong, this is not the work of Julian. It’s a poor imitation.
(Click any image to enlarge.)
A couple of peculiar cards set up the main title.
First a very slow pan down while hands appear and disappear.
Allied Artists gets their title card – not full screen!
The main title.
The camera pans across brick wall fragments
as a few names come and go.
The camera makes a slight move as we go from the
title above to the title below.
Single card.
Shadows move in as type changes.
Cut to a pan as a bunch of titles fade on and off.
Single card title.
Some black cut out figures pan up and in.
They’re so shoddily produced that the lights are
shining off the edges of the card.
Single card title.
The text is printed over a photo of a brick wall.
I guess they had no left over artwork.
Obviously there are problems with this title sequence. The worst has to be seen as it moves on screen. A pathetic sense of timing has type popping on and off the screen too brieftly or held too long. The artwork looks more like some agency storyboard than actual production artwork.
This is most certainly not Paul Julian’s work. Stylistically it’s obvious, however, there’s so little professional about these titles that I know Julian couldn’t have been involved.
What I expect happened, was that he was offered the job for less than the couple of hundred dollars usually offered. He turned it down and some beginner took it to get his feet wet. Too bad.
The unfortunate part is that the designer didn’t even get a credit, so we don’t know who did it.
on 20 Oct 2009 at 4:58 pm 1.Fernando Ferreira said …
Thanks for the information. It’s true… if we look closer, we’ll see a bad imitation (a technical drawing, not an artistic one). Anyway, it’s fun to see that Julian’s work on titles stimulate imitation. It proves that he create a ‘style’. Thanks again…and bring more Julian’s works.