Opening credits

In a television program, motion picture, or videogame, the opening credits are shown at the very beginning and list the most important members of the production. They are now usually shown as text on a blank screen or static pictures, or sometimes on top of action in the show. There may or may not be accompanying music. Where opening credits are built into a separate sequence of their own, the correct term is title sequence.

Opening credits since the early 1980s, if present at all, identify the major actors and crew, while the closing credits list an extensive cast and production crew. Historically, however, opening credits have been the only source of crew credits and, largely, the cast, although over time the tendency to repeat the cast, and perhaps add a few players, with their roles identified (as was not always the case in the opening credits), evolved. The television movies after 1964 and the increasingly short "shelf-life" of films in theaters has largely contributed to the credits convention which came with television programs from the beginning, of holding the vast majority of cast and crew information for display at the end of the show.