george lucas - Why do the ellipses in the Star Wars opening crawl have four dots?

Most of the Star Wars movies, and many of the EU works, feature an opening similar to this one:

However, generally, ellipses have only three dots, as confirmed by Wikipedia:

Ellipsis … is a series of dots (typically three, such as "…")

Is there some creative reason Lucas chose to have four dots in the opening, or was it just a typographical error?

Answer

Perhaps because Flash Gordon did it?

According to Wikipedia, Lucas was influenced by Flash Gordon and similar programmes – he watched them as a child, which lead him to write his own space opera. Quoting the article:

Lucas has stated that the opening crawl was inspired by the opening crawls used at the beginning of each episode of the original Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers film serials, which were the inspiration for Lucas to write much of the Star Wars saga.

It cites the Revenge of the Sith DVD commentary, which I don’t have to hand, so I can’t check myself.

Here’s the final paragraph from the opening crawl of an episode of Flash Gordon:

Notice that it ends with four dots, not three.

~~And maybe it’s just me, but it looks like the third and fourth dots are closer together than the first three – which might lend credence to the theory that the fourth dot is really a full stop.~~ I misjudged it – see @NeilSlater’s comment for a more plausible spacing explanation.

I can’t find anything with Lucas acknowledging this, but there’s a good chance he used a four-dot ellipsis because that’s what Flash Gordon did.

Comments

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