It pays to stay to the very end
QUESTION What was the first film to feature a scene after the credits?
An AFTER-CREDITS scene is called a stinger or teaser in the movie industry. Their ubiquitous use in Marvel and DC superhero films has cinema-goers hanging on to the bitter end.
Thor: Ragnarok had two post-credits scenes: a comic scene and a hint to a possible sequel.
The earliest example is from 1903’s 12-minute single reel The Great Train Robbery. It featured a final scene where the leader of the bandits unloads his gun at the audience.
In the modern era, 1963’s From Russia With Love had a post-credits title card saying ‘James Bond will return in the next Ian Fleming thriller Goldfinger’ and this became a tradition in the 007 franchise.
A true after-credits scene is the 1966 James Bond spoof The Silencers, in which Dean Martin is shown lounging on a bed with a group of beautiful women before a tease for the sequel, Murderer’s Row.
The Muppet Movie kicked off the aftercredits craze of the Eighties. After the credits roll, the drummer, Animal, bursts through the credits while shouting ‘Go home! Go home. Bye bye!’
Matthew Broderick borrowed this gag for Ferris Bueller’s Day Off in 1986.
In 1980, Airplane! ended by returning to a taxi passenger who had not been abandoned in the opening scene.
One of the creepiest after-credits scenes is 1981’s werewolf film The Howling, featuring a TV playing an excerpt of Maleva from 1941’s The Wolf Man whispering: ‘Go now. May God help you.’
Richard Wendell, Dudley, W. Mids.
QUESTION What are the worst song lyrics by a great songwriter?
EMInEM is regarded by fans as the greatest lyricist in rap. His lyrics feature puns, such as ‘Standing on my Monopoly board, I’m on top of my game’ in the song no Love. These are balanced out by some real stinkers. Take this line from Love The Way You Lie: ‘now you get to watch her leave out the window, guess that’s why they call it window pane.’
Coldplay have written some subtly brilliant lyrics. The excellent Viva La Vida contains the line: ‘I used to rule the world/Seas would rise when I gave the word/now in the morning, I sleep alone/ Sweep the streets I used to own.’
However, they are walking a thin line with the absurd ‘I swam across/I jumped across for you/Oh, what a thing to do/’Cause you were all yellow’ from the song Yellow and ‘Lights will guide you home and ignite your bones’ from the sickly Fix You.
U2’s lyrics can display a rare level of skill, for example, With Or Without You: ‘See the stone set in your eyes /See the thorn twist in your side/I’ll wait for you.’
However, their song Elevation, from the 2000 album All That You Can’t Leave Behind, has one of the worst lyrics of all time: ‘I’ve got no self-control/Been living like a mole now/Going down, excavation/ High and high in the sky/You make me feel like I can fly/So high/Elevation.’
Madonna isn’t often given credit for her song writing. In Live To Tell, she has: ‘A man can tell a thousand lies/I’ve learned my lesson well/ Hope I live to tell.’
Perhaps this is due to some of her weaker efforts, notably I Love new York from Confessions Of A Dance Floor: ‘I don’t like cities/But I like new York/ Other places make me feel like a dork/Los Angeles is for people who sleep/Paris and London, baby you can keep.’
While the soft rock band Toto stake no claim to be great songwriters, their song Africa was one of the most successful of the Eighties, despite featuring the daft lyric: ‘The wild dogs cry out in the night/ As they grow restless longing for some solitary company/I know that I must do what’s right/Sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti.’
Elaine Walters, Hessle, E. Yorks. BOB Dylan, acknowledged as the best lyricist of the rock and pop era, has won the nobel Prize for Literature.
Yet his 1985 Empire Burlesque album displays a creative lull. The song Cleancut Kid contains the lyrics: ‘He went to Hollywood to see Peter O’Toole/He stole a Rolls-Royce and drove it in a swimming pool.’ Ouch!
Tim Mickleburgh, Grimsby, Lincs. SInGER songwriter Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah is sublime. However, Jazz Police features the extraordinary: ‘Stick another turtle on the fire/Guys like me are mad for turtle meat.’
In 1981 neil Young produced Reactor, a grungy mess of an album. Its nadir is the nine-minute T-Bone, which consists of the lines ‘Got mashed potato/Ain’t got no T-bone’ endlessly repeated.
Lisa Cowan, Swansea.
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