Someone posted the animated opening title sequence for It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World to YouTube so I might as well link to it and point out the following.
I first saw this movie (one of my favorites) shortly after it came out…a few days after John F. Kennedy was murdered. My family and I were in the front row — way too close — of the Cinerama Dome Theater on Sunset in Hollywood. If you think Jimmy Durante's nose is frightening in normal viewing, you should have seen it from those seats.
One of the eight million things that fascinated me about this movie came in the titles…at the moment when the "world" blows up and the names of the stars rain down on the screen. Sitting there in the Dome, my eleven-year-old eyes thought they saw other names in there, names other than the performers in the film. I have always read very fast but that evening, I made Evelyn Woods look like…well, fill in your own joke. I definitely spotted other names in there. When I saw the film again a year or two later in a non-Cinerama theater, I again thought I saw the mysterious other names…but of course, in those days, we didn't have VCRs and TiVos and means by which one could slow-mo or freeze frame a movie.
The day I got my first home video copy of It's a Mad4 World — in Beta! — I immediately checked and sure enough, there they were…the name of men who'd animated the title, plus the names of what I guess were friends and family members. Years later, I asked one of them — Bill Melendez — about it. He remembered the staff all inserting their monikers but didn't recall which ones he was responsible for.
Anyway, they're in there if you want to peek for yourself. The cartoon world explodes around 2 minutes and 15 seconds into the clip. Happy hunting.
