Secret Invasion’s Terrible Titles

Disney/Marvel’s latest offering is the Nick Fury-centric Secret Invasion. Episode 1 was OK-ish, undermined by feeling like the Doctor Who Zygon episodes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Zygon_Invasion ). We’ll see how it goes, the cast is good even if the plot appears weak.

The opening titles though…well…they are bad, comically bad, like “how did anybody agree to this?” bad. They look (and in fact are) like animated versions of MidJourney art and not even the better examples but the examples from several months ago.

This image used in an article on the title is a better example of the style:

https://www.polygon.com/23767640/ai-mcu-secret-invasion-opening-credits

Marvel paid a creative studio to make the titles, so it is probably not a money-saving move. What it reminded me of was Napoleon III’s cutlery.

There is an apocryphal story that Emperor Napoleon III had a extremely fancy set of cutlery that was reserved only for the finest guest. The cutlery was made out of aluminium which was an expensive commodity until the process for extracting aluminium for ores vastly improved. Whether the specifics of the story are true is one question but it is true that aluminium was once more expensive than gold.

Of course, now it isn’t.

I can see the thought process that would see the unnatural, distorted, uncanny valley aspect of machine generated images would be a good match for the themes of the series. The problem is that these images have been so ubiquitous (mea culpa) in the past few months and so easily generated by the most talentless of people, that the whole sequence looks cheap and cobbled together.

I can see, how maybe a year ago, this sequence might have looked quite clever. I can’t see how nobody realised that a year later, it really doesn’t. Landing in the midst of a writer’s strike in which machine generated text is a point of dispute only adds to the problem of it.