Watch Fan-Made 'X-Men: First Class' Opening Credits

The '60s setting of X-Men: First Class has offered some great opportunities for visual design. Some of the film's sets and costumes really seem to go to town with the visual signifiers of the time period, and there have been other nods to the early '60s in vintage-style magazine covers and fan-made posters. Now check out this fan-made opening credits sequence, which uses well-known design ideas from Saul Bass and various James Bond credit sequence designers to condense the basic ideas of the characters and the time period in which the story takes place.

Here's some info from the Vimeo page:

Set during the midst of the Cuba Missile Crisis, X-Men: First Class tells the story of the first team coming together, before they would become the heroes and villains we know from the original X-Men Trilogy.

This sequence was designed to give a very brief primer on the time period, the setting, as well as show the relationships of the characters in this film, as they are very different from the previous movies and audiences shouldn't be confused as to why Professor X and Magneto, enemies in the original trilogy, are the best of friend in this prequel.

Super Punch held a contest redesigning the posters for the film, which played it safe by sticking very close to the correlation to the original trilogy, and winding up rather mundane compared to the slick trailer rife with espionage, red fear, and 60s hair. Several people were quick to make posters in the Mod, Saul Bass, and James Bond style that I had in mind, so it was decided that I'd make a title sequence instead.

As Devin at Badass Digest points out, there are some anachronisms here in the background images chosen. Some of the stuff is spot-on, but then the peace protest images and a few others are from years after the point in time where this story happens. But, in general, this is pretty good stuff. I like the queasy, weird cello-heavy version of the title theme song from the '90s X-Men cartoon that plays over this sequence, and the DNA stream that 'mutates' as the animation begins.