It is possible that the visual style and impact of the title sequence could impact some individuals from the first frame of film. Back in the mid-1950s, movie screens had curtains in front of them. When the lights went down and the movie started, the audience could see the Paramount mountain logo through the sheer curtains as they were being drawn. Then, with the first frame of the film there started a 2-minute sensory experience.
It may well be that primed or serious film viewers could watch this movie’s opening and experience the common, wonderful involuntary spine-tingling sensation (probably triggered by the release of endorphins, oxytocin, and serotonin) that this viewer did. [Ponti Crystal. https://www.good.is/Health/asmr-tingly-brain-orgasms].[Miller, Thomas Kent. Mars in the Movies: A History. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, pp. 66. 2016. ISBN 978-0-7864-9914-4.]
While the Paramount logo appears for five seconds and while it is dissolving into the first frame of the picture, the martial score of Nathan Van Cleave begins with a crash of cymbals and a rising fanfare of expressive horns. The first frames of film show the spectacle of a blanket of stars and nebula not like any starscape I had seen before or since (no, not even Forbidden Planet, 2001, or Star Wars). Space has never been so black, nor the stars so scintillating. The scattered and crystalline disk of the Milky Way, glowing across the entire VistaVision-shaped screen, is a blend of purples and blues and blacks that stunned me, so I felt that I was looking into infinite space. Toward the top of the frame, small in the distance and drifting slowly in front of the stars, is the white circular von Braun-inspired space station that is at the heart of the story. It is at once spinning and orbiting the earth whose blue disk fills the bottom quarter of the screen. Also, in the distance but somewhat to the left and closer to the camera is a white spaceship with broad wings and globular fuel tanks. As these images appear, Van Cleave’s score becomes quiet and eerie with the music gently rising and falling in pitch and blending with a subtly ethereal chorus, all underscoring the impossibility of seeing these images. At the exact moment these frames begin, a man’s deeply sonorous voice narrates emphatically:
“This is a story of tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, when men have built a station in space, constructed in the form of a great wheel—
[Dissolve into a closer view of the station and ship in the same relative configuration.]
—and set a thousand miles out from the earth, fixed by gravity, and turning about the world every two hours, serving a double purpose: an observation post in the heavens, and a place where a spaceship can be assembled—
[Dissolve into a closeup of the space ship (stage left) with the space station turning in the distance (stage right).]
—and then launched to explore other planets, and the vast universe itself, in the last and greatest adventure of mankind—a plunge toward the—
[At this point the narrator abruptly stops speaking; the silence is almost tactile, and the picture quick- dissolves into a closeup of the rocket motors blasting, filling the screen with sparks and pushing the ship out of the screen to the left. Another quick-dissolve as the rocket soars across the middle of the screen away from the camera so that in an instant its size diminishes by half and then it disappears, dissolving into the stars just as the bright sparkling yellow and outlined film title “Conquest of Space” sails into view appearing as though from infinity and quickly filling the screen while the narrator breaks his seemingly long silence and speaks emphatically, all the while the score soaring majestically with lots of horns and percussion.]
—CONQUEST OF SPACE!”
[Now the opening credits roll superimposed over those amazing stars using the same yellow font as the title and the music quickly changes from quietly eerie to fully martial. The card “Directed by Byron Haskin” dissolves into another outstanding view of the ship and turning station hanging in space, and then we dissolve into the interior of the station.]
All this takes exactly two minutes and was only the beginning of this steadfastly visual motion picture.
