3 ms·

They're called "wipes" and they had fallen out of fashion by the time Star Wars was produced. They were used in a lot of old sci-fi serials like Flash Gordon.

• WorldMaker 4y ago
  They were used in a lot of films in general for a long time until people decided they weren't "hip" or "cool" anymore. There's a lot of classic MGM musicals too, for instance, with all sorts of fun wipes. Classic TV shows also used to be full of wipes, especially game shows. Modern editing moved to focus almost exclusively on unadorned CUTs, but for a relatively long time in cinema the CUT was just one tool in the toolbox. Most screenplays the only "scene break" you will see is: CUT TO: But it used to be part of screenplay creativity as well that you might want to note the relationship of two scenes with a: WIPE TO: Or even a specific wipe (that became most associated with 60s/70s game shows): STAR WIPE TO: But these days people generally consider that "wrong" in a screenplay for anything other than a CUT TO or maybe a LONG CUT TO (traditionally used to show that a character died [1] or similar reason to "pay respects to a moment") and a lot of Hollywood feels that scene transitions should be "left" to directors and editors in the creative process (and that in today's films you rarely use anything other than a basic cut, the rest are too "ostentatious" and "distracting"). So the "scene break" in screenplays starts to feel very vestigial now that it's just about locked to CUT TO. [1] The editing of The Sixth Sense spoiled the movie for me, at least.