Having lived in Malibu where credit watching is an art form and smatterings of applause break out when groups of two or more gather to recognise/wait for a friend’s name to scroll by, I was pleased to see the BBC listen to its viewer complaints for squeezing and speeding up movie end credits into a tiny illegible box so they could run promos for up-coming shows and show what is playing on the Beeb’s other 3 channels. 2,000+ viewers complained on their Point of View website.

Their beef? As the image here shows, the bottom right hand ¼ of the screen was where the movie’s credits ran (without music) while the top half showed live promos for upcoming shows. The bottom lefthand box had a list of programs currently running on BBC 2, 3 and 4. It looked like a peripatetic FOX or SKY News screen with eye bleeding headlines in virtually every corner and tickers running at bottom with a tiny space for the on-screen person talking (trust me, in this country that’s a huge insult as reviled Aussie media magnate Rupert Murdoch owns both networks and several newspapers).

It is a rare and beautiful thing to see a big organisation admit they are wrong and allow viewer to see the full credit run. Now perhaps the ball is back in Hollywood’s court to strike a balance between the classic movies which ran 6-8 slates of credits at the start of a movie and the words THE END in the 1940’s -1960’s the current explosion of end credits. Once there, they figured no one but the most dedicated would even watch and we saw a cornucopia of names explode.

They grew to where the film my son and I saw this weekend in the DreamWorks hit animated film Kung Fu Panda nearly 8-minutes of credits. This included an entire team for a series of alphabet letter computer machine graphics operators that ran by so quickly I cannot remember them and meant nothing to anyone but their Mom and Dad because anyone operating this kind of a machine has no life but this machine. Even my 8-year old son was pissed that we were the only two left in the theatre as the cleaners worked around us while he tested his ability to run up and down the stairs.

We read about the star’s (remember it is an animated film so they come in to do solo voice over work in a tiny sound studio) and their multiple assistants (what does one plump the booth pillow under their angelic butt whilst the other brings herbal tea for the equally delicate voice), the accounting team (hey what movie can be made without a team of bean counters counting out every penny?), the drivers (not sure what they do on this movie…), the lawyers and their assistants (your bad lawyer joke goes here) and the catering company because no army, even one locked up in buildings with digital cubicles 24/7 goes anywhere without food.

I half expected to see location credits for virtual filming in virtual China and I did see an envious newsfeed over the weekend about Chinese film and animation artists wondering why their country could not produce something this good but that’s another subject for another time.

At the very least DreamWorks finally got it that we want to know who played what character as we were leaving so we could say out loud, “Oh my gosh that was Dustin Hoffman! Wow, they even had the greatest martial arts film star ever Jackie Chan in a Kung Fu movie, how cool!,” before we saw the names of the 3rd Assistant director and her assistant’s assistant.

Progress by any other name is still progress.