What is meant by “branching opening crawls?”
Branching is when there are different sets of video/audio that can be played based on a selected path; so in this case, if you wanted to watch the English '77 crawl, you’d select that in a menu and it would play the crawl and then proceed on to the normal video of the rest of the movie, if you wanted the '81 crawl or a Spanish crawl, you’d select that, the selected one would play and then it would proceed on to the normal video. Basically, instead of one contiguous movie, it would be broken up into parts that “seamlessly” (you’d hope) jump from one to another to form the full movie. It can be complicated and doesn’t always work out so well with the tools available to the masses.