For a certain type of person, showing up to the movies a few minutes late is no big deal. You avoid a few trailers you’ve probably already seen online, and, in the worst case scenario, you miss the opening credits. Then there are those of us who will shush you the second the studio logo comes onscreen. Maybe we learned it from Alvy Singer, Woody Allen’s character in Annie Hall, who refuses to go into a foreign film when Annie arrives to the theater two minutes late. “We’ll only miss the titles,” she points out. “They’re in Swedish.”

For those who suffer from Alvy’s specific strain of cinephilia, the new feature that Netflix rolled out last week will cause a severe anxiety attack. The streaming service now gives its viewers the option of skipping the title sequences of certain films. When you press play, a small box labeled “skip intro” will pop up in the bottom right-hand corner. Even though you are not required to skip the credits, it’s a tempting proposition, as we could all stand to save a few minutes.

Netflix began offering this feature for TV episodes back in March. Nobody complained; when you’re bingeing ten episodes of the same show over the course of a weekend, watching those opening titles can be a drag. Wisely, Netflix only applied this feature to its original TV programming. Perhaps out of respect for television history, older shows imported from other networks – such as Star Trek, Friday Night Lights, and Friends – remain unalterable.

As if it weren’t already clear, Netflix has no similar reverence for film. For example, you can now avoid watching a feather drift on the wind for three minutes at the beginning of Forrest Gump, skip the first thirty seconds of Pirates of the Caribbean or refrain from kicking off ET in the way that Spielberg intended. On the other hand, you are required to watch the slow riverboat ride that opens The African Queen, and you are rightly required to listen to the Jewish prayer that underscores the opening of Schindler’s List. Is there a method to this madness? Is Netflix only applying this feature to its most popular films? Perhaps, but with Netflix executives famously tight-lipped about their streaming numbers, we can only speculate.

One thing is clear: when we lose title sequences, we are losing something of artistic value. The title sequence has a unique and colorful path through history, and it deserves consideration as an art form itself. In the first half of the 20th century, these sequences were as perfunctory as the opening pages of a book. They simply listed the actors and crew who worked on the film, without bothering to evoke any emotional, psychological, or narrative qualities of the film that followed.

In 1955, everything changed, when the graphic designer Saul Bass was hired by the director Otto Preminger to create the titles for The Man with the Golden Arm, a provocative drama about a jazz musician (Frank Sinatra) struggling with heroin addiction. Driven by his belief that “the audience’s involvement with a film should really begin with the first frame”, Bass riffed on the themes of addiction by depicting white lines shooting across a black screen while the opening credits rolled. In the end, the lines came together as a deformed human arm.

Bass would go on to work with Alfred Hitchcock and Martin Scorsese, and influence many title designers who followed, but in the meantime, his vision was perverted and commodified by the Hollywood machine. By the mid-1960s, studio movies were paying vast amounts of money for elaborate, animated title sequences that added little of value to the film, such as those featured in the Pink Panther movies and With Six You Get Eggroll. Such silly animated openings didn’t survive the dark, cynical films of the 1970s, but they had a brief comeback in the early 90s in comedies such as City Slickers, Honeymoon in Vegas and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

These days, the spirit of Bass (and his wife Elaine, a frequent collaborator) can be felt in some of Steven Spielberg’s more playful films, such as Catch Me If You Can and The Adventures of Tintin, both of which sport colorful, narratively complex openings that could easily function as stand-alone shorts. Of today’s new masters, only David Fincher is carrying the torch; he confronted viewers with the dark twisted visions of Seven and The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo right from the start with his abstract, nightmarish openers.

Beyond historical context, a great title sequence often precedes a groundbreaking film. Vertigo opened with an extreme close-up of a female eye, setting the stage for its twisted commentary on voyeurism and misogyny. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing announced its presence with authority, starting with three minutes of a hip-hop dancing Rosie Perez backed by the inimitable beats of Public Enemy’s Fight the Power. Neither white nor black audiences had seen anything like it in a movie theater. Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb set the table for irony, opening with serene classical music under images of nuclear fighter pilots.

If artful sequences like these are indeed dying out, Netflix’s decision is more symptom than cause. For decades, the opening credits have been shrinking, from the full cast and crew list that opened films in the classical era to today, when most films smash-cut right from the title card to the action. It’s not just in Hollywood blockbusters, either. Of the nine films nominated for best picture at this year’s Oscars, only one – Lion – featured an opening credits sequence that lasted beyond the film’s title. Moonlight, the eventual winner, had no opening titles at all, instead jumping straight into its human drama.

Perhaps the end of title sequences seems inevitable, but that doesn’t mean we should allow ourselves to rewrite the past. Watching an older film without its opening titles is like erasing history itself, or at least radically distorting it to fit present viewing habits. We wouldn’t erase the stage directions from an Arthur Miller play or tighten up the Mona Lisa by a few inches. In this age, all media is designed to pander to our dwindling attention spans, and movies, which by definition require more patience from its audience, are already fighting an uphill battle in this larger war. At least we can each do our part. Resist the temptation, watch the intro, and save a little piece of history.