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Educated by Mr. McKee's definition & purpose for prologue, I feel I'm beginning to see its utility to the story craft more clearly.

The prologue montage to 'Up' comes to mind; as does, the prologue fight scene in 'Enter the Dragon.'  I could be wrong; but falling down is a part of learning.

This was a great overview with good examples of all the ways you can use a prologue within your stories.

Thanks Robert,
Birddog

This helps.

Regarding #4 and #11 - I can think of an example of a movie which disastrously attempted to use an opening to introduce variety and to set up the laughs: CHASING AMY.

The film opens with a ludicrously over-the-top scene set at a comic-book convention in which every single person over-reacts to any insult directed towards them (imagined or real). A comic-book writer promoting his latest comic-book "White-Hating Coon" (an anti-white racist diatribe) to an audience begins to rant at how the movie STAR WARS is racist. When one of the major characters asks if the message of STAR WARS is true, that all "black people secretly want to be white", the racist writer pulls out a gun and shoots him. The crowd leave in terror, and it turns out this writer is actually friends with the major character, and that they like playing this prank at conventions. This outrageous scene sets up the movie as a frenetic comedy about comic-book readers and professionals.

However, the film immediately switches gears and begins a story in which the major character is caught in a bisexual love triangle between himself and another heterosexual man and a lesbian. Throughout the movie, people kept expecting more outrageous scenes like the one that opened it, instead of lengthy scenes of people talking with great banality about this absurd relationship. Whenever the racist writer returned, the audience hoped he'd be the bombastic racist they saw in the prologue, but instead he is revealed as a well-spoken and outrageously camp homosexual, and he becomes the 'wise sage' to the main character's romantic dilemmas.

Regardless of the actual quality of the storytelling of the film, CHASING AMY strikes me as a useful example of how a prologue, improperly used to add variety or laughs, can completely mislead an audience. Using seemingly serendipitous reasons such as "variety" and "just for laughs" confused the audience irreprably.