Alternate opening crawl for "Freaks" (1932)

THE CASE OF THE OPENING CRAWL: Just what is the story behind the interminably lengthy opening crawl which opens many prints of "Freaks", taking an inordinate amount of screen time considering the abbreviated length of the film? In the 1940's exploitation director and producer Dwain Esper, procured the distribution rights to "Freaks" from MGM, renaming the film "Forbidden Love" and later "Nature's Mistakes" in an attempt to cash in on the film's already sensational nature. He added the new, extensive opening crawl to the film whose intention is apparently to shed sympathy on the featured freaks but actually callously warns (in a way, a pre-William Castle shock to the anticipatory imaginations of the audience to increase nervous tension) of the horrific nature of the freaks; doing so in an hysterical manner typical of carnival sideshow hyperbole, with the resulting references to the film's unnatural cast as "misshapen misfits", "freaks of nature", "unfortunate", "the abnormal, the malformed and the mutilated", "blunders of nature" and "the ABNORMAL and the UNWANTED", none of which appears to be grounded in vocabulary sympathetic to the cast members of he film, but merely a new form of exploitation; which is fine if that is what Esper was clearly aspiring to, but the pretense toward a sympathetic solidarity is galling. The crawl also exploits the alterations made by Browning from Robbins' original text in that it emphasizes the menacing Code of the Freaks, which substantially changed the film's initially empathetic view of the freaks into one of nightmarish horror. By this emphasis, Esper is ensuring the audience to ultimately find revulsion in the characters toward which the film confusingly spends the majority of its time in drawing audience sympathies. The fact that there is a fatal confusion of intention built into Browning's film seems to neither bother nor interest Esper (it's doubtful whether the problem was ever recognized by the "producer") as long as sufficient macabre elements were retained from MGM's apparent bowdlerization of Browning's original cut.