Everyone loves a good trailer. It whets your appetite, it threatens you with a good time, it swears on its soul to take you on an incredible journey to faraway places and makes promises that the movie itself almost certainly can’t keep.
But that’s not the trailer guy’s fault. He’s here to sell you something.
Once the movie is released, the trailer is invariably forgotten. Discarded. Its purpose is served. When the whole meal is available, where’s the value in a single bite?
But every now and then a trailer comes along that sticks in the mind, challenges all you believed to be true, and makes the case that at their very best, trailers can be considered not just marketing material but an art form in itself.
I issued a challenge to the LMO writers to post their greatest every movie trailer along with a brief justification. Go ahead and laugh at them if you like. Remember, we’re not necessarily talking about great movies here. We’re talking about great trailers.
We loved, we dared to dream, and even though we sometimes got our hearts pulled out of our ass by the final product, there’s no forgetting that first look that took our breath away.
Here’s mine:
The first Matrix Resurrections trailer promised so much. It’s the perfect mix of nostalgia and new. There’s mystery, mind-bending action, and a promise to make up for the disappointing sequels. But most of all, there’s that awe-inspiring remix of Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit. I still watch it regularly and get goosebumps every time.I’#m about
For the record, I didn’t hate the movie as much as the rest of the world seemed to, but it wasn’t a patch on the trailer. That trailer deserved an Oscar.
Twister Of Lime
Wrenage: The most memorable trailer I witnessed was for Twister. I have never seen a preview hit a theatre that hard. When the screen cut to black at the end, the entire theatre was dead silent, and you could pretty much guarantee everyone already had their ticket bought. They were simply waiting for the release.
Maybe the reason for this dreadful fascination is that I live in an area threatened by tornadoes in the summer. Over the course of three years, multiple towns were devastated by tornadoes. My brother and I went to volunteer at one site, and driving into it was like entering a bomb blast. Trees got flicked away. Houses got obliterated. What really stands out is that the guts of a house end up looking like a trash dump. Little bits of junk strewn every which way, and a foundation. That’s it.
I saw a funnel cloud once, hovering over a little town in the distance. For size comparison, the town’s water tower looked like the head of a pin, and the funnel cloud looked like a beer mug hovering over it. If that funnel cloud had come down, it simply would have erased the place.
We even had tornado drills in school. I remember one female classmate lived in mortal terror of tornadoes whenever a storm approached. I once overheard another student regaling everyone about a story where a tornado hit a fictional school and killed everyone, except for one boy who survived. “But he had a broken back.” The person told this story because they knew the scared girl was listening, and you could almost watch her face go pale.
Kids will be kids…
My runner-up for a favorite trailer is Alien. I dig that siren-sounding musical cue…
The Hope of Episode 1
Boba Phil: Back in 1999, we still had dial-up internet. Trailer A for The Phantom Menace dropped, and I was desperate to see it. Being on dial-up and using Real Player (remember that?), it buffered more than you can imagine. In the end, I had to download the largest version, which took something like 6 hours. However, seeing it was great.
1999 was still the best year for movies in my opinion, and where I lived, we had a new 15-screen cinema. A few friends and I went to see The Matrix. We got there late and had to sit in the front row. I had a plastic, light-up green lightsaber. The trailer for The Phantom Menace came on, which I had seen about 3 times at the cinema. I lit up my lightsaber and started ‘Jedi-ing’ under the screen. Good times.
The trailer, though, was something special. It gave me hope that the new Star Wars might be awesome. When I saw The Phantom Menace in the cinema 9 times, I thought it was the best. Now I’m a little older and wiser, I realise it’s terrible, it feels like Star Wars, but it’s still terrible.
Side note, Trailer A and Trailer B for The Phantom Menace were shipped on 35mm as movies called The Box Lunch and She Stood Alone. This was so fans wouldn’t try and steal them. Cinemas were told that the 35mm trailers had to be sent back to Lucasfilm. My mate worked in one of the old cinemas, which closed down when the new one opened. I have both The Box Lunch and She Stands Alone on 35mm on my shelf in my office.
Believing A Man Can Fly… Again
Stark: Movie trailers, to me, are an art form. Through most of the 1980s, they were just a thing. Well-edited, sure, but still an assembled series of scenes from a movie set to some of the soundtrack, with a similar voice-over dropping plot bombs and created by the studio more out of necessity than with any love. Then the 1990s happened, and movie trailers really, really started to develop.
I think it was the multiplex experience, something of that seemed to make the trailers into an integral part of the event. Back in a time before the internet, it was also the first thing you ever knew about quite a lot of new movies. It was your first taste of the wonders that lay ahead.
As this art form, I genuinely think that it all culminated into my favorite. The best example of the development of the trailer as an art form rather than just a cobbled together sales tool is the 3rd trailer to Man Of Steel. The intersection of imagery, pace & flow, plot point reveal (without spoilers), dialogue, and music, and the way it just builds and builds is simply exquisite as a trailer. I still don’t think it has been beaten.
It still screams “Fuck everything and get to the movie theater right fucking now!”
Like You’ve Never Seen Before
Drunken Yoda: Boy, I had a head scratcher on this one. Trailers even since the 90s have been shit for the most part. Good ones many times turned out to be trailers for shit movies. The best ones back in the day were when I was a wee lad, and if you didn’t get the movies, you didn’t see the trailers. But there’s a couple I can dig up that actually stick in my memory. I’m going by the rules of “When they were released.” So while The Shining trailer with the blood tidal wave is awesome, I sadly didn’t see it until DVD came out years later.
This one for the Star Wars 20th Anniversary Special Edition, though, was epic. Get this. It’s 1996. Star Trek: First Contact has been released, and we’re in the theater to watch it. The first trailer before that movie starts is this:
Hot damn. The theater is going wild. Borg are almost on the screen and we get that?! Talk about pumped. Then the next trailer that falls is Evita. Yeah, with Madonna. The theater falls utterly silent except for one lone voice in the back that yells out “Boring!” as Homer Simpson-esque as possible. “Know your audience” is a skill they didn’t have back then, no wonder they chase the idea of “Modern audiences” now.
Taking the Ring to Mordor
Still Yoda: Then a few years later there was this one for… well you know. It crudely kickstarted one of the greatest trilogies ever made:
I include it as it’s probably the first trailer I watched online easily and over and over again. Yes, I’m sure I watched a lot of others. In fact I recall downloaded the Independence Day trailer on my lowly dial-up modem over the course of hours just to get a good one. But this is when broadband finally took hold and we were able to finally start watching trailers fairly immediately. It was glorious.
And finally I’d be remiss if I didn’t include a Star Trek trailer. None of them really were memorable, or at least I don’t recall seeing them but this one really got me excited as at the time as I wasn’t even aware they were making a final movie with the original cast. Putting all the past on the ship itself was masterful:
Nostalgia done right with a peppering of one last great adventure. It turned out to be a great send-off for our crew. The trailer reminded us of the entire journey.
Over To You Outposters
Trailers are the gateway to the movie. You see a trailer and it makes you want to park your bum at the cinema. What trailers do you remember? Is there something that sticks in your mind?
