Didn’t believe me when I said that the suits at Fox had no idea how to market the original Star Wars? Then check out this vintage trailer:
I dig the ominous music. Sounds like it came from some disaster flick like The Poseidon Adventure or something. Not to mention the random alarm wail that’s never actually heard in the film. The art of the movie trailer has come a long way in 30 years…
A “big, sprawling space saga” indeed. The trailer is cut to make the movie look really slow. The reverse-logo crawl reinforces this effect. And all the shots of spaceships are moving very slowly.
Contrast this to the trailer for the theatrical release of the special edition back in ’97 or so, which was so exciting it made me jump up and cheer. I felt like I’d never really seen the film at all and I just had to go see it in the theater–which was exactly the ad campaign.
Agreed on all of the above. To be fair to whoever made this, however, I think a big factor at work here was simply the way trailers used to be cut. Every ’70s vintage trailer I’ve ever seen is really slow and meandering. I’ve got one on one of my old VHS tapes for a Gene Wilder movie called Quackser Fortune Has a Cousin in the Bronx and I swear to god that thing is about 10 minutes long and never tells you a thing about the movie.
Even trailers from my theater-working days in the early ’90s seem kind of slow compared to how they’re done now. It’s like we’re all on speed these days…