CT the original star wars theaterical trailer...

i'm sure you've all seen this trailer...
what do you think of it. personally i think it makes star wars look really like it hasn't aged very well. the trailer makes it look like a generic 70s science fiction movie. i'm not insulting the movie i love it and think it is still really fun to watch in this day and age, but this trailer really hasn't aged very well..
what do you think..

 

This trailer is terrible simply because the effects aren't finished, the music is missing and the voice over artist sounds bored. I don't blame the movie at all, just this thrown together trailer.

 

"A boy, a girl and a universe."

If anything, the trailer's an interesting little snapshot of when the studio was absolutely baffled by this film & didn't really know what sort of a film they had on their hands.

 

Yeah, that's a really lousy trailer. It doesn't even tell you what the story's about! I think the studio really had no clue how to market it and thought, "Ah, heck, we'll just cut in lots of shots of aliens, robots and spaceships. Kids love those!"

Parts of it remind me a LOT of 'Hardware Wars'. A story of romance, rebellion and household appliances...

 

It's like it's waiting to get going. Instead of Star Wars on acid, it's Star Wars with a hangover. Interesting to try and imagine seeing those brief snapshots for the first time. To our jaded eyes, not the most amazing stuff ever seen, but put yourself in the mind of a little kid, or young adolescent. The trailer does appear to be dogged by trepidation, but let's also remember that trailers are cut a heck of a lot faster today, and studios have become rather comfortable -- a little too comfortable, perhaps -- with big-budget, effects-loaded, escapist bonanzas. Star Wars was pretty new territory in 1976/1977, and while it had some amazing Science-Fiction and Fantasy movies hot on its tail, it still got there ahead of them all, and delivered something totally dynamic and new. So, while that trailer is not within five cantina sequences and a cargo container full of spice's worth of value-distance to the final film, it's a cool trinket nonetheless.

 

Pretty much this. The trailer is about as exciting as watching paint dry, but it's not the film's fault.

 

I actually kind of liked it. It was almost...ominous, especially in the beginning. Luke's "hello" was a bit idiosyncratic, though. It's funny, because it made the movie seem a lot darker than it actually is -- the trailer didn't make me think that this would be a high-flying, seat-of-the-pants adventure at all.

 

What? Racism, misogyny, smuggling, physical harassment, amputation with a sword, class warfare, charred corpses, choking, mind rape, attempted decapitation with a sword, near- crushing and asphyxiation, death by searing laser bolts and two -- count them: two -- planterary holocausts aren't good enough for ya, eh?

 

The trailer reflects the general nature of sci-fi films up to & around that time - cold, intellectual visions of dystopian futures, along the lines of 2001: A Space Odyssey, Logan's Run, Westworld, Soylent Green and so on. Despite the voiceover going on about "Rebellion & Romance" and "Heroes & Villains", it's as if the people who cut it just couldn't understand that a film set in space could be anything other than an ominous excursion to a time & place where hope itself is doomed to be obliterated by the folly of mankind surrendering itself to technology.

Reminds me of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pioBHf11N78

In all fairness, though, so much of what made Star Wars great doesn't exist in the bits and pieces that the promo department would have had to work with, it was in the final totality. The completely different approach to the editing, ILM's breakthrough FX, John Williams' classical score - take away the elements that weren't completed until the eleventh hour and you end up with a mess that even GL's closest friends couldn't help but rip to shreds (which they did).

 

I don't expect much from a seventies trailer, but it is interesting to see how, as Nub put it, the studio was "baffled" by the film.

 

Yeah i was a kid when the special editions came out, i actually though when i got the box set for christmas that it was a new movie trilogy that just came out. I was only 6 though. But when i read in steve sansweets 1000 collectibles book that nobody thought the original star wars movie was going to go anywhere, my mind was blown.

It's the same thing as music, nobody knows which song is going to be a hit until they release it to the public. For example black sabbaths song paranoid, which would become on of their biggest hits. It was added on the cd at the last second, nobody thought it would be the biggest hit.

 

Believe me, you should've seen the TV commercial that came out at the time if you think that was bad ~ which I didn't...

You 'kids' are so spoiled...

We grew up on special effects from old horror films like Abbot & Costello Meet Franfenstein, Godzilla & those chessy 50's Sci-fi movies, plus 60's TV shows like Lost In Space, Batman & Star Trek, lol.....

We'd never seen anything like Star Wars, especially on the Big Screen. It was AMAZING!

But, back to the TV commercial....

Back then, in the 70's, big time movies didn't do TV commercials, at least not until they were in the second run.

Only low-budget B-flicks did...

I know 'revisionist history' says Star Wars was sold out in LA in advance, blah, blah, blah, and I'm sure that was true ~ there. For a day or two, whatever....

But I'm telling you, I saw it in an empty theatre 2 & 1/2 weeks after it came out.

Fact.

It wasn't a big thing right away, I'm telling you.

It just wasn't.

 

Except they didn't have "CD's" in 1970....

 

Bloody kids these days

 

I like the trailer. It has an aura of mystery. Perhaps the studio thought they'd found something like "2001: A Space Oddysey".

 

The best trailer for the original trilogy was the trailer for Empire Strikes Back with Harrison Ford narrating

 

There is one, cant find it now, that makes it looks like Luke is killed. We see him in his x-wing, Biggs yells to "Luke, Pull up!" then we see a x-wing blow

 

It's been awhile since I've seen it but from what I can remember it wasn't very well put together. Still fun to watch though.

 

Now that's a trailer I haven't seen in a long time. A long time. It was good enough back then to make my 6 year old sister and an 8 year old me beg my parents over and over for weeks to see it.