Originally published at: A modern trailer for The Empire Strikes Back | Boing Boing
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Instead of allowing edited clips from the movie to encapsulate the film’s story succinctly, older trailers used voice-over artists to literally tell you the story.
Mass audiences might need a generation or more to get familiar with new cultural technologies. During that process, the content creators often fall back on familiar mechanisms. If you think the '80s and '90s trailers were clumsy, earlier ones had an even more obnoxious tone of advertising industry hard-sell calls to action.
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Original trailer, for comparison. Yes, it does seem goofy.
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“A galactic Odyssey against oppression!” C3-PO rips a sticker off a door. 
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Unstickin’ it to the man.
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But, but… where’s the overly melodramatic, minor key remake of a formerly upbeat pop song?
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I prefer cheesy voice-overs to modern trailers that give away the entire story. If this Empire trailer was truly in the modern style, it would have ended with “Luke, I am your father”.
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Especially since the narrator sounds like Harrison Ford putting on a funny voice.
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Yep, I noticed that also. Lots of enticing images. No story points given away.
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If you haven’t seen it - and I think too many people probably haven’t - I really do recommend Lake Bell’s movie In A World from, golly, quite a few years back, now. Rewatching the trailer just now I realise, crumbs, everyone’s in it.
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I mean “modern” trailers show you all the story beats, they don’t entice you they just blatantly show you the movie, twists and all…
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In an era (or maybe I should say IN A WORLD) where trailers gave away everything, this trailer for Alien was far ahead of its time. It perfectly encapsulates the tension and horror of the film without ever once showing the actual alien, or more than faintly hinting at any of the film’s major events. Heck, even the egg shown isn’t a spoiler for the actual egg scene.
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The original teaser trailer for The Shining is another good example. It gave me nightmares as a kid.
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I’d never seen that one before. I like it better than the actual film. (Never was a Shining fan, it just never hit right for me- I didn’t even like the book, and I usually enjoy Stephen King.)
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And there’s this, with no footage at all from the movie, just the audience. (There’s another trailer uses the same technique, but I can’t recall which film.)
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A couple of brilliant things about the Alien trailer… there’s the tension and mystery in the opening space where the lines gradually appear to create the word “A L I E N”. But the warning siren, covering the action of the film - that’s easily the most frightening alarm I’ve ever heard. It’s a pitch and mode that sounds like someone screaming, over and over again. Yes, if I hear that alarm, I’m running for my life! Especially compared to almost every other alarm in TV and movies, where’s it’s like, “womp… womp… please evacuate… ah-wooga!.. womp… womp…” Or just the standard fire alarm bell.
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“Ach, oof, d’oo ye want to get sued?”
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“In a world where…” and “(Insert plucky protagonist here) was just your average joe until (insert major plot point here) took them on the journey of a lifetime” were common phrases uttered over the top of virtually every trailer.
Feels like that was a very '90s movie trailer thing. There were suddenly all these trailers that used that format starting in the early to mid 90s (maybe a few in the late '80s?). I don’t remember any from before that - and it seems to have fallen out of favor since, as it suddenly became a serious cliche.
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This is classier
This had no narration bur it did have fancy visual dissolves
Potentially trailers could be classed by medium (TV, length) and by how many months they preceded the original film, and intended audience (before kids movie, before an adult movie,. before a “roadshow”/70mm film. If you can only edit together 4 minutes of footage, because nothing else is complete, goiing back to the old style of narration may be the only thing that works.
Non linear editing systems came later and I’m sure that those were instrumental in the “modern” style of trailer
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I do a regular movie night with my kids, and am trying to introduce them to as many older classics as I can. They like to watch the trailer before we watch a movie, and I usually have to give them the disclaimer, “This is an old movie so the trailer will be terrible. Don’t judge the movie based on the trailer.”
I have to agree with others, though. I really hate it when modern trailers give away the whole movie.
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