Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2017/12/18/watch-the-first-star-wars-trai.html
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In retrospect they probably shouldn’t have been pushing the “romance” angle for that first movie…
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Alan Dean Foster, the onetime “king of novelizations” who was the author of the original Star Wars novelization (even if it was credited to George Lucas on the cover), was given permission to write his own Star Wars sequel “Splinter of the Mind’s Eye” in 1978. His interpretation of the Luke/Leia relationship…was not canon…to say the least.
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Looks like they hadn’t finished the typography or the music when they released this.
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it was another time, at malls, in the 70s, in Alabama…
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Doesn’t look like they’d settled on lightsaber colors yet, either.
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Good lord, where is the John Williams score?!?
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I would not want to go see that movie.
Update: I did see it, for my 10th birthday, and my friends and I all thought it was awesome. The theater jumped when Han Solo came back to clear the field for Luke.
That said, this trailer still stinks.
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I have a theory the the music of Star Wars is 80% of why it’s a good movie. This trailer confirms that it’s true.
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I have no idea whether it was unusual or just happenstance that I, a 10-year-old boy, managed to avoid seeing any Star Wars advertising at all until opening day at the theater.
Did anyone else my age remember the advertising? My classmates knew what was coming, but I was clueless.
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It was 1977 and virtually no one had VCRs yet. You could only expect people to sit through Smokey and the Bandit so many times.
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Even back then — “light years ahead of its time.”
It hurts so much.
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as sampled in Unkle’s excellent Guns Blazing
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I dunno. . . looks pretty corny. Roger Corman film?
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I heard a radio ad for it and the ad was done poorly, so poorly I stayed away from the movie until people I knew and trusted were coming into the comic book store I hung out at frothing at the mouth about how good the movie was.
The ad had sound effects from the movie and tag lines such as “Don’t be alarmed, it’s only the Death Breath of the Dark lord” and ended with “It’s only a movie and it’s just for fun” so I assumed it was some sort of comedy/campy send up of SF movies and ignored it.
Someone goofed somewhere with that ad but once I saw that star destroyer that kept coming and coming and coming…my god I was hooked.
Whatever else one can say about Lucas, he gave us an SF universe that looked used, as though real people, aliens and droids lived in it and did things.
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Man, they thought Chewie was what would put the meat in the seats, didn’t they?
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That is one hell of an opening sequence.
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Nice… I have a 16mm-sound version of this trailer that I bought at a Comic Con in Chicago right after the film came out. I just recently watched it on a projector and was considering paying to have it transferred but the colors are all washed out.
Also- in my 16mm version the contrast is so crappy you can see the rotoscoping mattes around the Tie Fighters as they move around. OK I’m done now.
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I was convinced to see it by a commercial that said “never before has so much money been spent…just to have fun”. I’d love to see that again.
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