by most accounts “The Shape of Water” is pretty good.
I remember those radio ads also. Another tagline was, “Don’t be afraid. It’s just an intergalactic dogfight to save the universe”. I went opening weekend, just based on the radio ads, having never seen a trailer at all.
Most of you younguns don’t remember a time when radio ads for movies even existed. They were pretty integral to film promotions, because more people were liable to hear a radio ad (back when radio was your normal source of continuous music throughout the day) than they were to see a trailer or even an ad on TV. A few years later, I remember hearing “It’s the story of Dr. Indiana Jones and his search for the lost Ark of the Covenant”. That was so exciting, coming out of nowhere, that I clocked out of work for the day, headed for my local cinema spot, and the rest is history . . .
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Hey, now… that movie featured the ship and crew that did the Kessel run in 12 parsecs!
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this movie looks awful
This!
The cool industrial menace of the Death Star interior. The wacky asymmetrical space ship. The lovely desert / mountain scene with R2D2 getting blasted. Chewie.
There was nothing like this before, at least on a screen. It was like a Poul Anderson novel humped Dune and had a movie baby.
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I’d wondered about that! I think I noticed at a department store when Empire came out on home video. Darker polygons around the TIEs, right?
I was 13, and I remember no advertising for star wars. In fact, I saw it with my father at a small art house theater (The Ken Cinema in San Diego) fairly late in the first year it was out, maybe it needed more screens than the regular theaters could handle?
You are so spot-on with this it’s almost transcendent. Movies that we had put up with before this were just mind-numbing in their ability to kill brain cells. Star Wars, as has been mentioned countless times, changed everything.
This trailer, for an audience in the seventies, was a glimpse into something that had literally never been seen before. Sci fi never looked like this. It blew everyone’s minds in a way that nothing before (or since) has ever done.
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Well, thank goodness for the wealth of intellectual cinema that Star Wars inspired.
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What asymmetrical space ship?
Referring to movies *like Smokey and the Bandit, to clarify.
The Millenium Falcon!
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Agreed. What were the preceding science fiction movies? Logans Run. The Planet of the Apes movies. Some other movies that we kids were not even aware of, like Barbarella or Silent Running.
A year or two later, some older kids at Boy Scout camp introduced me to Melee, which led to Dungeons and Dragons. And Traveller. And Top Secret. My fate as a geek was sealed.
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Huh. Never found the Millennium Falcon to be particularly asymmetric. Certainly not more than actual ships which cruise the oceans and have some stuff on starboard and some on port.
It’s certainly “used” now alright…
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