The whole thesis of the trailer sucks. It comes from a time where supposedly there was a need to explain to people what Star Wars is – so that’s a huge disconnect for me right there. The VO sounds like they took some half-assed Mad Men style writing assignment and ran with it. “All right, fellas, here’s the pitch ‘Star Wars: It’s a ____________’ give me twenty tags by Friday.”
And the first face we see is Chewbacca!?
Yeah. It seems the music in the trailer isn’t suitable “action” music. Also, the sound editing in the clips shown gives me the impression that they were using raw film footage. No polish at all.
Heh, are you riffing on the crazy but devastating critique of The Phantom Menace by Mr. Plinkett? The critic there also mentioned how the script looked like if it was written by an 8 year old.
I think it’s the music, more than anything else. Low key, monotonous, tension filled. Would be great for an Alfred Hitchcock trailer. Played over swashbuckling action, it sucks the life right out of the scenes. Of course, knowing what should be playing makes it worse, and as someone else pointed out, John Williams was probably still writing the score when that trailer was cut. But damn, they couldn’t have grabbed some old Korngold out of the vaults for that one?
But it’s bad in a lot of ways. “The story of a boy, a girl, and a universe,” is a howler on its own, but in the trailer, it’s paired with a clip of Vader about to interrogate Princess Leia - so, is he “the boy” they were just talking about? When the narrator says, “Aliens, from a thousand different worlds,” we get a clip of the sandperson attacking Luke. Instead of, say, flashing the cantina scene, we see Claude Reins from The Invisible Man trying to brain someone with a tire iron. Doesn’t do a lot to sell the concept.
And the cutting back and forth from the logo was really awful. For the first couple times it shows up, as Chimera said, it’s too small to read. Then it’s legible, but it’s also two words. I don’t really need that much time to read it. And then it explodes.
nm
Trailers were by and large HORRIBLE in the 70s.
Alien was pretty good.
Yeah. And you need to put it in context. Even things like the glimpse of a light saber would’ve had an impact. Sci fi before Star Wars was even cheesier than this trailer. The SFX teases in this trailer would’ve impressed.
The studios at the time had no faith in a sci-fi movie. They probably pawned the trailer off on a couple of interns.
I thought the same thing, but then I figured it would be more legible if you were seeing it on a full-sized movie screen in a theater.
I was 11 in 1977. My family was not a movie-going family (seriously, the last movie I can remember seeing in a theater before Star Wars, was a double feature of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Colossus: The Forbin Project, both movies I was too young to understand) so I never saw any trailers in theaters, but I saw plenty of TV commercials for movies. I never heard the stories about the long lines to see Star Wars, but I saw the commercials. And those commercials were much better than this trailer. They were the first movie commercials that made me, a boy for whom watching movies was not a “thing”, beg and plead and pester and cajole my parents until they caved in and took me to see the movie. The TV commercials made that big of an impression on me. I had to see this!
I still point to Star Wars as the formative event of my youth, which went on to define everything I became interested in while growing up, and continuing to the present day.
Some other SF movie trailers from the era:
A Boy and His Dog
Logan’s Run
Rollerball
Silent Running
Soylent Green
Westworld
Zardoz
It does seem that trailers for SF movies seemed to feel they needed exposition.
I’m about the same age, and I remember seeing the commercials on TV, too. I had a different reaction than you did, but then I may have seen different commercials. Maybe it was the trailer linked in the OP. I do remember the shot of Luke saying “they’re coming in too fast!”, and him and Leia swinging across that trench.
My reaction was “another fly-by-night sci-fi flick. Better catch it in the theater quick, if I want to see it at all. It’ll be gone in a couple weeks.” It played the Roxy in downtown Tacoma for more than a year.
I like the Star Wars trailer more than modern trailers in some ways. It’s not ear-shatteringly loud, like too many modern trailers. It doesn’t give away the entire plot, like some modern trailers.
The white lightsabres really stood out for me.
Opposite for me. My friend Scott and I (we were 10) saw the commercials that focused on the cantina scene with all the aliens and we were all, “Man, we’ve got to go see that!”
That was pretty much all we did that summer. Go see Star Wars every weekend.
That reminded me how lame the swordwork in IV was. Wow…you’d think Alec Guinness, at SOME point in his long acting career, would have gotten some rudimentary fencing instruction…
Well, consider that Guinness was in his 60s at that point, and Prowse (whom I suspect is not a nimble man to start with) was wearing a big, bulky suit of armor. I know that Bob Anderson, who was a swordmaster and stuntman, worked on the original movie (and was the stand-in for Prowse in the fight scenes in TESB and ROTJ), but I don’t know to what extent he choreographed the saber duel in ANH.
I don’t know about the web, but it was included on a home video release at some point. Not sure if it was on DVD, Bluray, or both, but I know I saw it on one of those.
It really does seem like an entirely different movie. To me, just goes to show how important John Williams was to the franchise (not that the music is the only weirdness of the trailer).
I’ve complained about the original Star Wars trailer many times on this Board in the past. It did not make me want to see the movie at all. They managed to use effects that didn’t carry the excitement of the film, and seemed just a half step above 1960s effects. They didn’t use John Williams’ score, but a boring, brooding one. Even the iconic yellow-piping Star Wars logo wasn’t used, but a boring typeface.
I didn’t mind the narration. That isn’t what killled any interest for me. But nothing about the trailer got me excited about the prospect of watching the movie.
The moment I knew I was going to like Star Wars was before the words “A Long Time Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away…” appeared. Lucas used the FULL 20th Century Overture. Until that time, you only heard the first few bars of the fanfare, without the rising strings* It was the first time, I think, I ever heard the full overture in a theater, and it showed me that Lucas paid attention to details. Lucas clearly had nothing to do with the trailer.
*(unless you were watching a CinemaScope film of TV, where they retained the full overture. But, as if to make up for it, you didn’t see the movie in Cinemacope. They didn’t believe in letterboxing back then, so it was all small-screen pan-and-scan.)
I went to see Star Wars on the opening weekend, solely due to the radio ad.
Yeah, radio. The ad was hysterical. I told my friends that even if it was awful, they’d laugh.
I think we were in the 3rd showing, the first day in the Denver theater.
I never saw the trailer. As far as I’m concerned they could have played the radio ad over a black screen and people would have gone.