In the 70s there seemed to be this need for excessive voice-overs on trailers. If you can find the trailers for Three Musketeers and Four Musketeers they were pretty verbose, IIRC (I found this one on youtube and it is 1:45 but lacks 30 seconds of approaching logo). My computer has no sound at the moment so I am going on memory.
Interestingly the 4 Musketeers trailer pulled a lot of the scenes from the final fight, wheras I don’t think the Star Wars trailer had a single scene from the Death Star battle.
These days the trailer would be all fast cuts and would show the Death Star blowing up.
The music is the main problem. It’s early 70’s sci-fi music. It’s very “deep” and ponderous. Completely wrong for the trailer. I know that George told John Williams to use Mars the Bringer of War by Holst as a ‘inspiration’ so why didn’t they use that?
re:2001 side discussion
But back then movies could play for a year, they didn’t expect a movie to make all its money the first two weekends then slowly peter out over another 4-5 weeks before going away for a few months then coming out on Bluray,DVD,PPV etc. Making your money back in a year seems like it might have been pretty reasonable. Movies also didn’t used to open all over the place at the same time either, some areas might not have even gotten the movie until it had been close to a year.
Be that as it may it still took a while for 2001’s box office to kick in. That was because word of mouth gave it a cult status. By comparison other movies would get their premiers and slowly move to 2nd & 3rd run theaters. The receipts would descend slowly in a predictable pattern, not spike after a couple of weeks of mediocre sales.
If you had invested in 2001 you would have been sweating bullets over the potential losses you were facing after just two weeks.
In 1968 films did not open ‘wide’ like they do today. It would be impossible for ANY film at that time to make it’s money back in a couple of weeks. Films then would open in certain markets and then move from city to city. The business model back then was completely different.
To give you a little perspecitve. Beverly Hills Cop in 1984 was the first movie to be released on 1000 screens at one time. 2001 came out in 68. Probably to a hundred prints. Hell I had to wait till November to see Star Wars because it didn’t come to Oklahoma City until then.
I was a big fan of the original BSG (but, hey, I was 13, I didn’t know any better ). The animal trainer who handled the chimp in the daggit suit appeared on The Tonight Show with the chimp, in the suit (I made a point of watching The Tonight Show that night, for that very reason). He started taking the suit off of the chimp, to show Carson that it really was a chimp inside…as he did so, he just tossed the parts of the costume aside. Johnny made a comment along the lines of “hey, shouldn’t you be more careful with those?”, and the trainer replied, “nah, it doesn’t matter…the show just got cancelled.”
Even by 1983, that was still the case. I was living in Green Bay, and when Return of the Jedi came out, it didn’t arrive in the Green Bay theaters until a full month after its release (Fox claimed that they only had a limited number of prints available for the initial release, and that was a movie that everyone knew would be huge). Fortunately, I had to go to Madison for college orientation during that month, and was able to see the movie a couple of weeks before my friends did.
). The animal trainer who handled the chimp in the daggit suit appeared on The Tonight Show with the chimp, in the suit (I made a point of watching The Tonight Show that night, for that very reason). He started taking the suit off of the chimp, to show Carson that it really was a chimp inside…as he did so, he just tossed the parts of the costume aside. Johnny made a comment along the lines of “hey, shouldn’t you be more careful with those?”, and the trainer replied, “nah, it doesn’t matter…the show just got cancelled.”