Well, I’m still not back on my blogging game (obviously) but in my achy insomnia last night I came upon some items of interest. I give you the original trailer for Star Wars:
Just goes to show you how much George Lucas changed movies. In a post-Lucas world, a trailer with this level of teh suckage would never see the light of day.
And please note the movie’s title: no episode number, now “New Hope” nonsense. Lucas had not yet dreamed up a number of things that he “planned all along,” including apparently — spoiler circa 1980 follows — the fact that Vader was Luke’s father.
From the Youtube comments:
You can’t say you wouldn’t have liked this trailer because you don’t have a 1977 mind dude.
It was ALL different in those times, even the way we conceived coolness.
It was a remote and strange epoch in human history, that’s for sure. I have high school pictures that could very much make this guy’s point.
Next we find:
See how Lucas changed the world? This looks like an infinitely better movie than the first one when in fact it was only substantially better. From the voice over at the end, I take it that this was a “now showing” trailer, not a “coming soon” trailer — I’m not sure whether that distinction even exists today.
Finally, a trailer for a movie that was never released — at least not with the title shown:
Lucas claims that he had to change the title at the last minute because he suddenly realized that revenge is not a Jedi value. While that speaks to the overall coherence of a guy who planned so many things “from the beginning,” I’ve also heard that this was a head fake on merchandising. He knew what the title would be all along, and when his officially approved action figures and so forth hit the market, they had the right name on them. Any merchandise labeled “Revenge” was immediately spotted as a fake.
Note to Harvey — I don’t think it’s where I cough so much. I just need to break this habit of licking doorknobs.