For the last week I’ve been feverishly awaiting the new Toy Story 3 trailer to appear online. I’ve been a film nerd since I was a kid and luckily for nerds like me the internet has given a shot in the arm to an often overlooked art form: the film trailer. When a trailer is good, it’s a minor masterpiece in its own right. When it’s really good, a trailer is better than the actual film it’s selling.
This was never more apparent than when George Lucas unwisely decided to dust off his Star Wars franchise and give an undeserving world ‘The Phantom Menace’. In probably the most hyped movie trailer of all time, nerds the world over had a collective geekgasm over the seismic significance of a double-ended, that’s right kids, double- ended light sabre. In fact, it was a meticulously orchestrated trailer. When Lucas’ misguided vision finally vomited from the screen into our innocent laps the yawning gulf between trailer and final film was laid bare. Ten years later and I’m still wringing figurative galactic space puke from my smalls.
For the record, my top three film trailers (that’s right, I have favourite trailers) are:
Psycho – in which Alfred Hitchcock gives us a personal tour of the Bates Motel
Monty Python and the Holy Grail – which barely has anything to do with the actual film
And my all time favourite; Alien, which conjures up more sweaty panic in its wordless two minutes than almost anything I’ve seen at the cinema. Apart from Jar-Jar Binks of course.
