How 'Star Wars' Trailers Have Changed Over The Years

Like the movies, the accompanying movie trailers are a product of their times. Nearly 100 years old, the first trailers were shown in the late 1920s, after a film ended – hence the name “trailer.” In these early days, trailers relied heavily on narration, which continued for many decades to come, well into the 1990s. And the teasers and trailers for the original Star Wars trilogy were no exception.

Tell, Don’t Show

On November 26, 1976, Charles Lippincott, the man responsible for promoting Star Wars, met with George Lucas, producer Gary Kurtz, assistant optical editor Bruce Green and three ad agency people to discuss the creation of a teaser trailer for the upcoming space opera. As ILM struggled to get the movie done, Lucas hired another company – Modern Film Effects (MFE) – to help with the special effects.

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While the rough cut for this teaser was produced in only three days, neither Lucas nor 20th Century Fox was very pleased with the result, the main problem simply was that there weren’t enough completed shots to make a satisfying teaser. Still, Lucas, who had a million other things on his plate, approved the teaser, which was released into cinemas around Christmas of 1976 to a somewhat mixed reception.

As John Williams hadn’t recorded any soundtrack, the music used for this teaser was Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (Winter). The narration was done by Malachi Throne, who also appeared in Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation, making him the first person to partake in both franchises. The teaser ended with the explosion of the Star Wars logo in a much different font from the one in the final movie.

The trailer for Star Wars that was released shortly before the launch of the movie relied heavily on narration again and basically gave away major plot points, like the rescue of Princess Leia and the explosion of the Death Star, but as the novelization for Star Wars had been released back in December of 1976, spoilers probably weren’t that much of a concern.

The teasers and trailers for The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi were made in a similar style as its predecessor. However, it is worth noting that the initial teaser for Episode V didn’t include a single shot from the movie (as none had been filmed back then), but just a montage of quick images from various artworks of Ralph McQuarrie.

The launch trailer for Empire included the voice-over of Harrison Ford, basically summarizing the events of the first movie. The first teaser for Episode VI still had the name Revenge in its title, which was changed to Return in subsequent teasers and trailers. TV spots that were shown around the movie’s launch in May of 1983 established the explosion of the second Death Star and the celebration of the rebels, again spoiling a central plot point of the movie.

(Don’t) Meet Joe Black

Fast forward 15 years to November 18, 1998, when the release of the first teaser for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace finally ended the “dark times” for many long-time fans.

The voice-over narration was gone, replaced by title cards like “Every saga has a beginning.” The teaser was played in front (and also after) movies like Meet Joe Black or The Waterboy, with many Star Wars fans, who had no love for Brad Pitt or Adam Sandler sneaking out of the cinemas before the movies actually started and coming back in after the end credits to watch the trailer again. As the trailers for the original trilogy, this teaser showed footage that should have probably been kept a secret until the movie’s premiere, like Darth Maul’s awesome double-bladed lightsaber or the strange-looking puppet Yoda.

Your Download Will Be Ready In Three Hours

The late 1990s also saw the rise of the internet and gave fans a chance to rewatch a movie trailer as many times as they wanted. All you had to do was to fire up your 56k modem, install Apple’s Quicktime Player, hit the download button, hope that the servers don’t crash (which they often did), and wait for several hours until the .mov file was finally on your hard-disk and you could watch the teaser/trailer on your 14” CRT monitor in all of its non-HD glory.

Still, the trailer for Episode I, released on March 11, 1999, was downloaded more than a million times within the first 24 hours and 6.4 million times within the first 3 weeks. These numbers may seem ridiculous in our current times, but it was an amount that was unheard of back then. Although Episode I ultimately didn’t live up to its expectations, its teaser and trailer are still regarded as one of the best ones in modern cinema.

Episode II had three different teasers, with the first one including no dialog, the second one focusing on politics, and the third one placing the love story between Anakin and Padme center stage.

The teaser and especially the trailer for Episode III relied heavily on the assumption that this would be the last Star Wars movie, as a large part of it consisted of dialogues and scenes from previous Star Wars movies, summarizing what has brought the galaxy to this point in time. Again, the trailer gave away major plot plots, which probably wasn’t a problem, as everyone knew beforehand that the Empire would win in the end and that Anakin would become Darth Vader.

The trailer for Revenge of The Sith contained the “A long time ago in a Galaxy far, far Away…” card for the first time since the re-release of A New Hope in 1978.

Chewie, We’re Home

Flash forward again to November 2014 when the teaser for The Force Awakens was released, more than two years after Disney had acquired Lucasfilm and made it official, that they would do a third Star Wars trilogy, and more than a year before the release of the movie.

The world was a different place than the early 2000s, and so was the style of this and subsequent teasers and trailers. Title cards were more or less gone (besides the announcement of the release date), but the narrator was somehow back in the form of Snoke’s voice.

By this time, movie studios were no longer dependent on putting their trailers in front of other movies; they could release them anywhere and anytime, be it on morning TV shows, during Super Bowl breaks, or on big conventions. As a result, the crowd at Star Wars Celebration 2015 went absolutely nuts, when at the end of the second teaser for Episode VII, Han and Chewie entered the cockpit of the Falcon with the now-iconic words “Chewie, we’re home.”

Trailer <> Movie

Celebration 2015 also saw the release of the first teaser for Rogue One, although Lucasfilm called it an animated movie poster (that was never officially released to the public): a dense jungle with voice chatter in the background until the camera panned upwards, revealing a TIE-fighter and the silhouette of the Death Star. Rogue One is also a prime example of another thing that has changed in recent years concerning teasers and trailers: With digital technology so readily available, it is much easier (though still quite expensive) to make significant changes to a movie between the release of a teaser or a trailer and its premiere on the big screen. As a result, more than half of the scenes in the teasers, trailers, and sizzle reels for the first Star Wars stand-alone movie, didn’t end up in the final product. From Jyn Erso and Cassian Andor running on the beach, the heroine confessing that she rebels, to her infamous stand-off against a TIE-fighter, something Lucasfilm has later said was never intended to be in the final film, which of course no one has ever believed.

To a small extent, the sequel trilogy movies also included scenes and/or dialogue that didn’t make it into the final film.

The Times They Are A-Changing

A lot has happened since Christmas of 1976. While the teaser for A New Hope had cost $ 3.915,10 and was mainly produced in-house. Today, there are companies whose primary purpose is to create movie trailers for a budget close to that of the whole Episode IV in the late 70s. Movie houses can pitch several of these trailer houses against each other and pick and choose whatever they like. Movie trailers have become events of themselves, with teasers announcing that a teaser for a trailer will be released on a given date, and the internet goes nuts. The 56k modem and the 14-inch monitor have been replaced by 3G, 4G, and now 5G and various mobile devices. Teasers, trailers, and short clips for TV are available anytime and everywhere. The 6.4 million downloads of 1999 are now achieved within the first few hours after releasing a new trailer. Fans can rewind, rewatch freeze-frame and analyze trailers to no extent, create reaction videos of themselves watching a trailer for the first time, while others make reaction videos of watching other peoples’ reaction videos.

The Star Wars teasers and trailers of the late 70s and early 80s may seem totally awkward by today’s standard, but they had a sense of originality that many current trailers, despite all their technical perfection, often seem to lack.

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Written by Gerald Petschk

Sources: starwars.com (archive) [1], [2], CNBC

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