Yesterday, I placed comic strips atop the list of the most conservative media.
What’s number two?
It’s a strange little medium, a subset of advertising, almost as resistant to change as comic strips.
Remember the “In a world…” movie trailer announcer? His name was Don LaFontaine. He started voicing trailers and used the phrase “In a world…” starting in 1964.
Since then, and through the late-2000s, he read the same copy for every movie trailer produced by the major studios:
“In a world where the sun burns cold, and the wind blows colder.”
“In a world filled with violence, their only weapon is the truth.”
“In a world where great risks can bring extraordinary rewards, one man has succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.”
Pablo Francisco did a well-known comedy bit about it in 2010. In 2013, an indie called In A World… got picked up for theatrical distribution.
After LaFontaine died in 2008, trailers began to change. The narrator was gone. Starting around 2010, most notably with the trailer for Inception, trailers used clips from the movie’s dialog instead of a narrator.
Many, many other clichés remained:
• The repeated fades to black, where most of the trailer ends up being black because the image is constantly fading to black.
• In comedy trailers, they start serious, then there’s a record-scratch sound effect, and then they reveal the funny part.
• In computer-animated trailers for kids, someone always has to slam against a window and then slowly slide down with a squeaking sound effect.
• In recent years, they’ve started doing the trailer for the trailer, a two-second trailer for the two-minute trailer that happens right before the trailer.
The reason movie trailers keep doing the same things, repeating the same clichés, and all other movie trailers continue to look like every other movie trailer, is because millions—even billions—of dollars are on the line when a movie is released. No one dares take a chance trying something in a movie trailer that hasn’t been done already.
This makes movie trailers the second most conservative medium.
The folks who make the trailers believe any shot more than one second long will bore us. And if the music and extreme sound effects don't build in a screeching crescendo, we'll fall asleep in our bucket of popcorn and get extra butter on our faces. Hollywood, where creativity goes to die. But at least we have another sequel of "A Quiet Place" starting this week. Sshhhhhhh!
A lot of the stodginess etc. from the trailers also comes from the fact that these same trailers need to be used for non-US markets. And the material needs to be translatable (actually translated into a foreign language) and relatable, especially comedies. We USians see a dorky high school kid with taped up glasses and floods (ill-fitting pants) being shoved into a locker as Vivaldi plays in the background, we know exactly the type of teen comedy we're about to see. Someone in Bulgaria or Japan might be thinking: "WTF is this??!! Is this a horror movie?" So in that regard, the "record scratch" as it were does provide a valuable service....