Trailers have always been interesting beasts. When done right, they can be the perfect creative marriage of artistry and marketing; Telling truncated but compelling stories that tease you just enough into selling you on wanting to see the movies they’re for. That’s the balancing act the film industry has always walked (art vs. commerce), and trailers are the perfect encapsulation of just that.
So it’s especially interesting when you start comparing the assembly of trailers across the decades as the language of film and marketing has changed.
Take the video below for example. YouTube user “DrewboiX” has assembled a really good modernized trailer of 1982’s TRON. It’s got today’s more bombastic music, quicker cuts, graphical inserts, more sound effects, less talky exposition… all of it. It really makes the original TRON look a lot better than I think it actually is, but hey, that’s just good marketing. DrewboiX, you should be cutting trailers, yo!
For reference, the original ’82 trailer is directly below the modernized one.
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