Keeping up with yesterday’s dosage of Boy, The Nineties Did It Wrong On So Many Levels, I thought I’d pick another little something younger generations might just skip on their drama-free way to adulthood: 1994’s S.F.W.
I’ve said it once and I’ll say it again: the Nineties just didn’t work.
The longer trailer manages to do a decent job, though. First 30” function as a subtle parody of the “TV special within the movie” technique that was favored by pop storytelling at the time. Shades of Natural Born Killers are swiftly neutered, and the overall pace/look is pretty close to what they must have thought about while still in pre-production, the biggest clue being a then untested, emotional song as a character/audience bonding tool (hallo, Radiohead), whereas the choppy period-specific editing choices fill the coveted “anything can, and probably will, happen” spot (hallo, monumental spoiler).
And how Nineties are those big flickering words? Aww.
Still, the shorter, raucous trailer is much closer to the actual movie - disjointed as they come, trying to hit way too many targets and laying it all on Stephen Dorff’s alleged leading man potential.
True, I shouldn’t rag on him, since my girl just loved him in Blade. But one exploding vampire can only atone for so much (hallo, Norman Reedus).
Random wisdom from YouTube commentators: “1:43 it was for you !”
“Let’s face reality. We’re all businessmen here. And businesswomen. Hi, gals.”
This fabulous teaser trailer for This Is Spinal Tap was - one guesses - intended only for theaters, but it sneakily manages to defuse any sort of expectation towards the film in question.
Director Rob Reiner, “famous television star”, only mentions Tap in passing, but goes all out - swearing, begging, boasting, cursing studio executives and, finally, caving in to their request (“you gotta show something”).
Chaos ensues.
Possibly the funniest teaser ever made, it speaks volumes about the Tap experience, and the cultish appeal it would retain even 20+ years down the road.
1995 theatrical trailer for Amy Heckerling’s Clueless, the first and best example of that cute/meta/poppy teensploitation which would become a standard in years to come (or, a simple throwback to the Valley Girl era).
As slang-heavy as they come, a lot of dialogue bits made the cut (including Cher’s big speech about U.S. diplomacy), proving that the marketing department had at least some faith in Heckerling’s snappy banter as a box office draw: interestingly enough, one major subplot is featured only as a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it moment, while the whole Emma-esque point of Cher’s character is nowhere to be found.
Check out a teaser trailer here - hilarious Cher-and-Dionne mini-teasers were being shown on Mtv at the time [one was about the proper etiquette for ordering just a glass of water at a restaurant, another about the perils of cybersex - how Nineties] but they seem to have vanished online. Sob.
