Check Out These Vintage Star Wars Trailers

Marketing the new Star Wars film, The Force Awakens, is a bit tricky in China. The Chinese, for the most part, aren’t familiar with the franchise. It is, at the Wall Street Journal put it, an unfamiliar force.

But there was a time when Americans had no idea what Star Wars was all about either.

Take a look at the original trailer released in 1977 when our minds were all still tabula rasa.

It’s low tech, like the original film—nobody had even imagined CGI yet—but it seemed high tech at the time.

George Lucas, who will forever be the man who brought us Star Wars, is advertised in the original trailer as the man who brought us the now mostly-forgotten American Graffiti.

You’d have no idea, watching that original trailer, what the story is about if you didn’t already know. The marketers weren’t interested in telling us what it’s about. We were where the Chinese mostly are now.

Instead, the marketers told us what kind of story it is.

It’s “the story of a boy, a girl and the universe. It’s a big sprawling space saga of rebellion and romance. It’s an epic of heroes and villains and aliens from a thousand worlds.”

Awesome.

Back then, the film was still just called Star Wars. It was not yet the first (or fourth) in a series. No one knew there would be a sequel, let alone any prequels. Not until later was it renamed Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.

By the time The Empire Strikes Back came out in 1980, just about everyone in the galaxy (outside China, anyway, and also the Soviet bloc) knew all about Star Wars.

Here’s the original trailer.

It begins with a voiceover. “The Star Wars saga continues with a special limited engagement of The Empire Strikes Back!”

Laughable now, isn’t it? A special limited engagement? Really? As if the studio was going to pull the film after a week or so and not let anyone else pay to see it.

No marketer would even consider saying such a thing in a movie trailer today, but hardly anyone had a VCR in 1980. Video rental stores weren’t around yet, let alone Netflix and Apple TV. Perhaps the Star Wars fan base really did think they’d have to get to the theater post haste or they’d miss it.

The rest of the trailer is brilliant marketing from beginning to end. No one else says a word until the end, not even the characters. We just see Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia and Darth Vader running around and shooting and light sabering in all kinds of action sequences in exotic new settings. Hoth, ice planet. Dagobah, swamp planet. An asteroid felt teeming with Tie Fighters.

The audience knew exactly what it was going to get: something familiar, yet different. And better!

The original Return of the Jedi trailer is equally brilliant.

It, too, begins with a voice-over. “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” We all knew instantly when we heard that that this was a trailer for a new Star Wars movie. The branding was already in place. All the marketers needed to do was use it.

Once again, we see some of our favorite characters in new settings (Endor, forest moon) having bigger and more spectacular adventures than ever. Something familiar, yet different, and this time with stepped-up special effects.

The franchise went a bit off the rails with the prequels. Some kind of a course correction was needed. Disney bought the rights from George Lucas and hired JJ Abrams to direct the seventh installment.

A terrific choice, we must say. Abrams has proven himself eminently capable of rebooting a science-fiction film franchise with the new Star Trek movies featuring younger versions of Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Scotty and Bones.

Abrams took Star Trek back to basics with smashing success, and it looks like he’s doing the same thing with The Force Awakens. It comes across right there in the trailer, which is drastically different from the orignal trailers.

First of all, it is not instantly obvious that this is a trailer for a Star Wars movie.

We see a mysterious figure swathed in all-enveloping cloth and eye goggles repelling down inside a futuristic structure. An unseen character’s voice asks, “who are you?”

Beginning with a question is a tried and true method for hooking an audience. Witholding the answer works even better.

In the trailer, a woman’s voice answers the question. “I’m no one.”

Audience: hooked and even more curious. It’s clearly a science-fiction film set partly in space, but we don’t know anything else yet.

The trailer cuts to a desert scene where some kind of robot that looks a little like R2D2 but clearly is not R2D2 rolls toward some sand dunes. Is this a Star Wars movie?

Then we see the Lucasfilm logo. It is a Star Wars movie!

And we’re back to basics now, too, with an army of stormtroopers at a fascistic Nuremberg-style rally.

Darth Vader is dead, but we catch a glimpse of a brand-new character in a black mask who promises to “finish” what the Dark Lord of the Sith started.

The Force Awakens is more of the same, only different, and this time with far more advanced special and cinematic effects.

Right in the middle of the trailer—bam, there’s Harrison Ford. Han Solo is back. So is the orignal Star Wars so many of us know and love, and it looks spectacular.

Enjoy the show.