Friday's Awesome Time Suck: The 50 Greatest Trailers
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We've been bad bloggers today due to a variety of things: getting furniture in our apartment, shopping for cameras and getting read to go out to the LA Film Festival once again.
That's when we happened to stumble across IFC's 50 Greatest Trailers list:
We know them as trailers, but they don't trail anything; they play before the movie, not after it. The name dates to their earliest incarnation, when they actually did follow the feature. The documentary "Coming Attractions" dates the very first trailer to a 1912 Edison serial entitled "What Happened to Mary?" After each installment, a black card with white text would appear to inform audiences "The next incident in the series of 'What Happened to Mary' will be shown a week from now." Not exactly "In a world..." but it did the trick back in 1912.
What happened to Mary wasn't nearly as important as what happened to trailers, which have grown into one of the most popular forms of advertising in the world. Some think they spoil the movies -- Gene Siskel famously hated them so much he wouldn't enter a theater while they were playing -- but for the rest of us, they're a treasured part of the moviegoing ritual, a delicious cinematic appetizer to prepare us for the main course.
For all intensive purposes, #50 is at the top here. Go to IFC and check out the rest.
-John Lichman
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- groups:
- Movies, movies blog
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- tags:
- Awesome, Trailers, John Lichman, IFC, 1 more
