This weekend, Lucasfilm revealed a metric ton of upcoming projects at D23, from the final Andor Trailer…
to Tales of the Jedi and some g*ddamn YADDLE...
…to a teaser trailer for The Mandalorian Season 3 (which is Grogu being cute and some “this one goes to 11” shots of the apocolypt-ed Mandalore)!
There’s Young Jedi Adventures for the pre-school set, the Amblin-inspired Skeleton Crew; Bad Batch Season 2 in January, and what feels like Season 5 of Rebels, Ahsoka. There’s even Willow!
Which may be the best trailer of the bunch!
And there’s Indiana Jones 5! Which we didn’t see a trailer for, but we did get a preview of “Helena’s Theme,” and if you look around you can read a description of the footage shown in person at D23. This’ll be the first Indy not directed by Spielberg, the first Indy in 14 years, and pretty clearly the last one with Harrison Ford. (If you’re curious, yes I really liked The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.)
I personally add the Glass Onion trailer to Star Wars related-news because this is a Rian Johnson stan account.
So, that’s a lot to be excited about that is either from Lucasfilm or Lucasfilm adjacent. And, I don’t know if you recall, but Obi-Wan Kenobi came out this year. What are you trying to do to me, Star Wars, bury me alive with happiness? You know I would spend more money to watch all this. Why aren’t you charging me more?
This makes me think about how scarce information once was, how rare new trailers were, and the lengths one had to go to find them.
When The Phantom Menace was on the horizon, I had just graduated from Acting School at Emerson College, where I learned how to breathe and comfort my peers about their childhoods, even though we were, in retrospect, pretty much still having our childhoods. I was too cool to do the normal thing and go to New York or Los Angeles. I’d convinced myself that I should go to a real theatre (with an RE) town and figure things out from there.
I wound up in Chicago in the fall of 1998. My friends Jordan and Matt and I all rented a walk-through in Logan Square for about $500 a month total. (It was pre-Logan Square being cool by about three years.) I was temping at the American Medical Association, adding I don’t know, stuff to a computer program, it was one of those temp jobs that existed just maintain headcount. That’s where I first saw the Star Wars website and saw, to my shock, an image from Episode I. Liam Neeson’s face. There was going to be more Star Wars.
The internet, as many of you will recall, was not the social media dystopia of advertising, comments sections, free flowing recommended videos, and anonymous racism that it is now. It was a lot of websites. There were like six websites. I think I read Dark Horizons a lot and Ain’t It Cool News. They were static and funky and formatted like someone had dropped all their crayons on the screen. Companies were just trying them out. Lucasfilm was releasing videos, Lynne’s Diary for example, to excite fans about the coming release.
Eventually, a teaser trailer was announced. The first live action footage of a Star Wars movie since I had been a kid.
For context, it was cold in Chicago, it was pretty lonely too. My girlfriend lived in New York City and was 20 hours away by bus. (She actually arranged my first viewing of Episode I, which was at a mall, I think, in New Jersey, I can’t remember where). We had something called a phone bill that was rapidly bankrupting me as we talked on the phone in my room, which was a converted patio, adjacent to the kitchen, with a cheap bed in it.
I was feeling lost. My Star Wars excitement was an organizing principle. It was something wonderful coming, that I couldn’t wait to see. Something I knew would be there even if I screwed everything else up.
Anyway, in order to see the teaser trailer, which came out just before Thanksgiving in 1998, we had to go to the movie theater and get a ticket for either the sci-fi classic Wing Commander or Adam Sandler’s The Waterboy. (The Waterboy is funnier than it should be because of Kathy Bates; and Wing Commander actually has David Suchet in it, collecting a paycheck. David Suchet is one of the all-time great British actors, so watching him swallowed in a bad costume in a dimly lit movie was appalling - and funny.) I saw these movies a lot over that weekend, often about three minutes of them before I ran over to another screening to go watch the trailer again. The trailer wasn’t coming home with me on my phone. It was only there, on the screen, so I tried to practically memorize it.
I can now watch it any time I want and I do.
But to see the Official Theatrical Trailer first, in March of 1999, you had to download it. Downloading video in 1999 was challenging. It took hours on my overworked dial-up modem. I didn’t have the patience to just set it up to download and leave it until the morning. I sat there, all night, watching it slowly arrive, frame by frame. By the time I could watch the trailer all the way through, I had already watched most of it two hundred times. By the time the droids blew up, I was so tired I could barely see. (I was probably late for work the next day. Again.)
Seeing these trailers lit up beacons in my brain that have never be unlit. (“The beacons are lit! Gondor calls for aid!” “And Rohan will answer!”) Especially because it became my hobby. How to find out. When to see what? How to get it accomplished with 10 bucks and the affordable 1999 internet connection. It was what I was doing between unsuccessful auditions, being cold, and wondering what to do with my life.
This is all to say, that’s how it was to find two trailers, over the course of six months before Episode I first appeared in theaters and caused the first-ever, now traditional, Star Wars fandom existential crisis. So these beautifully produced fifty-three-trailer days that just kind of magically show up in my phone while I’m driving? They still kind of stun me. I’m not that good at processing them. It feels like I got the cheat code to the video game or something.
My brain asks, is this allowed?
Holy crap. It is!
So much to be excited for! But my favorite part of this whole thing has to be that you like Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. I was fascinated by that movie as a child and it's one of the only Indiana Jones movies I even remember 😂