Always two there areĪ second trailer was posted online on 11 March 1999. After a decade and a half of anticipation since Return of the Jedi, the world went crazy for the first glimpse of the new Star Wars adventures. offered a free download of the trailer in Real Video, QuickTime and AVI formats. Trailers were also repeated afterwards, so some fans are reported to have ducked out before the feature presentation only to return at the end for a second glimpse of the preview.īut the real impact was seen online. Star Wars fans queued around the block to get in, watch the trailer and leave before the movie. The first trailer was shown at 75 US and Canadian theatres before Universal's Meet Joe Black, Disney's The Waterboy and 20th Century Fox's The Siege. Into this veritable stone age came the first teaser for The Phantom Menace, six months before the film's release, exactly 20 years ago, on 18 November 1998. My phone was a payphone at the end of the corridor, and you had to hope someone passing by would answer it and knock on your door - which is why I also got my first mobile phone, an Ericsson T28, that year.īy 1998 we had the iTunes Trailers site and news site Ain't It Cool, but there was no Facebook, no Twitter and no YouTube. I hand-wrote essays, until later that year I acquired a word processor with an LCD screen that displayed three lines of text. In 1998, not only did I go to college, but I also I got my first email address - Hotmail, of course. It's astonishing to think how much things have changed in the last decade and a half, and many of those changes began for me that very year. At last, we will reveal ourselves to the Jedi And they were instrumental in proving the next-generation technology that would drive the burgeoning internet's quantum leap forward. But back then the previews of The Phantom Menace didn't just offer a peek at the new film: for some of us the Phantom Menace trailers were our first significant brush with this new-fangled invention called the World Wide Web. Today, teasers and trailers and teasers for trailers are a huge part of the movie marketing machine on YouTube and countless entertainment and fan sites. The trailers for The Phantom Menace gave the first glimpse, and therefore were huge events in themselves.īut they were more than that.

Long before Star Wars' current ubiquity, long before The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi and Rogue One and Solo, before even the Clone Wars cartoons, the return of the sacred saga to the big screen was set to be a world-shaking moment. Like Star Wars fans all over the world, my buddies and I couldn't get enough of the Phantom Menace trailer.

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