missmediajunkie

We've been seeing a steady influx of trailers for the summer movie season, and a couple of oddball outliers for pictures coming up later in the year and beyond. So here's a quick rundown of some of the notable trailers and teasers that have popped up since January. All links below lead to Trailer Addict.

Annie - The reactions to the new "Annie" coming up for the holiday season have been decidedly mixed, especially Cameron Diaz's new take on Miss Hannigan. Still, Quvenzhané Wallis looks like she's going to make a great Annie, and Jamie Foxx is in rare form as Will Stacks, the new Daddy Warbucks figure. I'm a little disappointed that we didn't hear more of the music, though, and that the trailer decided to emphasize the humor instead.

Hercules - So much cheese on display. I'm getting flashbacks to "Conan: The Barbarian" here. Best case scenario is that we get a completely pulpy, silly B-movie Hercules and Duane Johnson's considerable charms don't get buried under too many CGI effects. I'm not sold based on the action and the spectacle alone, and this trailer really could have used a little more spark and personality. Unfortunately this comes off as pretty generic-looking.

Chef - It's nice to see Jon Favreau taking a break from big summer blockbusters and trying his hand at a foodie comedy. And it doesn't hurt that he apparently decided to have an "Iron Man 2" cast reunion at the same time. Being released in the middle of May, "Chef" is clearly a personal project being served up as counterprogramming, and looks like a perfectly sweet, feel-good alternative to the superheroes and Adam Sandler. They don't make enough of them like this anymore.

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - A very brief look at the new designs for the Ninja Turtles confirms that they're way too humanized, to the point of being a little off-putting. The rest of the trailer is following the exact same template as the "Transformers" films, especially with the presence of Megan Fox as April O'Neil. I don't have high hopes for this, but I've learned not to underestimate Michael Bay and toy aisle nostalgia. Proceed at your own risk.

Tammy - Melissa McCarthy has worked her way up the ranks over the past few years to the rare position of female comedy headliner - and when was the last time we legitimately had one of those? The trailer for "Tammy" makes it very clear that this is a major starring vehicle for her. I've found McCarthy's previous efforts very hit-or-miss, and I don't know how well she's going to work as a lead, but this teaser with her stumbling through a robbery routine did make me smile. I wish her all the best.

The Giver - Confession time. Despite being recommended the book by every English teacher in junior high, I've never read Lois Lowry's beloved dystopian YA novel, "The Giver." I figured this could be a plus, allowing me a different perspective on the film version than I've had with other, similar adaptations. So far, the trailer is pretty bland, trying too hard to make itself look like every other teen action franchise out there. The appearance of Meryl Streep and Jeff Bridges is intriguing though.

Peanuts - This isn't coming out until November of 2015, but it provides a crucial first look at the visual style that's going to be used for the new "Peanuts" movie from 20th Century Fox and Blue Sky Studios, best known for the "Ice Age" movies but steadily getting more ambitious with recent features like "Epic." It looks like they've done a good job of capturing the iconic look of the Charles Schultz drawings with CGI. However, getting the story and humor right will also be crucial.

Edge of Tomorrow - I thought this was a spring release, but apparently the latest Tom Cruise science-fiction action film is coming in June. Cruise has proven to be a good fit for this kind of material, and I'll watch Emily Blunt in just about anything. Based on a Japanese novel and manga called "All You Need is Kill," this looks to have a lot in common with "Source Code," except much more action-oriented. Also, having Doug Liman and Christopher McQuarrie onboard doesn't hurt.

Guardians of the Galaxy - And finally, we come to my favorite trailer of the batch, which introduces us to the motley crew who will be starring in the next Marvel Universe film. I think what makes this work is really John C. Reilly as the audience surrogate, providing the introductions and setting the tone for how we're meant to view these characters. Frankly, I have my doubts about how the concept is going to play, but the trailer goes a long way in convincing me that they've got the tone right and the humor right, and we're in good hands.
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Have you become annoyed by the abundance of lengthy movie trailers that seem to spoil all the good stuff and marketing campaigns pushing movies so far ahead of their release dates that you lose track of when they're actually going to show up in theaters? Well, your complaints have not fallen on deaf ears. Well, sort of.

This week the National Association of Theater Owners (NATO), a trade organization for movie theater owners, released a series of guidelines for the marketing materials for upcoming movies. The voluntary standards specify that trailers run no longer than two minutes, and run no more than 150 days before a movie actually opens, and other advertising such as aposters and standees displayed no more than 120 days prior. Potential loopholes involving third parties advertisers are also addressed. There would be some exceptions for special content such as behind-the-scenes featurettes, and each distributor gets two films a year that wouldn't be subject to these restrictions.

This would mean some drastic changes in the way marketing campaigns are run, which often release their earliest teasers over a year in advance of a film's release date. The date restrictions would mean that a summer tentpole opening on Memorial Day would have to wait until Christmas to start campaigning. Remember that great teaser for the upcoming Christopher Nolan movie "Interstellar" that was released back in December? Under the new rules, it would have to be kept under wraps until June. The "X-men: Days of Future Past" standees that have been in the front window of my local theater since mid-December would have had to be kept under wraps for another month at least.

Teasers are usually two minutes or less, but the later full-length trailers usually run at least two and a half minutes. Most of the reports I've seen about the guidelines make the assumption that the shorter length is meant to discourage spoilers, which there have been increased complaints about recently. However, I don't think that's the case. Thirty second television commercials are often the most spoiler-laden bits of advertising, and it would be as easy to divulge third act secrets in two minutes as it is in two-and-a-half. And while everyone seems to agree that the spoilers are annoying, they haven't really been affecting the theaters' bottom lines. However, shorter trailers mean that theaters can play more trailers or more pre-show advertisements, which they've become increasingly reliant on for revenue.

A year ago, we were getting reports that larger exhibitors were regularly charging studios to play certain trailers, because the advertising space in front of the features was becoming more and more valuable. Most theaters now run one or two trailers attached to a film for free, but the rest have to be paid for. And because more trailers bring in more revenue, over the past decade we've seen a steady rise in the number of trailers that play in front of a film. You'll notice that the new NATO guidelines don't address a common complaint of moviegoers these days, which is that there are too many ads and coming attractions in front of a film. It's not rare to find films that actually start twenty minutes after they've been scheduled because of all the previews.

The new guidelines would go into effect for movies opening after October 1st. They're voluntary, remember, but it's the theaters that decide which trailers play in front of which movies, and where to place the posters and standees, so if they're all onboard with the new rules, the studios may be out of luck. Sure, print, television, and online advertising are major alternatives to consider, but the trailers that play in theaters are special. It's an audience that the studios know will be the most receptive, that is paying attention, and can't change the channel. Trailers are considered part of the normal moviegoing experience, and some viewers still take pains to arrive early so they won't miss any.

And lest you think the theaters are being too stingy about this, remember that the studios have been the ones who have been cutting into theater owners' ticket revenues by shortening the amount of time that movies play in theaters exclusively. It's not uncommon to find new studio movies on disc a mere 90 days after their initial release dates, and there was talk recently of premium VOD cutting that number in half. The way that the theaters and studios split ticket sales, the longer the run of a film, the more money goes to the theaters. So you can hardly blame the theaters for pushing back and exercising their leverage over the studios' marketing campaigns.

As for us consumers, nothing much changes. Even if we get shorter trailers, we'll probably sit through more of them, and longer versions will still be released online. They'll be easier to avoid, at least. The fight is really between the theaters and the studios over money, and the preferences of the viewers make for good P.R., but they're really a secondary concern for both sides.
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It's that time of year again. September brings the major film festivals that lead into Oscar season, and things are already heating up with a lot of big titles from big talents. Here are some of the more interesting ones that have put out recent trailers. All links below lead to Trailer Addict.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty - Everything I've seen of the ad campaign so far has been excellent, and the trailer is no exception, laying out the premise of a man who escapes his mundane life by indulging in elaborate flights of fancy. This trailer has even been singled out as an example of how to make an engrossing trailer that doesn't give away the whole story, just through the use of strong imagery and emotionally resonant music. I find Ben Stiller very hit-or-miss as a director, but this promo gives me a good feeling that this could be one of the hits.

Dallas Buyers Club - Will Matthew McConaughey finally get that Oscar nomination he's been due for a while now? The trailer for "Dallas Buyers Club" certainly makes a good case for it. McConaughey will be playing AIDS patient and activist Ron Woodruff, who smuggled alternative AIDS drugs into the United States to keep himself and other AIDS patients alive during the early days of the pandemic in the 1980s. The trailer also offers a few intriguing glimpses of Jared Leto, who is practically unrecognizable playing a transgendered woman, Rayon.

12 Years a Slave - Getting huge buzz out of early screenings is the latest film from British director Steve McQueen. The cast is jammed with familair names, including Brad Pitt, Benedict Cumberbatch, Paul Dano, and Paul Giamatti. However, the two actors I'm looking forward to the most are Chiwetel Ejiofor, playing the protagonist Solomon Northup, and Michael Fassbender as the villain of the piece. Ejiofor is one of those actors who hasn't been very high profile, but has been consistently excellent in everything I've seen him in for years. It's high time he had a turn in the spotlight.

The Counselor - Speaking of Mr. Fassbender, I'm still not quite sure what to make of "The Counselor," an original script from the great Cormac McCarthy being directed by the occasionally great Ridley Scott. It's a thriller about drug trafficking with a lot of colorful characters, but I can't tell if it's doing anything differently from all the other thrillers about drug trafficking with a lot of colorful characters that have come before it. The cast is fantastic and all the core creative talent looks good, but I'm a little wary of getting too excited too fast for this one.

The Monuments Men - On paper the movie sounds great. George Clooney and Matt Damon lead a stellar cast, playing untried new members of the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program, that in real life helped to secure and safeguard many of Europe's historic and cultural treasures during WWII. The trailer focuses too heavily on the comedy, and on the bumbling nature of the older recruits, played by Bill Murray and Bob Balaban. Might just be a marketing thing, but I'm a little worried. George Clooney never had the best directing record - though his projects are always interesting.

Saving Mr. Banks - This is sure to be utterly a feel good movie that is just dripping with Disney revisionism. It's well known to any Disney fan that P.L. Travers detested the "Mary Poppins" film. "Saving Mr. Banks" is pushing the idea that old Walt managed to turn that frown upside down with trips to Disneyland and by listening carefully to her concerns about adapting her beloved novels. Even with Tom Hanks and Emma Thompson involved here, I expect I'll end up cringing through this movie. I mean, it's being directed by the guy who did "The Blind Side," for heaven's sake!

American Hustle - I'm glad that David O. Russell has managed to turn his career around in recent years and assemble a semi-regular troupe of great actors that he gets along with. Returning for this round are Jennifer Lawrence, Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper, and Robert De Niro to play a variety of scam artists and special agents in a dramatization of the 70s ABSCAM sting operation. Jeremy Renner and Louis C.K. are along for the ride too. From the set photos that have been circulating around the internet, this one will be worth seeing for the wigs alone.

Diana - Poor Naomi Watts has the unenviable task of playing one of the most famous women of the twentieth century, and trying to justify a biopic that appears awfully thin on story and way too heavy on melodrama. It doesn't help that the film looks like made-for-TV-movie fodder, and so much has obviously been invented or diluted to pander to the tastes of the gossip-hungry mainstream audience. It's going to be up against the similar "Grace of Monaco" with Nicole Kidman, and with the Weinsteins behind that one, I don't think "Diana" or Watts stand a chance this awards season.

Her - Spike Jonze returns after a too-long hiatus to bring us a strange science-fiction romance between a man and his new computer operating system. The man is played by Joaquin Phoenix, in his first outing since "The Master," and the computer is voiced by Scarlett Johanssen. The trailer makes the film look offbeat and idiosyncratic, which is exactly what I expect from Spike Jonze, whose last film was "Where the Wild Things Are" In a season full of so many big movies, it's nice to see that there are a couple of smaller, weirder, unassuming titles in the mix too.

The Fifth Estate - Let's all take a moment to acknowledge that Benedict Cumberbatch doesn't look a thing like Julian Assange, but he does look odd and striking enough in his own way that we can let that slide. "The Fifth Estate," the Wikileaks movie, has patterned itself after a political thriller, and will likely be loads of fun to watch, and not remotely constrained by any actual facts. And that's okay. There will be plenty of dissections and debates surrounding the movie to let the various sides air whatever grievances they need to. The movie just needs to entertain us.

The Wolf of Wall Street - And finally, Martin Scorsese returns in his sixth collaboration with Leonardo DiCaprio to take a stab at making the spiritual sequel to "Wall Street" that Oliver Stone couldn't. I love how stylishly in-your-face this trailer is, with the Kanye West track, bright colors, and the gleeful bad-boy antics. I never would have guessed that this was for a Scorsese picture if I hadn't known about the project long in advance. And I happily anticipate getting to watch DiCaprio play another slimy villain - he's proven to be pretty good at those.
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It's the first week of May, and we've already got several full trailers for some of the big November movies in circulation. I haven't done a trailer post in a while, so we'll be talking about these, plus some of the notable later summer films where the first trailers were only released in the last few months. We've got a lot of ground to cover, so let's get started. As usual, all links below lead to Trailer Addict.

Thor: The Dark World - Of all the individual Marvel movies, I'd put "Thor" near the bottom of the list. I like the character, but his appearances on screen have felt the most slapdash and lacking in substance. I expect the filmmakers know this, which is why they make sure to show us part of a scene that likely happens a good ways into the second act: Thor seeking help from Loki, who is easily the most memorable villain in Marvel's film universe so far. We don't see anything of the film's actual villains, or really much of the threat they pose, but Loki's involvement is enough.

The Hunger Games: Catching Fire - I've already been spoiled regarding a lot of what happens in this movie, so I was impressed with how well this trailer kept some of the biggest plot points under wraps, at least for now. I wouldn't be surprised if future trailers go on to reveal more. However, this one nicely sets up the rising tensions between Katniss and the Capitol, giving a lot of screen time to Donald Sutherland, who plays the major antagonist President Snow. And the sight of Philip Seymour Hoffman getting in on the fun makes me indescribably happy.

R.I.P.D. - The trailer spends most of its time setting up the concept of Ryan Reynolds and Jeff Bridges as part of an undead police force, but what it's really doing is selling you on a certain mood and tone. This is going to be a supernatural action movie with a lot of CGI effects, but it's also going to be a broad comedy. I can definitely see why people are suggesting that this is going to be "MIB" with the undead. Even the poster looks pretty similar. But will "R.I.P.D." be any good? I can't tell from what we've seen so far, but I do like everybody involved here.

2 Guns - Here's Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg playing a pair of cops, who are both working undercover at cross purposes, get betrayed, and have to join forces to win the day. Pretty standard buddy movie setup. So you sell the movie the way you always do. Car chases! Gun battles! One liners! The big question is whether Washington and Wahlberg are going to work well together onscreen, and I think the clips make a decent case for it. The banter flows, and the antagonism feels genuine. It's not very original, but who sees a movie like this for originality?

RED 2 - The retirees are back for more mayhem, and this time they're joined by new villains Catherine Zeta-Jones and Lee Byung-hun. However, the highlight of this installment is almost certainly going to be Anthony Hopkins, who is acting a great deal sillier than I've seen him on the screen in some time. Will he and John Malkovitch have a ham-off at some point? I can only hope. Otherwise, you have your typical spies and renegades story and most of the cast of the previous film back for more fun - including Helen Mirren and all her dangerous toys.

The Wolverine - The problems of "The Wolverine" trailer are twofold. On the one hand, it's relying way too much on previously established imagery from the "X-men" franchise. And on the other hand, the new material looks pretty weak. The bulk of this movie will be set in Japan, but the visuals are generic, the action and effects look underwhelming, and the whole thing is just so much smaller scale than anything else in the franchise. These are major problems that the marketing for "X-men: First Class" had too, and I hope "The Wolverine" is similarly better than its ads.

Elysium - Director Neil Blomkamp is back, and he's brought more "Halo"- like visuals and some big stars for his latest science-fiction film. Matt Damon and Jodie Foster star in the tale of a dystopian future society where an extreme split has developed between the haves and the have-nots. I'm expecting more social commentary, more crazy action scenes, and more deeply flawed characters. And I'm intrigued that the story appears to have many similarities to the manga "Battle Angel Alita," the one James Cameron's been trying to turn into a film for a decade now.

Ender's Game - And here's the movie that I'm the most curious about, out of everything else listed here. How do you turn Orson Scott Card's science-fiction classic into a Hollywood effects extravaganza? From the new trailer I recognize the characters and the concepts, but how faithful is this adaptation going to be? The trailer is provocative, but it's hardly very informative, more concerned with making sure we see every award-winning actor who will appear in the film than introducing us to Ender Wiggins or his universe. The glimpses of Battle School and the Formics are encouraging though.

Turbo - I know, I know, but the little snails are frickin' adorable!
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Well, somebody finally did it. An enterprising Spider-man fan named Louis Plamondon edited together all the footage from all the different trailers and commercials and other previews for "The Amazing Spider-man" into a 25-minute short version of the movie. This was to prove the point that marketing for blockbusters has gotten out of hand, and the studios are releasing way too much spoiler-laden footage in advance that ends up negatively impacting the actual experience of watching the film. I haven't seen the video myself, as Sony was quick to quash most of the copies online, and I actually would like to be able to watch "The Amazing Spider-man" with some of the mystery intact.

However, as reported by Variety, Plamodon's mini-epic contained about ten minutes of the finished film according to Sony (Note that only ten minutes or ten percent of the running time of a film, whichever is shorter, is the maximum allowed to be shown in a nontheatrical medium prior to the film’s theatrical release under Academy Award eligibility rules). The rest is a mix of unfinished scenes, behind-the-scenes footage, b-roll, repeated footage, and padding. Still, the fact that you could piece together a coherent narrative out of all the released clips is pretty telling. It's not just not the amount of footage that we're seeing, but so many of the best shots and sequences, repeated ad nauseum in so many different bits of promotional material. This is going to be a great discussion piece for copyright law classes for years, as the message of the video is inextricably tied to its length and the amount and variety of footage it contains.

Of course spoilerific trailers detailing exactly what happens in a movie have been around forever, and I understand why the marketers frequently want to oversell movies so zealously. I've mentioned before that my significant other responded very poorly to the first "Amazing Spider-Man" trailer from last year, but after seeing a couple of the subsequent ones and the commercials, he's slowly come around. A Spider-man reboot has been a very hard sell for many viewers, me included, who think that Sony should have waited a couple more years for the memory of the Sam Raimi "Spider-man" films with Toby Maguire to fade a little more. In such cases, showing off the good parts can make a difference in the mind of a doubtful moviegoer. However, when you've already been convinced to see a movie, and you're actually anticipating it, oversaturation can have very negative effects.

It was only after I saw "Prometheus" that I finally went and watched some of those later trailers. I'm glad I kept my distance, because they do show a little too much. A lot of the film's best shots and sequences work so much better if you don't have any foreknowledge of them, and I can see how some elements may have misled viewers to expect something different from what the movie actually delivered. Of course all advertisements deal in false hype to some extent, but "Prometheus" was one of those cases where I think they went too far. Some "Alien" fanboys got worked up into such a lather, and were then so disappointed when they got to the theaters, it "Prometheus" helped become one of the most divisive and polarizing films of the summer. Good grief, does anyone else remember when the "Alien" movies were just big dumb action/horror flicks?

And then of course, there's "The Dark Knight Rises" coming up. I have this growing dread that the film is not going to live up to these crazy expectations that some fans have for it, and the fallout is going to get ugly, maybe even worse than saw for "Prometheus." "Dark Knight Rises" doesn't even need all the trailers and the marketing, which there's plenty of, in order to reach saturation levels. The fans are doing it by themselves. I've come across multiple articles making the case that one of the new characters is secretly Robin, even though director Christopher Nolan has stated repeatedly that Robin won't appear in his Batman universe. Like with "Prometheus," there are fans who are doggedly trying to piece all the details of the plot together from previews and interviews. Reams of analysis are being written about bits of footage totally without context. It's getting a little scary, to be honest.

It's nice to know that there are other fans out there who have had enough, who don't want to be inundated by all this information, and are getting fed up with the over-aggressive sales pitches and having to hide from marketing campaigns. The irony is that I love trailers. I thought the first "Prometheus" teaser was brilliant, but I didn't watch any of the others for fear of ruining the movie for myself. And I've been sitting through many previews lately with my eyes screwed shut, thinking back to the days when I used to look forward to the coming attractions.
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I'm a little late, but I wanted to mark the occasion.

Ten years ago, on April 27, 2000, the first preview trailer for "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy was released online and promptly broke all download records for the time. It was only a quick peek, a minute forty-four consisting mostly of behind-the-scenes footage of practical and CGI effects being created, makeup, concept art, models, and quick interview clips from director Peter Jackson and our newly minted Frodo, Elijah Wood. There were only a few finished shots, almost all from the Weathertop scenes from "The Fellowship of the Rings," but there's no way to convey how amazing they were to see. After months of speculation, it was our first look at the cast in costume, the first proof that the long-anticipated project was actually going to happen. That one quick preview set out the scope of Peter Jackson's ambitions - at the end of it, the titles of the three films of the trilogy were flashed on screen, one after another, along with their projected release dates.

I think of that moment as the beginning of the modern age of mainstream blockbusters, the point at which the Internet truly became a marketing tool for the movie studios and online fandom took off. There were earlier cases like "The Blair Witch Project" in 1999, where online marketing campaigns helped to spur interest in smaller films that had otherwise limited avenues for promotion, but never anything on the level of "Lord of the Rings." For the first time we were getting extensive set reports from sites like AintitCool News, and even whole websites devoted to covering the film's ongoing production like TheOneRing.net, all months and years in advance of the films' theatrical releases. The technology had caught up to the point where it was feasible to consume a lot of information in an online setting, though only up to a point - a medium-sized two-minute trailer in the pre-broadband era could easily take an hour to stream.

From a cultural standpoint, the idea of faithfully, respectfully adapting such hopelessly geeky source material was still a novel one. This was back when the fanboy film milieu was still in the nascent stages of its ascendancy. To put it into cinematic historical context, this was before the first "Harry Potter" film, before the first "Spider-man" or "X-Men," before the Wachowski brothers broke our hearts with the "Matrix" sequels and "Star Wars" fanboys were still holding out hope that "Attack of the Clones" could salvage the prequels. At the time, the idea of New Line Cinema putting up money for a largely unknown New Zealand director to mount a fantasy film trilogy with no major stars was viewed as a risky, potentially disastrous proposition. The conventional wisdom was that fantasy didn't sell, and one only has to look at the typically campy fantasy projects of the era like "Dungeons and Dragons" and "Kull the Conqueror" to understand why. I'd love to say that "The Lord of the Rings" changed all that, but it didn't. The stigma still persists to this day - though now at least we know what's possible.

And personally, "The Lord of the Rings" was my first online film fandom, as I'm sure it was for many others, and the first time I really got consumed by the online hype. I remember that first internet preview in particular, not only because of its impact, but also because it became almost completely inaccessible in later years. The original website stopped streaming content correctly after a few Quicktime player upgrades, and the preview never showed up in any of the DVD sets. I suspect this was because of the neat little trick of the aspect ratio changing from full-screen to wide-screen midway through, which was probably too much for the DVD technology of the time to handle. Or equally likely, the creative types simply forgot about it or thought it was too dated to bother with. I had a copy of a converted file saved on my hard drive for a while, but lost it in a crash. It was only after periodically sifting through Youtube that I stumbled across a working version again a few months ago.

Watching it now, there's no question that this was a very, very preliminary preview where the direction of the marketing strategy hadn't quite been worked out yet. This was the only promo to use the lines of the One Ring inscription - the "One Ring to Rule Them All" bit Gandalf recites for Frodo. It also featured a CGI-heavy visual scheme that incorporated the forging of the One Ring and a stylized Eye of Sauron, never seen again in later promotional materials. A year after the preview's release, New Line's more broadly-aimed marketing of "The Fellowship of the Rings" shied away from such geeky touches, preferring a more horror-tinged approach that downplayed the fantasy elements. You can even spot glimpses of special effects that were later abandoned for other methods, including the giant legs that were supposed to stand in for regular-sized humans when the smaller-scale hobbits were onscreen. Yet the promise was there, in every shot. It wasn't the effects that caught me, but the style and approach to the material that was already evident from those few seconds of finished footage.

And it still makes me excited to watch the movies after all this time.

I was a little too young for the original "TRON" when it was released in 1982. It was only a few years ago that I finally sat down and watched it, but I was definitely aware of the film throughout my childhood. I always remembered the imagery, especially the circuit-patterned bodysuits - a wonderful product of the neon-fixated early '80s. As a kid from Southern California with a serious Disney habit, it was hard to avoid "TRON." Stills and clips from the film regularly showed up in the Disney literature and TV retrospectives. The toys and merchandise were floating around, and the fanboys were already spreading the word and solidifying future cult status.

But my best memory of "TRON" comes from the now defunct PeopleMover ride at Disneyland. Up until it closed in '95, it had a TRON-themed section, where some of the CGI segments of the film were projected on giant screens decorating two tunnel segments. My mother was a big fan of the PeopleMover, since it was a long ride where we got to sit down, and it didn't move too fast. Unfortunately, it also had a habit of breaking down as it got old and creaky in the 90s, usually only for a few minutes at a time before lurching back on its merry way. Having been stuck in the TRON tunnels during a few of these breakdowns, listening to the blaring soundtrack of the lightcycle sequence, I would know the sound of those pixels anywhere.

It's odd to feel nostalgic toward a movie that I didn't actually see until I was well into my adult years, but that was part of the fun. The film's visuals were so strong and so iconic, I didn't need the story to feel the impact of "TRON." In fact, knowing the plot probably would have ruined the film's mystique for me. I did enjoy "TRON" when I finally saw it, but the best parts were the bits I'd already experienced - the visual effects sequences and the sound design.

I'll readily admit that "TRON" is still mighty impressive to this day, and holds up better than films half its age. It's pure popcorn, though, and I have no illusions that it's anything else. And that's all I really expect the new "TRON Legacy" to be - a big, loud, shiny, crowd-pleasing action movie. From the new trailer that was released last week and the Comic-Con test footage that left the fanboys euphoric, it looks like Disney is going to deliver. The updated visuals look gorgeous and the leaked plot details suggest the story will be solid, if not very ambitious.

But mostly, it's good to hear those lightcycles again after all these years. I can't wait for December.