Ghostbusters, Blade Runner, Lost, And More Get The Retro Trailer Treatment
Sometimes I love the internet. While it can be a depressing place — especially if you spend any time reading YouTube comments — it can also help spur creativity in ways you wouldn’t expect. It allows cool ideas to proliferate worldwide and challenges other people to riff on them. Today’s example, “premakes.” The idea is simple: you pick a modern movie, then imagine what a trailer for it might look like if it had come out in an earlier era. Up above you can see the answer to the question, “What if Ghostbusters had come out in 1954?
Or what about Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner? That film is already packed with film noir style, but what if the movie had actually come out during the height of film noir, back in the 1940s? It might have looked like this…
There are tons of these “premakes” out there, and they’re pretty fascinating. Most of them combine footage from the movie itself — often turned black and white — with footage from actual movies of the target era. A bit of fancy editing work and occasionally a new voiceover and shazam, you’ve got a premake. So what if The Empire Strikes Back was a 1950s 3D flick?
Or what if two of the biggest pop culture phenomenons of the past decade, Lost and The Walking Dead, had aired in the ‘50s as well?
Or finally, what if John Carter had been a 1950s Disney movie? (It probably would have fared better with ’50s audiences, sadly.)
