Star Wars Day: Why ‘The Phantom Menace’ Trailer Was a Game-changer – CNET

I might feel it: a disturbance in the Force.I stick my go out of my door and run into 2 of my neighbours. “Hes seeing it again!” we yell at each other. Together we run down the corridor of our college residence, our brand-new house because leaving house only a month or two earlier, to the room at the end– where the one man with a modem and a computer system plays the trailer for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace at piercing volume, again.It was 1998. Like Star Wars fans all over the world, my friends and I could not get enough of the Phantom Menace trailer. Long before Star Wars existing universality, long prior to The Force Awakens and The Last Jedi and Rogue One and Solo, before Disney Plus and The Mandalorian, before even the Clone Wars animations, the return of the sacred legend to the cinema was set to be a world-shaking minute. The trailers for The Phantom Menace gave the first glimpse, and for that reason were big events for fans.But they were more than that. Today, teasers and trailers and teasers for trailers are a substantial part of the motion picture marketing device on YouTube and numerous home entertainment and fan websites. Back then the sneak peeks for The Phantom Menace didnt simply use a peek at a brand-new Star Wars flick: for some of us, the Phantom Menace trailer was our first major brush with this new-fangled development called the World Wide Web. The trailer was a game-changer, a turning point for the next-generation technology driving a cultural and technological breakthrough into a new millennium.At last, we will expose ourselves to the JediIts impressive to believe just how much things have altered in the last two decades, and a lot of those modifications began for me that really year. In 1998, not only did I go to college, however I likewise I got my very first email address– Hotmail, obviously. My phone was a payphone at the end of the corridor, and you needed to hope somebody passing by would address it and knock on your door– which is why I also got my first cellphone, an Ericsson T28, in very brief order.I even hand-wrote essays, until I obtained a word processor with an LCD screen that displayed 3 lines of text. By 1998 we had the iTunes Trailers website and news website Aint It Cool, but there was no Facebook, no Twitter and no YouTube. Into this veritable stone age came the first teaser for The Phantom Menace, 6 months prior to the films release date Nov. 18 1998.
The very first trailer was shown at 75 US and Canadian theatres prior to Universals Meet Joe Black, Disneys The Waterboy and 20th Century Foxs The Siege. After a years and a half of anticipation considering that Return of the Jedi, the world went crazy for the first glance of the brand-new Star Wars adventures.Always 2 there location 2nd trailer was posted online on 11 March 1999. QuickTime itself was downloaded 600,000 times simply on the day the 2nd trailer went live.The second trailer was even more of a galactic-sized hit.
Steve Jobs himself explained the second trailer as “the biggest Internet download occasion in history”. According to Empire, the trailer “produced online blockage not seen because the publication of the Starr Report”. The web held.In fact, the success of the Phantom Menace trailer showed the success of a new technology for handling such enormous traffic.
Lucasfilm
Between Entertainment Tonights website hosting Phantom Menace trailers and ESPNs online protection of March Madness, Akamai effectively managed 250 million hits on those 2 websites alone. A few million individuals seeing QuickTime videos may not seem like much in an age when billions have viewed Despacito and Gangnam Style, but the Phantom Menace trailers offered a preview of how huge cultural events would soon be voraciously consumed and gone over online. The Phantom Menace trailers were a turning point in producing todays online world.

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Together we sprint down the corridor of our college residence, our new home because leaving home only a month or 2 earlier, to the room at the end– where the one guy with a computer and a modem plays the trailer for Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace at piercing volume, again.It was 1998. The trailers for The Phantom Menace offered the first glance, and therefore were huge events for fans.But they were more than that. Today, trailers and teasers and teasers for trailers are a big part of the motion picture marketing device on YouTube and countless entertainment and fan websites. Back then the previews for The Phantom Menace didnt just provide a peek at a brand-new Star Wars flick: for some of us, the Phantom Menace trailer was our first significant brush with this new-fangled innovation called the World Wide Web. QuickTime itself was downloaded 600,000 times simply on the day the 2nd trailer went live.The 2nd trailer was even more of a galactic-sized hit.

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