Published at: March 17, 2008, 2:22 a.m. CST by quint
Ahoy, squirts! Quint here. I'm a trailer fiend, always have been. As a kid they were half the fun of going to the movies. It was all well and good I was going to watch an anticipated movie, but what's coming soon to a theater near me?
When I got into my early teen years I began collecting movie memorabilia... movie posters, lobby cards, etc. I also started collecting trailers and now have thousands of trailers on film (16mm and 35mm both, but the majority on 35mm). I love trailers... and some of my favorite from my collection are the red band trailers.
If you're not sure what a red band trailer is, you've probably seen a few online. It's a trailer that starts with a Red "Restricted" band instead of the Green "All Audiences" band. Pretty much that means that the trailer has a curse word in it, or a boob or some graphic violence... something that doesn't allow it to be shown to "All Audiences."
Back in the day the Red Band trailers would play your local movie house... now I think I can only remember seeing Red Band trailers in art houses.
Regal Cinemas just changed that. They've decided to run Red Band trailers in their cinemas. Since Regal is the nation's largest chain, I bet we see the rest adopt this policy as well.
Of course that doesn't mean you'll see a graphic Saw V trailer before WALL-E this summer. They'll put the red band trailers on their R-rated fare.
My personal favorite Red Band trailer from my collection is the original Scanners teaser trailer, which was just the scene with Michael Ironside when he volunteers for the mind experiment... the whole scene plays out (it's a long trailer, maybe 4 minutes) and it ends with the doctor's head exploding. Great trailer.
Can't wait to start seeing the new bloody Red Band horror trailers and the raunchy boob-filled red band trailers for the R-rated comedies being cranked out right now. What do you folks think?
