Maplecrest Trailer Home

Well folks, I’ve come to terms with the fact that I’m going to have to exorcise my Tim Burton trailer demons sooner or later, and I may as well do it while I can simultaneously acknowledge Sweeney Todd’s advertising schizophrenia. In regards to Burton trailers in general, the beaten path involves repetitively capitalizing on his magical worlds and imagination in what is probably an all-inclusive attempt to figure out a target audience. So, here we go:

1. There are 3 or more successful music shifts in each trailer. This may be due to the introduction of the Edward Scissorhands score as a standard trailer music choice, a la 1 minute into the Nightmare Before Christmas trailer. His trailers often feature the music from a previous movie, which is a somewhat unique attempt at building up a coalition of a director’s movies past the good old, “From the director of..” title card. Notwithstanding some of the corniness in this (open your mind..), and the extreme praise (is the world really full of wonder?) the story and visuals are undeniably trailer-worthy and solid, like Jack in front of the moon or falling into Christmastown, and it leaves me completely unannoyed. Not to mention, “What’s This” being so damn loveable.

2. A tendency to kind of give far far far too much away. This could easily cut off at the Edward/Kim dilemma, shift into montage mode, and call it a day. The last section of this trailer is not horribly done, but it just feels at that point like squishing too much information into a small space, and giving away pretty much the entire movie. Also, the “Hold me..” “I can’t” is possibly my favorite trailer finish, heart-wrenching Scissorhands music and all.

3. The really crazy thing about the Sweeney Todd trailers (of which this is the first) is that it fell into a gap that Nightmare avoided by being Disney. Torn in a seemingly unmarketable area between horror and musical, some executive or another (I always like to imagine every decision in Hollywood being made at some sort of meeting around a big rectangular table) decided, hey, the Sondheim freaks will already come out, so let’s just not let anyone know this is a musical, they’ll figure it out 30 seconds into the movie. It’ll be great. In that way, this trailer, and even moreso the second trailer, attempts to completely deceive the public as to what they’re actually going to see, choosing to focus all their energies on the Tim Burton half of it. It’s almost freaky how few people I’ve talked to knew anything about Sweeney Todd’s Broadway nature from the trailers. This one is more representative of the movie (featuring a snippet of music) so I should have posted the second one, but let’s face it – I really can’t part from the shot where he says, “I want you bleeders”, nor “The years no doubt have changed me”. This also features one of my favorite moments of deceptive editing – the peephole shot where Alan Rickman sees Sweeney walking toward him with a blade. As a sidenote, there’s a “make your own trailer” feature on the Sweeney Todd website, may you come to a conclusion of how you feel about that far better than I.
And so, with that, I lay down my Tim Burton trailer sword.