TheFugitive Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Taking a trip down the memory lane of 1993 led me to hit up YouTube for trailers. Movie marketing wasn't nearly as pervasive as it was today, and so I often find myself trying to remember when exactly I heard about this movie, or that one. I've always envied friends who remember when they saw the trailer for The Empire Strikes Back and how they felt, and I can't even remember how the hell I knew I wanted to see Braveheart. I have no memory for movie marketing prior to 1999, it seems, which why I started looking up the trailers for 1993. I only got as far as The Fugitive and decided it had to be shared as a Terrific Trailer.

Most trailers of the '80s and '90s were pretty cheesy, despite the sultry tones of Don LaFontaine. They're edited badly, they give too much away, and are the wrong tone for the fillm. The Fugitive could have fallen prey to all of that, but it's tight and mysterious. I like how it doesn't even tell you whether Harrison Ford is innocent or not. Of course they were working from a very well known television series, Ford was never a bad guy, and it would be rather difficult to sympathize with a fugitive who was guilty. But if all you saw was this trailer today, you would be forgiven for wondering exactly who the good guy would be. Would it be Ford, or Tommy Lee Jones?

1993 holds a really special place in my heart for one reason: Jurassic Park. While I had seen some event movies in my 11 short years, there had never been a movie like this. It was the first movie I had to wait in line for -- and the line seemed huge because it actually went outside the Southwest Plaza Mall.

To this day, I don't know when it first appeared on my radar, or how I saw my first bit of footage. All I remember is that T-Rex foot coming down in the mud with a sinister squish, and knowing this was going to be one hell of a movie. And it was. I'll never forget that first shot of the brachiosaurus. I'm pretty sure I stopped breathing. When the shot expanded to the swamp filled with dinosaurs, my mind knew it was that new thing called CGI, but my heart was half-convinced Spielberg really had cloned dinosaurs. It sounds pretentious, but I knew movies were going to never be the same again. This was the future, and I was going to see it. If you could go back in time and tell young Beth that she'd be employed to write constantly about it well, she wouldn't be surprised. She knew she wasn't going to be a paleontologist, anyway.

So large does Jurassic Park loom in my memory that it's kind of funny to see what else was released that summer -- and how drastically the idea of a "summer blockbuster season" has changed since the 90s. Let's revisit, shall we ...