Coming Non-Attractions

On of my favorite parts of any movie-watching experience has always been the previews. I think it has to do with the half-second after it is done when we all get to play movie critic and declare how stupid or great a movie looks from the 2 minutes of clips we just viewed. But, I also like old trailers. Even now I get amused when I put in an older movie and see the 'previews' for a movie which came out a decade ago and I have since seen half a dozen times. I also like to guess on how many there are going to be for any given movie and when it comes time to watch a movie on DVD I use them as an indicator of the quality of the film I am about to see. After all, since the studios know you are interested in one of their action/adventure movies the odds are in their favor you will watch another one as long is it is close in quality. The only time I don't like trailers is when they are totally different from the movie which you are about to watch. Only about 2.5% of the audience in a superhero movie are going to want to see a costumed period piece about a writer from 19th century England, so putting a trailer for it in front of them wastes time which should be spent showing them a movie they might actually spend money to go and see. Today I had another reminder that some people need to do a better job of matching the previews with the people who are about to watch the movie.

I was with two of my nieces and my nephew watching "Madagascar 3". Now, I had my first inkling that I might be in trouble early because we had to sit through the Jimmy Fund commercial and the manager going around collecting money after that. I'm not complaining about the asking for money because the Jimmy Fund is a fantastic cause and who is going to be more willing to give money to a place looking to find a cure for childhood cancer than a captive group of parents? I just think they should have done it a little sooner. Most kids have DVD players and as such the movie starts as soon as they sit down. Every minute you make them wait may as well be five. As such the 3 year-old drill sergeant who had been bouncing through the lobby 20 minutes earlier was already wondering why the movie hadn't started and losing enthusiasm with every passing second. Then the previews started. The first one was some movie about Santa, the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny teaming up and while it looked a little intense I'm sure it was fairly harmless. Then came a preview for a Katy Perry documentary that I believe was called, "Hey, Look At My Boobs." (Admittedly, this was probably just my thinking and the movie was a lot more innocent-looking to a little kid.) Then came the big problem.

The third movie was from the makers of "Nightmare Before Christmas" which meant five seconds in I was not excited to see this preview. Done in that same kind of motion-capture animation, the movie was about a little kid who only has one friend and is picked on at school all the time for being a little weird. He is so weird, you see, because he can see dead people. Every time he turned the corner there is another ghost looking to talk to him and soon some even scarier ghost comes to get him and people start raising from the dead to chase him and his friend. (Not only was the preview not suitable for most of the children in the audience, it is also an obvious rip-off of "The Sixth Sense". Don't be inappropriate and unoriginal.) Also, it was rated PG. I know it doesn't sound like a lot, but there is a big jump from G to PG. Not that I want to sounds like Tipper Gore here, but these ratings were invented for a reason. I have no problem with the ratings on a sliding scale down (showing PG or PG-13 previews before an R-rated movie), but they shouldn't go the other way. There were a lot of kids in the audience who were probably freaked out by this preview. Judging from the look on my niece's face, she certainly won't be begging to go see that movie.

Look, I am the first one to tell parents to shut up when they get hyper-sensitive and complain about their kid seeing something they deem inappropriate on television, because most of the time they are being idiots. (I would refer you to the parent who complained about the disappearing vampires commercial during the Super Bowl.) Also, most of the time people get enough warning about what is coming and advertisers are pretty good about matching the spots to the content. Every show comes with ratings now and if you are letting your kid watch "Sons of Anarchy" (no matter how amazing that show is) you have no right to ask for an apology. Still, sometimes the concern is justified. I think parents have a right to get upset when a beer commercial finds its way onto the Disney Channel because it just shows a certain lack of common sense and this was along those lines. After all, it is not like they didn't have any other previews they could have shown instead. This is prime kid-going-to-the-movie time of the year and new movies are coming out every week. Walking in we passed four or five movie posters featuring flicks that would have been much better to have previews for than what we ended up with. Movie tickets already cost enough money, don't start adding therapy costs on top of that.