COMING SOON

The World of Laurel & Hardy

Cinema Trailers

 

In our ‘Laurel and Hardy Magazines’ we have covered Laurel & Hardy publicity material, such as lobby cards and press books. One area we have not covered are CINEMA TRAILERS advertising future releases at your local cinema.

Trailers consisted of various key scenes from the film being advertised, often augmented with large, descriptive text describing the story, and an underscore generally pulled from studio music libraries. Most trailers had some form of narration and those that did featured load and powerful voices.

Trailers consist of a series of selected shots from the film being promoted. Since the purpose of the trailer is to attract an audience to the film, these excerpts are usually drawn from the most exciting, funny, or otherwise noteworthy parts of the film but in shortened form and usually without spoiling the story of the film. For this purpose the scenes are not necessarily in the order in which they appear in the film. A trailer has to achieve that in less than two and a half minutes, the maximum length allowed by theatres.

The term "trailer" comes from their having originally been shown at the end of the main feature. That practice did not last long, because patrons tended to leave the theatre after the films ended, but the name has stuck. Trailers are now shown before the film along with the cinema adverts.

I always remember when I started collecting films on SUPER 8 HOME MOVIE film, it was so expensive for a 20 minute sound (or silent) short, that they often released shortened  small 50ft (about 3 minutes long) reels. I recall collecting a few Laurel and Hardy film trailers, in those days it was a nice taste of the films you could not afford.

On this page we present to you several of the original cinema theatre trailers that would whet your appetite to come and see the next Laurel & Hardy release.

BONNIE SCOTLAND

 

A CHUMP AT OXFORD

PACK UP YOUR TROUBLES

WAY OUT WEST

HOLLYWOOD PARTY

THE FLYING DEUCES

AIR RAID WARDENS

THE BULLFIGHTERS

BABES IN TOYLAND

ATOLL K (UTOPIA)

Now here is a very rare item, it is Laurel & Hardy actually speaking German in a recently discovered trailer for PARDON US. This will be included on the "Spuk um Mitternacht" ( German phonetic The Laurel & Hardy Murder Case) DVD coming out March 2010.

PARDON US (German)

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