Now that the trailer is due to be scrapped on Friday, or so I have been told, and also read on TF.N, I might as well add a few additional comments about it. It was hard finding the trailer back in the end of November and in the beginning of December. The local paper, the Calgary Herald, announced that it would be shown in front of all the movies coming out at the end of November, examples including The Siege, A Bug's Life (a truly cool movie, I should add -- it's so wizard!), and The Rugrats Movie. Now, this was the same paper that published an article about TF.N this morning, and talked about the promotional campaign news that they published last Friday.

Now, November is usually a very busy month for me. The trailer was released on the Friday of Comdex Week in Las Vegas, and when I came back I found that I had a lot of catching up to do in my schoolwork. I'm not so sure I'm completely caught up, even now. Because of this, I missed The Siege, which I had planned to see. Someone else watched The Rugrats Movie and said, "no trailer." And so it was until the beginning of December when I went to see A Bug's Life, a spectacular film by itself. Hmm... no trailer there either. In the words of the great protocol droid C-3PO, "What's going on? Turn around, Chewbacca, I can't see!"

A week later, I watched Insurrection. (Yes, I am an avid Star Trek fan -- it is possible to like Coke and Pepsi at the same time, and the two sci-fi titans aren't as yin-yang as you would think.) I now know that the trailer appeared in front of Insurrection in UK screenings, but Canadian screenings? No such luck. That's one of the small nitpicky problems about Canada; we count as part of the domestic North American gross, and have release dates that are usually the same as those in the States, but nobody says anything when there's a difference. TF.N, JediNet and all those other big fansites chatter on and on about when the movie and the trailer is released at what theatres internationally, across all seven-and-a-half oceans and up to the space station Mir but not across the forty-ninth parallel. Canadians can be different sometimes too!

So this continued, and I flocked from movie to movie until the end of 1998. After a healthy dose of a simplified, animated Ten Commandments as well as an outrageously clever romantic comedy that even computer nerds like myself enjoy, I was still trailerless save the 20MB QuickTime file that I run on my laptop double-size with stereo speakers. And it just figures that a fortnight later the boys at Skywalker Ranch come out with a widescreen high-res version with no cropping. It absolutely figures.

Finally, I was able to catch the elusive trailer no less than two weeks before the magic date, January 15. It was at a screening of Enemy of the State, on a Tuesday. Now, I don't know how it is anywhere else, but here in Calgary we have matinee pricing on Tuesday nights at Cineplex Odeon 'plexes. This means that normally, nobody watches movies on a Tuesday. So they made it cheaper, and now everybody watches movies on Tuesdays. There was a ten-minute line between the ticket counter and the place where they actually check if you have a ticket. The cineplex was jam-packed with people that had yet to see You've Got Mail, getting me thinking, "Thank goodness I beat the rush."