Darth Maul’s Lightsaber
My own little trope
Let’s talk about the old days when “spoiler” wasn’t a word yet, and why “spoiler” became a word.
I’m going to talk about Star Wars, so some bona fides are probably in order. I was born in 1973, so never saw the first movie in a theater. However, I came of age at the advent of home video, and vaguely recall seeing Empire Strikes Back (1980) and specifically recall seeing Return of the Jedi (1983), both at the drive-in around the corner from my house (a dollar a head, or five for the whole carful), in my Star Wars jammies and holding a full-size brown grocery sack of popcorn my mom air-popped before the family loaded into the car. I was a Dungeons & Dragons teenager, careening through a VAST array of similar games in the 80s and 90s, including multiple swerves into West End Games’s d6-engine Star Wars role-playing game (IYKYK). I never actually got any action figures, but I collected tabletop miniatures for the RPG. I found the Ewok cartoon amusing, and I read the Timothy Zahn sequel novels (the Thrawn trilogy). Luke Skywalker was my Harry Potter; the Star Wars films were the great Campbellian myth cycle of my youth. I was exactly the kind of fan who experienced Star Wars as a kid, was indelibly marked by it, and occasionally dreamed of more sequels. More sequels that increasingly seemed like they would never actually come.
Then, in 1993, ten years after the theatrical release of Return of the Jedi, George Lucas announced that he would be making another Star Wars movie. Fans lost their minds in collective glee. If you were around for this, you may recall the hype. The movie that would become The Phantom Menace was arguably the most anticipated sequel of all time (yeah, yeah, it’s a prequel, but stay with me).
In November 1998, the trailer debuted. People lost their minds again. For five years the fans (the word “fandom” had not entered the pop culture lexicon yet) had hung on every drip and drab of news from magazines and “insiders” (remember Steve Sansweet?) and the arrival of the trailer at long last was a confirmation of everybody’s wildest dreams. It had been 15 years since any new Star Wars footage had been in the hands of fans, and the hype train went past full steam into runaway mode. This was going to be the biggest movie event ever.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see some of the red flags the trailer tried to gloss past (Jake Lloyd and Jar Jar, looking at you two). And I admit with no pleasure that I noticed them then. I’m a little bit of a contrarian by nature, and I’m fundamentally sceptical of hype, so I was trying to stay clear-eyed about what was now appearing on screen (and then appeared on every screen nonstop for the next six months) even as my inner kid was indulgently optimistic to see some more Jedi awesomeness.
What stuck out at me most was Darth Maul’s double-ended Lightsaber. I couldn’t quite put my finger on what bugged me about it, but it nagged at the back of my mind. It wasn’t the impracticality (how would you even learn to fight with a weapon that could maim you in one wrong move?). This was Star Wars; “practical” technology was a silly thing to expect from a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away. As time went on, however, it hit me. It wasn’t the lightsaber itself. It was the REVEAL.
It was a spoiler before “spoiler alerts” were a thing. In a flash of a second or two, we see Maul pop the second blade out the butt end of his extra-long lightsaber hilt. And if you were a kid of 10 or 11 (and admittedly if you were a fan pushing thirty) it seemed at the moment like a super cool evolution of lightsabering. They can have two blades?! Awesome!
But how much cooler would that have been in the theater, seeing it cold? The climactic faceoff between Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan, and Maul had built up for the whole movie. It eclipsed the entire Battle of Naboo. It was the fight sequence that made the film, with one of the greatest musical cues John Williams ever produced: “Duel of the Fates” is transcendent.
How much cooler would it have been to see Maul pop that extra blade out just as the sequence opened, in the theater? It would have been wildly epic. Instead, everybody knew it was coming already. And just like that, throwing one more thing into the trailer messed up the real viewing experience.
My complaint here is about trailers spoiling something small but important (in brief: fan service). It’s not accidentally telling you how the story ends in the “summarize the whole movie in the trailer” way. There are plenty of offenders that do that, too (looking at you, A Working Man), but this is more specific. This is a totally unneeded glimpse of something the fans will probably love, but don’t need to see yet. The fans are already coming to see this movie. They don’t need you to sell them with “but wait, there’s MORE”.
This happens all the time. Once you start seeing it, it will make you want to not watch trailers. Even now, I’ll see something in a trailer, like the gunner seat reveal in the Ghostbusters: Afterlife trailer, and wince and shake my head and murmur, “Darth Maul’s Lightsaber.” The Afterlife trailer is amazing, hitting all the right notes just right. And I was excited to find it, since I had heard nothing about the film’s production and came across the trailer in a “films coming next year” compilation on YouTube. That kind of cold view is vanishingly (and tragically) rare anymore, and I was pretty excited to learn that this movie was a thing. But the trailer should have ended the moment Ecto-1 roared to life in the barn. We never needed to see the kids in the car. Seriously, watch it and tell me I’m wrong.
Contrast this with, say, Deadpool & Wolverine, or Spider-Man: No Way Home. Those productions could have produced trailers filled with Darth Maul’s Lightsaber moments, because they were chock full of fanservice Easter eggs that were made infinitely better by virtue of being left as surprises in the theater. Can you imagine if any of the guest stars from those movies had been included in the trailer? It would have destroyed those reveal scenes later. Ryan Reynolds dreamed of locking the details down even further, if you can believe it. And if they had pulled off Alpha Cop it would have been legendary. Imagine ruining this scene in a trailer. Look at the energy in that room. Undermining that would have been shameful. Imagine ruining this sequence in a TRAILER. Blowing years of fan hopes and dreams on a two-minute commercial.
Spoilers in the trailer are a deep betrayal of your audience, exposing a distrust in your fans that fans should rightfully find offensive. Nobody was on the fence about going to see The Phantom Menace. Everyone was going to go see this movie–it sold 80 million tickets and grossed over 400 million dollars (in 1999 dollars, no less). Nobody needed a little extra tease about lightsabers to get their butts in a seat. But some goober cutting the trailer decided it would “seal the deal” or something, so in it went. Darth Maul’s Lightsaber, spoiled for a two-minute commercial for a movie that didn’t even need commercials.
Stop doing this, trailer people. Stop tossing “one more little glimpse” of whatever into the trailer. Respect your fans.