This morning, feeling the pull of childhood nostalgia, I decided to view the trailer for this spring’s “Speed Racer” feature. Naturally, I looked for it on Apple’s trailers site, but no joy. I finally found it on AOL’s site, which surprised me by presenting it in Quicktime (at least, on my Mac).
But here’s where it becomes an annoying experience. It streamed the trailer to my Quicktime player, and then disabled any save functions. I can watch it as many times as I want until I close the player window, and then it is gone.
What is the point of this kind of lockdown? Are movie studios worried about piracy of their ads? Do they think that somehow someone will be able to recreate the entire film out of 2 minutes of 1-second-long clips? Isn’t the idea of a trailer to generate hype and thus ticket sales? What’s the purpose of restricting the dissemination of such a thing; of denying people the ability to save the trailer to their disc and then show it to friends — or just watch it over and over and over until they become so obsessed that they are first in line two days before the premiere to buy tickets?
Is it just me? Or are entertainment industry decision-makers just complete and utter morons?
[Update: Just ‘cos I’m a troublemaker, here’s a discovery I made that’ll allow you to save the movie (assuming you have Quicktime Pro). Show the Movie Properties (command-J) and click on any track entry. Then click the “Resources” button, which will display the actual URL where the movie resides. Open a new URL movie (command-U) and type in that url. Unfortunately, you can’t copy and paste it. The URL will be something like: http://pdl.stream.aol.com/aol/us/moviefone/movies/2007/speedracer_028006/speedracer_trlr_01_itjlsfc_720p_dl.mov …
This will open the movie up in a new window, one which will allow you to save it to the hard drive. Have fun!]
Sure, sure, what you said…. none the less the casting for this movie is figgin’ brilliant.
Brilliant and, really, kind of obvious. I mean, who else but John Goodman could play Pops?
You know, it was a brilliant career move for him to never lose weight. He’s the go-to guy for any character above 200 pounds. Thank goodness he’s actually a good actor, eh?
John Goodman had to loose weight to play “The Babe”!!!
BTW, strange but that address you posted goes past the right side-bar.
Also,if you get a chance to see John Goodman as a young actor you’d be surprised to see how he was very good-looking. Model like actually.