Tuesday Trailer: 1941

One could argue that this teaser is as overlong and self-indulgent as the movie itself. As a big fan of 1941, I wouldn’t argue that. But, as “Hi, we don’t have any real footage to show you yet” teasers go, this one’s of obvious interest to fans of the flick and of John Belushi.

Even though Belushi’s Wild Bill Kelso (referred to as Wild Wayne Kelso in this teaser — the name was changed before filming started) is just one among several million characters in 1941, and gets about as much screen time as anyone else, the teaser obviously put Belushi front and center because he was fresh off of Animal House, and Saturday Night Live was peaking in popularity. Kelso’s in-character rant is appropriately jingoistic and racist, parodying wartime rhetoric. Belushi’s buddy Dan Aykroyd narrates in his rat-a-tat Bass-o-Matic mode. Did Steven Spielberg direct this teaser himself? The bracketing footage of Kelso’s airplane looks pretty second-unit, but the Kelso footage has Spielberg’s style. There’s a lot of headroom, probably so that bits of the teaser could be repurposed for TV.

The longer trailer spreads the attention to the other cast members — and comes amusingly close to being just a montage of people screaming — but neither was enough to lure moviegoers. It’s something of a myth that 1941 was Spielberg’s “huge flop.” It made $31,755,742, which in today’s dollars would be about $90 million. Unfortunately, it cost $35 million. You don’t spend $35 to make $31. (Worldwide, it made about $90 million, which would be about, yeah, $270m today.) It certainly wasn’t a Heaven’s Gate-level disaster — it wasn’t even Spielberg’s first box-office disappointment (his debut, The Sugarland Express, only grossed $7 million; then again, it only cost $3m). It was only a “flop” in relation to Jaws and Close Encounters.

Anyway, was the marketing effective? Neither ad really tells you what the movie’s about — it looks like a zany WWII comedy with a killer cast. Well, nine years earlier, there had been another zany (or perceived as zany) WWII comedy with a killer cast, and Catch-22 flopped. Also, the target audience — teenage/college fans of Belushi and Aykroyd (who never actually share a scene in the movie) — were probably too young to understand the teaser’s satirical elements. The longer trailer is simply a greatest-hits exercise in chaos — a fair representation of the movie, granted, but if you didn’t like what you saw, you weren’t likely to spend your hard-earned $2.50 to go see two hours of it.

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