The Star Wars TV Commercials Project Thread
OVERVIEW
As we all know well, there have been a great many Star Wars-related commercials aired on television ever since that fateful year of 1977. Some greatly memorable moments have been forever embedded in our minds by these short advertisements, particularly the Kenner toy ads, or product commercials featuring Star Wars characters. Unfortunately, the majority of these were a one-shot deal and were only shown for a short time before disappearing forever into the ether–especially the earliest ones from the period when most fans did not own recording devices or just didn’t think to try and preserve commercials. Now some of these early spots are priceless artifacts from what was (perhaps) a more civilized time. Finding recordings of these classic commercials is difficult, and although some attempts have been made to collect a few of them together, there has never been a real focused effort to attempt to collect together and preserve all of them in the best quality possible. This thread is intended to get the wheels rolling on this often-talked-about project.
STEP 1: RESEARCH
The first step in preservation is research, and the first step in this thread is to research all the material to find out the following:
- a complete list of what commercials aired
- what years/dates they were aired in, and in what order
This is where you, the reader, come in. Our list to begin with will be very incomplete, and many of you will certainly be able to add to it or correct it. As you guys send in more information, the list will be edited accordingly, eventually becoming more and more accurate and complete. This will not only benefit preservation efforts, but will also be a useful resource for anyone interested in the history of Star Wars commercials over the years. Currently there is no substantial information out there that I am aware of, and we hope to change that.
STEP 2: PRESERVATION
Once a complete (or mostly complete) list of what is known has been drawn up, we can begin to try and determine where the best quality sources can be found. Once the sources are identified and the pieces obtained, they can be cleaned up, edited, and added into the collection. The goal is to wind up with a set of discs which at this point are likely to be divided into at least two collections: Kenner/Hasbro commercials and non-Kenner/Hasbro commercials. Further divisions for other categories such as video games, foreign commercials, etc. may be considered down the line, depending on how much material turns up.
Following this post will be the lists of all the information we know on the commercials so far.
–SKot
- NOTE: I did not include TV spots for the films in this list as I feel they belong under the category of trailers, and JediSluggo is working on a trailer preservation project currently (which I intend to assist him with as much as I am able).
I know you wound up using digitalfreak's capture over mine as it was better quality, and that's good. But I assume the extras are still the ones I provided, snagged from the VH1 website? digitalfreak is only credited with providing the main content. Just curious to see if it was my extras content that made it in.
