In short, frankly, I don’t want to have anything spoiled for me anymore. In short, it appears that nobody knows how to put together a preview for anything anymore, without giving something crucial away.
Case in point, prior to watching the season 2.5 premiere of The Walking Dead, there was a brief preview montage of what to expect in the next 6-7 episodes. In this montage of visuals, there was a clip of a gold sedan getting flipped over – this is obviously big, considering the pool of characters in which are capable of driving a motor vehicle is pretty limited to the core cast, meaning someone’s going to be getting seriously hurt. Obviously, it’s absurd to think that nobody’s going to get hurt in a show about annihilation and survival, but knowing in advance that someone is going to get into a car wreck is something I’d rather not be told ahead of time.
Naturally, when I saw a character hopping into a gold sedan, I groaned in my head, knowing that this person was fucked. The circumstances in which it all transpired weren’t spoiled, but I knew it was eventually coming. The entire situation was spoiled in less than one second due to a shitty preview being compiled.
It’s not just The Walking Dead either. I’ve pretty much flat-out refused to watch any preview for anything I deem substantially important or promising to my interests. There are some exceptions, like the game Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City, because it’s not canonical, and no matter that I think it might be a fun game, is still widely a throwaway placeholder until RE6 is released in the fall. But speaking of RE6, I made the mistake of watching the trailer, because my fandom got in the way of my objectivity; and sure as shit, I saw some things I wish I hadn’t. At this point, I can only hope that the time until the fall makes me forget about it, so that I can enjoy it fully when it comes out.
With Mass Effect 3 on the horizon, there have been a slew of teasers, trailers, articles and blog posts all over the internet in preparation for the sequel to what I thought has been the greatest game ever. I’m not watching any of it. I saw a teaser way back last year, and was fortunate enough that it was done in a manner that gives nothing away, but sets the scenario up, nothing more. That is all I will watch, as I don’t want any teasers or trailers to spoil anything for me up until its release date. As a fairly regular Kotaku reader, there have been plenty of ME3 posts, to build hype and sell copies, and I’m ignoring them all. I’m even whizzing past the posts as soon as I realize it’s a ME3 post, so that I don’t get sucked into the visuals either. I don’t want to know anything about it until it’s playable for me, I just don’t.
After months of Amazon recommendations, I started reading The Hunger Games. I didn’t even realize that it’s already practically in post-production for its movie rendition. I am already liking the book, because it makes me think of Battle Royale, which in turn naturally draws its comps to Lord of the Flies, even if it is a little teen-angsty, but a refreshing story after so much sport and nihilistic reading. So, because I am enjoying the story, I refuse to watch any trailers for the movie, because I simply expect that they’ll give away crucial information to a story in which I haven’t finished yet. When I finish the book, it will be a different story, but until then, all bets are off.
The art of making a good preview is more or less dead. There’s a laundry list of movies that I’ve pretty much not enjoyed or not watched outright, because the preview essentially ruined it. And there are lots of people who mirror my sentiment, or at least attest to movies being completely given away or “the best parts were in the preview.”
Nothing will be as bad as the preview for Tom Hanks’ Cast Away, where they pretty much reveal that he gets off the fucking island, but the point remains, trailers and previews simply give up way too much important information to be worth watching without expecting to have something spoiled in some capacity.
