Revisionist movie trailers
Yesterday, I watched a DVD I got for my birthday: Troop Beverly Hills, one of my favorite movies from childhood. The DVD contained trailers for movies that, I'm guessing, were due out soon after the VHS release, and one of the trailers was for A League of Their Own.
This trailer was so lame! It starts out with that scene where Tom Hanks is praying before the game and he asks God to "let our balls... be plentiful." Then there's a picture of Tom Hanks, and the announcer says, "Tom Hanks is managing the impossible!" The whole thing is set up like one of those baseball shorts, like the one they create in the movie itself, but it's all about Tom Hanks and how he's managing this ragtag group of ladies who get out there and play ball ("What can you do? Give them a league of their own!"), and thank sweet Jesus they have Tom Hanks, because he's MANAGING them--he's saved the day! It totally misses the whole point of the movie: the ball-playing women are talented and intelligent, and Tom Hanks' character is a drunken slob who's useless, at least for the first half of the movie. The women are the ones who manage Tom Hanks, and the only thing that lifts him out of his stupor is the women's total badassness on the field.
Troop Beverly Hills was all I remembered it to be and more.