Star Wars: 10 Years Ago Today the World Went Crazy for That Force Awakens Teaser Trailer

Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ first teaser trailer hit the Internet 10 years ago today, on November 28, 2014. The teaser certainly did its job, providing Star Wars fans with a tantalizing sizzle reel of footage, with ominous narration by the voice of the villain fans would later know as Supreme Leader Snoke. From the very unorthodox opening — a desert landscape interrupted by John Boyega’s Finn, sweaty and bleeding, popping up into the frame wearing Stormtrooper armor — J.J. Abrams, Lucasfilm, and Disney sold viewers on the promise that The Force Awakens would be an entirely new era of Star Wars, but one that was also safely familiar.

Best of all, this epic teaser didn’t waste a single frame of footage from The Force Awakens — each character, setting, gadget, vehicle, and costume that fans saw was meticulously selected by the filmmakers to evoke nostalgia, curiosity, excitement, or a combination of all three. The includes the first sight of new rolling droid BB-8, the flash of new stormtrooper helmet designs, Rey riding a new hover bike across the desert, Poe Dameron locking in for a high-stakes X-Wing dogfight, and, of course, that first chilling rear shot of Kylo Ren in a black cloak marching throw a dark snowy woods, igniting his red lightsaber with its crossguard design.

But what really got audiences all over the world out their seats and cheering was that final sequence of the Millennium Falcon taking flight and battling TIE Fighters over the desert, with the dizzying, spiraling camerawork that literally and figuratively let fans know they were in for a ride. The Force Awakens teaser even had a post-credits Easter egg, dropping in the sound of a familiar lightsaber being ignited. Every line of dialogue spoken, every image shown, even every sound effect used in the teaser was combed-over by fans, looking for hope that the “authenticity” of Star Wars was still intact under the Disney banner.

The teaser for Star Wars: The Force Awakens worked like a charm: with just 88 seconds of footage, Abrams and Lucasfilm cracked new viewership records for a trailer debut, and sparked an entire year of online buzz, fan theories, trailer recuts, spoof and analysis videos, fan fiction, and everything in between. By the time the full trailer for The Force Awakens arrived nearly a year later (October 19, 2015), the world was more than ready — it was waiting for it, and the viewership records went through the roof all over again, leading to Star Wars: The Force Awakens ultimately shattering box office records during its theatrical run.

Star Wars: The Last Time We Were Happy Together

Sadly, one of the top comments on teaser trailer for The Force Awakens perfectly sums up the nostalgia of watching it, a decade later: “It’s like watching your parents’ wedding video after they got divorced.” The trailers for Star Wars: The Force Awakens — starting with this teaser — represent the last time that the entire Star Wars fan base felt united in hope and optimism about the franchise. The film would be overwhelmingly well-received by audiences, but even at that early time in the Sequel Trilogy run, there were already seeds of doubt about just how closely Abrams was echoing the beats of the Star Wars: A New Hope. After that, a schism grew in the franchise with release of spinoff films like Rogue One and Solo, and that schism became a chasm when Star Wars: The Last Jedi followed The Force Awakens. Since The Last Jedi, the Star Wars franchise has arguably fractured entirely over the last decade.

At this point, outside of a few outliers (Star Wars: Andor) the only real point of consensus about Star Wars is that most fans think it needs repair. To that end, Lucasfilm recently announced that there’s a new Star Wars movie trilogy being developed — one of half a dozen film projects that the franchise is supposedly developing.

The Star Wars Sequel Trilogy is streaming on Disney+.