Create a free profile to get unlimited access to exclusive videos, sweepstakes, and more!
Watch: 'Lost' Twin Towers teaser for Sam Raimi's Spider-Man remastered from original print
It's been 17 years since Sam Raimi brought a big-budgeted Spider-Man movie to the big screen, and while there have been several reboots since then, fans are still finding new life in the Tobey Maguire era of Marvel's famous wall-crawler.
Working from an original 35mm film print purchased on eBay, YouTuber YoshiKiller2S was able to remaster a "lost" teaser trailer for the trilogy's first entry. Two friends — users credited as RU.08 and Notelu — helped with the scanning and color correction, respectively. The teaser in question features a group of bank robbers being caught in a web spun by Peter Parker between the Twin Towers pre-9/11. The footage, which also features the World Trade Center reflected in the eyes of Spider-Man's mask, was obviously pulled from theaters (along with a teaser poster) following the devastating terror attacks that changed the United States forever. Just two days after the the towers fell, IGN wrote a story about Sony pulling the promotional materials, which had become distasteful in the blink of an eye.
"I saw this post on this website called OriginalTrilogy (a website that talks about Star Wars and film preservation) about someone who wanted to find a 35mm print of the trailer to preserve it. But that post was made in 2013 and went cold," YoshiKiller2S exclusively tells SYFY WIRE. "This was something I really wanted to see in HD because all that existed online was very low-quality. Then one day, I thought of this famous philosopher named Pyrocynical who once quoted a man by saying 'WE CAN’T EXPECT GOD TO DO ALL THE WORK, NOW CAN WE?' And that was enough motivation for me to do it."
Check out the remastered trailer, which oozes the early 2000s (thanks in no small part to the use of Lunatic Calm's "Leave You Far Behind"), below. According to io9, the teaser, which did screen in theaters for a number of months before Sept. 11, 2001, has surfaced online several times in the past, but in varying qualities that have ranged from mediocre to downright eyesore. YoshiKiller2S's 4K and color-corrected version is by far the best anyone has seen thus far.
"Honestly, I think they used the World Trade Center in the coolest way possible. It’s a shame it had to be cut because of 9/11," adds YoshiKiller2S, alluding to Spider-Man's undying and instantly recognizable connection to the city of Manhattan.
Describing the process of converting the film reel into a digital format, YoshiKiller2S says:
"After finding a place to get it scanned (a place in Toronto called Frame Discreet), I simply went there and they scanned it — they were really nice people. Then when I got the file, I sent it to my friend, Notelu — who also does restorations and remasters — to do the color correction. When he was done, I then synced up the video to a better audio source given to me by Originaltrilogy user RU.08 then I simply cropped the video and uploaded it ... The color correction was done through Sony Vegas Pro; my friend simply got rid of the green tint the scan had ... The sound originally came from the scan, but then Originaltrilogy user, RU.08, sent me a much cleaner audio source which came from a DVD copy of the trailer, which I used instead."
Spider-Man: Far From Home (a collaboration between Sony and Marvel Studios) was the most recent live-action Spidey film to sling its way into theaters. More importantly, it was the first-ever movie to feature the iconic hero to break $1 billion at the global box office.
