Tons of Vintage 35mm Movie Trailers Scanned & Uploaded to YouTube
by Alex Billington
May 10, 2022
Source: The Film Stage
If you didn’t already know, we loveee movie trailers! FirstShowing has been hosting, posting, promoting, and covering movie trailers for 16 years already. There was a time, years ago, when we had to fight with the Hollywood studios to upload trialers to YouTube – they would send their anti-piracy legal teams after us (yes this is a true story) just because they didn’t like them being posted on YouTube. Every single time I would argue with them and remind them that YouTube is where trailers belong now, they get so many views, they spread so easily, it’s searchable, and it’ll be the main place for trailers. Eventually they conceded. Thanks to a tip from our friends, we’ve heard about this user – there’s a YouTube channel from Montreal that uploads full, high res scans of 35mm trailers. The way they used to make them! For decades, Hollywood had to strike 35mm prints of trailers and send them to theaters. Not anymore, but this is an epic collection of trailers – there’s already hundreds of classics available on this channel. Check out a few of our favorite trailers below.
Click above to visit the YouTube channel directly and browse through the collection. Thanks to our friends at The Film Stage for the tip on this. These 35mm trailers (and a few 16mm and 8mm and other sizes) are being uploaded by a person named Denis-Carl Robidoux, who built his own version of what is known as a “Gugusse Roller“. This is a system designed to view and transfer and digitize 35mm film prints – you can learn more about it on his own official website here. He built this system with a Raspberry Pi computer and various parts, and the results are incredible – hence the YouTube channel of all his trailer uploads over the last year or so. It’s no surprise that trailers scanned from prints have an entirely different look and feel to them, the same as scanning photographs originally snapped on film. Plus it’s super cool to see all these old trailers that don’t really exist on YouTube (or are only available in bad quality) finally appearing on there for everyone to enjoy. With that said, dive in and start discovering some old trailers. Any favorites discoveries?
