the guardian

Join us every week for a trip into the weird and wonderful world of trailers. Whether it’s the first teaser for the latest instalment in your favourite franchise, an obscure preview for a strange indie darling, whether it’s good, bad, ugly or just plain weird – your favourite pop culture baristas are there to tell you what they think.

Do you know how difficult it is to get your hands on trailers for video games before, say, 1995? The short and boring answer is: pretty difficult. If we wanted to present a trailer for one of the Ultima games featuring the Guardian, the series’ long-time antagonist, we’d have to resort to an ultra-low resolution video for Ultima IX, and that’d be in no one’s interest. (Also, we already posted that one last week.) So instead, here’s a very loosely related trailer for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre II, which didn’t just feature one Dennis Hopper, but also Bill Johnson, who would later voice the Guardian. These days, we get the likes of Willem Dafoe and Liam Neeson in video games, but in 1992 we had to make do with the guy who played Leatherface.

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I know I’ve been sorely amiss with respect to new posts. This will be remedied soon – I’ve got four very special posts in the pipeline that should be of interest to anyone reading this who is into film, crackpot cults, milkshakes drunk from across the room, falling frogs and huge penises. (If that last sentence doesn’t get me tons of hits, I don’t know what will. People love falling frogs on the internet.)

However, this is more than just a “Coming soon” – it’s also me telling all of you to read the final interview with Iain Banks (published in The Guardian), the prolific and talented Scottish writer who died on 9 June (in a morbid coincidence also my birthday). Go, now, and read!