With over seven months to go until Star Wars: The Force Awakens arrives in theaters and inevitably dashes the sky-high expectations of fans, it’s up to the film’s already much-viewed and much-dissected trailer to shoulder the burden of the world’s dreams in the interim. Some of those dreams, it turns out, involve cross-pollinating the venerable space opera franchise with Tony Scott’s indelible 1986 softcore jet porn smash, Top Gun. As illustrated by David Johns’ clever new mashup trailer, Star Wars and Top Gun have a lot of aesthetic similarities, making them a natural pairing. At their core, both are about dudes who don jumpsuits and crash helmets, fly around in souped-up and fuel-inefficient aircraft, and blow shit the hell up as triumphant music plays in the background. Their respective protagonists, Luke and Maverick, could even bond over their respective unresolved “daddy issues.” Top Gun just has homoerotic volleyball games instead of homoerotic lightsaber duels.
What David Johns has done is to take a minute and a half of precious Star Wars: The Force Awakens footage, remove the portentous original audio, and add some choice cuts from the Top Gun soundtrack for maximum kick-ass effect. The trailer starts with slowly-building grandeur, as Harold Faltermeyer’s majestic, guitar-drenched “Top Gun Anthem” accompanies shots of characters zipping around the desert and tentatively fondling such iconic props as R2D2’s dome and Darth Vader’s helmet. But then, when the action really kicks in at about the one-minute mark, it’s time for Kenny Loggins’ cocksure “Danger Zone” to take over. From that point on, it’s all explosions and running away from explosions. Never has the Millennium Falcon looked cooler while doing totally pointless yet impressive barrel rolls.
[via The Daily Dot]