#Blogtober 17 - Trailer(s) of the Week - Elm Street Oddities

Time for a little reel of extended trailers related to the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, as discovered by The Duke Mitchell Film Club.  First of all, who here remembers the Freddy Krueger TV series?  Called Freddy's Nightmares, it ran for a couple of seasons, and was basically an anthology show.  There were a few episodes connected to the Nightmare on Elm Street storyline, including the pilot, but mostly they were unrelated horror stories, with Freddy acting as a greek chorus, basically being this show's Cryptkeeper (although the Tales from the Crypt TV series started after this began.  Hmm, I wonder...).  Now there isn't a full DVD boxset out there; there was only one, three episode DVD released in the UK yonks ago, but you can see a couple of episodes as they are bonus features on the Nightmare on Elm Street complete collection Blu Ray set.  But well before that though, a bunch of episodes got released on VHS in the UK; here's an advert from the time...

Now that's fairly standard, but what's below is something a bit rarer.  See, back in the day of video stores (remember them, eh?  Remember white dog poos too?), they would often get sent promo tapes from the distributors, telling them why buying certain titles from them would be good.  These would boast about the tie-in advertising campaigns, the box office figures, extra stuff that comes with ordering them, basically everything to say why they would make good rental stock.  You might have seen a while ago the one for Terminator 2's US video release, which features Robert Patrick in his non-blinking glory and a very weird double bill of T2 and Drop Dead Fred.  Well, here we have the full, fifteen minute long promo tape for this release of Freddy's Nightmares.  The opening is talking about the marketing campaign itself (I love how they boast it's "even bigger than The Running Man"), whilst the rest is footage from the show.  Man, they manage to make it look goofy as all hell with this choice of clips, wonder how many were going to buy the set before they saw that?  Also, note that at no point do they actually mention that these aren't films, they're TV episodes.  Ah, the old days of VHS, before the concept of a box-set was a thing.  Enjoy!

The other Elm Street Oddity is another video dealer's promo, but one that goes in a different direction.  Now a lot of the studios would send video shops more general trailer tapes too, some to be played on the screens in store, some would be there just to show the shop owners what was being released.  Well, for this April 1986 tape, which was bigging up the VHS release of A Nightmare on Elm Street 2, Warner Home Video decided to go the extra mile, and make a miniature Freddy movie for the tape, A Nightmare on Alperton Lane.  And yes, that's where quite a few video companies had their offices in the UK back in the day, Alperton in North West London, not that far from me.  It's quite well done for a little sketch that was only meant to be seen by video shop managers, with some real effort put into their Freddy make-up and such.  Nice selection of trailers too, including Friday the 13th (not the last time those two franchise would cross paths), a different Wes Craven film Swamp Thing, an all time favourite of mine Theatre of Blood, and the rather intriguing looking Hollywood Ghost Stories.  It says a lot though how much effort was put into this when it wasn't that long since the UK video scene was turned upside down by the Video Nasties business, to be putting that much effort into horror releases shows how much the whole matter had calmed down by then.  So, enjoy part 2 and a half of the Elm Street franchise, A Nightmare on Alperton Lane...