TVLand Launches Huge Movie Trailer Database

Is there ever such a thing as too much movie nostalgia? Perhaps when you start singing the "Saint Elmo's Fire" theme in the middle of a board meeting, but I'd bet you that at least a couple of people would start singing along. TVLand.com has launched a new tool to allow you to relive the movies of yesteryear -- a database of almost 1,000 movie trailers. It's available at http://blogs.tvland.com/movie_database/.

When you come to the page you'll see a trailer immediately starts playing -- in my case it was one of the Austin Powers movies but I don't know if that's random. You can browse the trailers by genre or by decade, or go through them alphabetically.

When I was growing up I watched a lot of marginal Disney movies. Like Gus and Unidentified Flying Oddball. Alas, the TVLand trailers database didn't have either of those, but it did have Attack of the Killer Tomatoes, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, and True Grit.

Many of the trailers are 30 second affairs that start playing as soon as you visit their pages, but others are longer -- True Grit is over 3 minutes and 30 seconds long. (Note there's an icon to make the trailers play full-screen if you don't like the small in-page embeds.) Trailers are accompanied by a cast listing and studio information as well as information and commentary about the movie -- occasionally snarky commentary. (True Grit: "Wayne's casual charisma is infinitely more effective than the mannered method acting of Kim Darby and the floundering non-acting of poor Glen Campbell.")

After watching all these movie trailers, you might find yourself actually wanting to watch full-length versions of some of these movies. Unfortunately TVLand's site doesn't offer much in the line of external links to video markets -- for that you'd be best off going to The Internet Movie Database at http://www.imdb.com/ .