The Original Rush Hour Trailer is Gloriously 90’s and Surprisingly Prescient
Bask in the nostalgia. Embrace the ball busting. And remember: Never touch a black man’s radio.
We’ve all felt it. Our shoulders tighten, toes begin to tap, eyes darting a little more quickly with each passing thumbnail. It’s the “what to watch” scroll. Seconds turn into minutes turn into deep meditations on the transient nature of life as rows of content flit past — Popular on Netflix, Just Added, Critically Acclaimed, Blockbuster Collections, Gems for You, Irreverent TV Comedies, Provocative Docuseries, Relentless Crime Dramas, 90-Minute Movies (becoming a more likely choice by the second).
The anxiety of deciding what to watch is an epidemic. But a mirror experience exists, equal and opposite in its effect on the psyche: The post-watch browse. As opposed to the pre-watch search, the post-watch browse is aimless, open-ended, and fail-proof. This is the browsing experience after you’ve finished watching the thing you pulled your hair out deciding to watch earlier. The post-watch browse asks, “What exists here? What’s even on the menu?” Instead of narrowing down choices to find a single one, the post-watch browse is at its best when it’s opening up entire new universes of possibilities. “Epic Anime Sagas? Seems like such an addicting genre. How ‘bout a trailer?”
Post-watch browsing is heavy on trailer consumption. It’s like going to the grocery store on a full stomach. If you’re lucky you’ll find yourself in the hot sauce section thinking, “Truffle-infused Thai Chili and Lime Sriracha? Who knew?” Post-watch browsing unveils limitless potential futures, unfolding like a tesseract of timelines. (The beauty, of course, is that you don’t need to commit to any of them.) It also provides portals into the past. Temporary tours of the artistic manifestations of earlier cultures. It’s the uplifting counterpoint to the pre-watch search, an elixir for our anxieties.
It was late. I had just finished an episode of Succession and was post-watch browsing on HBO, looking for something to wash the elitist narcissism off my brain before going to bed.
Nick Cage in One Man Army? He takes a samurai sword to Pakistan on a hunt for Bin Laden? On paper it’s got legs. The trailer was less convincing.
The Rush Hour collection came into view. In my 12:30am mental haze, I wondered if the original Rush Hour even has a trailer, it being so old and all. “Of course it does,” my inner voice corrected me, “It wasn’t made in the 1930’s.” Following this whim, I found the Trailer button and clicked it. What transpired over the next 150 seconds was a glorious tour of late 90’s movie trailer culture, and, when looked at from the right angle, a wisdom text, bottled and preserved, tossed to sea, waiting to be uncorked by the future-people of the 2020’s as they comb the beaches of the internet.
The middle of my wide-screen television filled with lit pixels, the sides remaining a dormant black. The trailer was shot in 1:1*, and the equilateral dimensions caused a faint but familiar squeezing sensation on my peripheral vision. “Would the epigenetic mutations that have shaped my ocular architecture have given me taller, more circular eyes had we never made the transition to wide screen TVs?” I thought. Never mind.
The trailer immediately established the stakes of the plot.
“If you want the girl back alive, listen and do not talk,” said a Chinese gangster with a leather jacket and a bleached blonde buzz cut. “The drop will be made tonight. 11pm. The amount will be 50 million dollar.”
“50 million dollars?! Man, who you think you kidnapped? Chelsea Clinton?!” Chris Tucker squawked back through a corded landline phone.
For those keeping score, only 15 seconds in and we have a trailer shot in 1:1 dimensions, a Chelsea Clinton reference, and a corded landline telephone. Bask in the ‘90s-ness.
That’s when the voiceover came on. You know the one I’m talking about. It’s the one that became a trope and would only ever be used ironically now. The one that always starts with “In a world…”. So the “In a world…” Guy came on over clips of Tucker getting chided by his jowly LAPD boss, and proceeded to unpack the plot in that oh-so-familiar, grumbly baritone that sounds like Marb Reds and Coca-Cola had a baby.
At this point the trailer had communicated this much: Chris Tucker is supposed be rescuing the kidnapped daughter of a Chinese Government official, but he’s fucking up, and his colleagues aren’t happy about it. So, the kidnapped girl’s father is sending over his top man from China to help out.
That’s when the trailer cut to an airplane parked on the tarmac of LAX. As the plane door opened and its stairs unfurled toward the camera, my speakers exploded with a massive “GOOOONNNNGGG!!!” The sound effect that became an audio avatar for all of Asia crashed out from my TV, rippled across the room, through my brain, vibrating loose myriad competing emotions — shame, anger, hilarity, hunger. Jackie Chan stepped into the plane’s doorway.
A montage of the mismatched duo unfolded from there: Tucker gives Chan his now-iconic line “Don’t you ever touch a black man’s radio, boi!” after Chan turns the dial to a station playing the Beach Boys; Chan mishandles a dap; the two compare kung fu moves; “In a world…” Guy continues to spoon-feed the viewer, letting us know that these are “two cops with nothing in common, except the case they can’t walk away from.”
The montage wrapped with Tucker and Chan dance-stepping down the street in sync, arms raised to the sky, akimbo, firing off finger guns like two Yosemite Sams fresh off a successful train robbery. Buddy cops!
The giant cell phones, the loud and simplistic text graphics, the hyper-exaggerated fight sounds, and the oversized-suits of it all is pure, uncut 90’s. It creates a time-capsule effect that’s reason enough to watch this trailer anytime you want a hit of 1998 nostalgia. But it’s the lightness of spirit oozing from this trailer that transcends eras. Rush Hour was unburdened by the weight the subsequent twenty-plus years have placed on popular culture, and its simple naïveté is refreshing.
Is the trailer cringe-free? No (e.g. the massive gong sound that introduces Jackie Chan). Could you make this movie, exactly the same in 2022? Probably not. But looking back at just the trailer from the somewhat more woke America we inhabit now, it’s surprisingly prescient.
Rush Hour had BIPOC leads, and supporting actors. It showed the ineptitude possible within the higher ranks of any bureaucracy, and it demonstrated the power of a common cause to unite people from disparate cultures. All this, draped over a through-line of healthy, cross-cultural ball busting (not the spiked-bat variety you see in YouTube comments).
From a more eternal vantage point, Rush Hour, in just the two-minute-and-thirty-second trailer, shows the fundamental commonalities between all people, even if we’re from opposite corners of the globe. (Cue “In a world…” Guy: “The fastest hands in the east, meet the biggest mouth in the west.”) We all share an instinct to protect helpless kids, especially cute ones, a self-consciousness when we’re in a foreign setting, and an ever-shifting internal dance between ego, hierarchy, duty, and autonomy. And lord knows we all love jokes cracked in the middle of fight scenes. This is something the human citizens of New Muskland, Mars in 2275 will still, no doubt, cherish.
The Rush Hour trailer is from a time before Twitter, a time when, for Americans, China still seemed far, far away — only connected to the US by long distance phone calls on corded landlines and overnight flights that you could board without going through security. It’s a gleaming snapshot of the late 1990’s, that after 25 (or so) years has proven to be both extremely of its time, and well ahead of it.
*This square version of the trailer is on HBO but not, apparently, on YouTube.
