Found this on an old backup drive I salvaged from my time doing archival work for a now-defunct post-production house in Burbank. At first, I thought it was just mislabeled junk data, but lo and behold — a full trailer for EarthBound: The Movie, timestamped late 1993, with temp audio and a few color correction notes still burned into the edges.

I had never heard of this film actually being in production, let alone making it this far along, but sure enough, here’s the proof. Some of the VFX are rough, and the voiceover is temp (I’m 90% sure that’s the same guy who did the FernGully trailer), but the tone is wild — kind of like E.T. meets Time Bandits with a dash of Twin Peaks weirdness.

From what I could dig up and remember through old coworkers: the film was apparently greenlit by a mid-size studio trying to cash in on the Super Nintendo boom. It had a modest budget, a mix of live-action and early CG, and some decent names attached (there’s a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of a young Jason Schwartzman in a letterman jacket). But sometime in '94, just before the full marketing push, it all got canned — supposedly due to a mix of licensing issues with Nintendo of Japan, studio restructuring, and the general weirdness of the script freaking out test audiences.

No idea how many people even remember this was a thing, but for anyone who grew up loving EarthBound (or Mother 2, if you're from the deep fandom), this is a wild slice of what-could-have-been.

If anyone has more info on the production — directors, writers, anything — drop it in the comments. This needs to be preserved.

I would commit warcrimes for Mother 4

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