While we don’t get the appeal of sitting down for four hours and watching a bunch of cars drive around in a circle, apparently, a lot of other people love it so no surprise that the Daytona 500 has — this year at least — become a mini-Super Bowl of sorts. During yesterday’s broadcast of the race, two short, new trailers for a couple of the summer’s biggest sequels dropped with enough new footage in each to make them worth a moment of your time.
First up, “Cars 2” still failed to get our motors running (get it!?). We still can’t get into the the spy-mission angle of the sequel this time around (the spy jokes feel stale and dated) but this is a billion-dollar-plus earner in merchandising so that’s all the justification needed, apparently. Owen Wilson, the still irritating Larry The Cable Guy, Tony Shalhoub, Cheech Marin, Michael Keaton, Emily Mortimer, Jason Isaacs, Joe Mantegna, Peter Jacobson, Thomas Kretschmann, Eddie Izzard and John Turturro star in the voice cast. “Cars 2” drives into theaters on June 24th.
And then there’s “Transformers: The Dark Of The Moon,” a sequel that thus far has baited fanboy anticipation thanks to a well-edited Super Bowl spot that has made everyone forget that once actual dialogue is spoken everything will be ruined. So the Daytona 500 keeps in that spirit giving Shia LaBeouf one generic action movie line and then stacking the rest with metallic shiny things going smashy crashy everywhere. The world goes dark or something on July 1st. Check out the spots below.