Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew | Official Trailer

We’ve heard famous songs in trailers before, sure. But “Stairway to Heaven”? Undisputedly one of the best rock songs ever made, Led Zeppelin’s 8-minute opus, released in 1971, has never been licensed for use in a film trailer… until now.

Director Greta Gerwig personally reached out to Robert Plant and Jimmy Page with the request to use their song in the trailer for her new film. It’s an adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ 1955 book The Magician’s Nephew, and Gerwig was convinced that the narrative of “Stairway to Heaven” is “exactly the story of the movie.”

After an opening shot of the wardrobe from The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (The Magician’s Nephew is a prequel to that story), at 0:10 we hear the unmistakable opening guitar arpeggios from “Stairway to Heaven”. Visually we’re meeting our protagonists Polly and Digory, who live in London circa 1900.

These opening guitar phrases are chopped up, leaving space in between for lines of dialogue which introduce us to Uncle Andrew (Daniel Craig), seen through the children’s eyes. The first lyrics we hear are at 0:30, “Ooh, it makes me wonder,” as curious Polly and Digory sneak into Uncle Andrew’s magical laboratory.

As Polly and Digory open the door into the sparkling iridescent laboratory at 0:42, they are accompanied by Jimmy Page’s fanfare-like lead guitar. This trailer’s use of the Zeppelin epic trims out the first six (!) verses and has now skipped ahead to 5:34 in the song (the transition into Jimmy Page’s guitar solo). Some extra chimes are added to the track to highlight key details on-screen: the magic rings at 0:52 and the reminder at 0:54 that Greta Gerwig also directed Barbie.

Digory puts on a magic ring at 1:02. At this point the song is a splitsecond away from the guitar solo, but, instead of letting it flow gracefully into Jimmy Page’s iconic minute-long solo, we cut to a high-pitched ringing-in-the-ears tone. And then at 1:03 in the trailer, the music plays 3 seconds of John Bonham’s drum fill from the middle of the guitar solo. But again, the guitar solo remains elusive, and for the next 25 seconds, as Polly and Digory explore the infinite worlds they are being transported through, the music is sustained orchestral chords and big drums.

Can you imagine being on the music editing team for this trailer, the moment your supervisor tells you, “We’ll give the audience two back-to-back segues leading into Jimmy Page’s iconic guitar solo from “Stairway to Heaven.” But instead, we’re NOT going to play the solo, and I need you to create some music to replace it with.”

No pressure.

In the end, the music they’ve replaced the guitar solo with is standard trailer fare, pretty unremarkable. It does leave space in the sound mix for us to hear Polly and Digory’s voiceover as they come to grips with the multiple universes they’ve discovered.

At 1:30 when we’re seeing a close-up of a glistening silver face, Zeppelin kicks back in, arriving with another ferocious John Bonham drum fill. As Robert Plant begins screaming the last verse of “Stairway to Heaven” at 1:33, we see on screen the words “For The First Time” and yes it is indeed the first time this song has been used in a trailer!

For about 30 seconds, the epic climax of “Stairway to Heaven” is all we hear, with only a few details from the visuals making their way into the sound mix, notably, Digory’s scream at 1:36, and the shattering of windows at 1:48, timed to align on the beat with Bonham’s crash cymbals. Note that this window-smashing moment is a music edit as well, they’ve cut out 4 lines from this verse, going from “there walks a lady we all know” right to “when all are one and one is all”. The “lady we all know” shown here is the White Witch (played by Emma Mackey), villain of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, and in this scene she’s out to terrorize the jolly streets of London town.

At 2:00 the music disappears into a cloud of reverb, and we see our protagonists watch as Aslan sings a new world into existence. It’s a heavenly scene, full of stars, so, you guessed it, this is the moment chosen for us to hear Plant sing (unaccompanied), “and she’s buying a stairway to heaven.” And although that lyric is the actual end of the song, in this trailer, the music isn’t done yet because when Aslan roars (at 2:18), turning from celestial body into flesh and blood lion, at last we launch into Jimmy Page’s guitar solo (for 10 seconds).

It’s an epic song to use in a trailer, and while we could sit here all day and agonize over the snippets of rock and roll history that the editors assigned to the cutting room floor, at the end of the day, this edit serves the story very well. They’ve kept key moments from the song, the music and lyrics align with the action on screen, and the edit stays true to the patient slow buildup from mellow to raucous that is “Stairway to Heaven.”

Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew is in theatres February 12.

— Jack Hui Litster