New Star Wars: The Force Awakens footage unveiled in TV trailer

A raft of new footage has been revealed in both a Japanese trailer and a new TV spot. Here's what we learnt.

Hans Solo — Harrison Ford — in a scene from the newly released trailer for television.

Anyone who's been paying attention to the trickle of Star Wars: The Force Awakens footage released thus far — and plenty of people have been paying attention, indeed — would, by now, have a pretty good grasp of what to expect.

Which is why we all understood when director J J Abrams promised that enough was enough, that the very loud, very proud release — live, half-time, at a football match — of a "final" official trailer last month would be the last thing we would see before the film's December 17 UAE release. Some uber-geeks even mashed the existing three-and-a-half clips into a "super-cut", which has attracted 1.7 millions views and counting, and many have decreed the best of the bunch.

But there’s more.

First came the surprise release of a Japanese trailer last week, supposedly to stoke excitement in the Far East market (as if the rest of the world wouldn’t be watching and the Japanese don’t have YouTube).

A total of seven unseen nuggets of footage emerged, including a beautiful shot of flying spaceships that quotes Apocalypse Now, a scene showing heroine Rey (Daisy Ridley) held captive by baddy Kylo Ren, another proving cute robot BB-8 can speak — and a clip showing once and for all that C3PO is definitely back.

If that wasn’t enough, just moments after the world’s gasping fanboys had regained their breath, another surprise trailer emerged, this time back home in the United States. This new “official TV spot” shows Han Solo hanging out on an ice planet, swooping spaceships, and what looks like Rey piloting the Millennium Falcon.

With fewer than 40 days to go, surely there’s nothing more to come out before December 17? Then again, we’ve said that before.