I’m sure some of you saw this yesterday, but the good folks at Vulture askedLouis Pamadon to cut together yet another trailer for Walt Disney's DIS +0.55% Avengers: Age of Ultron, but with a twist. The 90-second trailer is cut and structured like a stereotypical 1990′s action movie trailer, complete with Don LaFontaine/Hal Douglas-type narration and what amounts to a glorified plot summary. The teaser, which is a wonderful bit of loving satire, is labeled as a ”IfAvengers: Age of Ultron Came Out In 1995,” and I would argue the choice of year is no coincidence. That the first peaks at Spectre and Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation debuted in the run-up to the opening weekend of Furious 7 is no coincidence, as those three franchise make up not just three of the bigger tentpole-type franchises around but also something of a “last stand” for old-school practical stunts-and-explosions action cinema that used to be considered an uncontested A-level blockbuster in the 1990′s. But that’s for another day. What I would like to briefly discuss is the first respective teasers for the “first” respective 90′s-era chapters in each series. I am speaking of course of the initial teasers for GoldenEye which opened in November of 1995 and the first Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible film from May of 1996. Those initial teasers basically reinvented the modern action movie trailer and slowly-but-surely changed how trailers for action movies were constructed.

Yes, I  am aware that GoldenEye was actually the 18th 007 adventure. But for all intents-and-purposes, Pierce Brosnan’s entry into the franchise, which came six years after the box office failure of License to Kill left the franchise’s long term future in doubt, was something of a soft reboot back before Hollywood felt the need to retell the origin story every friggin time. Anyway, the initial teaser trailer announced that James Bond was back in movie theaters during the summer of 1995 (attached to Species) showed off Pierce Brosnan in a tuxedo, and then dove headfirst into a 50-second montage of nonstop action and excitement, offering nary a hint of voiceover, plot, or even much in the way of narrative coherence. It was arguably the first trailer to move so quickly that you could barely digest the images.

That’s not a criticism, but it was edited within an inch of its life and made the conventional action movie trailer, full of voiceover exposition, explicit plot points, and long take action sequences, feel downright slug-like by comparison. The James Bond franchise had one shot to reclaim its hold on the popular zeitgeist and make a case for its continued relevance in a world with Die Hardand Batman, and it wasn’t going to take any chances by coming up for air. And it was perhaps the most action-packed and relentlessly breathless action movie trailer you had ever seen. The next prime example of this somewhat new form of trailer construction came not with the second GoldenEye trailer (which was a conventional 1990′s sell with voice over and copious plot reveals), but rather the initial two teasers for Brian DePalma’s Mission: Impossible.

What did audiences need to know about the Paramount release, which at the time was pegged to be the biggest grossing film of the summer (it sounds crazy now, but ID4 was not considered a sure thing even as late as June of 1996) other than that it was an adaptation of the popular ensemble spy action show and that it starred Tom Cruise?  Nothing, which is what Paramount’s marketing department gave them outside of those two facts. The initial Mission: Impossible teaser dropped in late 1995 and didn’t even bother with a single line of dialogue, voice over or otherwise. They merely gave us 55 seconds of Tom Cruise and friends engaged in non-stop action set to Lalo Schifrin’s classic theme song culminating in that climactic “Cruise flies off an exploding helicopter onto a train” bit that was one of the coolest things you had ever seen back then. That final shot of Cruise leaping from the exploding helicopter was the best money shot in a trailer I had ever seen.  But upon seeing the film, my heart sank as I realized that golden money shot was actually the climactic death of the primary villain.

So yes, I’ve been complaining about studios giving away the action finales of their films in the trailers for at least twenty years.