A film's trailer is practically a movie in itself — serialized into traditional trailers, red-band ones, teasers, and teasers of teasers, it creates a condensed version of the film full of fleeting references and heavy-handed setting of the narrative. There's a reason recut trailers are so popular: the tropes used in a trailer can drastically change a film's tone or even the decade in which it was apparently produced. In a multi-part feature (with links on the left of the page), Wired takes a look at what goes into a trailer, charting its history from the studio spectacles of the 1940s to the present-day summer blockbuster. And what, they ask, was the best trailer ever? Hitchcock and Kubrick films get a mention, but at least one top pick is proof that "you can't judge a trailer by its movie:" it's an early ad for The Phantom Menace.