Beyond packaging a film into a concise mini-movie (that can almost never run in excess of 150 seconds), trailers represent their moment of release more fully than nearly any other advertising. Accordingly they are a nostalgia trip of some higher order, the most random preview a compendium of faces, names, music, fonts there’s been little reason to think of in decades. Another experience entirely is watching 35mm scans of the previews, filled as they are with filmic grit, wear and tear, and a luminosity that recalls actually sitting in the theater at the time of release.
So I felt watching a preview for The Perfect Score, a mostly forgotten teen movie I have never seen, have never wanted to see, will probably never see. But the 35mm scan so evoked memories of 2004 in toto that I was, God help me, moved. (Lest this get too embarrassing, let the record show I watched a standard upload and, requisite nostalgia aside, was a night-and-day difference.) YouTube user Denis-Carl Robidoux has uploaded, across two playlists, more than a thousand videos—largely trailers spanning 2000-2007 studio films, but with the occasional trash-bin salvation or ad.
Robidoux’s project has been handled with a Gugusse Roller, which he details in this playlist. We encourage you to trawl through both troves at your heart’s content; in the meantime we’ve embedded some favorites below.