Fond memories of waiting hours for the "high definition" (360p?) trailer of The Phantom Menace so I should scrub through each frame and watch it dozens of times

Seeing the trailer for Comedian (2002) remains the single most disarmingly delightful trailer experience I've ever had in a theater. Neither the movie itself nor the two men it is about live up to it (the film itself is almost wholly forgettable), but the trailer is absolutely in a league of its own.

The trailer for Dark City (1998) is also excellent, if you forgive some of the affectations of its time. The thing that's really striking about it is its understanding that, maybe, people shouldn't always be talking over the goddamned trailer! I can't emphasize enough how rare it was for a trailer advertising an English-language film in the 90s to have no voiceover at all. Even Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001), whose trailer inexplicably opened with the same music, couldn't help itself. That said, I'm persuaded that trailer design is just one of the important ways in which Dark City resides within the same creative zeitgeist as The Matrix (1999).

In the modern era, the only movie trailer I've seen that I think truly stands up is Inception (2010). It feels like it's telling you the plot of the movie in the way we have come, unfortunately, to expect, but it's actually revealing very little, only exposition that gets covered in the first couple scenes. Instead, it very effectively conveys the vibe and aesthetic of the film. Sure, it (and the film) have now been parodied to death (especially its score, which hilariously isn't composed Hans Zimmer, but is instead a soundalike by Zack Hemsey), and Nolan's puzzlebox films don't quite have the caché they used to, but it's hard to argue with this trailer on a technical level.

It's difficult to think of any game trailers that I've found genuinely affecting in their own right. Marketing for games is impossible to separate from the hype it generates, and it's pretty rare to discover a game from its trailer. The only ones that come to mind are trailers for Jet Set Radio Future (2002 and Fez (2012), and the only reason either of these work is that they sell the aesthetics of those games so openly. It's quite difficult for the cinematic format of a trailer to sell the fundamental gameplay loop of a game, and any game whose trailer is just cutscenes pretending to be a movie is immediately suspect.

Still haven't seen Fincher's Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, but the trailer fucking bangs dude

I'm a sucker for a trailer that follows the Fucked Up Alternate Version/Cover formula. Watchmen didn't turn out to be a great movie, but the trailer definitely convinced me to go read the book.