I recently reacted to the trailer for the upcoming Super Mario Bros. movie. In short, the single-frame poster depicting a vast Mushroom Kingdom over Mario's shoulder succeeded in raising my anticipation, while the trailer itself disillusioned and dispirited me. A month later, the second trailer did more of the same. Aside from the questionable casting, there was a heavy feeling the film was "trying too hard" to be a "mainstream" "American" "movie."

But next, a continuous one-minute clip from the film was released on its own: Mario wandering through a bustling Mushroom Kingdom plaza on the way to Peach's Castle. Toads looked like Toads. They sounded more varied, more natural, and more akin to their in-game counterparts than the so-far-universally-screamy and barely-if-at-all pitch-shifted Keegan Michael-Key. Manifest artifacts and signs resembled in-game items and artwork. The orchestral music was a medley that felt like flipping through a back-catalogue of Mario's titles as adjacent shots' moods flipped by. In other words, plenty of evidence of care and conscious choice around the task of creating the film.

It felt like it still earned some of the nitpicking I'd been doing, but there was a real difference there. I felt eager to critique the artistic choices, challenged to do so – not merely called to duty with the slumped shoulders the trailers had left me with. The good news became that perhaps the total package of the movie would be the deserved celebration of Mario's history after all.

That left the realization that it would have been better if the one-minute clip had been released alone, and the trailers hadn't been released at all.  That the trailers may actually have damaged the movie's reputation before it released.

That realization felt like the fruit of a larger problem that's been evolving on its own. "The blockbuster Hollywood trailer" was readily parodyable two decades ago with its interspersed deeply-announced sentence fragments and templated pacing. And it's not a bad thing to be lightheartedly mockable. But like a good handful of things that were once lightheartedly mockable, it's grown past dreary, even beyond soulless, all the way to this point of active damage.

Star Trek is the other name that comes to mind when reflecting on this. I'd say "modern Star Trek" doesn't deserve its embedded name, so in this case there seems little mismatch between the soulless trailers and the soulless material, but the trailers still qualify as instances of said pattern.

The tragedy here pertains to the upcoming season of Picard. The first season was what finally convinced me that Star Trek had ended in 2005, and the second served simply as an opportunity to ignore the shows and instead dwell among the reminiscences of longtime fans left with naught but to seek mutual conversation of the lost values they still mutually carried.

However, in a rare turn, the upcoming third season, has an underdog showrunner named Terry Matalas who once worked on DS9, and the enthusiastic endorsement of Robert Meyer Burnett, a lifelong fan, commentator, and the producer of the TNG Blu-rays. He insists this is an exception. I supposed I was essentially equipped to attempt to clear my mental palate of modern damage done, pretend I hadn't seen the TNG cast since Braga and Berman's final gestures, and dare to suspend belief one more time.

But the trailers.

Of course, given this one additional chance to reassure the long-abandoned audience with one of the world's most missed full casts, they offer the same old clumsily cookie-cut assemblage.

Picard whispering "I need a ship." Whispering "what is it that's out there?" Action shots. Shots of villains laughing. Lines that tell us little. The same music, presumably written by the same person who writes the music for all the trailers for everything now, with the same single note on the right-hand side of the piano hitting simultaneously with the same "bass hit" sound effect, eventually crescendoing into the same metal objects hitting the same quarter-note triplets into the same cut to black.

I suppose what's astonishing about all of this is the lack of originality. Or – no – the feeling that the lack of originality implies the lack of confidence in core values, or even the lack of values themselves.

Nintendo has values. Star Trek has values. Timeless, cherishable movies, shows, books, plays, have conviction that "this thing, which may be hard to say in words, is worth dwelling on, expressing, doing this way and not that way, a little more like this, a little less like that; take this into account, take that out of account." And trailer after trailer that just looks like the previous trailer seems to mean that kind of operation must some time ago have broken down and stopped.

The world of media has changed, in case the studios haven't noticed. Everyone has an imagination, and now practically everyone can make a movie – not just major studios. Individuals who crave proper fiction are, presumably, going to note they have options.