Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight was seen as a vanguard for superhero movies in 2008: a massive box office success that also earned a staggering eight Academy Award nominations and eventually won two. But Nolan’s second Batman adventure wasn’t the first comic-book movie to break through the Oscars’ once-impenetrable ceiling. It wasn’t even the one that did it best.

Before comic-book movies ruled the box office, the genre was littered with one-offs (Howard the Duck, The Rocketeer, The Shadow) and franchises that are already being remade today (Superman, Batman, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles). Warren Beatty’s Dick Tracy was an outlier. A star-packed callback to the glory days of trench-coat-clad crime fighters and a nostalgic confection set to the music of Stephen Sondheim, it was unafraid to not just nod, but fully lean on its roots as a two-dimensional story ripped right from the funny pages.

Now, as it turns 25 years old, Dick Tracy still hasn’t gotten its due—even though it has three Oscars to show for itself.

Based on the Chester Gould comic-strip character of the same name, Dick Tracy imagines a stylized, thirties-era world where men are men and bad guys, well, are kind of gloriously deformed in a way that’s damn hard to ignore. Beatty stars as hero Detective Dick Tracy, who is constantly up to his ears in crime, thanks to a city overrun by literally cartoonish baddies, like rising mob star Alphonse “Big Boy” Caprice (Al Pacino), whose crime syndicate is hell-bent on taking over the city. As Tracy attempts to take down Big Boy and his wacky band of henchmen, he also has to juggle his relationship with the long-suffering Tess Trueheart (Glenne Headly), the appearance of a sass-mouthed orphan (Charlie Korsmo), and the advances of one helluva dangerous dame (Madonna). It’s a classic story, a detective tale, and a comic-strip adventure tied up in a big, colorful bow.

Dick Tracy’s road to the big screen was bumpy, as the property cycled through attached directors (Steven Spielberg, John Landis, Walter Hill), possible stars (Harrison Ford, Richard Gere, Mel Gibson), and even studios (originally optioned by Paramount Pictures, it was made by Disney and released under their Touchstone label) for over a decade. Things turned around once Beatty came on board to direct, produce, and star in the feature, marking only his third turn behind the camera. A hard-core Tracy fan, Beatty was committed to making his film more of an homage to the comic strip than a singular adaptation. He didn’t go for the dark and gritty; he wanted something that looked like what it was, and Beatty’s desire to do just that turned Dick Tracy into one of modern cinema’s best adaptations of the two-dimensional storytelling form.