The weird thing? That trailer wasn’t released by the film’s studio—Disney—it was released by a guy named Michael D. Sellers . An independent filmmaker and longtime fan of John Carter creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, Sellers thought that the trailers released for the film had been a bit lackluster, and after the movie’s Super Bowl trailer proved equally disappointing, he decided to make his own.

Back in early 2012, the fan buzz around the upcoming film John Carter was, well, not great. It had a promising director in Andrew Stanton and what looked like great special effects, but thanks to some of the early teasers hopes weren’t high. Then, a new trailer for the film appeared online and soon enough people started getting excited about the new Taylor Kitsch vehicle.

“Fans were suffering through the promotion, but held out hope that the Super Bowl Ad was going to be a big moment where Disney started getting it right,” Sellers told Wired. “That night, fueled by frustration and perhaps a few margaritas, my buddy Mark Linthicum and I decided to download everything Disney had put out to date and make our trailer.”

His trailer spread like wildfire and eventually hit nearly a quarter-million views, at least one of which came from Stanton himself, who tweeted “Great fan trailer! They get it!” The trailer was also honored with headlines like “Fan-Made Trailer for ‘John Carter’ Could Be Better Than Official One” and “A Fan-Made Trailer For John Carter Sells The Movie Better Than Any Other Trailer So Far…”

It was a hit for Sellers, who went on to write a book—John Carter and the Gods of Hollywood—about his experiences with the film. But really it was just the latest piece in the burgeoning art of fan-made trailers—a movement that includes supercuts, remixes, mash-ups, the relatively new art of “Gritty Reboots” and voice-overed versions that pinpoint the ludicrous things that happen in the trailers themselves. And one where the works created by the audience often turn out better than the source material.

— Michael D. Sellers, creator of John Carter fan trailer ‘That night, fueled by frustration and perhaps a few margaritas, my buddy Mark Linthicum and I decided to download everything Disney had put out to date and make our trailer.’

As with most things on the internet, it’s hard to pinpoint exactly where, when or how the first remixed movie came into existence, or whether remixes preceded supercuts, or vice versa, and so forth. But there are definitely forerunners. Some point to a 2003 video known as “Kill Christ,” a brutally funny remixing of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill and Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ.

“There’s a lot of content around this that people like and I would probably go back to probably the first one in my memory which is ‘Shining,'” said Mitch Rotter, head of programming for Break Media, which launched its own Honest Trailers YouTube series in February 2012. “It was really funny and it was viral.” The 2005 cut, which makes Stanley Kubrick’s horror flick The Shining sound like a quirky family comedy, was made by Robert Ryang for a video competition put on by the New York chapter of the Association of Independent Creative Editors and eventually garnered Ryang a write-up in The New York Times.

Putting a new spin on old trailers has taken on whole new meanings in the last few years. Powered by YouTube, easy and affordable editing software, and the proliferation of teasers released online by studios, fans and spoofers have been releasing heaps of brilliant interpretations on the traditional trailer format. There are piss-taking projects like Honest Trailers and Literal Trailers, which point out the hyperbole in a lot of movie promos; those done in the style of the Shining remix, which recut trailers to make them different than their actual genre (comedies become horror flicks, Twilight becomes Brokeback Mountain, etc.); and supercuts, which collect every instance of a certain kind of cinematic moment (every “dude” in The Big Lebowski, say) into one video.

And that’s just the beginning. Take, for example, The Avengers. Do a simple YouTube search for “The Avengers trailer” and the first results should be the official trailers released by Marvel. Scroll down, however, and before you even click to Page 2 of the results you’ll find an Honest Trailer, an Inception-style remix trailer, a “Justice League vs. The Avengers” fan clip, and a parody for an Avengers videogame — all with thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of views. The next page is even more of the same — right down to a “Sweded” version and — because Rule 34 is always in effect — a porn parody (640,000 views and counting).

“I love the democratization of creativity that has happened in this era — I do not accept the notion that someone my age is at any disadvantage technically at all,” said Sellers, who placed himself in the same age bracket as John Malkovich. “It’s all there, at everyone’s fingertips, and as long as you remain curious and like learning new things, I don’t see any reason to fall behind or become irrelevant.”

It’s a phenomenon that strikes a populist chord, especially when every new fan trailer or remix that strikes a chord has the potential to inspire new video memes and subgenres, or even a new artform. (See: The supercut of movie clips edited to sing Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believin'” by the creator of “Don Draper Says ‘What?’“) Plus, every fan has a favorite—or, for that matter, highly disliked—movie they want to talk about with others. Now they can just do it with embeddable case-in-point videos.

“Within, and I say this broadly, a fanboy or fangirl community, people love to say, ‘I didn’t like this or I did like that or “Oh you thought the same thing too?”‘ Rotter said. “It’s kind of a rallying point; we’ve all had late-night coffee house or bar drinks talking about the merit of The Godfather vs. Goodfellas… so it’s just something everybody identifies with.”

And now that studios seem to be warming to the fact they can take ad revenue from YouTube clips with their content rather than ask that they be taken down—and that we live in a post-BuzzFeed world where there’s innumerable places on the web looking for smart embeddable videos—the remix trend shows little to no signs of dying down. Toby Turner, the actor/comedian behind the Literal Trailers series, which does to movie trailers what had previously been done to “Total Eclipse of the Heart” and Tears for Fears, has gotten some 64 million views on his 14 movie trailers and has even adapted his style to make literal versions of TV trailers and videogame trailers.

“I think online audiences are very plugged in and aware of what’s going on with pop culture, so you have to find a way to stay relevant. We always try to get a literal [trailer] done for a bit movie the same week it comes out,” Turner told Wired. “I hire a lot of my friends and I want us to all be able to avoid getting a desk job.”

And that’s a distinct possibility. Sellers mentioned that he got a couple job inquiries after his John Carter trailer went online, and mOcean studio head Michael McIntyre—interviewed in this month’s issue of Wired—mentioned online portals as a place to scope new talent: “They’re doing it almost for free out there,” he said. “Let’s bring them to Hollywood and ruin them, break their hearts.”

Check out some of the best trailer remixes et cetera in the gallery above.