Movie trailers have evolved into works of art unto themselves, and, aside from featuring some of the best editing in Hollywood, they also use music more effectively than 80% of most mainstream films. Coming attractions are part preview, part sales pitch, part music video, and the truly great trailer editors can bring all of those elements together in a rousing package that forces you to turn to your best friend and whisper, “Dude, we HAVE to see that.” And music is a big part of eliciting that reaction from audiences. While some of the more hacky trailer editors re-use the same lame tunes over and over again to pull at your heart-strings or telegraph laughs – Peter Gabriel’s “Solsbury Hill,” Smashmouth’s “All-Star,” and “Kung-Fu Fighting” must NEVER be used in a movie preview ever again – superior trailer craftsmen know that song choice means everything to the emotions they’re trying to convey and, when they get it right, it’s magic.

That’s why we end up buying so much music solely based off what we hear in movie trailers. Ten bucks says if you asked a staffer at Google to compile a list of the most frequently repeated searches of all time, the phrase “what’s the song from the ______ trailer?” would have to be in the top hundred. Movie trailers are amazing venues to show off how cool both old and new songs can be, and 2008's previews were no exceptions. To honor these sterling examples of song selection, here are our favorite songs from movie trailers released in 2008.

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M.I.A., “Paper Planes,” from the Pineapple Express Trailer

This was probably THE most talked-about trailer song of 2008, attracting a write-up in Entertainment Weekly and inspiring countless replays of both the regular and red-band Pineapple Express trailers on YouTube. Sampling The Clash’s “Straight from Hell” and whipping up a repeating chorus of cash register “chings” and gunshots, the song fit the vibe of Pineapple Express to a T, with lyrics ranging from odes to sitting around smoking pot to darker themes of street hustling and survival. And the funniest part is – even though everyone now associates “Paper Planes” with Pineapple Express - the song doesn’t even appear in the movie. That’s how powerful trailer songs can be.

Click to hear all of “Paper Planes”

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The Ting Tings, “Great DJ,” and Sigur Ros “Hoppipolla,” from the Slumdog Millionaire Trailer

Want even more irony? M.I.A., however, does contribute several songs (including “Paper Planes”) to Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, a movie that we’re convinced will be the Juno/Little Miss Sunshine of the 2009 Oscars, but none of those tunes are featured in the trailer. (Funny old world, eh?) But, regardless, we’re still in love with two songs from the Slumdog trailer, which shouldn’t surprise anyone familiar with Boyle’s work. (His use of pop/rock music in Trainspotting and 28 Days Later was damn near virtuoso.) The Ting Tings' “Great DJ” comes in at the 0:37 mark of the Slumdog preview, sounding like The White Stripes on Prozac and making us smile, nod, and sing along to the “Ah, ah, ah-has” - however, be warned, the Tings are the current love-or-hate-em icons of the indie scene - while Sigur Ros, an Icelandic rock band, fades in around 1:11 with the cinematic pianos of “Hoppipolla,” a song that is destined to be painfully overused in lesser trailers and commercials for years to come.

Click to hear all of “Great DJ" and “Hoppipolla”

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Rammstein, "Mein Herz Brennt," from the Hellboy 2: The Golden Army Trailer

You all remember Rammstein, right? Even if you’re not into German industrial death metal, how could you forget the summer of 1998 when America fell in love with a delicate little ditty called “Du Hast,” which had already burned up the Euro charts the previous year? (“Du Hast” was also featured on The Matrix soundtrack.) Sure, we do find Rammstein a little silly, but THE best kick-ass movie trailer music cue in 2008 was unquestionably the German industrialists’ contribution to the second Hellboy 2 preview, in which the overblown opera-rock chords of "Mein Herz Brennt” blast in following an “Oh crap” by Hellboy (around the 1:45 mark), marking the beginning of one of the best-edited trailer action-montages of the year. Granted, if you listen to the song itself, you have to wait until 0:59 to get to the "Hellboy-goes-off" violin cue – wading through a lot of German growling into the microphone for the first 58 seconds – but the rest of the song is so heady, stirring, and bad-ass that it’s worth the wait.

Click to hear all of "Mein Herz Brennt"

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Camille Saint-Saens, “Aquarium” from “The Carnival of the Animals,” from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button Trailer

On the complete other side of the spectrum from Rammstein are the delicate, whimsical pianos of Camille Saint-Saens, a French composer and pianist who flourished at the end of the nineteenth century, which were used so effectively by David Fincher in the first preview for his magic realist take on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. While the Hellboy 2 trailer made us want to stand up and hit something, Saint-Saens’ playful “Aquarium” movement from his well-known “Carnival of the Animals” suite just made us want to sit back and marvel at its beauty, which is exactly the same way we felt about the Benjamin Button trailer, a preview that could easily be called the most gorgeous trailer of 2008.

Click to hear all of "Aquarium"

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Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime,” from the W. Trailer

It’s hard to say that the W. trailer re-introduced us to “Once in a Lifetime” – it’s possibly the most famous song from a very famous band – but the preview for Oliver Stone’s biopic of George W. Bush that makes use of that iconic Talking Heads song stands as perhaps the hands-down BEST pairing of song and subject material in movie trailer history. Watching Josh Brolin as Dubya staring blankly at everyone in his life as David Byrne sings “You may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife, and you may ask yourself, ‘Well, how did I get here?’” – it’s so perfect that it’s borderline genius. The first time we saw the trailer, we re-watched it about 700 times and, sadly, that two-minute-and-four-second trailer ends up being a much, much better film than Oliver Stone’s oddly toothless final product.

Click to hear all of "Once in a Lifetime"

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Smashing Pumpkins, “The Beginning is the End is the Beginning,” and Muse, “Take a Bow,” from the Watchmen Trailers

Watchmen, Zack Snyder’s movie adaptation of the Citizen Kane of comic books, isn’t coming out until 2009, but the two trailers he released in 2008 were so powerful, expertly crafted, and universally drooled over that it’s impossible to talk about 2008 movie trailers without making mention of them. The first trailer opens with Billy Corgan’s sleepy vocals pushing forward a moody anthem that ticks along like a clock, singing about “flesh and blood” and “our darkest hour,” which anyone familiar with Watchmen can tell you are perfect thematic fits for the story. The other aspect that makes “The Beginning is the End is the Beginning” such a sublime choice for Watchmen - which is considered the best comic book ever published - is that the song is essentially a remix of the Pumpkins’ earlier tune “The End is the Beginning is the End,” which appeared on the soundtrack for Batman & Robin – which is considered the worst comic book movie ever made. (How funny is that?) The second Watchmen trailer was equally well-received, in no small part thanks to Muse’s “Take a Bow,” the first track from their 2006 Black Holes and Revelations album (kicks in at 1:21), which builds to a glorious techno-rock crescendo as Matt Bellamy sings about burning in Hell for your sins, which, again, if you’re familiar in Watchmen, couldn’t be more appropriate.

Click to hear all of "The Beginning is the End is the Beginning" and "Take a Bow"

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What do you think? Did we miss some obvious choices for best movie trailer songs of 2008? Can't believe we ignored the power riffs of Audioslave's "Cochise" from the Iron Man trailer? Were there some hidden gems from the Made of Honor preview that slipped our attention?

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