In its second weekend of release, Joss Whedon’s Marvel’s The Avengers raked in yet another $100 million at the US box office. By next Friday its grosses should surpass 2012’s previous champ, The Hunger Games. Running a distant second place, Tim Burton’s $150 million reboot of 1979’s Love at First Bite should be proud that it earned in a single weekend what Disney’s Chimpanzee has earned in four, but appears unlikely to catch up to Disney’s John Carter by the end of its run.

I’ve seen six of the seven previous collaborations between Tim Burton and Johnny Depp (Sweeney Todd continues to elude me) and respect their general track record as a team despite my misgivings over Alice in Wonderland. However, this weekend’s performance implies I wasn’t alone in being repulsed by the trailers.

Strike One was the music selected from old K-Tel disco compliations. I’m not a big fan of trailers augmented with overplayed Top-40 oldies, which don’t score nostalgia points with me as they do my peers and elders. In my ’80s youth, we were used to the occasional ’60s hit here and there in our trailers, frequently even sung by the characters. In the grand scheme, a twenty-year-old song was forgivable. Whoever edited the Dark Shadows trailer was required by the setting to indulge in a musical generation gap twice as wide. This year Curtis Mayfield’s “Super Fly” will celebrate its 40th birthday, and the other tracks weren’t much newer. Disco would be the perfect bait if the film’s target audience were former polyester dance-floor kings over age 60.

I realize the filmmakers chose 1972 as their landing point for a specific purpose, but did the trailer need to sound like every other 1970s spoof ever made? Was disco the only genre of choice for musicians from 1970 to 1979 in the same way that the 1990-1999 Billboard charts were comprised entirely of sad-sack grunge acts? Somehow I don’t remember it that way.

Think about that number again: forty years. Perhaps rose-colored glasses have obscured my hindsight, but I don’t recall ads for the original Fright Night featuring much Bing Crosby, or the Jimmie Dorsey Orchestra luring the kids in to see Jim Carrey’s Once Bitten. I am similarly unconvinced that The Lost Boys would have doubled its grosses if the Saxophone Guy had been replaced by the Andrews Sisters belting out “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy”.

Strike Two was Depp’s portrayal of Eddie Munster as an anachronistic stiff with the self-awareness of Michael Scott. I hope the actual film at least avoids the hackneyed man-out-of-time joke from other movies in which a displaced hero looks at a modern car and thinks it’s a dragon, despite having wheels just like any known wagon from any previous millennium.

Strike Three was this slow-paced exchange of comedy death:

“Are you stoned or something?”

“They tried stoning me, my dear. It did not work.”

This was the exact moment that certified the movie as unwatchable for me. I know from bad puns. This is not how you construct a good bad pun. This…is a bad bad pun. This is humor for viewers who still chortle anytime someone says, “Ya think?” Those same fans are probably skipping theaters and waiting for its release on DVD, which might have been a better first home for this flick. I have no intention of getting past the trailers and finding out objectively whether or not this “joke” is an isolated instance, either in theaters or months later at home.

When it comes to TV-show remakes as self-parody, that quota is already filled on my shelves by The Brady Bunch Movie. I’ll pass.