Twenty years ago, this teaser trailer was released:

It is difficult to imagine a world where the finished product of Peter Jackson and friends hasn’t been realized.  How odd to have a voice-over by someone not from the movie! How odd to see a trailer to this movie without Howard Shore’s score bringing it to life!  How odd to witness scenes from later movies in the trailer mostly promising the first!  How odd to hear so little dialogue from the most quoted movie series of my lifetime!  And yet here we are, twenty years later.

Here’s a short article from twenty years ago that The Guardian posted about the trailer.  It really was another world back then.