Sunday’s Super Bowl marks the finale of the football season – and the kickoff of the next phase of 3-D entertainment.

At the end of the second quarter of the game, NBC will air an extended trailer for the upcoming animated movie “Monsters vs. Aliens”–in 3-D. More than 125 million pairs of special glasses have been available at soft-drink outlets, enabling fans to see a three-dimensional effect on ordinary television screens. Those same glasses will come in handy when NBC airs a 3-D episode of the spy comedy series “Chuck” at 7 p.m. Monday.

The comedic smackdown “Monsters Vs. Aliens,” which opens nationwide on March 27, is the bruising fullback in a new wave of 3-D movies that also includes the recent “My Bloody Valentine” and the upcoming “Coraline,” “Avatar” and “Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience.”

Believe it or not, 3-D movies have been around for more than 100 years. The gimmick peaked in the ’50s, with genre films such as “House of Wax” and “Creature from Black Lagoon,” as well as 3-D versions of mainstream movies such as “Kiss Me Kate” and “Dial M for Murder.” There was a revival in 1969, when the sex film “The Stewardesses” became the highest grossing 3-D movie of all time. (It was just released on DVD last week.) And there have been periodic attempts to revive interest by grafting 3-D technology onto existing franchises such as “Jaws” and “The Amityville Horror.”

But with the recent development of new polarizing filters, 3-D has been greatly improved,  and Hollywood is betting heavily on the technology to lure audiences back to movie theaters. Jeffrey Katzenberg, whose Dreamworks studio produced “Monsters vs. Aliens” says 3-D will be as game-changing as the advent of sound and color.

I’ve seen enough of these new movies to understand the appeal, but 3-D won’t do much to save Hollywood if the stories aren’t good. “Coraline,” from the director of “The Nightmare Before Christmas,” is imaginative enough to leave an impression on young minds, but few kids are likely to cherish their memories of “Journey to the Center of the Earth” or “Fly Me to the Moon.” And soon 3-D will be making its way onto TV and computer screens–I saw a cheap 3-D webcam at the Consumer Electronics Show this month–so the novelty of 3-D movies will wear off.

And then maybe Hollywood will finally get serious about developing Smell-O-Vision.