Or at least it was. The moment is easier to see now that it has ebbed. Many of the films it produced seemed to imagine themselves as barrier-breaking productions, landmarks like “In the Heat of the Night.” In reality, they have come to feel more like a niche genre of their own, the way spaghetti westerns or blaxploitation films do — unique products of a particular cultural moment that now require context and explanation to understand. They remind me, more than anything, of 1980s action flicks, a genre whose tropes and ideologies feel almost comically redolent of a specific era, whether the films are good or so-bad-they’re-good. This was the decade of Sylvester Stallone’s going back to Vietnam to try to win the war for Reagan’s America in “Rambo: First Blood Part II,” the decade of flat-topped martial-arts commandos, good cops who don’t play by the rules, gunshots that make cars explode, brawny henchmen machine-gunned by the dozens. But by the time we reached the 1993 meta-action-comedy “Last Action Hero” — an irony-laden genre sendup in which a boy magically gets to become the sidekick to a fictional hero played by Arnold Schwarzenegger — you could hear the death knell of the kinds of films Schwarzenegger and Stallone and Jean-Claude Van Damme had been making for years.