Japanese Teeth: I switched out the pic because I think this one makes the shift more obvious when compared to the caption. The old pic is
here
◊ if we decide to change it back.
Travis Wells: Does
Elfen Lied really count? The first episode is pretty damn gory. You'd have a better case saying it shifts from horribly violent buckets of blood to fluffy happy friendship (instead of vice versa as the article currently claims), but even that is wrong. It has a lot of bloody episodes all through it.
Sockjuggler: I'd agree. Oh, it's
Mood Whiplash to be sure, but the anime overall is pretty consistent throughout about mixing saccharine moments and love comedy with tragedy, titties and gruesome carnages, from the beginning of the first episode to the end of the thirteenth. Compared to things like Mai-Hime and Evangelion, who took rather dark turns in-season and ended up in a way you'd probably
never predict just from seeing episode one, I'd say it should be removed.
Novium: About Lost, doesn't it sound a bit... I don't know. The part about the "boring script" seems so.... judgmental? It's quite possible that some of the strengths of lost (at least originally, I haven't watched in a few years) was in the original script, like the character interaction and development.
Roy: While the "Giant Nazi Doom Fortress", at the end of Medal of Honor is rather jarring,
Flaktürmes or
Flak Towers really did exsist; dosent explain the gas masked wearing mini-gunners though.
Dangermike: Do sequels really count? I was under the impression that GS was about genre shifts
within a single work. But several examples— Aliens, Riddick— talk about the sequels being different from the first films. Take out? Keep?
BritBllt: I'd say if they're all chapters in a single continuity, keep them. It's all part of the same story, and that story's shifting from genre to genre, it's no different than a television or book series. But if the sequels are
In Name Only or part of an anthology, then they shouldn't count. Like,
Halloween 3 wouldn't be a
Genre Shift from the first two movies because it was a whole new story.
BritBllt: Deleting this one...
- Star Trek, the 2009 film, has a very different tone from every show and movie that came before it in the franchise. It takes itself and the setting much less seriously, cuts down on themes of social progress (there are no female admirals or captains, for example), and includes a lot more slapstick humour. The film also pokes fun at some of the common tropes of the franchise — there is a Red Shirt Lampshade Hanging, for example, and The Kirk himself is both somewhat Flanderized and subverted. It all adds up to a vastly different feel compared to the rest of Star Trek — more of a fun, often funny, ray gun action flick than a World Building Space Opera. Still, most Trek fans loved it (as did most non-fans) — though of course, Your Mileage May Vary.
I'm just not seeing it. It's still a serious space-opera adventure with a
Big Bad threatening to destroy Earth, and while it does have some flandarizing and lampshade hanging, it's still comfortably within the genre range of the rest of the movies. The movies as a whole might count, though: they run the gamut from political thrillers to
Survival Horror to
Fish Out Of Temporal Water comedy.
- I added it because to me, the overall tone of the movie just seemed hugely different. Basically, "it takes itself and the setting much less seriously" is the big part. In this film, everything goes by Rule Of Cool or Rule Of Funny, and established bits of canon — meaning not history, but things like how time travel or the transporters work in the Star Trek universe, which in theory shouldn't change — were thrown out the window whenever this aided the storytelling. This is the only Star Trek work of any sort where you can fly through a black hole to travel through time, by the way — basically, the whole movie felt like it wasn't even trying to take itself seriously, intentionally, because the emphasis was on fun and flashy action, not the normal Star Trek approach of at least somewhat serious and self-consistent storytelling. It's not a serious space-opera adventure, it's a very much not-serious space opera adventure, and having a Big Bad hardly narrows it down all that much, since lots of different genres have them.
- Additionally: This was a re-boot of an existing franchise, intentionally meant to change the way the franchise works. Once the inevitable "Star Trek 2" comes out, it will become an even more obvious break-point in how Star Trek works. So it should definitely count as an example of genre shift — it is a transformation of the franchise from its old form to a new, very different one. The changes in canon history and visual style are just the smallest and least significant parts of this transformation, and the change in the overall feel and approach to storytelling seems much more important.
- Pretty much everything about Rule Of Cool and Rule Of Funny seems to apply more to The Voyage Home than to the new Star Trek movie. It ran almost entirely on Rule Of Cool and Rule Of Funny (Spock nerve-pinching a mohawked punk-rocker for playing his boom box too loud and getting applauded by onlookers, Chekhov's attempts to blend in and his "nuclear wessel" issues), it had the heroes travel through time by flying around the Sun, and addressed it in a funnier and more offhand way ("everybody knows you fly around the Sun, you get a time warp!"), and there really was no Big Bad, just the plot-motivating alien probe. That's why I don't think the new movie really counts as a Genre Shift: it's not that much funnier, darker, or more action-filled than the funniest, darkest or most action-filled previous movie. But the franchise as a whole, including the new movie, could probably count: the only reason I don't think the new movie stands out as an example is just that the movies were already veering all over the place.
- I'll go ahead and try to write up the series as an example, including the new movie.
- The Voyage Home didn't break any already-established rules of how the universe works for the sake of being cool or funny. The way they travelled in time by warping around the sun actually *was* brought up before — there were a couple Original Series episodes where they mentioned doing something similar, so that was not something random invented in an offhand manner, but a case of bringing up an established, if obscure, bit of canon. Also, seriously, at least they didn't fly through a black hole. There was a lot of comedy in Voyage Home, true, but again, it's not just the fact that funny stuff happened in the new movie that makes me think it is a case of this trope, it's the fact that it didn't take itself, or its setting, very seriously. Voyage Home was funny, but the same thing cannot really be said about it, and while cool and funny stuff appeared, neither humour nor Rule Of Cool were used as excuses to come up with random new plot devices or to break established in-universe rules, so I don't think it would be correct to say the movie ran on Rule Of Cool or Rule Of Funny in the same way that the new movie did. I get what you're saying, the movies *were* all over the place, but I still feel strongly that the new movie specifically is a radical departure from *all* the previous works. It's not just "darker" or "funnier," it's a totally different kind of story, where the Enterprise uses Beam Spam, Kirk's hands get huge for no clear reason, transporters send you across half the galaxy instead of being used as a shiny elevator when the plot calls for it, and black holes are literal 2-D holes in space — and where all this is okay, because it's the kind of story where we expect such things to happen. It's more like the difference between, say, Babylon 5 and Duck Dodgers in the 25th Century than the difference between The Motion Picture and The Voyage Home. ... Anyway, I just wanted to say that, but I think the new write-up is pretty awesome.
Captain Crawdad: I took this out:
- Inglourious Basterds begins as a World War Two action/drama, then near the very end it suddenly turns into Alternate History when they kill Hitler and the entire German high command and end the war early.
Just because in the end
they succeed in killing Hitler doesn't mean the genre has shifted.
◊ if we decide to change it back.
