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" You birds have a hundred thousand bad drawings in you; start getting rid of them now."
— Chuck Jones, quoting one of his art school instructors.
" Not since the British raided Cologne had so many bombs landed in such a small space in such a short time."
They say that you have to do bad work before you can do good work. Not just one piece of bad work, but tons of it, some so bad that it puts The Eye of Argon to shame.
Whether it's fan fiction or original published work, some really bad stories have been written (this goes for other art forms too, sometimes just as badly). And even though you have to do bad work before you can do good work, the bad work still exists, and the creator has to deal with it. Sometimes it's published to wither and die on its own; most of the time, it isn't.
If the creator tries to erase any trace of its existence, shies away from it, moves on to the next question when it's brought up, or otherwise just tells people not to care about it, it's an Old Shame.
One of the leading causes of Dead Fic: authors express intent to finish their old work, read through it as a refresher, and can't get past the first chapter because of how bad they think it is. In fact, the vast majority of fan fiction in general becomes this after the author gains some age and perspective. Just one look at the Troper Tales section will confirm this. This is common place at the start of someones fan fic writing career, usually ending up with countless Mary Sues due to the author wanting to write a really good fight scene or really interesting plot, however this eventually ends up with the story having many plot holes and forgotten plot points. as the writer gets better and looks back, they cringe as they realize how bad they were and often want to erase all memory of it.
Compare Creator Backlash, where the work in question gained popularity but earned the ire of their creators anyway. See also Ham And Cheese, where an individual in a movie he/she knows will at some point become Old Shame decides to have fun with it, and Took The Bad Film Seriously, where an individual doesn't even seem to realize the movie is awful, and gives all they have. The motivation behind many an Orwellian Editor. Compare Grow The Beard. I Was Young And Needed The Money is an extreme example. Generally the opposite of First Installment Wins.
Can be the source of Never Live It Down.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- The original Suzumiya Haruhi manga, based on the light novels and written before the highly successful anime, was disowned by its publisher, most records of its existence erased — they didn't even try to capitalize on the series' newfound immense popularity from 2006 on by bringing it back. Instead, another manga was commissioned to another author in order to capitalize the phenomenon. It's said that the first author did some Hentai Doujinshi about the very same series he was drawing, and firing him and disowning his work was the only way the publishers got to manage the affair.
- It was also because the artwork for that manga was terrible. Just type "original haruhi manga" in Google images, click the fourth one and see for yourself.
- Referenced in Excel Saga: In the opening to one episode, the production staff of the show confront Rikdo Koshi (the writer of the original manga) and toss down several doujinshi in front of him, causing him significant embarrassment. Those doujinshi are actual ones Koshi wrote before he did Excel Saga. Guess what the plot of that episode is based on?
- The Beach Episode of Sailor Moon R seems to have been disowned, not even appearing on the "uncut" English boxset. Their excuse was that Takeuchi Naoko hadn't liked the episode anyway. Then again, who did? Dinosaurs, people...
- Similarly, Mobile Suit Gundam is famous for having a "lost episode" which was removed from all home releases at the request of Yoshiyuki Tomino, who felt it wasn't up to the standard of the rest of the series. People who have seen the episode are split on the issue
 . Ironically, that episode is tremendously popular in Gundam video games, with entire stages revolving around it and the episode's one-shot villain becoming a (sometimes major) playable character.
- The Japanese producers of Pokemon seem to like to pretend that "Electric Soldier Porygon" never existed. This is the infamous episode that featured flashing colors, causing over 800 viewers to go to the hospital with seizures. When news broke of the story in Japan, they aired the same clip again, sending even more people to the hospital. It was an extremely embarrassing event that caused massive problems in the anime industry in general, as apparently something like this could have happened at any time in the previous decade due to the use of "strobe light" animation techniques, they just didn't pay it heed until then. It also nearly killed the franchise. Of course they want no reminders of it and that includes Porygon itself. Note that no major characters in the games use Porygon either (although that may just be because Porygon is supposed to be rare). What's particularly bad about it is that the cause of the seizures wasn't Porygon at all—the cause was the weapons used by an antivirus program (that looked first like an ambulance, then transformed into a cross between an X-Wing and a syringe), which launched explosive missiles: for some insane reason they decided to make explosions in cyberspace flash red and blue, and the antivirus was the cause of all the explosions in cyberspace.
- Yuki Kaori had an entertaining way of describing her first published manga (a one shot about vampires): "I wrote this story while I was still dumb- I mean young." She laughs at its narmfullness now.
- In-universe example: When Christine presents Leda Zeff a copy of her first published work to autograph, Leda's reaction is something akin to a brief Heroic BSOD, followed by her putting on the puppy dog eyes to persuade Christine to instead Kill It With Fire.
- The title of the third chapter of Axis Powers Hetalia (entitled G-R Nonaggression Pact?) might seem strange, as Russia barely shows up (except to break England's cursed chair) and there is no pact depicted. It turns out that the original opening to the webcomic DID depict it and the pages were removed by Hidekaz Himaruya, as Unfortunate Implications were rife in them with him either not having done the research or having used a terrible source for information on Germany and Russia's pre-WWII relationship and the conditions of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Needless to say, he rectified part of the problem in a later chapter and finally depicted the pact, but once American fandom found the original deleted strips and scanlated them? You can bet the memory will be coming back to haunt him, if the Internet Backdraft between German and Russian fans is to judge.
- Another set of strips titled "Italy Scribbles" were purged from the site in 2008, due to the fact that they contained sexual content involving France, Spain, and the child version of Italy. Though France and Spain back down before they cross the Moral Event Horizon, their overall behavior in the comic shocked fans when these strips were also recovered and scanlated.
Comic Books
- Even Tintin creator Herge has a couple. The first, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, is ripped off wholesale from a single book condemning the Communist regime. The second, Tintin in the Congo, is flabbergastingly racist and caused a furor in the UK when it was reprinted. Tintin's psychotic maiming of wildlife (blowing up a rhinoceros with a drilled hole and a stick of dynamite) is pretty hard to take as well. Herge recognised this in retrospect and begged for them to be left out of print. Unlike the Soviet adventure, Tintin in The Congo has been published in color. The rhinoceros was spared in the Scandinavian edition and the English colour edition. 'Shooting Star' had the Jewish American villains (the comic was created during the Nazi occupation of Belgium) become generic villains, and the terrorist attack in 'Land of Black Gold' vanishes altogether. (Although in the latter case it was because it was no longer topical, not because there was anything shameful about the way he portrayed the scenes.)
- In another subversion, Scott Adams released a series of Dilbert strips that are really contrived to give Dogbert an arch-nemesis named Bingo the Cow Herding Dog in order to give Hollywood some material to work with, and it would have turned the strip into something only other cartoonists like. This was during strip's early years that focus more on Dilbert's antics at home than at work. You can read them here.
- In a twentieth anniversary collection, Scott Adams included some comics he wrote for Dilbert as practice before trying to find a syndicate. Before listing the examples, Adams wrote "At the time, I thought puns were the highest form of humor. Forgive me."
- Charles M. Schulz frequently said he was somewhat embarrassed by the first few years of Peanuts. As a result, several hundred strips from the early 1950s were never reprinted in book form during his lifetime, only seeing the light of day via Fantagraphics' Complete Peanuts series. They're not so bad (although the term "fuss-budget" doesn't get any funnier on the 100th use), but the characters are less well-defined and Snoopy is dull.
- The 1930s Mickey Mouse comics count as this, since many of them contain racist stereotypes, Mickey attempting suicide, and other themes contrary to the image of Mickey Mouse today. Because the comics themselves were believed to be in the public domain, Eternity Comics, an independent company not affiliated with Disney, attempted to anthologize "The Uncensored Mouse" in comic-book format in 1989 without permission from Disney, doing everything they could to prevent a lawsuit (using all-black covers, shrink-wrapping them so nobody would flip through the books, acknowledging Disney's rights in the copyright page, etc.). They got shut down anyway, because even if they comics were in the public domain (which is questionable), the characters weren't.
- Jhonen Vasquez, author of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, Squee, and co-creator of Invader Zim put out a single-issue "throwaway" comic called the Bad Art Collection, which was exactly what it says on the cover. When someone brought a copy to a signing event at a convention he responded with his usual good grace and humour; and commented, laughingly, "Oh my god, someone actually bought this thing," while signing it. According to Vasquez, the origin of the collection was him writing the cartoons back in school in order to get people to stop bugging him to draw for them.
- Mexican cartoonist Rius published many comic books in the 60-70s. Being a firm believer in Marxism, many of them are dedicated to socialism/communism and prophesized the fall of capitalism. One of the most famous examples of this is the book he made under orders of the Cuban government about the Cuban Revolution. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, he admitted that he had to eat his own words and that he never drew anything negative about the socialist states of the time because, in his own words: "Didn't want to provide ammunition for the Imperialism."
- For a long time this was the attitude Mark Millar took towards a collection of early strips he wrote for Sonic The Comic in the nineties, insisting that he only wrote them for the money to pay for his wedding. Seems to have softened his stance on them lately, though.
- Before Garfield, Jim Davis did a short lived comic called Gnorm Gnat. Davis thought it was funny. Not a lot of other people did. After one editor told Davis that "no one can relate to bugs", he pretty much gave up, and the final comic had Gnorm stepped on. The only times Davis brings the comic up now is when he's mocking it as "one of his biggest mistakes". This was lampshaded in one of the Garfield book collections. A gag comic at the end of one book was titled "Top 10 Comic Strips Jim Davis tried before Garfield" where Number 2 on the list was...Gnorm Gnat. The number one comic strip "tried" was Garfield being a living toaster.
- Even though he hasn't taken it out of publishing, David Herbert would like everyone to forget Warriors of the Night, which is his first graphic novel.
- Bill Watterson claims he regrets introducing Calvin's Uncle Max into Calvin And Hobbes. His reasons are that Max didn't have much of an identity, he didn't bring out anything new in Calvin, and the awkwardness of Max not being able to refer to Calvin's parents by their first names.
Fanfic
- Linkara of That Guy With The Glasses and Atop The Fourth Wall, had written "Web of Dimensions" A Self Insert Fic crossing Pokemon/Digimon/Sailor Moon under the name PsyWeedle. It appears to have been taken down, as that one is not on his list of fanfics.
- Which got hilariously lampshaded when Bennett the Sage got his hands on it for Masterpiece Fanfic Theater. Linkara is there...tied up and trying to stop Sage.
- Notorious furry Sage Freehaven. As a teenager — and prior to entering the Furry Fandom — he wrote several awful Rescue Rangers fanfics called "The Dark Savior Saga", which saw various revisions over his tenure in the fandom and contained innumerable examples of bad fanfic tropes; he also made the mistake of writing them under his real name, only later changing them to bear his Furry Fandom pen name. Years later, he had the entire series — and anything else associated with both that name and his real name, including a MiSTing of the first fanfic in the series — stricken from the Rescue Rangers fandom's fan works repository. The only place you can read any of it now? Everything What Is Crap, where the MiSTing of the first story in the series (found under the "American Works" section) remains intact.
- Hunterjeanmidna, the author of Avatars II When Qwaritch Takes Revenge and Alvan An The Chipmunks 3 The Second Squeakuel. He's admitted that those stories were terrible and that he just didn't care about spelling or grammar, and has stated that he's been putting a lot of effort into improving his writing. He's currently working on a Ka Blam story, and it's noticeably better than his earlier output.
- Gemini Star 01 has been hovering around Fan Fiction.net for six years now, starting with the second season of Digimon and Yu Yu Hakusho fics. Don't bring them up when talking to her, unless it's in person and you want to see the funny color she turns.
- Eyrie Productions Unlimited's first project was Undocumented Features, a work they are still continuing 18 years after it started. However, their second was the spinoff (Gryphon and Zoner get) Hopelessly Lost, something that the original authors would prefer to have you forget (and which they are, in fact, recreating as Bubblegum Crisis: The Iron Age, a markedly superior work). Also, within the Undocumented Features body of work, the authors aren't too fond of the initial stories, which had started as a silly blend of wish fulfillment and in-jokes; Gryphon has referred to them as his "crap period."
Film
Literature
- The epic poet Virgil on his deathbed ordered that The Aeneid be burned, so the old shame is Older Than Feudalism.
- Franz Kafka himself suffered from this. Very little of his writing was published in his lifetime; he left his papers to his friend Max Brod upon his death and instructed him (in writing) to burn them all unread. Needless to say, that's not what Brod did with them.
- William Powell, the author of the original Anarchist Cookbook, released a statement on Amazon which expressed his regrets of writing the Cookbook and his desires to take the book out of print. The "recipes" in the Cookbook are outdated and any inevitably futile attempt to replicate the "recipes" contained can result in a hospital visit and possible felony/terrorism charges.
- HP Lovecraft averted this trope by burning virtually everything he'd written when he was young. While notoriously dissatisfied with even his published works throughout his life, this one might've been a good call, as the few fragments which escaped the fireplace probably didn't deserve to.
- Robert Heinlein's first novel, For Us, the Living, was written around 1939. It was not published, and Heinlein attempted to destroy every copy of it. He failed: it was published posthumously in 2004. Some people think it would have been better had he succeeded. In this case, it was his younger self's politics that he was ashamed of, not his writing.
- Of the short stories Heinlein published under the pen-name "Lyle Monroe," Heinlein requested that the "stinkeroo three" of "Beyond Doubt," "'My Object All Sublime'," and "Pied Piper" not be reprinted.
- Terry Pratchett wrote The Carpet People in his non-PC youth. His approach to this Old Shame was to re-write and re-publish it to be in line with his current morals.
- He also isn't too fond of the first Discworld book, revealed when he confirmed that the completely different Ankh-Morprok Patrician in it is the same character as Vetinari, just "written by someone much less talented."
- A gem from Thomas Pynchon's introduction to Slow Learner, a compilation of his early short stories: "My first reaction, rereading these stories, was oh my God, accompanied by physical symptoms we shouldn't dwell upon."
- Flann O'Brien couldn't find a publisher willing to release his novel The Third Policeman, causing him to believe that it was no good and claim to his friends that he lost the manuscript. It was eventually published the year after his death and went on to become his most popular book.
- Diane Duane has said that she will probably not finish her "Tale of the Five" series, originally projected to be five novels, stuck at three currently for a very long time, because after doing some other work, she went back and read them and discovered (paraphrased) "they were everything I ever hated about fantasy."
- This was George Orwell's attitude toward his novels Keep the Aspidistra Flying and A Clergyman's Daughter, which he wrote for mostly contractual reasons. He also destroyed several unpublished novels he wrote in the 1920's, before he adopted the pen name of "George Orwell" (his real name was Eric Arthur Blair).
- Nasu Kinoko refuses to re-publish Mahoutsukai no Yoru - Witch on the Holy Night despite fan pleas to do so (since only five copies were ever made), mainly due to embarassment over "bad writing". His feelings about other old works seem to be similar.
- Neal Stephenson was fine with letting his first novel The Big U stay out of print until people started spending hundreds of dollars for copies on eBay. He let it be republished because he felt the only thing worse than people reading the book was paying that much to read it.
- At a Sandman convention in 2004, Neil Gaiman was the guest auctioneer for a charity auction. One of the items was his first book ever written, a biography of the group Duran Duran. He grew so embarrassed and ashamed of it while he was up there that he temporarily passed the auctioneer duties over to Charles Vess because Neil simply couldn't sell it in good conscience. Vess quickly declared that Neil would sign it if the bidding got over $1,000, which drew quite a horrified reaction from Neil himself. He later remarked that he was a little less ashamed of it after a chance encounter with Simon le Bon, who had exclaimed "Oh, we liked that one!" when Gaiman confessed to having written it.
- Edward ("The Monkey Wrench Gang") Abbey's first novel, Jonathan Troy, was published in 1954 in an edition of 5000 copies; he repudiated it at once, and it has never been reprinted. The cheapest copy currently available at Advanced Book Exchange is priced at $1300.
- Dr Seuss was said to have destroyed the majority of his work because he was displeased with it. One notable book that was published posthumously is "Daisy-Head Mayzie" which really wasn't up to par with some of his other work.
- The Spy Who Loved Me was an experiment on Ian Fleming's part; unlike the other James Bond novels, the book focuses on the Bond Girl. Fleming grew to regret that move; when the producers of the film series sought the rights, he only let them have the name, preferring Adaptation Decay to having it brought to the screen. (Interestingly, many Fleming fans consider it one of his best works, in large part because it departs so radically from his typical approach.)
- Philip Pullman states on his website that he hates the first novel he ever wrote and refuses to even name it so people can't track it down. *
You mean The Haunted Storm? Pullman had better hope people forget how to use Google.
- Lynne Cheney, wife of US vice-president Dick Cheney, tried to convince the publisher of her 1981 novel, Sisters, not to reissue it in 2006. Given the sexual content (including a lesbian affair) of the book, she was afraid political opponents of her husband would use it to stir up controversy. In the end, The Daily Show ran with it, mostly learning about it from her attempts to keep it secret.
- Sergej Dowlatov, an emigrant from Russia, forbade all his work made in USSR from being reprinted. He then wrote a novel, Compromiss, to show why (basically all of his previous writing was heavily modified by Soviet censorship).
- Stanislaw Lem said that his first sci-fi novel, The Astronauts lacks any value. The shame was not about its being sci-fi, but about its being communist propaganda. He wrote it for the money dear boy.
- Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis, a British design studio who created famous album covers for bands such as Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin between the late 60s and the early 80s, deal with this trope imaginatively in their retrospective book For the Love of Vinyl: The Album Art of Hipgnosis. In the introduction to the (nearly) complete list of their covers at the back of the book, they admit that "There are some designs we would rather like to forget altogether"; within the list, these are marked with an icon of a turkey.
- Alastair Reynolds included an afterword in Galactic North admitting that his Revelation Space novels are derived in part from a much more space-opera-ish set of unpublished novels which he devoutly intends should never see print, although he regards them as a valuable learning experience.
- Dean Koontz spent the seventies writing straight science fiction under his real name, and several other genres including romance under various pseudonymns. Since becoming a bestselling author, he has refused to let many of these early novels be reprinted. One of the most infamous of these is The Funhouse, a novelization of a decent but forgettable slasher flick, written under the pseudonym Owen West. The book was so terrible, that when he was unable to prevent it from being republished under his real name, he wrote a lengthy introduction decrying how terrible the book is and about how he likes to imagine the life that particular pseudonym took on after its publication ending very violently soon after its completion (namely, trampled by wildebeests while on safari).
- Orson Scott Card refuses to reprint his short story "Happy Head" in any form, and urges his fans to "think of it as something written by an earnest young graduate student rather than anything I did."
- Saul Bellow burned the manuscript of his first, unpublished novel The Very Dark Trees and refused to divulge any details about it throughout his life.
- Nancy Mitford did not allow her third novel, Wigs on the Green, to be republished in her lifetime—partly because the Fascism-praising heroine was based on her sister Unity, who had a self-inflicted bullet lodged in her brain when Germany declared war on the UK, and died a very slow, lingering death.
Live Action TV
- MST3K refused to re-air KTMA episodes after they left that station and requested Comedy Central cease airing Season 1 episodes shortly before Season 4. While some of these (especially the KTMA eps) had to do with the legal issues surrounding the movies in use that has plagued the series to this day, they admitted to this very trope in the Amazing Colossal Episode Guide, likening it to becoming a famous writer and then having an old classmate publish one of your shameful high school works.
- In Brazil, famous children's television hostess Xuxa tried at all costs to retrieve old pornographic material involving her, which is understandable. After the advent of the Internet, Xuxa successfully sued a big auction website to stop sales of a soft-porn movie with her, as well as a widely circulated newspaper for showing a half-naked picture of her.
- This post from Jack Coleman of Heroes, aka Noah Bennett, may utterly define this Trope.
- Tina Fey apparently feels this way about the first episode of 30 Rock, saying "if I never see that pilot again, it will be too soon."
- In-universe example: In a 3rd Rock From The Sun episode, Mary discovered a thesis she had written years ago and which she had thought was brilliant at the time. She read it again only to find it was crap.
- iCarly: The Benson family, with the sport of fencing.
- Don't forget Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Joss Whedon has made every effort to make sure the unaired pilot is never seen.
- In several episodes of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart refers to his previous film career in this manner. He seems particularly regretful over Death To Smoochy. He said in his opening speech at the Oscars: "Tonight is the night when we celebrate excellence in film - with me, the fourth male lead from Death to Smoochy."
- One episode of the Japanese TV series Ultra Seven featured Monsters of the Week who resembled atomic bomb radiation victims, complete with scars and welts. Their plot was to suck blood from women and children in order to rejuvenate their polluted bodies. In the only country in the world to have nuclear weapons used on it, this sparked an obvious backlash (especially from real radiation victims, who were already suffering severe discrimination). Similar to the Pokémon incident above, the producers' reaction was to strike the episode from the canon and act like it never existed.
- Another in-universe example can be found in the Robin Sparkles "Let's Go to the Mall TODAY!" tape from How I Met Your Mother.
- And its sequel Sandcastles In The Sand.
- Similarly, the breakup video Barney made for Shannon back when he was still a hippy.
- The Re Cut of Stargate SG-1's pilot was the result of Brad Wright viewing it again and realizing how much Old Shame was in it.
- Brannon Braga, the writer of the infamous Star Trek Voyager episode Threshold, acknowledges it to probably be the worst Trek episode he ever wrote, referring to it as a "royal steaming stinker." Despite this fact, the episode did win an Emmy® for make-up. This isn't "Old Shame" so much as "Newer Shame", as Braga had previously written and co-written some of the best episodes of Star Trek The Next Generation, such as Reunion, Birthright part 1, Frame of Mind and All Good Things.
- Tina Louise, given how she feels about Gilligans Island and her role as Ginger.
- The Star Wars Holiday Special, a quick exploitation TV show produced after A New Hope was first released. George Lucas has gone on record to say he would hunt down and destroy every last copy of the show if he had the time and the money to do it ... and virtually every actor who appeared in it, notably Harrison Ford, just about refuses to admit it exists.
- While this show has been around along time and fans have differing opinions on what seasons are considered good or bad, there is one thing Saturday Night Live fans can agree on: Season 6 (1980-81) was generally bad. So much so that, outside of a 60-minute Comedy Central rerun and a full 90-minute rerun on NBC, Season 6 hasn't aired in full anywhere in America (Canada, on the other hand, did air all the episodes from Season 6) and it's highly unlikely that the episodes will be released on DVD now that Seasons 1-5 are out, but who knows?
- Season 11 (1985-86) also qualifies as an Old Shame, at least to Simpsons writers George Meyer and Jon Vitti and NBC executives, who referred to the entire season as a "horrible, horrible dream" at the beginning of Season 12.
- ABC Family really doesn't want to be reminded they have to continue to give Pat Robertson and his 700 Club three hours a day on their network, along with one day in January for his yearly CBN telethon, just because some underling of Rupert Murdoch years ago couldn't persuade him to give up the network completely. So they throw on disclaimers so backhanded of Pat Robertson's programming, and their slogan pretty much plays down the "Family" concept entirely that nobody remembers it was the home of Big Brother Jake, Gerbert and Superbook once upon a time.
Game Shows
- Bargain Hunters: Peter Tomarken, best known as the host of Press Your Luck, supposedly called this show a "piece of shit".
- Gene Rayburn declared an embargo on his version of Break The Bank (he wasn't happy with his performance and the behind-the-scenes issues), and may or may not have had a hand in disallowing The Match Game-Hollywood Squares Hour from being shown again.
- Now You See It: Los Angeles news personality Chuck Henry has specifically requested that GSN never rerun the 1989 version, which he hosted. GSN has complied, though many fans think that Henry did a good job.
- The Price Is Right: Fur coats (and, in at least five instances, live dogs) used to be offered as prizes. Obviously, this was long before Bob Barker became an animal-rights activist, and per his wishes none of the fur coat episodes have ever been (intentionally) re-run. *
GSN accidentally aired three episodes with a fur in them. Barker graciously allowed the mistakes to slide. Among the fur-containing episodes are the first three episodes ever taped, including an episode that went unaired (and got replaced six days later) due to an ineligible contestant. BCI, which wanted to put the whole first week on the DVD set, offered to donate to Barker's favorite charities and/or put a disclaimer before the offending shows. Barker declined.
- Do not ask Barker about Dennis James' tenure on the show. Considering the "Game Of The Week" feature in GSN's Sunday Night In Black And White, Barker must have barred GSN from airing any James episodes...well, except one daytime episode where James filled-in for Barker, generally believed to be a "pity airing" following James' death in 1997.
- Wheel Of Fortune: The show has, for one reason or another, decided that the versions not hosted by Pat Sajak (including the daytime show as a whole and the kids' version) shall not be discussed or counted in the show's "official" history. This article on Season 28 even went so far as to state that Pat and Vanna have hosted the show together since the show's 1981 debut on NBC. There are so many things wrong with that sentence, it's disturbing.
- The show's official contestant application states in no uncertain terms that if you have been a contestant on the show before, in any version with any host (even the kid's version where the top prize package consisted of a knock-off faulty iMac-like PC and a week of limo rides to school), you can't be a contestant again. It may be a case of applying Old Shame, but it's definitely a lifetime ban.
Music
Tabletop Games
- Warhammer 40000/Warhammer isn't immune. GW regards the Squats and Zoats as "things better left forgotten". However, hints of them do pop up in new material from time to time...
- In the now-defunct official Games Workshop webboard, posting anything about the Squats would typicaly result in the thread being deleted, and the thread-starter banhammered.
- Later editions of Vampire: the Masquerade did their damnedest to sweep everything from the Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand supplement under the carpet.
- Gary Gygax has said that he regretted a number of rules that he felt pressured to put in various versions of Dungeons And Dragons, singleing out psionics, the monk class and weapon speeds and effects versus armor as egregious examples.
- Magic The Gathering has its share of old shames, specifically:
- Some of the overpowered cards in Alpha, due to the principles of the game and the colour pie being unclear at that point, as well as the creators not knowing that people would like the game enough to exploit those cards as badly as they did
- Urza's Saga block, which created the most unfun standard environment in history, according to Mark Rosewater the only block where "The entire team got called into the boss's office and got yelled at"
- To a lesser extent, any other overly format-dominating cards/archetypes.
Video Games
- Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima has went on to state that he felt the original two MSX 2 games in the series, Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2, did not age very well since the original Metal Gear Solid is essentially (gameplay wise) a remake of them and even went on to state that he regretted that he made Metal Gear Solid a sequel to those games instead of a reboot.
- The original Hitman: Codename 47 seems to have — many would say quite deservedly — become this. It's the only game in the series not to have been released on a console — a more typical platform for stealth games — and is not included in the Hitman Trilogy collection, whose very name implies that there are only three games in the series. IO and Eidos haven't yet publicly disowned it, but that may well be because they'd have to acknowledge its existence in order to disown it...
- Persona was one of Atlus' first attempts to localize an RPG in the North American market, but the end result was hopelessly screwed up. As Atlus USA has gotten much better over the years, the company eventually made an announcement that they were going to attempt a proper localization of the game for its PSP Updated Rerelease, more than a decade later.
- Hudson Soft, creators of the Bomberman franchise, have all but disowned Bomberman: Act Zero, making fun of it in a promotional video for Bomberman Live.
- In the early 80s, before they started publishing for consoles, Enix released some games for P Cs. Several games they published were hardcore hentai games where, if you lost, you saw the girls' mutilated and tortured bodies. As you can guess, Enix (now Square Enix) is a bit dodgy about these games now, and this part of their history doesn't pop up much in bios of the company.
- The epitome of this Trope in terms of videogaming has to be Atari, and their literal burial of the ET videogame for the Atari 2600. They took it far enough that they covered the buried games with cement to keep people from digging them up - though they stated that it was to keep children from encountering dead animals in the landfill.
- Music composer Grant Kirkhope feels like this with his DK Rap.
- In the 8-bit era, Code Masters was a major producer of unlicensed NES games (some of which were ports of their C64 games), although a few of these, such as Micro Machines, were actually fairly good.
Web Animation
- In-universe example: Strong Bad of Homestar Runner refers to his first attempt at drawing a dragon as the "S-is-For-Sucks" Dragon.
- However, in the Trogdor's 5th birthday toon, he sings a song about the S is For Sucks Dragon, then indicates that he's sick of Trogdor, claiming that "you Internet types" ruined him.
- An out of universe example would be "Marshmallow's Last Stand", the very first cartoon featured on the website. Once the quality of the shorts began to noticeably improve, the Brother Chaps removed "Stand" from the live version of the website and moved it to the museum (the area of the website where they archive old stuff for historical purposes), and then later removed it from the museum as well. Their reason: "The characters are completely different. Saying and doing things they'd never do now."
- Egoraptor has said that when he posted the first episode of Metal Gear Awesome on Newgrounds, he thought it would get blammed (deleted for sucking).
- Jonathan Ian Mathers of Ill Will Press, producer of Neurotically Yours has, for quite some time, consistently denounced and attempted to suppress much of his earliest work; typically citing the heavily Fanservice-oriented nature of it. However, much of his more recent work pushes the fanservice envelope much farther; the only difference being that it's now done "ironically" instead of straight.
Web Original
- Although Doug Walker (AKA The Nostalgia Critic) may be slightly embarrassed by one of his first works, starring himself as a cowboy, he had the guts to upload it to That Guy With The Glasses.com for all to laugh at. You have to give him credit for that.
Web Comics
- Megatokyo author/illustrator Fred Gallagher is known for his self-deprecating remarks about his earlier work. His detractors once tried to use this to stain his reputation by revealing fanservicey early drawings of possible precursors to the comic's female characters; in response, he publicly revealed the whole "hidden" site, showing that he wasn't hiding anything - he was just embarrassed about his old art.
- Although Order Of The Stick has always had simple art, it has gotten significantly better and more detailed as the series has gone on. Enough so that Rich Burlew has admitted that he hates having to draw the characters in their old styles (necessary for continuity purposes) when making bonus strips for the book collections. One design choice he particularly hates is the jagged lines that used to separate panels, so much so that he straightened them for the books.
- Before his explosive popularity as a games critic, and even before his modest popularity as the creator of the Chzo Mythos series, Yahtzee ran several shortish webcomics on his site, which he has now gone on to disown completely along with every game he made before The Trials of Odysseys Kent, as well as every work of fiction he wrote before the age of 20, as he doesn't want people thinking he actually cares about said work.
- In a recent Let's Play of the series on the Something Awful forums, he indicated that he doesn't stand by the Mythos these days either, but considers it an important step in his learning about games.
- Exterminatus Now is mainly based on mocking the daylights out of a setting that attempted to make Sonic The Hedgehog Darker And Edgier by adding Warhammer 40,000 themes. Eastwood has gone on record as saying something to the effect of "...made something good out of, in retrospect, the worst idea I ever had."
- In its formative years, Platypus Comix contained no archive. Some cartoons were literally only up for one week and then vanished forever. The practice was originally due to limited storage space (it began as a Geocities site) but was continued until 2006 as a means of quality control (anything the author didn't regret making was given a position in a selective archive section). Most of the pre-06 works are still offline, but lately they have turned up in book collections.
- Josh Lesnick, of Girly, took down his first comic down for this reason. As a result, a lot of people don't know there was a comic before Cute Wendy.
- The author of My Roommate Is An Elf took down the comic for this reason. The art was So Bad Its Horrible and the writing was rough draft quality at best.
- Tom Siddell has stated that he can hardly bear looking at the early pages of Gunnerkrigg Court.
Western Animation
- While none of the Family Guy writers or Seth have personally said anything about the episode "Not All Dogs Go To Heaven" the general tone of Quagmire's Take That Scrappy speech at Brian at the end of "Jerome is the New Black" is "Yes, we know, and we are very sorry!"
- According to Word Of God, the Earthworm Jim cartoon series was the product of Executive Meddling—the game creators were coerced into making the show in order to support game sales. Because they consider the series to be an Old Shame, it will never be available on DVD. Long story short, if you want the 1995 Earthworm Jim cartoon on DVD, you're going to have to steal it.
- Chuck Jones once said that if he were allowed to he would burn the negatives to every Looney Tunes short he made before 1948.
Real Life
- Don't even TRY to say you're not ashamed of pictures of yourself as a teen.
- The Daily Mail would rather forget the fact that it used to be Oswald Mosley's mouthpiece, but its critics (who argue that it hasn't strayed far) aren't going to let it forget the headline "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" in a hurry.
- Of course, many of these critics are quite happy for people to forget their own pasts as cheerleaders for the Soviet Union.
- Jimmy Wales, owner and co-creator of That Other Wiki, originally made money on the Internet with a site for what he calls "glamour photography", now downplayed for obvious reasons.
- The Germans hate the Third Reich more than anyone on the planet. They will not tolerate the Swastika being used for anything other than a dead serious historical documentary. Or by a Jainist, as it was their symbol first and considering they take nonviolence to a rather insane level, the more devout ones don't eat yogurt since it involves eating live bacteria, most German authorities have agreed to let them be.
- <blink>. Lou Montulli issued an apology for accidentally creating the beast, which was left in as an Easter Egg that everybody loved to use. While Opera's the only browser outside the Netscape line to implement the tag, CSS would introduce a standardized alternative - with the caveat that browsers didn't actually have to implement it(most just quietly throw it away); another web standard requires an option to disable blinking(which Firefox buries in about:config).
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