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Better by a Different Name

Bleach? I liked that show better when it was called Yu Yu Hakusho, and I liked that show better when it was called Dragon Ball Z!

— Vegeta, Dragonball Abridged

It is common that some work is heavily "inspired" by a previous work—they may have different authors and settings, but there are strong similarities of plot, situations and characters. It is also common that the second work is much inferior to the original, because the original is great or the derivative is awful or both. The Better By A Different name snark expresses this idea. The usual phrasing is "[This work] was better when it was called [other, earlier work]."

For Better By A Different Name to be effective, the original work needs to be well-known and admired. The trope is also rare when a work is a blatant Follow the Leader of another. For one thing, the joke is kind of ruined if the predecessor is obvious. For another, not all clone-work is execrable. Causality is also a confounding variable for Better By A Different Name. It may be that both the original and the supposedly "derivative" work were actually inspired by some even earlier common source.

Often overlaps with If I Wanted X, I Would Y.

A Sub Trope of They Copied It, So It Sucks, in that this trope is a common way to express that belief.

Compare Take That, Recycled In SPACE (which often is a cause of this), Serial Numbers Filed Off (another cause of this unless it's by the same creator), Spiritual Licensee.

Important: To avoid Natter, this is reserved for instances actually noted in a specific work, fiction or non-fiction, regardless of whether these comments are correct.

Examples (sorted by source of the comment instead of the subject):

Comics

During the period where The Incredible Hulk was intelligent, he once refused to wear a cap with a a fin on it, since he didn't want people to say "it's just Hulk with a fin on his head"''.

Literature

That is All: A variant. John Hodgman writes that he was able to accomplish his goal of getting The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr. back on the air, except he had nothing to do with it and the show is now called Burn Notice.

Live-Action TV

This was one of David Spade's trademark bits on Saturday Night Live. In his last season it got turned around on him, when host Teri Hatcher told him she liked his then-current movie Black Sheep better when it was called Tommy Boy.

Music

Mitch Benn liked Russia's 2008 entry for the Eurovision Song Contest better when it was by Cat Stevens and called Wild World.
Filk artist Voltaire's song "U.S.S. Make Shit Up":
I was stranded on the Voyager
And pounding on the door
When suddenly it dawned on me—
I'd seen this show before!
Perhaps I'm in a warp bubble
And slightly out of phase
Coz it was way back in the sixties
When they called it Lost in Space!
- Which is more than slightly amusing when one considers that Lost in Space can be described as either Robinson Crusoe IN SPACE! or Gilligan's Island IN SPACE! depending on how kind one feels on that particular day.
  - Or "a rip-off of the original series of Star Trek after Roddenberry gave CBS the complete premise of Star Trek and they rejected it."

Other

A magazine gave a breakdown of the Summer Blockbusters of 1997. They discuss how Hercules did only moderately well compared to other recent works of the Disney Animated Canon, and they surmised people thought it was done better when it was called Aladdin.
Roger Ebert: "All bad movies have good twins, and the good version of Goodbye, Lover is The Hot Spot... a thriller that was equally lurid but less hyperkinetic."
- He said the same anything with Say Anything (GREAT!) and She's Out of Control (HORRIBLE!), both of which opened on the exact same day (April 14th, 1989).

Web Original

Used in this video of Dragonball Z Abridged.
Nappa: I'd rather watch Naruto, Vegeta.
Vegeta: Oh, please! If I wanted to watch over a hundred episodes of Filler, I'd watch InuYasha.
Nappa: What about Bleach, Vegeta? It's like us, with swords!
Vegeta: I liked that show better when it was called Yu Yu Hakusho, and I liked that show better when it was called Dragon Ball Z!
In this recent review, Love Hina is said to have been better when it was called Maison Ikkoku.
A Zero Punctuation review for Pain Killer says that it's often called the Unofficial Doom 3 "since the actual Doom 3 tripped over something in the dark, banged its head, and forgot it wasn't System Shock".
- He also noted that BioShock was "not like System Shock, it is System Shock", though he didn't make a quality judgement either way.
Rotten Tomatoes' consensus on Duplex: "It was funnier when it was called Throw Momma from the Train."
The Nostalgia Chick notes that Spice World is a movie with at half the ambition of A Hard Day's Night, a quarter of the budget and at least two percent of the talent.
Moviebob, a week after reviewing Jennifer's Body (in the appendix to his review of Surrogates), compared said film to Ginger Snaps, which he called the good version of that movie.
In Kaiba's Real Father - Conclusion on Yu Gi Oh The Abridged Series
Kaiba: Was that a DragonBall Z cameo? Geez, knowing my luck, my father's going to turn out to be Ghost Nappa. That's pretty much how these things usually go.
Mokuba: Aaaahh, but you gotta admit, Seto, Nappa sure is funny!
Kaiba: Yeah, I liked him better when he was called "Tristan".

Webcomics

Pantsman of VG Cats does this twice in his rant about Inu Yasha, first saying he liked it better when it was called Fushigi Yuugi and later calling it "Dragon Ball Z for girls".

Accentuate the Negative

Criticism Tropes

Bias Steamroller

Bathroom Stall of Overheard Insults

Insult Tropes

Big Stupid Doodoo Head

alternative title(s): I Liked It Better When It Was Called X; I Liked It Better When It Was Called

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