The polar opposite of Vindicated by History, and a variant on Seinfeld Is Unfunny. This is something — an individual character, an individual song or book or game, an entire genre — that was very, very popular in its day. But at some point, it somehow just got too popular. It was talked about on every radio station, on every TV network, on every chat room (not that they'd been invented then...). It was overexposed until people got bored with it, and it got so much publicity and so many bad knockoffs that there was plenty of time to notice each and every flaw and dissect them under a microscope. Soon, small problems were regarded as unavoidable flaws. The final tell-tale sign is when ridicule, or even hate, comes not just for the thing itself, but for its fans. They become the subject of nasty, highly-specific stereotypes, and gushing about how you like it online is considered trolling.
Ten years later, almost nobody will admit that they ever liked it, and the only mention in the media will be cheap jokes about the fad. It may get revived decades later as kitsch, but it's unlikely to be popular on its own merits again. In fiction (and Real Life), a Disco Dan is a rare admirer who refuses to accept the judgment of history and passionately holds on to the belief that the dead thing is still as big as it always was — usually with comical results.
Of course, twenty years later, the situation may change again.
Sometimes caused by people saying that It's Popular, Now It Sucks too much, but not always: at its height, these people are typically not very vocal. It's particularly common with things that never had a cult following to begin with — they went from nowhere to everything, and then back to nowhere, very suddenly. This is essentially Hype Backlash after something faded from popularity with the haters still remaining.
Another cause of this trope, other than simple overexposure, is a franchise doing something that is widely rejected by the established fandom and fails to allow it to pick up a new audience. Falling victim to The Chris Carter Effect or a Kudzu Plot is one of the easiest ways for this to happen, as fans' memories of earlier seasons, films or books are tainted by the realization that the plot that they had spent years following is going nowhere, is being made up on the fly with little forethought, and isn't likely to be resolved. Consequently, the now-former fans tell newbies not to bother. Ending a series on a base-breaking note is another way to do this. In a nutshell, the series enters a Dork Age that it not only never gets out of, but which rubs off on when it was still good. Long Runners may be troubled by changing times (and thus,changing tastes), which can lead entire genres to being not even the shadow of that they were before.
Compare Jumping the Shark, Periphery Hatedom, Dead Horse Genre, Fallen Creator, and Hatedom. Contrast Vindicated by History and Nostalgia Filter. If a single work is perceived as rendering something Deader than Disco, it's a Creator Killer, Franchise Killer or Genre Killer. Compare and contrast Unintentional Period Piece, when a work can be precisely dated to a specific era, but it may (or may not) have remained popular up to the present day.
Not to be confused with Deader Than Dead, which is a completely different trope, or Gratuitous Disco Sequence, which is actually about disco.
The Other Wiki notes that "... it was inspired by natural forms and structures, not only in flowers and plants but also in curved lines", which would also fit nicely with the perception of Elves as more in tune with nature.
Art Deco (Art Moderne during the 1920s), from its symmetrical and futuristic designs, was popular and its were widespread throughout the world during The Roaring Twenties and the 1930s, from skyscrapers, to furniture, to fashion. After the Depression lifted during the late 30s and as World War II broke out, it declined, and its style didn't help out much during the war. During the 1960s, it was revived as a resurgence of interest.
Mid-20th Century Modern (often jokingly referred to as "Brady Bunch Architecture") was derided for many decades. Only in very recent times has it begun to be admired.
Mid-20th Century Modern style had been invented and perfected throughout an age which barely escaped from World War One to plunge itself in another war, an age that struggled with either mass poverty of the Great Depression or simply poverty during the Civil Rights clashes, where the cleanly designed majestic buildings were aimed to create a sense of hope - they came right from the future as people envisioned it. Not incidentally, they were enormously popular throughout the Eastern Bloc and newly-decolonized countries. A lesser known fact is the country which admires it most and fights to implement it wherever possible is North Korea — easy to guess why. Once the people began to realize the gigantic glass areas are very poor heat insulators and climate control systems built with no regard to environmental advantages are terrible energy eaters, the style began to subtly change to incorporate modern materials and building techniques.
The "McMansion" style, with its soaring ceilings, open plans, enormous rooms and enough square footage to comfortably hold one of thosehuge families from aTLCreality show, was an incredibly popular style of American home construction from the late 20th century up through around 2005-07. But in the wake of the late '00s recession, those same attributes made the costs of heating and cooling them prohibitive for a great many people. The fact that most McMansions were built in exurbs located up to an hour's drive or more from the nearest major city — and where land was cheap enough to put them within financial reach of people who weren't named Trump or Kardashian — also hurt them when gasoline stopped being cheap. (Such exurbs themselves often found themselves going from boom towns to dying towns virtually overnight.) Finally, McMansions made up a majority of the houses foreclosed upon during the subprime mortgage crash, as their sheer size often made them too expensive for most people to purchase without a loan.
Art
General
Science Fiction book cover illustrations. Artists such as Chris Foss, Peter Elson, and their imitators illustrated tons of memorable illustrations for SF book covers and magazines during the 70s and 80s. Their art was frequently collected into volumes such as the Terran Trade Authority and Great Space Battles. A large majority of these covers featured elaborate spaceships, big dumb objects, space battles, futuristic scenes and alien landscapes. Today's science fiction book covers are more mundane and minimalize the art in favor of displaying the author's name (especially if he's a big name) in bigger fonts. Art, when present typically feature human subjects, human character content being a selling point to today's more diverse (increasingly female) demographic. This is one of the reasons Elson (who has stated that his human figure drawing skills weren't up to par) became less prolific after spaceship covers went out of fashion. Books that have been turned into recent blockbuster movies often reject illustrated covers entirely in favor of using photoshots of characters from the film (such as in print runs of The Lord of the Rings after 2001).
The Science Fiction cover art which had enjoyed some popularity in the Eastern Bloc during the heyday of Communism exploded like a supernova just after 1990 - throughout the 1990s, all translations and reprints of Western Sci Fi featured glorious covers imitating the above-quoted artists, with complex spaceships, images of deep space, galaxies, and space-suited buxom heroines. Once the decade ended, the cover art style had become more tasteful, restricted and subtle.
Record album jacket covers: Once this was all that was needed to sell a record album, no matter how bad the album actually was. The phrase "Never judge an album by its cover'' was rarely heeded by customers. Beautifully illustrated album covers have often made the purchase of an unremarkable album worthwhile. Art has ranged from surreal, psychedelic to sci-fi/fantasy illustrations. Notable artists included Roger Dean and Shusei Nagaoka. Today's CD covers are more decidedly pedestrian and minimalist; either sporting a naturalistic photo or group photo of the artist(s) or simply the logo of the band. With the increasing popularity of direct digital downloads, art for music packaging is likely to vanish altogether in the not too distant future.
In the late 19th century the contemporary art of the academy was hailed as great masterworks, and the art of the impressionist were all but vilified. Today it's the other way around.
Throughout the 19th and 20th illustrations and advertisements were often hand-painted by artists, but beginning with the 70's, illustrated advertisements and posters began to die out.
Anime & Manga
There was once a time where every anime fan had to have at least seen one episode of InuYasha. Every con would at least have a dozen people cosplaying as the title character. Hell, it occasionally leaked out of the anime fandom and it wouldn't be uncommon to see people on the street wearing merchandise from the show. Nowadays, the show's largely considered a joke that most newcomers would never dare to touch. This is likely because of the frustration amongst fans of the anime watching it for years only to see it end without any conclusion to any of the plot. By the time a conclusion was reached with The Final Act, the damage had been done, causing lots of fans to simply tell newcomers "not to bother with it" or "read the manga instead".
The original Fullmetal Alchemist anime was once hailed as an absolute masterpiece the likes of which the west had never seen (even gaining a lot of mainstream popularity with those who otherwise weren't anime fans), but it soon got out that it wasn't completely faithful to the original source material. After the release of the direct manga-to-anime adaptation, Brotherhood, the fandom shifted from praising the first series to blasting it for straying from the manga halfway through and proclaiming Brotherhood to be the superior show.
Bleach started off as an overnight sensation, gaining rapid popularity in Japan (and in the anime fandom in the West) to the point of being considered one of the "Big 3" of Japan along with One Piece and Naruto. Around the time of the Arrancar arc however, Bleach suffered massive Hype Backlash due in part to it's rather infamous reputation for Arc Fatigue, along with many controversial plot twists. Said Arc Fatigue also negatively impacted the anime, as well causing (multiple) lengthy filler arcs. To add insult to injury, declining ratings would lead the anime to be unceremoniously cancelled and replaced by a Naruto spinoff. These days, with impending ending to the manga as well, most of the fandom have already called for Toriko to replace Bleach as part of the Big 3.
Mobile Suit Gundam SEED was once a smash hit, getting the second highest ratings in Gundam history only behind Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam, and introducing a new generation to the Gundam franchise. Fans would start clamoring for a sequel, which they got with Mobile Suit Gundam SEED Destiny, the first-ever full-length television sequel to a Gundam show outside of the original Universal Century timeline, as well as a manga spinoff in Gundam SEED Astray. There were even talks that the CE timeline could become the new UC.
This trope was referenced once in the English dub of Digimon Adventure:
Demidevimon: Aw, come on! Everyone makes mistakes, remember disco?
The Cut-and-Paste Translation as a dubbing practice. The method of altering the scripts of the episode began in The Eighties when Carl Macek combined Super Dimension Fortress Macross, Southern Cross, and General Mospaeda into Robotech; and World Events Productions followed a similar method to combine Go Lion and Dairugger into Voltron. The practice was taken to a higher level in The Nineties when 4Kids Entertainment dubbed Pokémon in such a manner to remove offensive or culturally inaccessible content for the US, and it became a hit. They went on to dub Yu-Gi-Oh! with this method as well, and it also became a success. For some time, this type of dub was one of the most common styles of translating anime.
However, there were several factors that led to this type of dub's decline. First, there was the controversy raised by several of 4Kids' later dubs. Namely, the violence in later episodes of Shaman King caused protests from offended parents, which led to 4Kids taking their practices to extremes for their dubs of One Piece and Tokyo Mew Mew; effectively stripping them of anything remotely Japanese. The creators of both series, not amused, thereby pulled the rights from them on the grounds that they made mockeries of their series. Second, the popularity of the films of Studio Ghibli, which enacted a "no-cuts" policy for studios that dub their films for foreign markets, proved that anime doesn't have to be toned down for audiences to appreciate it. Lastly, the rise of YouTube and other video-sharing sites helped uncut versions and subtitled versions of anime become more widespread, thus eliminating the need for sanitized dubs being the primary introduction to other types of anime. As a result, the Cut-and-Paste Translation has largely been discredited as a dubbing practice. As for 4Kids, the license to Pokémon was moved in-house to The Pokémon Company International, and they continued to dub anime in this manner amidst years of losing money and being the subject of mockery from personalities such as LittleKuriboh and MarzGurl until the company was absorbed into Saban Brands in 2012; with the Yu-Gi-Oh! license being given to Konami.
Love Hina standardized the typical slapstick a lot of viewers tend to associate with the Harem Anime genre. Thanks to a lot of imitators there has been a massive backlash against Harem cliches, the Hair-Trigger TemperTsundere in particular. Love Hina no longer shares the same popularity it once did.
Comic Books
General
This trope sums up pretty much the entire history of comic books, with Hype Backlash derailing the entire industry about once a decade. Before the Golden Age, comic books were just recycled newspaper funny pages, until Superman put a stop to that. When The Golden Age of Comic Books ended in the '50s, everyone thought that the Super Hero genre itself was Deader than Disco, with horror, sci-fi, and whatever else being the new standard. Then came The Comics Code, which killed those, leading to the reemergence of super hero comics in the Silver Age. This era soon became associated with camp and cheesiness, leading to the Bronze Age. Here, Gwen Stacy died, Bucky died, and Speedy became a junkie, and it seemed "relevant political commentary" was going to be the future of comics. In 1986, The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen came out and led the industry into the Dark Age. One comics crash and Kingdom Come later, and manga is on top, with the Dark Age having become a subject of derision and mockery (along with its associatedtropes). However, manga (along with its close relative anime) is being hit hard by ignorances such as All Anime Is Naughty Tentacles. Now we're back to superhero comics which are in what is called The Modern Age of Comic Books, a synthesis of campy Silver Age classics, Darker and Edgier (where it actually works for the concept), and some Bronze Age-style commentary all trying to live in the "Real World" most of the time. Sales are dismal compared to the Dark Age (with brief surges in popularity following movie releases or Crisis Crossover storylines) and earlier, but trade paperbacks, movie options, and digital distribution help the comics companies to make more money with a less popular product.
Letters pages in comic books. While not completely dead (the odd comic book still has them from time to time) the rise of message boards, Twitter and Facebook has pretty much rendered them superfluous - why bother writing to the writer directly when you can just comment on his Twitter account?
Supplemental articles and essays. Comic books often were like magazines. The writers often included inside the comics (often in the back pages) editorials, articles, short stories, and prose pieces that gave a look inside not only their creative processes, but also the work that goes into creating their comics. For the most part, this was discontinued quite some time ago to cut back on costs and leave more room for advertisements.
These changes are also related to changes in the law and buying habits of the readers. It used to be that having a page or two of text in a comic (a letters page counted) allowed the publisher to mail subscriptions at a cheaper postal rate. That law is different now, and most comics are no longer purchased through subscriptions anyway, so the letters page became surplus to requirements.
Specific
Todd McFarlane has fallen to this level in some circles, with people criticizing him for various reasons, especially his role in ushering in what some people view as the style-over-substance "Image Age of Comics". As a toymaker he's not so bad, though.
The Comics Code Authority; Established immediately after Dr. Frederick Wertham's book Seduction of the Innocent which painted comics with a broad brush as contributing to deviant behavior and juvenile delinquency. The CCA was a committee that forced comic book companies to police themselves. Basically, no profanity, no drug or alcohol use, no nudity or sex, no blood, gore or graphic violence, no depiction of authority, government, or law enforcement in a negative light and a host of other censorship restrictions. For decades, most mainstream comics carried the approval stamp. This necessitated the need for publishers to establish separate lines such as DC's Vertigo so that more mature themes were allowed. In 2011, Archie Comics, the last publisher to still carry the approval stamp, dropped it from all of their books. The parent organization of the CCA, the Comics and Magazine Association of America, is now defunct and the intellectual property rights to the CCA approval seal were acquired by the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
It is a running gag in The Simpsons that the Comic Shop Guy refuses to buy Pogs and sells them for ten cents per metric ton. He still can't get rid of them.
The original Clark Kent version of Superboy is now generally thought of as the character that launched the Legion of Super-Heroes but he was incredibly popular in The Fifties and early Sixties when he was easily the second most popular character in DC comics and far ahead of Batman and The Flash in terms of sales. A combination of overexposure and changing tastes meant that by the early Eighties Superboy was very much sidelined as a character and the Reboot following Crisis on Infinite Earths removed him from continuity altogether.
Fashion
The Pimped-Out Dress of the 18th century. Powdered wigs, knee-breeches, ridiculously overdecorated dresses, wide-brimmed hats, beauty patches on powdered faces, just to name a few. They were predominant in Europe, the most in France, and the Americas, from the time of Louix XIV to The French Revolution. During that period, they were elegant and stylish, yet very ridiculous in extremes. The person who killed the fashion? Marie Antoinette, of all people, who was painted wearing a simple (in comparison) summer shift. (The difference was so extreme that at first many people thought Marie had been painted in her nightgown.) As the French Queen, Marie of course wore her share of pimped out dresses - because that was her job - but she preferred more simple clothing. Interestingly, the very Revolution that cut off her head took credit afterwards for the change.
The Empire silhouette would not have existed without the simpler fashions of the 1780s paving the way, but the main influence for the style was classical antiquity, and in particular the paintings, sculptures, and bronzes being dug out of the ground at Pompeii. From the early 1800s until the 1820s women in Western Europe put away their tight corsets and powdered wigs and instead donned long, loose and high-waisted gowns sewn from multiple layers of muslin and linen. Hair was worn unpowdered and unfrizzed, instead being sleekly pulled back into a high bun, sometimes with loose ringlets at the temples. Older and more traditional persons were outraged by the new fashions, ridiculing them for their supposed indecency and flammability. After the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte in 1815 and the rise of Romanticism on the continent the Empire style disappeared, replaced within a season by the nipped waist, low neckline, and wide skirt of the early Victorian era. It wasn't until the 1880s that a style similar to the Empire silhouette returned, this time more as an accompaniment to the Neo-Classical era than as a memory of the past.
The "business at the front, party at the back" mullet haircut. From the early 1980s to the mid-'90s it was actually considered stylish, and many male celebrities, including Bono and Mel Gibson (in the first Lethal Weapon film), wore their hair in this fashion. But by the late '90s, the mullet was considered extremely uncool and heavily associated with stereotypes of "white trash". These days, whenever a character is portrayed with a mullet, they will inevitably be portrayed as a redneck or a lowlife (or at the very least he'll be portrayed as a Disco Dan who is hopelessly out of touch with modern trends).
Bell-bottom jeans went from being cool in the 1960s and 1970s to being extremely uncool in the 1980s. Since the 1990s the fashion industry has tried several times to "bring back" bell-bottoms and every time they've failed to catch on for very long. These days bell-bottoms are mostly worn only by sailors and members of hippie and stoner subcultures.
The "bald spot in the midst of normal-length hair" look. Now that George Constanza and a slew of TV dads during the '80s and '90s have made this look seem ridiculously uncool and unsexy, and the "bald-with-a-small-bit-of-fuzz-on-the-side" look is considered to be rather sexy/manly (thanks to such celebrities as Bruce Willis, Michael Jordan, and countless hard rock and heavy metal musicians), you'd be hard pressed to find a balding man under the age of 50 who still maintains normal-length hair on the side of his head.
For that matter, toupees. Now that hair implants have become mainstream and full male baldness has become not only more acceptable but also fashionable (see above), toupees are pretty much a thing of the past. Plus, unless you had a ton of money to spend, they generally looked horrible.
For most of the 20th century, hats (not caps) were an essential piece of clothing for men, to the point that going out in public without one made you look strange. But around the late 1950s and early '60s, wearing a hat became entirely optional. By the '70s, wearing a hat was seen as old-fashioned. These days, apart from the aforementioned baseball/trucker caps, the men's hat is almost never seen in public. The reason that hats fell out of fashion is often debated, but some of the more popular theories include John F. Kennedy's supposed refusal to wear a hat during his inauguration (he did wear a hat) and the rise in popularity of sunglasses. It's also worth mentioning that dress styles in general have gotten a lot more casual over the last 50 years; prior to the '60s it was standard for men to always wear a suit in public. These days jeans and t-shirts have become the norm.
The military draft, in place from 1940 to 1973, had a lot to do with men's hats going out of fashion. Having to wear a hat under threat of punishment if you don't - ranging from confinement to quarters to loss of pay up to and including incarceration - is almost guaranteed to give you a bad case of "anti-hat-itis".
Slap bracelets were a fashion accessory that consisted of a flexible steel band covered by a layer of fabric or plastic that came in a large variety of colors and patterns. People would slap the straightened band against their wrist, causing it to spring back into a curve that encircles the wearer's wrist. For a few years in the late '80s and early '90s, slap bracelets were a popular fad among children and teenagers. Then schools started banning after reports of students being injured due to improper use. Once schools started banning them, slap bracelets quickly fell into obscurity.
Trenchcoats as casual attire worn by teenagers. Black trenchcoats, especially have definitely gotten a bad rep due to the Columbine Massacre. Prior to this, trenchcoats and other long coats were considered badass. The youth who carried it out were known as the Trenchcoat Mafia due to their sartorial style. Some schools have banned trechcoats for this reason among students. As a result of the associated image, teenagers wearing trenchcoats as everyday attire may be looked at with suspicion. Adults, are more likely to wear trenchcoats over dress clothing such as business suits as opposed to goth attire. For this reason, adults can still get away with them if they're reasonably normal enough in looks and behavior.
Literature
General
For much of The Eighties, the cyberpunk literary genre and movement was the new wave in both Science Fiction and science fact, acting as a fertile seed on a ground tormented by efforts to adapt to a changing world where the computer was king and Japan was the new force on the block. However, books like Neuromancer failed to anticipate how a) the internet, cell phones, personal computers and handheld IT devices would become a mundane reality in the life of the average white-collar Joe Sixpack, and b) that the Japanese economic powerhouse would trip over itself in the early '90s. Once "the future" became the present, cyberpunk went from being high-tech to being filled with zeerust, painting a portrait of the future that had stopped being relevant after about 1993 — the main reason why Post Cyberpunk came to replace it. Not to mention that the virtual reality craze of the late '80s and early '90s simply shelved itself (for now) after failing to provide a holodeck-like experience.
Modernist literature such as that by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf has been replaced by the postmodernist genre.
During the 1850s, there existed an entire genre of "anti-Tom" literature (or plantation literature), written mainly by authors from the Southern US in reaction to the anti-slavery work Uncle Tom's Cabin. Such books were Author Tracts that portrayed slavery as beneficial to Africans, and abolitionists as villains who were lying about the conditions "enjoyed" by slaves and trying to destroy the Southern way of life. For obvious reasons, this genre died out very quickly after the Civil War, while Uncle Tom's Cabin has gone on to be regarded as one of the great American novels.
The industrial novel was a mid-19th century genre of English fiction that's been almost forgotten today. Often set Oop North, the industrial novel concerned itself with the lives of the new urban industrial working class. The best-known industrial novel today is probably Charles Dickens's Hard Times, but Elizabeth Gaskell's North and South was much more popular at the time.
Fairy tales aren't dead, but nobody ever publishes new fairy tale collections anymore. When people buy fairy tale books nowadays, it's always classics like H.C. Andersen or the brothers Grimm, or retellings of them.
Specific
Fifty Shades of Grey, by E.L. James has fallen into this trap in the United Kingdom, well, at least in the Midlands and Oop North, where it's got into Anyone Remember Pogs? territory. It's considered such a joke that radio deejays and social media make fun of the novel. Not to mention the title is much Older Than They Think, being used in 1998 for an article on a Japanese car...
Online services like Prodigy, Compu Serve, iMagination, etc. When the Internet was fledgling during the 90's, they were extremely popular. However, the more efficient, less resource-intensive and not-to-mention free World Wide Web put them on a steady decline. Today, America Online is the only one of these services that still remains. And even that's pretty much on its last legs.
Related to the above, dedicated instant messenger programs (such as ICQ, AOL Instant Messenger, and MSN Messenger) for computers were very popular among internet users during the days when a significant percentage of them had dial-up connections, as they would allow you to see when a friend logged on and instantly open a chat with them. But the rise in popularity of text messaging, cell phone plans with free long distance calling, social media sites like Facebook adding built-in chat features, gaming clients like Steam and Battle.Net having built-in instant messaging, and free video chat programs like Skype have caused dedicated instant messengers to become somewhat obsolete. These days IM programs are mainly used by businesses as a way of allowing quick, easy communications between employees who may not be sitting right next to each other.
Newspaper Comics
Newspaper Comics in general since the 1970's, though not as fast as other (past and present) newspaper sections once popular. Few are running as new strips written by the original artist; fewer were started after 1995 or so, mostly because of Values Dissonance of course (To quote South Park: "Only gay little dweebs read the funnies, Butters.") There are two other major reasons for this decline, and both of them have to do with the Internet. The first is the rise of Web Comics, which have the Infinite Canvas instead of the papers' ever-shrinking panels, a simpler method of publication (updating your own web site vs. signing deals with newspapers), and less censorship. The second is the decline of newspapers themselves in the face of New Media, which means fewer people reading the funny pages and thus less money to be made in writing for them than there was as late as the 1940s, when successful comic artists like Chic Young, Al Capp, and Milt Caniff could make upwards of $100,000 a year. Most major newspaper comic artists make middle-class incomes through a syndicate now (the rewards of signing a contract far smaller than in other industries); for a new artist still working a day job, getting there from here through indie channels is less daunting.
The newspaper comics generally considered to be the greatest of all time are The Far Side, Peanuts, Calvin And Hobbes, and Bloom County. The fact that none of these are currently running (Peanuts does persist in reruns) is definitely a factor. Only four active North American newspaper comics are highly regarded on the Internet: Dilbert, Get Fuzzy, Pearls Before Swine and Fox Trot. Zits also has a decent fanbase. The popular Cul De Sac ended due to its cartoonist developing Parkinson's.
Mexican print comic artist Trino still gets high regard for his mix of mordacious humor and sociopolitical commentary.
"Legacy" strips have especially suffered for this, especially because of their refusal (from either authors or syndicates) to keep up with modern times, specially after the success of Doonesbury and other comics during the 70's. The fact that The Katzenjammer Kids, the longest running narrative of ALL TIME (1896-present) doesn't yet have an article on this website just shows how far they have fallen.
In 2009, DC Comics did an experiment called "Wednesday Comics", in which they published a weekly "newspaper", consisting of nothing but comics done in the format of the 1930s. I.e., they were full color, 14"×20" (35cm×50cm), some of them fully painted. They were written and drawn by some of the biggest names in the industry (Gaiman, Kubert, Simonson), and starred both DC's greatest hits (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman) and quirky fan-favorites (Kamandi, Adam Strange, Metamorpho). The experiment lasted three months. Alas, newspaper-style comics don't sell.
Pro Wrestling
Professional Wrestling itself is almost always this trope, excluding the periodic boom periods note The mid-'80s, for example, brought us Hulk Hogan and the Rock & Wrestling era, and the late '90s and early 2000s brought us the Monday Night Wars. where it becomes okay to admit that you're a wrestling fan without getting called a redneck. Of course, even when wrestling is on the low, wrestling companies still tend to be relatively successful. Fans cry that the end is coming far too often however.
WCW. Once a dangerous threat to the WWE, it quickly fell apart due to catastrophic mismanagement, eventually being bought out by its arch-rival for scraps, and its disastrous final years are what many wrestling fans today think of when they hear the promotion mentioned.
The Monday Night Wars put an end to shows made entirely of Squash Matches. Once shows presented quality matches on free tv, fans of either company wouldn't settle for anything else. While some may have a squash match or two to debut a new wrestler or for a joke match, a show consisting entirely of them will suffer in the ratings. And if you're a younger wrestling fan (say, ages 10 to 30), you might not even be aware these shows ever existed.
The rise of cable television (such as TBS and the USA Network) and the World Wrestling Federation's successful national expansion (and to a lesser extent, Jim Crockett Promotions/World Championship Wrestling once Ted Turner came into the picture) in the 1980s, all but put an end to the concept of territorial wrestling promotions.
Puppet Shows
Spitting Image. In the 1980s the puppet-based satire show was the most important topical comedy show in Britain. Now it's almost totally forgotten except as a relic of The Eighties. However, its writers and voice actors went on to do things like Red Dwarf and Blackadder. Some of us, however still see those puppets in our nightmares.
In France, Le Bébête Show went the exact same way, except that their puppets were based upon Jim Henson's Muppet Show. Lasted for ten years or so, before being declared too lame to live, especially because of the comparison between them and their concurrent Les Guignols de l'info, which rose a few years ago on another network.
Les Guignols itself started in the beginning of the nineties, following the very same concept of Spitting Image, and is still aired. Slowly dying of flanderization after the successive departures of Benoît Delépine and, some years after, Bruno Gaccio, who both were a LOT sharper in their writing.
Radio
Back before television, the radio served the purpose of supplying scripted entertainment over the airwaves. While such programs are still made today (particularly in Britain), ask anybody under the age of 40 if they listen to the radio for anything other than music, sports andRush and you will most likely get a confused stare. "Dramatic series? Sitcoms? Game shows? On the radio? Leave me alone, old man!" There has been a minor revival in the form of podcasts, but it's still a very niche market.
As noted above, averted in Britain where radio sitcoms, games shows and dramas are still popular. In fact, many successful British comedy acts and sitcoms actually start out on the radio and make the move to television. It helps that the BBC has two radio stations dedicated to this kind of programming - the popular Radio 4 and the more niche Radio 4 Extra (the latter of which is largely a showcase for old Radio 4 shows and even older US Radio).
The "Better Music Mix" format, a format expanded into the United Kingdom (but not Scotland or Northern Ireland) as "Today's Best Mix / Best Mix of the 80s, 90s and Today / More Music Variety", which was pioneered by Australian radio in the late 1980s - early 1990s. Nowadays it's almostDeader than Disco, a Dead Horse Genre, but not quite. The fact that all the former GWR Group stations (except Leicester Sound, RAM FM, Trent FM) are now branded Heart (a female-skewed, softer-music format) with "more music/less talk", shows that Dead Horse Genre applies to radio. The new Capital Radio has made Galaxy's "hotter dance/House Music format" almost a Dead Horse Genre.
Only the UTV Radio group of stations now use the Today's Best Mix slogan, and that's In Name Only, as they are unrelated in presentation style to the old GWR stations.
The "local radio" and "personality disc jockey" genre has largely disappeared in the United Kingdom, to be replaced by big-box brands like Heart, Capital and Gold, with only UKRD, UTV and Bauer Media averting this trope. Stations such as The Pulse of West Yorkshire and Key 103 prove that this trope isn't entirely Deader than Disco - but the trope of Deader than Disco has been lampshaded by their D Jsmany, many times.
Now with speculation that Real Radio is set to disappear as a result of the GMG takeover, this could prove to be the final nail in the coffin. This prompted a huge internet backlash in social media, namely a British showbiz site, where people predicting "Real Radio will become Heart" ended up creating a "Funny Aneurysm" Moment - although, with the Competition Commission assessing the merger, we shall see how this situation plays out.
Sports
The Rookie of the Year award in various sports has proven to be a total crapshoot when it comes to predicting future greatness. Many have successful careers, but even more seem to quickly fade into obscurity.
Some of Major League Baseball's greatest players were Rookies of the Year, including Willie Mays, Pete Rose, and Tom Seaver. But not all ROYs have gone on to great careers. Anyone remember Pat Listach? Joe Charboneau? Don Schwall?
Football's Heisman Trophy has been dubbed "the kiss of death for college players", given how few winners have made it into the Football Hall of Fame.
In motor racing, Jacques Villeneuve. The son of the legendary Gilles Villeneuve, he first came to prominence winning the IndyCar Rookie of the Year award in 1994, and went on to win the IndyCar series the following year driving with his Dad's iconic 27 on his car. He moved to Formula 1 in 1996 and was sensationally on pole position for his first race (something only achieved twice before by Mario Andretti and Carlos Reutemann respectively), ahead of his much more experienced team mate Damon Hill. He won his fourth race, suckered Michael Schumacher by overtaking him around the outside in Portugal, and was in the hunt for the championship against Hill until the last race, finishing 2nd. He won the championship the following year in a final race shootout with Schumacher where he was generally applauded after trying an opportunistic overtaking move and leaving Schumacher beached in the gravel when the German tried to block him. Then his career tanked, he ended up struggling in the middle of the pack, he fell out with friends and teammates, and he stopped caring generally. He was finally sacked midway through 2006 due to a string of poor performances. People murmured that he'd lucked into his wins by having the best car and that Schumacher had nearly beaten him in an inferior Ferrari. He then released a music album which also failed. He tried NASCAR and made no impact, being fired from Bill Davis Racing before the 2008 Daytona 500 (after just two starts the year before) after his sponsors dropped him because he started a multi-car wreck in the Gatorade Duels. Despite all this, he is now in talks in returning to F1 in 2010, and is competing in the Le Mans 24 hours too, aiming to become the second driver since Graham Hill to win the Triple Crown of Motorsport.
Ryan Leaf. A Heisman Trophy finalist during his time at Washington State University, he was the second pick in the NFL Draft in 1998, behind Peyton Manning. It was predicted that he would go on to be one of the all-time football greats. Fast forward to today, and he's regarded as one of the biggest draft busts in NFL history, his four-year career being marked by injuries, bad relations with his teammates and fans, and poor performance on the field. His fall was so infamous that, every draft, sports writers speculate on which hot college prospect will become the "next Ryan Leaf" by flopping in the NFL.
Ever wonder why association football/soccerhas such a vocal hatedom in the United States? This is why. In the early part of the 20th century, when most of the major professional sports leagues on both sides of the Atlantic were in their infancy, the American Soccer League was among them. It was, at one point, the second most popular sports league in the country after Major League Baseball. However, disputes between the ASL and the rival United States Football Association over a number of factors led to a "Soccer War", with FIFA butting in and siding with the USFA over controversy that the ASL was signing players who were under contract to European teams. The Soccer War crippled the ASL, with the league folding at the end of the 1933 season. Worse, while the USFA and FIFA won the war and established their pre-eminence, the spectacle of a US athletic association conspiring with a European organization to undermine its rival alienated many U.S. sports fans by creating an image of soccer as a sport controlled by foreigners, and along with the lack of a professional league that was able to field good players like the ASL did, the events pretty much killed the sport’s popularity for decades.
Soccer experienced a brief but explosive boom in the United States between the late '70s and the mid '80s with the North American Soccer League, thanks in part to the New York Cosmos, which brought in some of the soccer world's biggest heroes (such as Pele himself and Franz Beckenbauer) to play for them. While financial hardships following Pele’s retirement would eventually lead to the NASL’s folding in 1984, it reintroduced soccer to the North American sports scene on a large scale, and was a major contributing factor in soccer becoming one of the most popular sports among American youth. Along with FIFA giving the US hosting duties in the 1994 World Cup, the improving success of the US Men’s and Women’s National Teams, and the implementation and growing success of Major League Soccer, soccer seems to be on the way to regaining its long-sought Major League status. However, with the ever crowded American sporting landscape from leagues that thrived in soccer’s absence, not to mention the persistent stereotypes of the sport which came about during its "death"note In the modern era, soccer is seen by many Americans as either a "kiddie" or "girly" sport played by adolescents boys and teenage girls with pushy "soccer mom" parents, or one that is dominated by (chiefly Latin American) immigrants., it will take time before this can go on the Popularity Polynomial page.
Joe Paterno, longtime coach of the Pennsylvania State University football program. For much of his life, it was thought that he would go down as one of the all-time great college football coaches. However, over the course of 2011-12 came revelations that he not only had a serial child molester on his staff, but that he and the Penn State administration knew about the man's behavior and had covered it up for more than fifteen years. Cue Penn State's removal of the statue of "JoePa" that stood outside Beaver Stadium and the NCAA revoking all of Penn State's football victories from 1998 to 2011, dropping him from being the winningest coach in college football history to being #12. Now, many sports fans, even at Penn State, view his legacy in a much less favorable light. To top it all off, his death in early 2012, at the height of the scandal, ensured that his life would end in disgrace, and that he would never be able to live down what had happened.
Michael Vick, hero of the Atlanta Falcons NFL team, saw his popularity crash and burn virtually overnight after the illegal dog-fighting ring he ran was exposed. His sponsors dropped him en masse, stores like The Sports Authority and the official NFL Shop pulled all of his merchandise, and Falcons fans donated their Vick jerseys to animal shelters to use as bedding and cleaning rags. While he's since returned to football and enjoyed some success as the Philadelphia Eagles' quarterback, much of the public still hasn't forgiven him. It's probably telling that, even more than coach Andy Reidnote who was fired at the end of the season, Vick has taken the brunt of the public's ire for the Eagles' massive decline in the 2012 season.
This tends to happen to any number of popular athletes who are revealed to have been using steroids or other performance-enhancing drugs.
Cyclist Lance Armstrong was an American sporting hero at the Turn of the Millennium, having not only won seven Tour De France titles, but having done so after beating testicular cancer. He used his profile to establish a highly successful charity dedicated to curing cancer, the Lance Armstrong Foundation, whose Live Strong yellow rubber bracelets became a ubiquitous fashion item mid-decade. However, it had long been rumored that Armstrong's cycling success was a bit less than squeaky-clean, and that he had been doping his way to the top. When those rumors were confirmed in 2012, Armstrong was forced to step down from the foundation bearing his name, and the International Cycling Union (the governing body for the sport) stripped him of his seven Tour de France titles. Now, while he still has his supporters due to his charity work, a lot of people view him as an embarrassment to the sport. A common joke was that the Live Strong bracelets should now read "Lie Strong".
The entire "home run derby" era of the late '90s and early '00s, a period that saw baseball rise to heights of popularity not seen in decades, is now treated as an Old Shame by the MLB and many fans due to the fact that many of the big stars of that era were revealed to have been either using steroids or engaging in other forms of cheating (like Sammy Sosa's corked bat).
Old-fashioned artifical turf surfaces (most commonly Astro Turf) were often used in many stadiums opening during the 1970s (those often being nicknamed cookie-cutter stadiums) in order to switch easily between baseball and football configurations. However, the surface being especially hard compared to natural grass (and technological advances such as FieldTurf that are softer than Astroturf) led to the former's extinction by the Turn of the Millennium.
Multi-purpose stadiums (often nicknamed cookie cutter stadiums) began falling out of favor by the mid-1990s starting with the opening of the Baltimore Orioles' Camden Yards stadium in 1992. As the 1990s and 2000s progressed, many of the multi-purpose stadia (most of which also used old-fashioned Astro Turf) were closed and demolished to be replaced with separate football and baseball stadiums instead of sharing a stadium. Currently, o.co Coliseum in Oakland and Rogers Centre in Toronto are the only stadiums left housing both a Major League Baseball (Oakland A's/Toronto Blue Jays) and professional football (Oakland Raiders/Toronto Argonauts) franchise.
Stand-up Comedy
Rob Newman and David Baddiel's stand-up. In the early nineties, they were the "New Rock 'n' Roll", hosting The Mary Whitehouse Experience and playing sell out gigs at Wembley Arena. Then they fell out, split their partnership, and a few years later most of their stuff fell by the wayside. Intellectual and philosophical comedy, and their grunge-meets-preppy style, was replaced by "laddish" comedy (including Baddiel's own Fantasy Football League TV show) and the Britpop wars of Oasis vs. Blur. Occasionally you might hear someone in Britain say "That's you that is!", but so far there has been no revival of interest. Both of them are now well known as authors, but their stand-up careers have been largely forgotten.
Rob Newman, anyway. David Baddiel's career recovered a few years later when he found a new partner in Frank Skinner. Skinner and Baddiel hosted the quirky sport programme Fantasy Football League and, with alt rock group The Lightning Seeds, scored a #1 UK hit with "Three Lions"...Then, Fantasy Football League was canceled and the bottom fell out of their career. Even though they can likely both retire from the royalties for "Three Lions", they've stuck around doing podcasts.
Andrew Dice Clay was a pretty big hit in the late 80s/early 90s for his controversial, sexist insult humor (essentially the Don Rickles of his day). However, his act was seen as annoying and offensive to some (most notably Roger Ebert), mainly due to his tendencies to play his stage persona in reality, as well as the fact that being un-PC just for the sake of it was getting played out. The tipping point was the flop of his star vehicle film The Adventures Of Ford Fairlane which, to add insult to injury, was removed from theaters due to pressure from Moral Guardians. Clay's popularity plummeted shortly afterwards; he subsequently tried to change his image as a result, even doing the failed CBS sitcom Bless This House where he played a family man, but to little avail.
On a more general note, such comedians as Bernard Manning and Jim Davidson, well known for their racist, sexist and mother-in-law jokes, were once huge, but are pretty much jokes themselves now.
Gallagher was huge in the The Eighties, selling out giant arenas and delivering expensive stage shows with a wide array of elaborate props. He fell quite far — until illness forced him to retire in 2012, he toiled in relative obscurity in local shows and squabbled with his copycat brother, while his act took an unpleasantly hateful, racist and homophobic turn (as described here). His original act is mostly remembered as being representative of all that was wrong with stand-up comedy in The Eighties.
The Blue Collar Comedy trend was established at the Turn of the Millennium. Jeff Foxworthy, Bill Engvall, Larry The Cable Guy, and Ron White's routines played with Deep South / white trash stereotypes while applying a Flyover Country perspective to general stand-up topics. Often touring together, they even had a Sketch Comedy show on The WB that reran on Comedy Central. But Foxworthy's signature "You might be a redneck" routine was parodied by every group ever even before the trend exploded, Larry was overexposed (partially via the Cars films), Engvall moved on to host a short-lived revival of the game show Lingo, and White still does stand-up but has distanced himself from the rest of the group.
This is not helped by the fact that said 13-year-olds still love to create Drizzt imitations in about every MMO known to man. If you see any sort of dual-wielding darkish kind of elf in an MMO, chances he'll have a name suspiciously similar to "Drizzt". Even that seems to be a Dead Horse Trope now.
This might be partially because the Drizzt books rely on the assumption of the reader that dark elves are evil. If the only dark elf you've ever heard of is Drizzt, you're going to lose something.
Having a character with a trenchcoat and a katana has become cliche and passe. The initial popularity was aided by the fact that in some editions, swords are more powerful than guns and katanas are the most powerful sword.
In The Nineties, Vampire The Masquerade gained a very low reputation in Poland for having players that were insufferable goth stereotypes. It ended in the establishment of WoD-free zone at a major convention.
Theatre
The infamous Happily Ever After version of Shakespeare's King Lear by Nahum Tate. The 1681 rewrite (which Tate boasted "rectifies what was wanting in the Regularity and Probability of the Tale") ends with the good guys surviving, Lear regaining his throne, and Edgar and Cordelia marrying. It proved so popular with Restoration audiences (who hated Shakespeare's Kill 'em AllDowner Ending—purely his own invention and diverging drastically from his source material, the Historia Regum Britanniae, in which the legendary king's story has a cheerful conclusion) that it completely eclipsed Shakespeare's King Lear for the next 150 years, enjoying hundreds of productions, while the original Lear languished in obscurity and went all but unperformed. In the 1830s reverent fans of the Bard began to restore Shakespeare's original ending to performances, and the Tate version gradually fell out of favor, increasingly derided by Victorian critics as sentimental and trite. Since the start of the twentieth century, the Tate play has only been revived a few times, and then only as a quaint historical curiosity. It's mostly remembered today as one of the earliest and oddest examples of Disneyfication.
Vaudeville (a series of unrelated acts, such as musicians, dancers, comedians, trained animals, magicians or acrobats), was one of the most popular types of entertainment in America for several decades between the 1880s and the 1930s. It waned due to the arrival of cinema and radio, and is today remembered mainly for having been the breeding ground for many of the talents of Golden Age of Hollywood.
Minstrel Shows were some of the most popular forms of entertainment in the 19th and early 20th centuries, being viewed as good, clean, light comedy. They were also very culturally significant as one of the first uniquely American forms of artistic expression. As times changed, however, the nasty racial undertones that lay at the core of the genre fundamentally discredited it. Today, it is only used in period works as a way to highlight the Values Dissonance of the era.
A notable turning point was in White Christmas, the 1954 remake of sorts of 1942's Holiday Inn. Like Holiday Inn, White Christmas had a minstrel-show number; unlike Holiday Inn, the performers wore tuxedoes, top hats, and gloves, but not black makeup.
Blackface, within minstrel shows and for any other reason, is now extremely taboo in much of the Western world and is used only for historical reasons, irony, or to make a statement about racism. However, this is not the case for some countries that the trope spread to, where it's detached from race relations. One of the most notable examples is Japan, where many people don't understand why it's so offensive and it still has influence on popular culture, leading to many a Cross Cultural Kerfluffle.
In The Eighties, there was an international craze for European, Scenery Porn-heavy musical spectacles ("megamusicals") such as Les Misérables, Miss Saigon, and the bulk of Andrew Lloyd Webber's output, which reached a commercial apex with The Phantom of the Opera. But at the turn of The Nineties, in the ironic wake of Lloyd Webber's not-so-mega Aspects Of Love's poor reception in New York City, newer megamusicals began underperforming or outright flopping in North America. By the Turn of the Millennium the style, never popular with theater critics, became deader than disco on Broadway. Attempts at exporting Tanz der Vampire, Notre Dame de Paris, The Woman in White, and The Pirate Queen to North America proved failures (heavily retooled in the first case) as audiences turned to straight-up musical comedies (i.e. The Producers) and jukebox musicals instead. Even Lloyd Webber's Phantom sequel Love Never Dies couldn't manage a Broadway production. However, the various Disney stage musicals, Wicked, and Spider Man Turn Off The Dark can be seen as following on from the megamusical with their massive production values, and Les Miserables and Phantom in particular still have huge fanbases.
While the concept of the classic Las Vegas showgirl, with her Showgirl Skirt and feathered headdress, remains iconic in the city and depictions of it in pop culture, the actual Vegas showgirl revue has been a dead art form since the Turn of the Millennium. Inspired by European cabaret revues, lavishly-designed shows like Folies Bergere and Lido de Paris ran for decades starting in The Fifties, alternating parades of scantily clad beauties with variety acts. Successors like Splash and Enter the Night simply updated the aesthetics to what was then The Present Day — Goddess, the fictional production in the movie Showgirls, is inspired by those shows.
The format was hit by two different kinds of competition from The Eighties onwards. First, strip clubs lured away guys who came to showgirl revues strictly for the babes. Second, audiences looking for spectacle were captivated by other genres. Stage magicians Siegfried & Roy rose from the ranks of the revues to headline their own show (Beyond Belief) in 1981, and their 1989 self-titled show at the Mirage Hotel and Casino was the show to see in Vegas up until Roy's notorious Career Ending Injury in 2003. When sister hotel/casino Treasure Island unveiled Cirque du Soleil's Mystere, a show which had artistic substance in addition to spectacle and daring feats, in 1993, revues were doomed. As additional Cirque shows and other performance art productions moved into town, the "classic Vegas revue" format was recognized as dated, unsexy, and unintentionally campy. Only Jubilee! at Bally's (it opened in 1981) is still running in The New Tens, scraping by on nostalgia for the format.
Touring ice skating revues. Dating back to the 1930s, such shows as Holiday on Ice, Ice Follies and Ice Capades featured glitteringly-costumed ice dancers, stunt skaters, comedy/novelty acts, Olympic champions, and costumed characters from kid-friendly franchises. With a new "edition" each year, they became as much of a family entertainment tradition as touring circuses, but by the end of The SeventiesHoliday on Ice absorbed Ice Follies, and stopped touring the U.S. by the mid-'80s (it still exists in Europe to this day). Ice Capades hung on into The Nineties but fell apart by decade's end, owing to the rise of the extra-kid-friendly rival franchise Disney On Ice and straightforward superstar showcases like Stars on Ice that appealed to serious skating fans and the skaters themselves. Nowadays the revues are best-known for serving as the real-life basis for the On Ice trope.
Circus and Stage Magician acts involving exotic wild animals (as opposed to often-domesticated varieties such as pigeons, ducks, dogs, cats, horses, etc.) started dying out in The Nineties as complaints from animal rights activists mounted and all-human circuses such as Cirque du Soleil flourished. The onstage mauling of magician Roy Horn (one half of the magic duo Siegfried & Roy) in 2003 by a white tiger effectively killed the use of exotic animals in magic acts. While the best-known "traditional" circus, Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey, still features elephants and tigers in its shows, it's not without controversy.
Toys
Any number of fad toys. Tamagochi/Giga Pets, Furby, Tickle-Me-Elmo, Beanie Babies, pogs ("tazos" in Mexico, Australia and other countries)... the list is ever-growing.
For the fogies in the crowd: Pet rocks. Mood rings. Lava lamps. (Although that last one has never quite gone entirely away, but is now mostly the venue of young kids. A lava lamp seen in a movie or TV show is an indicator that its owner smokes a lot of pot.)
For people of a certain age, we've seen our following childhood toys go through this: Cabbage Patch Kids (though they're making a valiant attempt at a resurgence), Teddy Ruxpin, Simon, pocket games that play only one game (such as Pac-Man or Centipede), Pound Puppies, the Snoopy snow cone maker, Strawberry Shortcake, and Rainbow Brite (though those last three are making something of a comeback).
Home chemistry sets and other science kits, thanks to a combination of perceived dangers to life and limb and the Wars on Terror and Drugs. The Gabriel and Skillcraft sets were highly acclaimed for being equipped with everything a budding young chemist needs: scaled down chemical glassware (real Pyrex), apparatus, and a host of chemicals used by real chemists. As a bonus, you could order from their catalogs for even more items. Due to alleged concerns about safety and liability, test tubes and beakers are now plastic, there are no alcohol burners, chemicals are now mostly limited to vinegar, table salt, table sugar, and other "safe" household items that are expected to already be on hand, and experiments are limited to simple, boring reactions such as color changes.
On top of that, there is a fear among police and various "public safety" groups and advocates that chemistry sets allegedly teach kids to make explosives and methamphetamines. (Breaking Bad has likely done little to help with the latter image.) Thanks to this, there have been a number of highly publicized police raids into the homes of what were nothing more than chemistry hobbyists. Some states, such as Texas, have even gone as far as making possession of any chemistry glassware illegal without a government permit.
Hobby telescopes: These are often sold in toy stores, department and novelty stores and they are usually priced anywhere from $49.99 to $99.99. With a little research, any budding amateur astronomer will instantly realise that the only good telescope is a telescope that you purchase from a dedicated and reputable science vendor. They are more expensive but if one is serious about the hobby, it's worth the investment.
The Game Overthinker episode "Who Will Be Remembered?" is basically a discussion of this trope, asking which iconic video games and characters will stand the test of time. Past examples from film, animation, comic books and stand-up comedy are employed to demonstrate how the trope works.
The episode "Thing We Lost in the Fire" also covers this trope, talking about how arcades have experienced this in the US, and how they could possibly make a comeback (using the Golden Tee series of golf games as Exhibit A).
Discussed again in the episode "Setting Sun", where he talks about the decline of the Japanese game industry.
Western Animation
The Shmoo, an Al Capp cartoon creature that became independently popular in the 40s as an expression, caricature, etc., have since become completely forgotten. See Let's Meet the Meat for details.
A special shout-out to Marvel/Sunbow's G.I. Joe cartoon, which actually used the line "Deader than Disco" in one of the episodes.
Cobra Commander: As of now, your little project is deader than Disco!
Western Animation in general for much of its existence. See Film.
Mr Magoo seems to have fallen into complete obscurity despite winning Oscars for Best Animated Short Film, appearing in a popular if forgotten Christmas Special, and being an advertising mascot for brands like General Electric. Disney attempted to give him a new lease on life in 1997 with a Live-Action Adaptation, but it flopped both critically and financially.
That's mostly due to Values Dissonance. Modern audiences are rather squicked by the apparent mockery of someone with a vision impairment.
The one time staple of Saturday morning cartoons is also fast heading this direction, with many TV stations selling off their Saturday time slots for more lucrative infomercials and sports blocks.
On the same note, the day of daily cartoons is long over, with a season of 60+ episodes like most of the toy driven series of the 1980s and early 1990s being unthinkable and unfeasible.
The concept of programming blocks in general, since networks can just create a niche channel like The Hub or TV Land to run those sort of shows 24 hours a day.
Any cartoons, where human adults are the central main characters. Protagonists are now almost always kids (usually tweens or younger, teenage protagonists older than 14 are becoming rarer) with adults as background supporting characters (if they are present at all). Even in anime expys such as Voltron Force, the original adult characters are now supporting characters with the preteen/teen protagonists as the main focus. Cartoons such as G.I. Joe, however, revolve exclusively around adult characters. This is one of the reasons why a cartoon series revival is doubtful. The only notable exceptions are Marvel and DC superhero based cartoons, but even shows like X-Men: Evolution and Legion Of Super Heroes choose to de-age the characters and make them teens instead of 20 or 30-somethings. There is a general consensus that adult characters leave little room for character growth or development.
During the late-80's and early-90's, Garfield and Friends was one of the most highly rated and critically acclaimed Saturday Morning cartoon series. Today, the show is largely forgotten and rarely (if ever) mentioned in discussions about the The Renaissance Age of Animation. This can probably be attributed to the show's heavy reliance on now-dated pop culture jokes and parodies. Mockeries like The Buddy Bears (a Take That at parental complaints about the lack of educational content in cartoons at the time) and Binky The Clown (a parody of TV clowns like Bozo) would likely go over the heads of anybody born after about 1990. Similarly, plots like struggling to find a good movie on TV or nobody knowing what vinyl is have aged rather poorly, for obvious reasons. The series' over-reliance on fourth wall humor and inarguable Seasonal Rot during its final days (due in no small part to the Executive Meddling it was suffering from by then) probably don't help matters much.
From approximately 1991-2003, Klasky-Csupo pretty much ruled over Nickelodeon's animated landscape, most notably with their breakout show Rugrats. Seeing how successful Rugrats was (which was, outside of The Simpsons, arguably the most popular animated TV series of the 1990s) and having to endure the rather nasty breakups with the majority of their other creators such as John Kricfalusi and Jim Jinkins (while at the same time retaining a healthy relationship with Klasky-Csupo), Nickelodeon kept ordering more Klasky-Csupo produced shows in an attempt to find the next Rugrats. Therefore, after Rugrats came Aaahh Real Monsters, As Told By Ginger, Rocket Power, and The Wild Thornberrys. Rugrats itself didn't really take off, so to speak, until it was Un-Canceled after a three year hiatus and the success of the 1998 motion picture, which was the first non-Disney produced animated film to gross $100 million domestically at the box office. In return, Klasky-Csupo released a show each year (one for every '90s trend, be it an animated soap opera in As Told By Ginger, action/extreme sports in Rocket Power, or environmentalism in The Wild Thornberrys) in their continuing attempt to create the next Rugrats. While these shows wound up having otherwise respectable, cult-sized fanbases, they weren't exactly megahits like Rugrats. Because of this, Nickelodeon resorted to turning the highly rated All Grown Up special from 2001 into a spinoff series. With the massive success of SpongeBob SquarePants and the popularity of Rugrats declining by the early 2000s (with the additions of new characters Dil and Kimi, as well as the box office underperformance of Rugrats Go Wild), as well as the studios now unpopular style (their unique, cutting-edge, and deliberately ugly animation may have worked best for Rugrats and Aaahh Real Monsters at first but became irritating by the Turn of the Millennium in part due to Nickelodeon's Wolverine Publicity of said shows at the expense of other Nicktoons), Klasky-Csupo shows no longer made enough money to warrant the high production and promotional budgets. Because of this, Nickelodeon decided to clean house of all of their Klasky-Csupo inventory except All Grown Up, which was kept because it was still relatively new and because Nickelodeon wanted to keep the Rugrats franchise around in some shape or form. When Nickeldeon's new managerial regime came into place in 2006, All Grown Up (which without the unique baby perspective of Rugrats, became an otherwise bland animated tween-com) became a victim of the new regime's programming purge, and that effectively ended Klasky-Csupo's Nicktoon dynasty.
While the film Who Framed Roger Rabbit? itself is still very well-regarded, there was a time when it looked like Roger Rabbit would be taking a permanent place alongside classic Disney characters like Mickey Mouse and Goofy. The Roger Rabbit Shorts came out of this period and the three-year gap between Roller Coaster Rabbit and Trail Mix-Up should tell you how fast the luster faded. Roger is still well-remembered, but as an icon of The Eighties rather than with the timeless appeal which once seemed so certain.
A remake of The Stooge starring Roger alongside Mickey Mouse is currently in the proposal stage.
