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"We didn't make them for kids. We made them for ourselves." - Chuck Jones on the movie theater release (30s to 40s) Looney Tunes shorts.
When dealing with media, sometimes it is difficult to overcome the feeling that, however much you may love a TV show, the only reason it exists is to make money. Sure, it might have great writing, acting, animation, but when it comes right down to it, it got produced because someone wearing a fancy suit thought a bunch of other guys wearing fancy suits could make money off of it. This feeling is even more overbearing when you consider all the TV shows you don't like - and likewise can only come up with the profit margin being the reason why anyone produced those horrible things.
But sometimes, there are shows which transcend the profit motive. It's not that they're good shows so much as it is that someone obviously cared a lot about it when they went into it. There are details which, frankly, make no sense for the genre formula. Why bother having a superhero show that has accurate Nazi war equipment? Why write a book set in a fantasy universe, but then include accurate fashion descriptions from the medieval period anyway? Why include hours of speech in made-up languages? Why, when you know simply from the brand name alone a product is going to make massive moolah, bother working at all, why not just phone it in and take a long nap?
The answer to this is simple. Not all of us need money to justify effort. A lot of people are honestly just Doing It For The Art.
This trope spreads across all genres of known media - its main hallmarks are when the creator of a work is clearly putting far more effort into the project than necessary. Indeed, sometimes the amount of work being put in is a little creepy. Sure, it's a great vision and all, but does anybody need that much detail?
Generally speaking this trope mainly applies to niche media, since oftentimes with more popular works the creators must work with the general expectation that they need to create something better than sliced bread. It also crops up more obviously in media where we generally have a set of diminished expectations - want to know why the Western Animation section is so huge? Because it's a genre where it seems like everything is either They Just Didnt Care or they're Doing It For The Art.
Of course if it does actually make money, well that's just a perk.
This is a Subjective Trope in spades - and one of the few we have that's generally positive in nature. So try not to muck it up.
See also: The Dev Team Thinks Of Everything, Shown Their Work, Easter Egg
Contrast with They Just Didnt Care and Money Dear Boy.
Examples:
Film
- It might be hard to believe today, but James Cameron's Titanic was a film of epic proportions which frankly had most of Cameron's producers worried. This thing cost 200 million to produce. Good luck finding many Oscar-chasing films today with even a tenth of that budget.
- Lord Of The Rings, the movie version. For those of you who don't already know about the insane efforts went to to make this faithful adaptation, just remember this- part of the budget was dedicated to a couple of guys making chain mail. Because normal costumes just weren't going to cut it. Of course, as you can see below, they were taking the motto of Tolkien straight to heart.
- And most of the Ominous Latin Chanting you hear in the soundtrack? It's not Latin. It's Elvish.
- Or Dwarvish. Or the Black Speech. And every damn word is context appropriate. Howard Shore should get a CMOA for this one.
- The very fact that all three films were made simultaneously over the course of 18 months before the first film was released, with additional reshoots for the films after each film was released year-by-year, is a great surprise in this age of next week sequels.
- Pans Labyrinth used extensive puppetry for its special effects as opposed to the CG animation which is far more the norm in modern circumstances. Suffice to say, puppets are a lot harder to do than CG.
- On a similar note, Team America, although these two movies are about as far apart from each other thematically as can be possibly imagined.
- Star Wars episodes I and II. Love it or hate it, George Lucas was determined to make sure his vision was brought to life. He relented a little for episode III, and the old trilogy...
- Mark Hammil has commented before on the fact that George Lucas seemed down in all of the interviews that he gave around the time that the original trilogy was made on account of the fact that he wasn't able to do things the way that he'd envisioned. As bad as people feel the rereleases may be, they're closer to Lucas' original vision than what was initially shown in cinemas.
- 2001: A Space Odyssey had Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke spending enormous efforts into making everything as realistic as possible. The earth moving equipment seen on the Moon would actually work on the real Moon. Quite a few experts from NASA and IBM were asked to help design the sets.
- Clarke published a few lines from his diary from pre-production in the introduction of a re-issue of the novel. They include "rang Isaac Asimov to ask him about the biochemistry of turning herbivores into carnivores." And they never even did anything with that...
- The green screen work was done frame by frame, instead of a chemical bath that is usually done.
- Actors gaining or losing weight for film roles certainly qualifies (when prosthetics could just as easily be used, especially nowadays), with Robert DeNiro's work on Raging Bull the most famous example...but Peter Sellers arguably went the extra mile by gaining weight for Being There because he felt it looked right for the character - despite chronic and worsening heart problems and a subsequent hatred of how he looked on screen. Some suspect his admitted difficult time losing the weight as fast as he could hastened his death. (See also Cue Irony.)
- The CGI for Transformers (and yes, we entirely recognise the irony of listing a Merchandise Driven film here) was some of the most intricate ever done. Michael Bay actually worked with the ILM crew to make sure all the light reflected properly off each part of the robots. He also filmed the action practically (with live action footage) and had the CGI made for the shots, instead doing everything CG wholesale. More expensive and harder to do, but the results speak for themselves.
- Not to mention that every single frame of the Cybertronians took twenty-four hours to render.
- This troper loves it when people watch the movie for the first time and realize that every little piece of the Transformers is in tandem with every other piece, and it's all put together so that it will fit into the actual size of the vehicle they're disguised as. Ironhide's guns alone are made out of ten thousand individual parts each, more than all of the parts that made up Bumblebee.
- Heck, Bay didn't even want to do this at first because it was based on a bunch of toys. People had to convince him...which Hasbro did by giving him the Transformers crash course, allowing him to understand that yes, they were a bunch of toys, with a twenty-five year pedigree and a worldwide fanbase of all ages.
- Richard Donner's work in the film version of Superman went notoriously over budget, and got him fired. His main concern was to make the best, most believable film he could. It could be argued Bryan Singer's issue with Superman Returns was that he was trying to emulate that instead of making his own film (which he promised to do next time).
- John Milius' movie adaptation of Conan The Barbarian was very, very, very good for a character most people treated as a joke and expected to get something lighthearted and campy. Instead, they got something dark, edgy, philosophical and yet still a good adventure movie. It had plenty of changes from the original stories, but it still stands up as an individual story and has actors that are either excellent, hammy or both. It was, correspondingly, a box-office flop.
Literature
- Lord Of The Rings and all related books written by J.R.R. Tolkien. It's
no exaggeration speaking God's own to say that the saga represents his total life's work. It's just that detailed.
- Ulysses by James Joyce features an incredibly elaborate series of metaphors and ironies. It was a very detailed stream of consciousness work that ended with a parody of such stories. It also shows the pitfalls of an author taking this trope too much to heart, since as we all know True Art Is Incomprehensible.
- Robert Jordan of the Wheel Of Time series features minute descriptions of clothes, military weapons, from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries - and this is a fantasy series we're talking about here. It's not like he's crossing his i's for any actual historians that might stumble across it.
Video Games
- Metal Slug. How many run and gun shooters were there back then- or even today that do as much random stuff as Metal Slug? Enemy conversations, animated chin movements, fifty different ways of watching the exact same tank explode? Nobody asked for all this- somebody just really wanted to make a detailed shooter.
- Super Smash Bros started out as a fun, but relatively simple brawler featuring Nintendo all-stars - a concept so inherently fun that messing around with it wasn't really necessary. The reason it's on the list is for its sequels, namely the trophies - both Melee and Brawl feature trophies of countless characters from Nintendo's past, all with descriptions of several sentences. It's a subset feature of the game which many people don't even look at. For those who do, it's hard to shake the feeling that somebody out there really, really admires Nintendo's history.
- Cave Story may not seem all that impressive to big brand name releases like Metroid and Castlevania, but consider this - the entire game, and the "Studio Pixel" responsible for it, consists entirely of one person.
- Over the course of 5 years. During the time he graduated and started to work.
- Freedom Force. Most people just see wacky technicolor superheroes doing wacky technicolor superhero things. Those geeky enough to know about the Golden Age and Silver Age of comics just feel an overwhelming sense of awe.
- Xenosaga required loads and loads of manpower in order to pull off the technical feats it could - especially when you consider that it was a first-generation PS 2 title. But man, did we really need that many cutscenes?
- The Monkey Island games feature an enormous amount of detail- especially impressive when we consider that the early games only had something like sixteen colors.
- Nintendo says they put their top teams onto their 'casual' games - Wii Sports and the like. Most developers scoff at such an idea. Those games are inexpensive enough to be almost guaranteed a profit. Nintendo does have potboiler games, but they don't seem to think casual games are potboilers.
- The Earth Bound / Mother series. There's a good reason why only 3 games have ever been made in the past 19 years.
- Chrono Trigger was explicitly some of Square's best Doing It For The Art, and it shows. For example, they didn't just script every encounter, they gave each and every last one brief, flavorful, and amusing animations. Some of why Chrono Cross was less well-received was because it was more explicitly made for the money and Chrono Trigger was a Tough Act To Follow.
- In most video games, incidental NPCs - even named ones - generally have no voice acting, two-dimensional personalities, and don't ever get up to much of anything. Not so in Psychonauts. Every single character in the game - and there's gobs of 'em, around 30 or so - is fully voiced, with their own quirky personality, and even their own mini-story they follow through the course of the game - such as the Love Triangle between Nils, J.T., and Elka, Quentin and Phoebe's garage band, and Mikail's search for the camp's bear population, which somehow leads to him and Maloof becoming the camp's local mobsters. It must be seen to be believed.
- Every single one of the 52 photographable animals in Beyond Good And Evil has an actually accurate Latin name, despite over half of them being fictional. For example, Megaptera anaerobica - "whale that doesn't need air", or Amoeba saltans, "jumping amoeba." This troper's not sure who went out and created Linnean classifications for 40-odd fictional animals, but she salutes them all the same for their attention to detail.
- Just one of the many examples from Nethack: There exists an enemy named the Quantum Mechanic. Upon death, it will sometimes drop a box. Inside the box is either a live cat or a cat corpse. If you check the source code, you'll find that the contents of a quantum mechanic's box, unlike all of the other boxes in the game, are not determined until you open it, just for the little extra joke that most people will never find. (Considering that the Nethack community is the one that coined the phrase The Devteam Thinks Of Everything, though, it's not that surprising.)
- Victor Ireland, of Working Designs, was clearly Doing It For The Art. Not everyone liked all of their art, but they put a phenomenal amount of effort into localizing relatively obscure Japanese RP Gs, even in the days before Final Fantasy VII brought RP Gs into the United States mainstream.
- The entire design team for Odin Sphere, an incredibly detailed game for the Playstation 2 (every limb has its own animations), consists of eleven people.
- The whole backstory of Final Fantasy XII: imagining a whole functional world with dozens of ethnicities, political subplots, more than a thousand NPCs, secondary characters who are more detailed than main characters from other games, detailed work on the different countries' architecture, clothing fashions, it feels like Square was trying to say "Yes, we can make something else than milking fanboys with remakes and spinoffs." Even unfinished and compromised (Vaan was not the original main character) it's still impressive.
- The DS Dinosaur King game looks pretty much like your average Pokemon clone, and is a licensed game. However, it has some of the best 3-D effects on the system (80+ dinosaurs in full 3D), puts effort into reconstructing the dinosaurs as accurately as possible (feathers on the ones which had them), uses many dinosaurs which otherwise would not be in a game, and has a Pokedex-clone which goes into depth in terms of dinosaur classification.
Comic Books
- Alan Moore's League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen is just dripping with cultural references. Actually, most of what Alan Moore does belongs here - Watchmen was originally just supposed to be an integration of newly acquired trademarks into the DC Universe, but Moore just didn't know when to quit.
Western Animation
- Every shot of The Boondocks has detail unheard of even for Anime. Thus, Aaron Mc Gruder has produced only 2 Seasons in 3 yeers.
- As much as I hate Robot Chicken, I respect it for being completely made out of clay, with no CGI.
- The DCAU team has always had high expectations of themselves, but they really outdid themselves in Justice League Unlimited. They animated nearly every single hero and villain in the DC Universe- most of whom are not well known and very few of whom even have lines. But the lengths they did to are even more well illustrated in the episode "The Savage Time", where for no reason whatsoever, they have very accurately drawn Tiger Tanks. How many people watching the show are even going to notice the tanks? How many can even tell that they actually did the research? They can, and apparently that's all that mattered.
- William Hanna and Joseph Barbera did this back when they worked for MGM in the 1940's. In one Tom And Jerry cartoon, they actually animate individual snowflakes. Remember that back then they had to do this by hand. Not because the audience demanded it- they just took that much pride in their work.
- Of course, this fact takes on tragic irony when we consider that William Hanna and Joseph-Barbera founded Hanna-Barbera - a company notorious for turning They Just Didnt Care into an art form and probably the single greatest contributor to the Animation Age Ghetto.
- For Avatar The Last Airbender, the creators flew all over the world to find inspiration and art references for architecture and landscaping, studied martial arts in order to create realistic combat sequences, and hired someone with a PhD so that all the Classical Chinese ideographs seen in the series would be accurate. They also hired consultants for these things.
- The creators of ReBoot had a lot of risk involved with their project. They predated the Toy Story Pixar CGI revolution by a full year. It was an untested medium and the equipment to do it was not cheap. On top of that all the voice-acting, writing, directing and music was done in the same studio, instead of being farmed out to different companies like most shows. The results were a really tight story with great voice acting and animation that was groundbreaking.
- Speaking of Toy Story, Toy Story 2 was originally intended to be direct-to-video. But Pixar didn't phone in their work like everyone else at Disney who made direct-to-video sequels - they actually set out to make a movie that was just as good as the first, and Disney was forced to give it a theater release as a result. Pixar is very well-known for this.
- The recent Sinbad animated film team went to an incredible amount of effort to make sure that the CG models for the ships and cities were accurate to a tee, once again regarding a film that was intended for children. Pity they didn't put as much effort into the script.
- The Mighty Orbots' artists, produced in the 1980's, actually studied from classical and Japanese animation in order to be the best they could be. Notable mainly because of the Animation Age Ghetto. When you could get away with stuff like Pac Man, or Gobots, or The Care Bears, studying classic film for inspiration is, well, a little weird.
- As seen by the page quote, the animators at the "Termite Terrace" studio producing the Looney Tunes shorts for Warner Brothers between the mid-1930s and 1946. Helping the anarchistic spirit along were a succession of humourless bosses that more or less invited open rebellion. Founder Schlessinger won unwitting immortality as the inspiration for Daffy Duck's trademark lisp ("You're dethpicable!"). The Warner Bros. themselves really didn't know or care what was going on in their animation unit, leaving hands-on oversight to bean counter Eddie Selzer. (Recounting the genesis of the classic "Bully For Bugs", Jones recalled the day Selzer showed up at his door as he and writer Mike Maltese were hashing out story ideas, and bellowed: "I don't want any pictures about bullfights! Bullfights aren't funny!" Then Selzer marched off, leaving his dumbfounded staff staring at each other. "Well," Maltese said, "Eddie's never been right yet...")
- Oban Star Racers came about solely because Savin Yeatman-Eiffel wanted to make it. Deciding working for another company would not give him the creative control he needed, he founded his independent own animation studio, spent years raising funds and years more perfecting the animation in cooperation with Japanese studios. Yeatman-Eiffel worked hard to secure the best talent available (including Yoko Kanno and Taku Iwasaki for the soundtrack, and French sound engineer Jerome Wiciak for sound effects - a dozen tracks were created simply for the Whizzing Arrow's engine noises), wrote the scripts for all 26 episodes in several languages and worked personally with the voice actors, and years were spent polishing the show to a mirror shine. The result is a children's series of extremely high quality, combining a story of exceptional depth and consistency with excellent characterisation, a great soundtrack and consistently breathtaking animation.
- Although it is easy (and usual) to simply dismiss any Transformers product as entirely Merchandise Driven, some works, such as Transformers Animated or Transformers Beast Wars, are well-liked for their appreciation of the mythos and written with the Periphery Demographic in mind.
- Nick Park's Chicken Run and of course, Wallace and Gromit. You can even see the thumbprints on the faces of the latter.
- Also, Shaun the sheep. This is most obvious when you look at the bull's texture.
Anime
- The music of Cowboy Bebop, rather than going for J-Pop music that's the norm for such anime, elected to go for classic jazz performed by composer Yoko Kanno and her band The Seatbelts. If you really want to be impressed, consider the fact that Jazz is not a popular art form in Japan.
- The anime film Metropolis uses the same music with a very similar impact.
- Gunsmith Cats actually sent its entire animation studio to Chicago to make sure they got the setting right, and instead of using stock gun noises they used recordings of each gun being used that they made themselves.
- The half-hour film Voices Of A Distant Star was created almost entirely by Makoto Shinkai. The only thing he didn't do by himself was the voice acting on the commercial release.
- Nausicaa Of The Valley Of The Wind - When Hayao Miyazaki originally pitched the idea, producers refused to risk money making a film not based on something else, so Miyazaki turned it into a manga instead. After the film's success he was given pretty much free reign on his creative ideas.
- Vinland Saga. Not only did the author make it because it was always his dream to create a kick ass Shonen series, and he always had a deep fascination with the Vikings and wanted to make something that portrayed them as they were, more than just Always Chaotic Evil killers and thugs. He even went on a trip to Iceland to research Viking Culture in greater detail, to give his artwork that authentic tinge, and it shows.
- ARIA. For all the details of buildings, geography, events, and all things. Also, the team travel to Venice every time they're doing a new season, even for one episode OVA!
Live Action TV
- Like the Transformers live-action film, a lot of the CGI in Firefly was done to fit in the shots instead of making the shots to fit the CGI.
- Battlestar Galactica (the new series). You'd think that'd be enough said, but just for emphasis they employ people whose job it is to cut the corners off of paper to make them into the series' distinctive octagonal shape.
Other
- The Disney Imagineers put excruciating amounts of detail into the designs of rides, gift shops, and even just the ambient scenery at the theme parks. Many of the "authentic-looking" props in period-specifc areas like Frontierland and Main Street, USA are actually authentic antiques, not replicas. "No one will ever see it" is not considered a good enough excuse to skimp. The policy is to create something that Walt Disney would approve of, and he was such a stickler that he would rather indefinitely postpone the opening of an attraction than let it open before it was perfect.
- A really great example of this is the Haunted Mansion, the hearse drawn by invisible horses? Real (and despite popular urban legend, it's not Brigham Young's hearse), the stretching pictures? actual paintings, they spend weeks on one animatronic in the attic before scrapping it for something else completely when they didn't like how it looked.
- Sadly, roughly since the initial disappointment of Disneyland Paris, which is regarded as the most elaborate of the "kingdom" parks, in recent years Imagineers have had to watch as entire new parks (most infamously, Disney's California Adventure) are whittled down to shadows of their originally conceived selves to save money. Similarly, many updates to older attractions are subject to budget restrictions and Disney may choose to close them altogether instead of taking the trouble, and new attractions are becoming rarer at the older parks. Many fans despair at this sea change in the company's policy, particularly when the Japanese parks, which are not outright owned by Disney, seem to have no problem giving the Imagineers free reign. Disney still is one of the best companies at theming and "immersive" environments, because the Imagineers do pay attention to detail where they can, but it's not what it once was.
- Dr Horribles Sing Along Blog, anyone? Done out of Joss Whedon's own pocket as a response to the writers' strike, with the cast and crew being paid almost entirely out of any profits it made from iTunes sales and ads. And it's insanely popular.
Webcomics
- Really, just about any webcomic fits this trope. Almost no one starts one expecting to make a profit.
- Same thing with Machinima, which actually requires an expensive capture card, a microphone, and some way to create a soundtrack if you want to make a half decent one. That's way over a hundred dollars for something you aren't even allowed to make a profit from due to copyright laws (unless the company tells you it's OK to make a profit, like the contracts Roosterteeth gets).
- Tom Siddell sprinkles Gunnerkrigg Court with surprisingly-accurate references to subjects like mythology and Medieval western martial arts, though it's unclear how many are simply subjects he was already interested in. However, it is known that Tom researched lock picking specifically for the comic. He even bought a set of lockpicks, because he wanted to depict it accurately, even though the subject has only come up on two
 pages.
- When Sluggy Freelance began, it followed the standard four-panel, black-and-white format of newspaper comics, complete with the triple-sized, full color strip on Sundays. As the years went by, Pete Abrams began using color a lot more frequently, as well as often doing several strips each week that were double, triple, or even quadruple the normal size. All while sticking to a daily update schedule. Compare a week's worth of strips from early in the series to a week of strips from the "That Which Redeems" arc.
- All the works by David Morgan-Mar and The Comics Irregular. ADCD, crammed with massive reference and explanations needed to just make a pun work, totally free of Schedule Slip and they are doing it as a hobby! That's something you don't get to see often.
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