Follow The Leader - Television Tropes & Idioms

The surprise success of the manga Love Hina, a story about a loser who through hard work, learns martial arts, becomes successful, slowly wins the women in his life, and finally gets to marry his first love. This gave rise to a ton of Unwanted Harem series in which a loser meets several women who immediately fall in love with this loser for no apparent reason.
- It was so bad, that when Ken Akamatsu, the guy who made Love Hina, went to make his next series, they wanted him to make another Love Hina. He agreed; for all of two to five volumes, that is...
- Just goes to show it really is Older Than They Think, since Love Hina is clearly derived from Rumiko Takahashi's Maison Ikkoku, with influence from Ranma One Half, Urusei Yatsura, and possibly Tenchi Muyo. Lovable Loser who gets the girl comes and goes, and usually comes in clumps. Love Hina just kicked off one of the largest clumps.
  - Note that harem anime is now heading back in the old direction of the Chivalrous Pervert once again, or something like that, at least most guys now don't act like they never saw breasts before
Neon Genesis Evangelion has imitators of its philosophical focus, its gratuitous religious imagery, its mecha designs, its mixture of pretty girls and sci-fi action, and even of individual characters.
Sailor Moon inspired a deluge of shows based on the Magic Warrior model that it popularized.
- In the same vein, Fushigi Yuugi practically set the trend for the genderflipped Unwanted Harem genre. It also brought Mikos into the mainstream.
Anime was largely an underground movement in the States before the success of Power Rangers, which led companies to look for more Japanese material to localize in 1995, including Ronin Warriors, Sailor Moon, Eagle Riders, Teknoman, and Dragonball. The Pokémon phenomenon several years later advanced it further, resulting in the localization of not just more Mons-flavored shows, but also the shonen genre in general. American TV producers have tried to cash in on this as well, but, not wanting to pay for an existing series, create their own. For proof that this rarely ever works out, look no further than Dragon Booster.
- Says you. Some of us grew up with Star Blazers, Robotech, Battle Of The Planets, and so forth LONG before 1995.
  - Kimba the White Lion, Astro Boy, Gigantor and The Amazing Three, you whippersnappers. Get offa my lawn.
- The American entertainment industry's interest in putting anime on TV may have started in 1995-2000, but the phenomenon of selling translated anime itself got started around 1990 as a response to the rise of fansubbing on VHS tapes.
- It's not like specific anime don't get recycled and Americanized as well (*cough*Shuriken School*cough*) or Bowdlerised (see: all anime licensed by Four Kids Entertainment).
The success of The Animatrix paved the way for direct-to-video anime anthologies of popular Western franchises, animated by different well-known studios. So far, Batman got in the act with Batman: Gotham Knight and later will Halo with Halo Legends.
Utena now has at least one imitator, Shitsurakuen. It's about a tomboyish young girl who gets accepted to an exclusive private school and wears shorts instead of a skirt with her uniform (although they came with the uniform, to her confusion). She sees herself as a knight defending the opressed girls of the school, who are used as weapons/objects by the boys, especially the head of the student councel. There is much Ho Yay and Les Yay to be had, too. At least here there's a sci-fi reason for the weapons coming out of the girls' chests: the whole campus is a 3-D stage for a videogame.

In the Golden Age, Superman inspired hundreds of new comic features on super-strong, invulnerable adventure heroes.
- The Golden Age also had a secondary trend of vigilantes with ill-defined omnipotent powers, who'd fight street crime without much regard for ethics. See Dr. Fate, Green Lantern, the Spectre, Black Widow, and so on.
In the Silver Age, all comics followed trends, to the point where it was an in-joke among comic writers and fans, for example an EC story about hiring Jack Kamen includes the line, "Jack, you old son! I haven't seen you for two trends!"
- EC of course, followed trends religiously for a while, then started their own, Horror Comics! This in turn led in part to the Comics Code (boo! hiss!).
Marvel Comics' success, particularly with Spider-Man, the first teen superhero, had many publishers trying for a more teenager-friendly product; sadly, these often faded into Totally Radical.
- On the subject of Spider-Man, his comics were also one of the first to illustrate the "normal" side of the hero, along with Fantastic Four. Rather than filling the issue with one action sequence after another, part of the issue would illustrate Peter taking on everyday tasks such as getting to work on time, experiencing relationships, dealing with school bullies, and so on. Even nowadays, polls and streets interviews indicate that the main reason people like Spidey so much is because "he's a regular guy like the rest of us." It has since become standard for comics to portray the everyday side of the superhero, with the character, like Peter, being portrayed as someone the target audience can relate to. Unfortunately, under worse authors, this often results in myriad forms of You Suck.
Social issues were rarely dealt with before "Green Lantern Green Arrow". Now it seems like a staple in many comics to feature issues that are a Very Special Episode.
Before "All New All Different X-Men" superheroes were WASPs.
- Except for Black Panther.
  - That was Marvel's Black Best Friend, unless I miss my guess.
  - You do, also Blade, Luke Cage and the Falcon all predate the All New All Different X-men, and Luke Cage, Blade and the Black Panther all stared in their own comics for a brief run prior to the All New All Different X-Men.
Nobody who's written Batman in the past 20 years has been able to escape the influence of The Dark Knight Returns. This case is particularly hilarious because the single greatest influence on Batman's character wasn't even canon. Even Batman's entry in the All-Star series, which was supposed to throw out all the complicated backstory and let the DC heroes have more Silver-Age-style adventures, was written by The Goddamn Frank Miller himself, and Batman was even more cranky and psychotic than ever.
- One especially influential aspect of The Dark Knight Returns is the blow-by-blow First Person narration. Apparently inspired by The Taxi Driver it was distinctive when Miller first did it. Then all Batman comics had it. Then just about all of DC. Marvel soon followed suit. Now it's pretty much universal in mainstream comics, whether it suits the book's tone or not.
- The ever-hilarious You Tube series Marvel/DC Happy Hour parodied this by having the second season's Story Arc involve the Joker using nanotechnology in an android named Lance to brainwash heroes like Superman, Wonder Woman, Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, and Wolverine into thinking that their loved ones died horribly right in front of them so that they would be more dark and brooding, like Batman, except that they would break his one rule in pursuit of Justice. The only heroes he couldn't brainwash were Ghost Rider, The Punisher (because he was already a dark, brooding, homicidal vigilante), and Spiderman (because the events of One More Day had already altered his perception of reality, and he has lost everything but never loses his optimism).
  - This series was also made in the aftermath of The Dark Knight, the phenomenal critical and commercial success of which had many producers scrambling to suggest that future superhero movies (including Superman) would be made more 'dark' to reflect this success. As such, amongst the parody there's also the valid point that what's good for the goose isn't always good for the gander; a dark tone works amazingly for Batman, but not every superhero is Batman.
  - Tell that to the executives. Wait, don't bother, they won't listen. And when their forced GRIMDARK (likely) fails, you can bet they'll wash their hands of all blame. There's a trope called Viewers Are Morons, there really should be an opposite trope split off from Executive Meddling, Executives Are Morons.
In the early eighties, mainstream American comic books lagged behind some of their British counterparts which featured more sophisticated and literary dialogue and story concepts. Then, after Alan Moore reinvigorated DC's poorly selling Swamp Thing, DC editors quickly signed up other emerging British writers such as Jamie Delano (Hellblazer), Neil Gaiman (The Sandman) and Grant Morrison (Animal Man). This proved so successful that the "British invasion" of DC continues to this day.
- This was parodied in the Doctor Who Expanded Universe novel Sky Pirates, which reveals Bernice Summerfield to be the author of a bizarre Vertigo-style comic called The 45 Second Piglet; said comic having been comissioned simply because she was in a big building in New York with a British accent.
The Chip And Dale Rescue Rangers comic book parodied this in the form of having the Rangers encounter a few other rescue groups made up of small animals (one of whom was revealed to be working for Fat Cat).
A large portion of the Dark Age of superhero comics was in some ways pretty much an extended attempt at following the leader by creating comics in the vein of The Dark Knight Returns and its contemporary, Watchmen, in an attempt to reflect the complexity and depth of these works. However, many critics — including, amongst others, Alan Moore, writer of Watchmen — accused them of only copying the superficial details, mainly represented by the Nineties Anti Hero, rather than the storytelling complexity and experiments with medium that these works pioneered, with the result that most comics of this period were no more deep or original than the earlier works they were moving away from — they were just nastier.
Batman Year One was the UR Example of origin stories in the more recent eras. Now both Marvel and DC produce Year One stories, with varying degrees of success, although none of them could match Batman's.
Gary Larson's one-panel comic The Far Side spawned quite a few gag comics, such as Close to Home, The Flying MCoys and The Argyle Sweater.

The ultimate example, perhaps, is Star Wars, which launched the science-fiction craze of the late 1970s/early 1980s. It pretty much opened the door for expensive fantasy/science fiction movies, and is credited with changing the way big blockbusters are viewed by Hollywood, but most of them were shallow attempts to cash in.
- Star Wars is also the reason that Moonraker was made when it was. Originally (in 1977) the next James Bond movie after The Spy Who Loved Me was supposed to be For Your Eyes Only, and indeed the closing credits of the former explicitly state this. The success of Star Wars changed this, and the 'spacey' movie was made. It was mediocre at best, so the next film was far more down-to-earth.
- This is also the reason that Star Trek: Phase Two, a new show that would take up from where 'Star Trek The Original Series left off, was cancelled in favor of big-screen Star Trek films.
- You know what? Let's just list the works that either ripped off Star Wars or were made because of it: The Black Hole, Battle Beyond The Stars, Battlestar Galactica, "Turkish Star Wars", Starcrash, Eragon, Krull... the list goes on. And on. AND ON.
Two years before that, Jaws begat the concept of the Summer Blockbuster, along with a slew of "animals attack" movies; one of the first and best copiers was Alligator.
- Spielberg's first movie Duel, while not as influential, has inspired a few ripoffs as well; the recent video-release Joy Ride: Dead Ahead was painfully blatant in its copying.
Top Gun led to several imitators, from Iron Eagle to the short-lived TV series Supercarrier, as well as a mini-boom of air-combat video games.
- Can you say JAG?
  - JAG was a decade later, and was obviously inspired by A Few Good Men.
Friday the 13th initiated the 1980s' slasher genre; the film was itself preceded by Halloween. Later, Scream re-invigorated the genre; among the works that came in its wake were Halloween H2O and Freddy vs. Jason.
- The slasher genre was arguably invented by Carlo Ponti's Torso.
The Disaster Movie craze in the 1970s featured such works as The Towering Inferno, The China Syndrome and Airport. This only ended with the release of Airplane, a parody that meant such films couldn't be taken seriously anymore. (That's how you know your parody was successful... when you kill your entire targeted genre.)
- Then the Disaster Movie craze made a brief comeback with Twister, Armageddon/Deep Impact and Volcano/Dantes Peak, not to mention a whole slew of mediocre Skiffy movies about earthquakes and volcanoes and killer storms in unlikely or odd locations.
  - Then the entirely different Disaster Movie subverted this by being the end of a trend of yearly So Bad Its Horrible spoofs by Seltzer And Friedberg.
  - If 2012 doesn't kill disaster flicks, I don't know what will.
  - With a worldwide gross of $759 million?! (although it's hard to top 2012 in "disaster level"...)
The success of the first X-Men film, followed by the great success of the Spider-Man film franchise, unleashed a deluge of Super Hero-inspired live-action movies upon the world that hasn't let up yet (and probably won't, thanks to the runaway critical and commercial success of the recent Iron Man film, and now The Dark Knight).
- Actually, Tim Burton's Batman revitalized the super hero genera after it was left for dead after the Superman series hit an iceberg. Unfortunately Batman And Robin put a bullet into the brain of superhero films until X-Men hit the scene.
Jacques-Yves Cousteau's The Silent World became the nature documentary all other nature documentaries would imitate.
The nature documentary March of the Penguins led to two animated features with penguin characters: Happy Feet and Surfs Up. Both were in production long before March of the Penguins was released (that being the nature of feature-quality animation of either kind), but the success of March probably got them slightly more publicity for getting on the "penguin bandwagon".
Dark City (1998) created a wave of dark, philosophical Science Fiction movies that question the nature of reality and have lots of John Woo-style gunplay. It was The Matrix that became the most successful and iconic of these films, even though it was not the first. Other examples include eXistenZ, The 13th Floor, and Equilibrium.
- The Matrix brought Cyber Punk into the mainstream during the late 1990s, when the genre was already almost dead in Sci-Fi literature, and spawned a multitude of movies and video games which mostly imitated its cinematic style and Bullet Time CGI effects.
  - Supposedly, when the Wachowskis were peddling their script, they brought with them a comic book and told prospective buyers that, basically they wanted to do something like that into a movie. The comic in question? Ghost In The Shell.
- More broadly, Dark City seems to have been the advance guard of a rash of films in 1998-1999 of varying genres involving a closed or false reality. Non-action examples would be Pleasantville, The Truman Show, and maybe even Being John Malkovich. These existed alongside science-fiction titles like eXistenZ, and, of course, The Matrix. This may have simply been the spirit of the age, however, and not strictly an example of this trope.
- And of course, most Cyber Punk movies owe debts of gratitude to Blade Runner (the "real world") and Tron (cyberspace)
- As far as stylistic precedents for The Matrix go, see also Event Horizon and the movie version of Lost In Space.
The twin successes of The Lord Of The Rings and Harry Potter movies are leading to more and more film adaptations of epic literary fantasy, varying from the relatively good The Chronicles of Narnia, to Eragon, which somehow managed to make even less sense than the book on which it was based. His Dark Materials and The Dark Is Rising have been released, but neither did very well.
- Correction: The Golden Compass has been released, WITHOUT the shock ending that kicks readers into the next book. This makes it almost certain that the sequels will never be made: Pullman is just too tough for the studio.
- It even spread to trailers. Bridge to Terabithia was advertised like a Narnia Clone, when it really, really, wasn't. Even the creators of the film are mad about that one.
  - As was Pans Labyrinth. Many parents were Not Happy.
Shaft became the model of a film genre for movies targeted towards urban African Americans now otherwise known as Blaxploitation. It also owed a lot to the film Sweet Sweetback's Baaaaadaaaaaaas Song, which wasn't quite an exploitation film.
In a rather strange example, there was an entire genre (Our Man Flint, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Modesty Blaise, Austin Powers, Spy Hard, Johnny English, etc) parodying spy movies in and/or of the 1960s... except that they only ever seem to parody James Bond. It's as if other spy fiction simply didn't exist, although they don't really need to parody those: the general public know about James Bond most and the James Bond movies created or standardised enough tropes by themselves. What made it rather odd is the James Bond series already started out pretty tongue in cheek.
Gladiator re-started the Historical Epic genre of things like Ben Hur. Russell Crowe's powerful performance, the high budget settings and gritty action caught something in the audience that studios have attempted to imitate with films such as Troy, Alexander, and most recently, 300.
- While obviously different from other historical epics, films like Gangs Of New York also owe a lot to Gladiator, both stylistically and in getting the execs to actually greenlight the massive budgets they needed. Some of these have garnered successes in their own light, not as imitations but as part as a new wave of Epic films.
Soft on Demand, a somewhat infamous Japanese adult video company, created a small series of films called Zenra -X-, where Zenra is the Japanese word for Nude, and -X- is some random everyday activity or sport — for example, Zenra Volleyball, Zenra Cross-town Bus Tour, Zenra Officework, Zenra Orchestra, etc. These films were successful enough and mimicked enough that Zenra has become an entire genre of Japanese pornography, dedicated to pointless nudity, with little to no sex, and occasional plots. It helps that the Soft on Demand company doesn't take themselves at all seriously.
George Romero's Night Of The Living Dead started the trend, which was then unofficially spun off with Return Of The Living Dead which then opened the floodgates to the Zombie Apocalypse genre. There had been previous zombie films like I Walked With A Zombie, White Zombie, and arguably The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari, but these had only one or two zombies each, and no apocalypse.
- Except for Invisible Invaders, which does feature a Zombie Apocalypse.
- Night Of The Living Dead may have been the first real zombie film, but there were only a few imitators after it, like Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things and the Spanish Tombs of the Blind Dead series. What really set off the zombie film craze was the release of Romero's later Dawn Of The Dead and the Italian-made Zombi 2 (Dawn of the Dead was called Zombi in Italy).
The Kentucky Fried Movie inspired a host of movies, most of them largely forgettable, that consisted of largely unrelated sketches made up mostly of pop culture parodies and pastiches.
- The first Scary Movie led to a couple crappy spoof flicks by Seltzer And Friedberg such as Date Movie and Epic Movie.
The success of the Saw franchise (at least the first movie) sparked a rash of torture horror movies, such as Hostel, Turistas, and most recently Vacancy.
- And of course, they all think what gives Saw its merits (however dubious) is its Gorn aspects, never realizing that Saw's unpleasantness is a means to an end and not an end in and of itself. Then again, what did you expect from film studios?
Sci Fi Channel has a tendency to release a cheap knockoff version of whatever hot movie is in theaters.
- King of the Lost World being a particularly notable knock-off of King Kong, Lost, and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (and/or The Lost World). Notably BAD.
Following the blockbuster success of Titanic, several other movies were made about the Titanic and shipwrecks in general to try to follow in its footsteps. Including an atrocious Disneyesque cheapass cartoon movie with singing animals.
- Pearl Harbor was also a pretty blatant attempt to recapture the tragic-love-amid-larger-tragedy magic that made Titanic so many gazillions.
Of course, Pearl Harbor was also part of a glut of World War II films released after the success of Saving Private Ryan, including Enemy At The Gates, Hart'sWar, The Last Raid, U-571, Windtalkers and others.
Alien has had a lot of "More Teeth Than The Osmond Family" movies after it.
- Then again, it's unlikely that Alien would have been fast-tracked into production if not for the success of Star Wars, proving that this trope isn't necessarily a bad thing.
- It also repopularized the Face Full Of Alien Wing Wong, which would often be done in a more literal way.
M Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense inspired many movies that completely ignored quality, fun, action and plot, instead focusing on some supernatural twist. They ranged from good to bad, to terrible, to shit. Unusually, M. Might Shyamalan himself seems to have been the main exponent of this trend.
A wave of Japanese horror movie remakes began with The Ring. Examples include The Ring 2, Grudge 1 and 2, and Cellular.
- Hell, Shutter even tries to look like a Japanese remake (the original was Thai, by the way).
  - It was Japanese when it was called Fatal Frame (or Project Zero technically, but that's not as cool).
After films like Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, and especially The Sound of Music hit the big time at the mid-1960s box-office, big studios fast-tracked a ton of big-budget movie musicals. While one, Oliver!, was successful enough to win the 1968 Best Picture Oscar, and Funny Girl launched Barbra Streisand's movie career, changing audience tastes doomed the vast majority of them to significant financial losses. The genre limped through the 1970s and quietly died in the early 1980s (with a mini-revival by way of the Disney Animated Canon in the 90s). Only in recent years has the genre become respectable again, and it's still not particularly profitable (in America anyway - the story is a bit different overseas, with Mamma Mia outperforming The Dark Knight in several countries, notably Britain).
- Moulin Rouge! (2001) revived this trend, making way for films such as Chicago, RENT, Across The Universe, Mamma Mia and Nine.
The success of Quentin Tarantino's movies Reservoir Dogs and especially Pulp Fiction led to a glut of similarly stylistic and flashy Crime Dramas with a retro-Seventies feel, focusing on amoral-yet-cool gangsters and criminals, stylised violence and witty dialogue (or at least dialogue the writers thought was witty) strewn with expletives and discussing seemingly trivial topics. Most went straight-to-video and, unlike Tarantino's works, were quickly forgotten if indeed they were even noticed.
Willis O'Brien's version of The Lost World invented the notion of a giant monster rampaging through a city, which O'Brien later did again with King Kong. The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, with effects by O'Brien's protege, Ray Harryhausen, took the next step by linking the monster to the nuclear bomb, inspiring a wave of imitators all throughout The Fifties, like Them!, The Beginning of the End, Earth vs. The Spider, and, most famously, Godzilla.
- Also, the success of Godzilla lead to many different monster movies all across Asia, including Pulgasari (an obscure North Korean film about a monster made of rice that comes to life and eats metal), Yongary, Gorgo (which was actually made in Britan and featured on Mystery Science Theater 3000), and everyone's favorite flying turtle. The genre was recently started up again with Peter Jackson's King Kong remake, and subsequently revamped with South Korea's The Host, which was followed by Cloverfield.
After The Dark Knight hit the box offices running, Warner Brothers executives have decided to revamp another of their classic characters in a darker, edgier way. Who is it? Superman. Yes, Superman.
- Many famous writers were really pissed off, when they heard that.
The success of Transfomers (2007) caused studios to greenlight Remake and Revival projects from olders series such as Speed Racer, Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, GI Joe, Robotech, Voltron and Knight Rider. Star Trek is also a part of this trend, "rebooting" the Original Series with a style and mood more reminescent of the "Revival" flicks than other films in the Trek franchise.
Anyone notice a recent trend in size changing/giant/tiny movies? We've had Ant Bully and Bee Movie, this year we have Monsters Vs Aliens, and then we have Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland, Ant-Man and Gullivers Travels. Is Hollywood going macrophiliac?
The Mockbusters. Enough said.
The massive success of Shaun Of The Dead has lead other films, such as Severance and Lesbian Vampire Killers, to try and mix comedy and horror. Quality ranges from alright to complete shite. But one thing is certain: all of these films will be promoted as the best comedy horror since Shaun Of The Dead.
The massive popularity of Bruce Lee after his tragic passing led to a peculiar phenomenon known as "Brucesploitation", in which various Hong Kong studios made movies starring Bruce Lee imitators with titles like Bruce Lee Fights Back From the Grave and The Clones of Bruce Lee. The fad eventually died out when none of the imitators were as successful as the original, though one of them, Cheng Long, would later go on to greater fame by pioneering his own unique, often-imitated, never-duplicated style of martial arts film. You might know him as Jackie Chan.
- And Now You Know The Rest Of The Story
After The Exorcist made boatloads of money for Warner Bros., the rest of the 70's saw a veritable flood of horror movies based around children: The Omen, The Other, Audrey Rose, etc. Many of its successors (such as The Sentinel) also chose to imitate its preoccupation with the symbolism and aesthetics of the Catholic church, as opposed to the scary-little-kid formula; in fact, any horror movie over the last forty or so years that relies heavily on Catholic iconography could be said to be following in The Exorcist's footsteps.
Imitators of 2001: A Space Odyssey: Solaris (original and remake), Star Trek The Motion Picture, Contact, Mission to Mars, Sunshine, WALL-E, Moon. However, 2001's sequel 2010 tried to avoid imitating it as much as possible.
- Star Wars is, of course, as far away from an imitator of 2001 as you can get, but John Dykstra continued to use 2001's style of lighting and detailing spacecraft on Star Wars, and from there it became the standard way to depict spacecraft in all of visual science fiction.

After authors such as Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis popularized Gothic fiction in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, hundreds of lesser known Gothic novels and condensed re-writes of better known Gothic novels were published in an attempt to cash in. This largely died down by the 1820s, but the large number of forgotten novels published by Minerva press (which also published Radcliffe's classic, The Mysteries of Udolpho) is a testament to the massive popularity of Gothic novels at the turn of the nineteenth century. Indeed, many of these "trade Gothic" works can be bought from Zittaw Press, Udolpho Press, and Valancourt Books. Thus, this trope is Older Than Radio.
The Da Vinci Code remained on best-seller lists for an obscene number of months, resulting in many copycat quest novels. Many of these were written even more poorly.
The incredible success of Harry Potter has led to a glut of children's fantasy, and probably helped open the door for the (second) publication of the book Eragon.
The success of William Gibson spawned the entire Cyber Punk genre (although it wasn't the first one - that would be John Brunner's The Shockwave Rider), which really only died after Neal Stephenson's Affectionate Parody Snow Crash pointed out just how silly it was (thus beginning the transition to various flavors of Punk Punk.)
When Stephen King published The Green Mile in serial format, lesser-known horror writer John Saul attempted the same thing with The Blackstone Chronicles. It didn't work as well.
Between Anne Rice making vampires fashionable and Anita Blake making supernatural female detectives fashionable, there's recently been a crop of supernatural mysteries with supernatural PI characters.
The popularity of Twilight caused a boom in the YA vampire genre. Notable examples include P.C. Cast's The House Of Night series, Richelle Mead's Vampire Academy series, and Melissa de la Cruz's Blue Bloods series, each having a wildly different take on the vampire mythos. The quality of both Twilight and its successors is highly disputed. Contrary to popular belief, Vampire Kisses by Ellen Schreiber does not fit this trope seeing as it was written before Twilight and its vampires are, for the most part, ripped straight from Dracula.
- That's not all: someone is publishing Wuthering Heights with a Twilight-ified cover and a sticker that notes it's "Edward and Bella's favorite book!"
- Doesn't apply to just Wuthering Heights: Numerous attempts to mooch off the popularity of Twilight have also led to an increase in similar book covers (I.E: A usually plot-insignificant object placed on a black background with the author's name and title in white text), even for reprints of ''Romeo And Juliet'!.
Every High Fantasy setting that ever watched over a humble adventurer on an epic quest to save the world owes large chunks of themselves to J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
- Ironically, another influence of Lord of the Rings is the use of releasing stories as trilogies, especially fantasy stories. This is despite the fact that Tolkien did not intend for the book to be split up the way it was, and was quite opposed to it despite the publishers' sound economical reasons (releasing it as three books that people could buy versus one book that would be too expensive for anyone to buy).
Jasper Fforde pokes fun at this phenomenon in The Well of Lost Plots: A Thursday Next Novel. While Thursday is exploring the Well of Lost Plots, where books and characters are created from scratch, a Mr Exposition explains to her that, when one character is written with a particularly forceful or distinctive personality, characters-to-be are affected by that and take on those traits. A side-effect of Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca, for example, is that hundreds of impressionable characters imitated the creepy and possibly psychotic lesbian housekeeper of the story, which results in, for Jurisfiction, an army of Mrs. Danvers clones. At the end, he offers Thursday, "Can I interest you in a wise old mentor figure?"
While Tom Clancy was not the first guy to do the techno-thriller, he spawned a lot of imitators.
Somewhat to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's chagrin, Sherlock Holmes arguably opened the floodgates for modern mystery and detective fiction, as detectives like Hercule Poirot, Nero Wolfe and Inspector Morse all followed in his footsteps in one way or another. Holmes even provided a key inspiration for Batman's status as the DC Universe's greatest detective.
The UK and Ireland have recently seen a surge of popularity for "misery lit" books based on stories (some true, some not) of childhood abuse/ParentalAbandonment etc. They all look exactly the same- a mostly white cover with the title in twirly, bright lettering- occupy entire shelves in shops and seem to be competing with each other to see which can be the most depressing. Possibly launched in America by A child called it by Dave Peltzer, which then brought the craze to Britain and Ireland when it was released there.
- Many bookshops now consider these a legitimate genre and have a section devoted to them, often called "Tragic Lives".
Philippa Gregory's Tudor-era historical romance novels (starting with The Other Boleyn Girl) jumpstarted a new wave of imitators set in or around the reign of Henry VIII (a trend exacerbated by the TV series The Tudors).
Pride And Prejudice And Zombies has at least two imitators (but with vampires instead of zombies) in addition to its own sequel, Sense And Sensibility And Sea Monsters (bonus: S&S&SM's cover features a guy who looks suspiciously like Davy Jones).
- One might argue that this was kickstarted by The Zombie Survival Guide and its companion World War Z.
- Now there are the non-Quirk Books Mansfield Park and Mummies and Emma and the Werewolves. 4 Jane Austen books down, 2 to go...
After the success of Gossip Girl and the subsequent TV series, many more novels about rich white teenage girls (with a Token Minority or two) in private schools have been made.
The Kimani Tru series, books about African-American urban teens, now has many imitators.

Sesame Street is such a strong leader that it inspires rivals and hurts its own viewership.
CSI precipitated a host of forensic science shows involving (to quote the show) "beautiful people doing high-tech crime work", even to the point that shows not inherently about forensics now spend more time on the subject (e.g. the medical examiner on Law And Order: Special Victims Unit).
- CSI itself was inspired by an earlier wave of forensic-science documentaries, on channels like Discovery and Court TV.
- Don't forget Quincy.
Survivor, of course, opened the floodgates of competitive Reality TV in the early Noughties.
Who Wants To Be A Millionaire and Pop Idol inspired scads of prime-time million-dollar quiz shows and talent contests, respectively.
- The latter which tend to always have a blunt English guy, a sympathetic woman, and some third wheel, most likely a 'cool' guy.
The heavily character-driven, strangers-in-a-strange-land suspense formula of Lost inspired plenty of other shows, such as Invasion, Jericho, Heroes, Surface, and Threshold. Many of which were cancelled before they barely even began to delve in their Myth Arc. Coincidentally, there is a Lost episode titled "Follow the Leader."
- The concept was sent up in a Mad TV skit. "You'll be asking yourself questions like, 'Who's the girl with the glasses, and why does she have scales on her leg?'"
- JJ Abrams had already created a fair amount of the concept with his earlier Alias.
  - This goes all the way back to The Prisoner, and maybe even before.
  - The Prisoner is the earliest inspiration, and Twin Peaks was the direct inspiration. Northern Exposure and The X Files also took a lot of notes from Twin Peaks's diary.
Friends resulted in a continuing string of ensemble Sitcom/Soap Operas, set in the city and populated by (supposedly) 20-somethings.
- One might argue the Friends was one of the ensemble Sitcoms inspired by Seinfeld. As George says in one scene set in Monk's coffee shop, "Every sitcom today just has four morons sitting around telling each other how bad their day was." Another would be Mad About You which co-creator Paul Reiser pitched to NBC as "Seinfeld, but Married".
Power Rangers inspired several other Macekres of toku series, such as Denkou Choujin Gridman as Superhuman Samurai Syber-Squad, the Metal Heroes series as VR Troopers, and Juukou B-Fighter as Big Bad Beetleborgs.
- This is an odd case, as three of the imitators—VR Troopers, Masked Rider and Big Bad Beetleborgs—were all made by Saban as a way to leech off Power Rangers, which they also made. Masked Rider was a total flop and the other two were only mildly successful.
  - Beetleborgs absolutely TROUNCED Power Rangers in ratings and toy sales for both seasons it aired, and was only canceled due to exorbitantly high production costs and a lack of additional source footage. Justin got introduced so Power Rangers could leech off the success of its own imitator.
Thanks to the success of Even Stevens and Lizzie Mc Guire, not to mention the eventual stardom of both shows' leads, Disney Channel is totally saturated with wacky, stock sound effect-laden children's sitcoms and shows with preppy High School settings.
- Disney is actually quite the repeat offender. Apparently it comes written into all of their female tweenage stars' contracts that they will get to release a high-profit CD of cookie-cutter bubblegum pop music within two years of the show's inception, complete with overpriced tie-in merchandise. For examples, see Hilary Duff, Hannah Montana, and The Cheetah Girls.
- This also goes for a little movie you may have heard of called Camp Rock, which is essentially High School Musical...at camp!
  - Also with the Jonas Brothers, who- you mark my words- will have spawned their own clones before the decade is out.
  - Yeah, but I liked them so much better when they were called Hanson.
  - Which is really to say that they're better sounding when they perform under the name The Bee Gees
- Almost every actress to come from Disney will be the Hilary Duff/Miley Cyrus model while looking like a previous star to boot! Nicole Anderson is a clone of Demi Lovato, who along with Selena Gomez, is a Vanessa Hudgens lookalike. Tiffany Thornton, Chelsea Staub, and Bridget Mendler are ringers for Ashley Tisdale (who is a Hilary Duff lookalike), and so forth. The Ultimate clone is Debby Ryan, who is basically Miley Cyrus with Selena Gomez's facial features.
Despite being cancelled years ago, Jackass still has copies around, including Dirty Sanchez, Crazy Monkey, Rad Girls, and the Finnish series Extreme Duudsonit (which actually came before Jackass).
- Even the stars of Jackass have started to clone their own show, with Steve-O and Pontius' "Jackass, but with animals" show Wildboyz and Bam Margera's "Jackass, but a reality show" Viva La Bam.
- Some of the Jackass guys helped produce an English language version of Extreme Duudsonit - which they list as the primary influence for Jackass - for an American audience. The resulting show - called The Dudesons - was cancelled by Spike TV after only a couple of episodes, mostly because people didn't watch it because they thought it was a spineless Finnish Jackass clone.
  - Jackass itself was derived in part from the character off Super Dave Osborne, a parody of 1970s stuntment like Evel Kneivel, played by comedian Bob Einstein. Einstein himself detests Jackass, pointing out in this interview that Jackass is tragically easy to imitate, while the stunts he pulled were a lot harder for viewers to copy.
The X Files inspired a number of series featuring alien invasions and supernatural hoohah, such as Dark Skies. Similarly, its unfolding "the truth is out there" "mythology" inspired Babylon 5's five-year plan, which in turn inspired Star Trek Deep Space Nine's "Dominion War" arc.
- Babylon Five, though, was in the works when J. Michael Straczynski was creating Captain Power, which came out in 1987.
- The success of The X Files mythology perhaps also inspired non-Science Fiction series, such as 24 and Lost, that used serialized storylines, which in turn led to more serialized thriller shows such as Prison Break, Kidnapped, Vanished, Reunion and Heroes, along with a few that also borrowed the alien invasion premise as well: Invasion, Surface and Threshold. Most of these series failed due to people being unable (or unwilling) to keep up with so many different ongoing stories — and also due to generally being not very good. Notice how few of these shows have blue links.
- There were tons of shows in Japan of this type long before X-Files. In 1964, we have Ultra Q, greatly involving Kaiju. Then, in 1968, two series: Operation Mystery(probably the most like X-Files out of the three) and Mighty Jack( the movie was lampooned in MST 3 K). All 3 are made by the same company.
The success of the pithy, sarcastic Judge Judy spawned a whole slew of pithy, sarcastic judge shows: Judge Mathis, Judge Joe Brown, Playboy Channel's Judge Julie etc. Even the venerable The People's Court replaced Judge Wapner with a sarcastic, saucy Latina (after brief stints by former New York Mayor Ed Koch and — I kid you not — Judge Judy's husband).
- To be fair, Jerry Sheindlin was a judge in his own right.
- The People's Court revival was originally planned as a vehicle for Lance Ito, who wisely declined.
The Buffy The Vampire Slayer TV series was followed by a slew of modern-day fantasy series (Charmed, Supernatural, Reaper, and a number of others) as well as helping to spark a resurgence of action series with female leads, though arguably the somewhat earlier Xena Warrior Princess was more of a trendsetter in that field.
- On another note it also inspired a lot of Wake Up Go To School Save The World series. Smallville, Roswell and BatmanBeyond being chief among them.
- It also had an influence on the revival of Doctor Who, although Rose did not engage in any roundhouse kicks.
The show Sliders became rather sad in its third season, as it started following any leader that presented itself, with episodes that were little more than cheap ripoffs of the movies Twister, Nightmare on Elm Street, Tremors, Jurassic Park, and The Island of Dr. Moreau.
After the publication of The World Without Us, we've had not one, but two TV adaptations, released within three months of each other: Life After People and Aftermath: Population Zero.
Probably the most incredible chain of such events: The Sopranos was “Goodfellas: The Series”. Deadwood was "The Sopranos in the Old West", Rome was "Deadwood in Ancient Rome", and The Tudors was "Rome in Tudor England". Surprisingly, the quality of all of these shows vary only from good to excellent.
Mythbusters seems to have inspired a number of popular science shows - most notably Brainiac Science Abuse, but none match it in terms of quality. Or explosions. Or, for that matter, quality of explosions.
- An exception seems to be Time Warp which takes the viewers' glee at watching things in slow-motion on the high-speed cameras, but keeps the material fresh by using more than just Stuff Blowing Up. (And the hosts are far more entertaining than some of those other failed shows.)
Monty Python inspired many an inferior imitator (although to be fair the original set an extremely high standard.) Some were pretty good: The Kids In The Hall was an excellent comedy.
Anytime a particular weapon or design in Robot Wars became really succesful it would be heavily copied in later seasons, some examples...
- TRACIE from season 1 was designed to run both ways up, though it never to a change to shows this the feature caught on and was used by a lot of robots in later wars including Tornado and SMIDSY.
- Flippers, first used by Recyclopse in season 1, however what made these really popular was 1: Cassius (Recyclopse's succesor) which used its flipper to right itself when turned over (this later became known as the SRIMECH) and 2: Chaos 2 winner of the 3rd and 4th season which had a very powerful flipper (and also was the fist to flip another robot over the fence).
  - The SRIMECH was spawned from flippers (and many robots made use of their's, or other weaopns) to self right, however some robots had separate self-righters that did not double as weapons.
- Crushers, first introduced by Razer in the second wars though these didn't start to catch on until the 5th season when the weight limit was increased.
- Spinning discs, first used by Hypno-Disc in the 3rd wars and produced heavy amounts of damage, however imitators rarely managed to succeed at this.
The revival of Doctor Who has lead to attempts at bringing back several other shows, including Survivors and Rentaghost, as well as to the recreation of the "Saturday evening drama" slot, evidenced by Primeval.
- And in America, it hasn't brought back anything, it's simply added to the long-running "Friday night Skiffy" slot which has been going for at least 15 years...around the time the Saturday evening drama seemed to go away for a bit in England.
The success of Hercules The Legendary Journeys led to a raft of other fantasy-adventure shows, including Roar and The New Adventures Of Robin Hood.
Degrassi The Next Generation was such a runaway hit in its US broadcast on the cable network Noggin that the channel's teen programming block, The-N, was spun off into its own channel. The-N has spent its entire existence making (or getting the rights to) shows that repeat the formula: a Soap Opera Dysfunction Junction of teenage (or slightly older) Star Crossed Lovers whose love is threatened by either No Going Steady or a Love Triangle, In A World where Adults Are Useless and a Family Unfriendly Aesop is around every corner, and everything changes constantly. The-N even marketed them this way, with Degrassi actors guest-starring in them and Cross Over commercials with characters from multiple shows. None of them gained the mega-popularity of Degrassi. They ranged from South Of Nowhere, (Degrassi meets Beverly Hills 90210...in America!), which managed a cult following, to Whistler (Degrassi meets watered-down Twin Peaks), which was poorly promoted and barely noticed outside of Canada, to Beyond The Break (Degrassi meets Baywatch, complete with a former Baywatch actor), which was exactly as cheesy and ridiculous as expected.
- Part of the reason for the clones not getting better than cult status may be that the Degrassi writers were beginning to get weary with their creation, and doubly weary with imitations of it. The Best Years, a clone created by the head of the Degrassi writing staff, was full of Take That against Degrassi, and the Cross Over commercials quickly changed from grimly earnest to Adam Westing.
Even Cartoon Network is getting in on the action, with The Othersiders (based on Ghost Hunters), Dude, What Would Happen...? (based on Myth Busters), Survive This (from the creator of and based on Survivorman), and Brainrush (based on Cash Cab). Curiously, all of these shows are live-action.
- And they're all Discovery shows. We've reached a network level of Follow The Leader!
The History Channel has a tendency to air programs similar to whatever blockbuster movie is sweeping the world. Indiana Jones is big this year? Here's specials about real-life treasure hunters and lost civilizations. The Da Vinci Code is popular? Have some documentaries about religious conspiracies and apocrypha. A disaster movie? We've got stuff that examines if the premise is plausible, as well as showcasing a few other possible apocalypses they might use for the next movie. Hitler rarely gets any airtime nowadays, although some might prefer at least some variety in the station again.
Britannia High is just High School Musical except, as the name suggests, set in Britain. It FARED rather badly - so badly in fact that even among its target demographic, it lost in the ratings war to Antiques Roadshow.
- Last I check Antiques Roadshow is loads more awesome than any musical starring teens.
USA released Psych, a series about a hyperobservant amateur who solves crimes by pretending to have psychic powers. Shortly after it became a hit, CBS released The Mentalist, a series about a hyperobservant solves crimes by pretending to have psychic powers. In fairness, the show is a lot angstier.
- One episode of Psych actually namechecked The Mentalist referring to it as a "carbon copy", and Shawn himself is a fan of the show, though he prefers people not confuse him with that fake psychic.
USA also released Burn Notice, a series about a small group of quirky ex-special operatives who use their skills to help out the little guy. Shortly after it became a hit, TNT released Leverage, a show about a small group of quirky ex-criminals who use their skills to help out the little guy.
- It's worth noting that the Leverage page used to have "Spiritual Successor" listed on it with no less than 4 examples, and both the Burn Notice and Leverage pages compare the shows to The A Team.
After Caiga Quien Caiga became famous, "Los Raporteros" began fashioning themselves after Mario and co., with black suits, black glasses, an edgier song ("Como Estamos Hoy, Eh", replacing the softer and more rhytmical "Abarajame La Bañera") and more controversial lyrics.
The sucess of Gran Hermano prompted a wave of Argentinian reality TV shows, including Solos en la Casa, El Bar and Survivor Operación Robinson.
The sucess of La Niñera prompted more Argentinian remakes of American TV shows, including "Amas De Casa Deseperadas ( Desperate Housewives )", "¿Quién es el Jefe? ( Whos The Boss )" and the remake that was better than the original: "Casados Con Hijos ( Married With Children )"
The sucess of Rebelde Way prompted more Argentinian tween shows like Patito Feo, Casi Angeles and Floricienta Also this, combined with the success of High School Musical, prompted the Argentinian remake of that movie.
After Perdona Nuestros Pecados got canned, a slew of imitators tried to take its place. However, most of them missed the point and mutated into talk shows. Only one of them, Ran 15, actually does what PNP used to do.
100% Lucha was created to fill the void after the cancellation of Titanes en el Ring.
Ghost Hunters inspired a wave (different from the wave of paranormal slasher horror movies) about paranormal investigations. Even the History channel got into the act. Your Mileage May Vary as to the quality of any of them.
It was unheard of to tape a sitcom in front of a live audience until the success of I Love Lucy.
- Aside from the fact that it wasn't taped (it was filmed), the production of "I Love Lucy" all but innovated everything you'll see in every sitcom since. The fact that it was filmed is what preserves it as the oldest television product that most Americans have ever seen, since it avoided the pitfalls of using videotape which would be wiped and reused later (since it was very expensive, and many networks were wiping videotape into the 1980s), or only existing today in the form of crude kinescopes (where a motion picture camera was pointed at a television monitor) that have little replay value today.
The raging success that was High School Musical was followed by a slew of easily-marketable Disney Channel movies—often featuring the channel's newest stars (Ashley Tisdale, Corbin Bleu, the Jonas Brothers etc). Meanwhile, Nickelodeon tried to get into the act with Spectacular!, a musical movie about a choir (who, for a change, performed "Eye of the Tiger") who failed because their leader insisted on doing the same old routines. The decision to cast Tammin Sursok (a soapie star best known in Australia) may not have been the greatest idea...
- Also MTV made the musical The American Mall. The less said about it the better.
The success of Dirty Jobs and Deadliest Catch on Discovery Channel spawned a host of interesting/dangerous jobs Reality TV shows like Ice Road Truckers (History Channel), two about extreme loggers, one about lobstermen (although that might be the originator since a special about lobstermen was essentially a test run for Catch) and Swords, which is about sword fishermen. I suppose Discovery channel's Whale Wars could also count, since it's about a crew of people doing a dangerous job out in the ocean, although the danger comes from whaling ships with sonic weapons and water cannons rather then nature.
Perhaps attributable to the success of Monk, a lot of "quirky investigative genius solves crimes" shows have popped up of late: Psych (the guy is a fake psychic), The Mentalist (the guy is a former fake psychic), Lie To Me (the guy is a Living Lie Detector), Bones (quirky forensic scientist) Raines (the guy is haunted by hallucinations of the murder victims until he solves the case) and arguably to a lesser extent Dexter (the guy is himself a serial killer) and Pushing Daisies (the guy can bring the dead back to life).
- The Living Lie Detector aspect of Lie To Me, to wit seeing if people are lying via micro-expressions and word choice, has already been used in NCIS Los Angeles. Something similar was used in a memorable scen in the film "The Negotiator", long before Monk aired.
The success of Twilight may have led to The Vampire Diaries being produced for television. (It's a preexisting franchise example, since it's based on a series of books that preceded Twilight.)
Survivorman was about survival expert Les Stroud being dumped into the wilderness and trying to make his way to civilization before a Rescue Chopper comes to him in a given period of time. Man Vs Wild features survival expert Bear Grylls being dumped into the wilderness and trying to make his way to civilization. There were several differences between the two shows, such as Bear's camera crew vs. Les toting around several dozen pounds of cameras, and Les pragmatic approach to Bear's more extreme version. M v W also stages situations for Bear to demonstrate unlikely or worst-case techniques. These points are explained in more detail on both pages.
After Walking With Dinosaurs, there came a whole onslaught of documentaries with CGI dinosaurs. When Dinosaurs Roamed America, Dinosaur Planet, and Jurassic Fight Club, to name a few.

After The Beatles' big American debut, a number of record companies scrambled to sign up young, British rock bands (or at least American acts with mop-tops). This is also, interestingly, the reason for the creation of Pavel Chekov of Star Trek.
- To be entirely fair, this particular game of Follow The Leader caused a lot of good bands to be signed - including The Who, The Kinks, The Yardbirds, The Rolling Stones, The Moody Blues, and left the door propped wide open for later legends like Black Sabbath, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple.
- The Monkees were also based on the Beatles (not just musically; the show was originally pitched as a serial version of A Hard Day's Night), but the wildly different influences of the four Monkees and their assorted music producers & TV directors broke them out of Follow The Leader mode before the first season had ended.
Similarly, after Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens were killed in a plane crash in 1959, American record companies scrambled to find teen rockers to fill the gap. Many were signed, but none had the talent or innovation of these two, and the evolution of rock music was stalled until the British Invasion. This time in rock history may also qualify as a Dork Age.
Black Sabbath's success in the early '70s propelled heavy metal into mainstream pop radio. Blue Oyster Cult, which had little in common stylistically with Sabbath, was dubbed "the all-American Black Sabbath" by its producer in an attempt to cash in on the craze.
The Boy Band craze of the late nineties, started by the Backstreet Boys. These pre-fab moneymakers seemed to be "built" from a mix of stereotypes: one or two pretty boys; a rebel with tattoos (rehab optional); the crazy one who gave the really funny quotes in the interviews; one who could actually sing, but looked funny; the sweet, down-to-earth one; and the schmoe. For the most part, good looks and flashy dance moves were a bigger priority than actual musical ability.
- Around that same time, Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera led the wave of "teen pop starlets" into the new millennium (thank you very much, Total Request Live). Of these former teen starlets, only Christina seems to have found genuine success doing actual music, winning/sharing a few Grammy awards and a string of hit records (possibly because she was the only one who could actually sing worth a damn). Of course, that hasn't stopped the Disney Channel from trying to build up the next best thing.
- Spears and Aguilera are actually the second such wave: in the late 1980s/early 1990s there was Tiffany, Debbie Gibson, Alanis and others. Of that vintage, only Alanis Morisette is still a legitimate popular star, after starting to use her full name and becoming Darker And Edgier.
  - Alanis was only a teen pop star in Canada. In fact, once she became famous in the States, her management and record company did everything in their power to block her earlier Canadaian material from being released in America, in order to preserve the "edgier" image they had created and were cashing in on.
  - Alanis Morrisette is really God. He/She can be whatever He/She wants
  - Billie Piper began her career as a teen pop starlet. After a brief music career, a marriage to DJ Chris Evans, and a few years' gap, she now has a respectable acting career. Doctor Who was not her first TV part.
- Spears's and Aguilera's rise to fame stemmed in turn from the success of the Spice Girls. Although not composed of teens, the group was novel at the time for reviving early-period Madonna's hyper-sexual approach to pop music. The above-mentioned Tiffany, Debbie Gibson and early Alanis were marketed as "cute and bubbly" rather than "barely legal sexy." It was the Spice Girls who made it possible for Britney to debut with a "naughty schoolgirl" look and Christina to do a genie-themed song full of Double Entendre.
- Boy band spilled over into country music. Rascal Flatts was basically a boy band with a steel guitar on their early albums, but has now evolved into… whatever genre "whiny power ballad" falls under.
Mitch Benn's "Everything Sounds Like Coldplay Now" satirises the fact that, well, everything sounds like Coldplay now. Whether he was aware that two of the bands that he name-checks in the song did it first is unknown. Either way, the song is hilarious.
- In fact, Coldplay themselves are often accused of ripping off Travis and/or Radiohead. So was Muse, but they essentially became an alt-prog band after their second record.
In the same vein, much of the late-90s to mid-2000s Top 40 alternative/rock music is essentially knocking off the previous "alternative band", and those surrounding them, which are all knocked off of the basic chords of Canon in D. While you can blame Kurt Cobain for the phenomenon, it was almost definitely started earlier. Still continues to this day, as much of the radio and Top 40 is virtually indistinguishable from each other. Parodied hilariously by Rob Paravonian's "Pachelbel Rant" (easily found on Youtube).
Back in The Nineties, after Nirvana really blew up, record labels scrambled to sign any act that was even remotely grunge-y. The absurdity reached a fever pitch when Sony Records went all the way to Australia to sign Silverchair, whose members weren't even old enough to shave.
- To be fair, It worked
Although there's considerable confusion over exactly what style of music Korn popularized — some say rap-metal, but only about 5 songs in the band's entire 8-album career have rap in them — it's generally agreed that a lot of bands followed their lead. Hence, they made an album called... Follow The Leader.
- And depending on where you go, you may hear people say that Korn was mostly just following Alice In Chains'and Faith No More's lead.
After 2pac's death loads of rappers tried to duplicate his image and music (minus the socio-political commentary mind you)
Once Bone Thugs N Harmony became popular a lot of other rappers emerged with a melodic R&B styled rap delivery (minus the speed).
After Jefferson Airplane and Jimi Hendrix hit big in the late 60's, major labels signed pretty much every psychedelic act they could find. Some found genuine talent: The jazz label Verve Records signed The Velvet Underground and Frank Zappa. Warner signed the Grateful Dead, although they used their contract to make three wildly uncommercial albums before making their two classic records in 1970 (after which, they promptly split from the label). And EMI, looking for a band that sounded similar to the Beatles' new psychedelic sound, signed a small psychedelic band called Pink Floyd. Other labels weren't so lucky and were stuck with multi-million dollar contracts with one hit wonders like The Strawberry Alarm Clock, The Ultimate Spinach, Bubble Puppy and The Electric Prunes.
In the 1990s, the "hat act" craze was in full bloom in country music. Many young, hot acts were kicking off their careers in their mid-20s like George Strait did, and usually wore cowboy hats. While this gave us some great talents in Alan Jackson, Clint Black, Garth Brooks, etc., it also gave a couple blander acts like Rhett Akins.
In general, whenever a secular music artist becomes popular and spawns imitators, the Christian Music industry will take notice and scramble to find bands and stars to fit the mold, so Christian kids will have "wholesome alternatives" to whatever's popular in the secular music biz. Sadly, this often means that several genuinely good, unique Christian bands get completely ignored, or go Indie when their label pressures them to mimic a popular style.
Classical music is littered with examples of this trope; pieces of music considered revolutionary at the time they premiered would often spawn scores of imitators, sometimes to the point of changing musical tastes and convention the world over. This isn't just true of music that was well-recieved upon its inception, either; Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring was so controversial that the audience at its premiere rioted, and yet it's been so influential in the modern era that much of 20th-century orchestral music might as well be called "The Rewrite of Spring".
Emo music first started in the 80's and has changed a lot since then, but more recently the enormous mainstream success of angsty hardcore-influenced bands such as The Used, My Chemical Romance and Taking Back Sunday seems to have proven that emo teenagers are a good audience to target. Thus every cookie-cutter pop punk act now has to over-straighten their hair, have the odd tattoo or piercing and wear eyeliner and overly tight jeans. See Metro Station, Boys Like Girls, etc.
In the early to mid 90's R&B acts followed 2 archetypes. One type was the 4 to 5 member group type with gospel inspired harmonic vocals ala En Vogue, and Boys II Men. The second type followed the 2 to 3 group member formula that was based on a edgy, sexually explicit street/Hip-Hop look and sound ala TLC, and SWV. Some were terrible rehashes, and copycats. While others was good in their own right.
In 1978, the album Van Halen was released with Eddie Van Halen's fretboard-tapping "Eruption" heard round the world. Two years later, Randy Rhoads' playing on Ozzy Osbourne's Blizzard of Ozz cemented fast, classical-inspired guitar playing known as "shredding" as the new standard. Pretty much every lead guitarist in heavy metal—and many even in hard rock and pop music—had to play blazing fast solos, preferably with fretboard tapping, until the rise of grunge in the early 90s pretty much killed off the trend.
Composer Anton Bruckner's huge, massive, overwrought symphonies directly influenced [[Gustav Mahler]]'s even bigger works, as Mahler was a student at the Conservatory and attended concerts at the Vienna Philharmonic that premiered Bruckner's works.

The success of ECW led to the founding of a number of other "hardcore" and "deathmatch" wrestling federations, and no less an organization than the WWF followed their lead. WCW tried to foster a backlash to this, painting themselves as a "family-friendly" wrestling show, but they soon jumped on the bandwagon after that posture failed. After all, how "family-friendly" can a show about people beating the snot out of each other be?
- Before that, after the arrival of Hulk Hogan, from 1994-1996, WCW revamped themselves into "WWF Lite", until the arrival of Kevin Nash and Scott Hall. And the rest is history...
  - And even before that, WCW head booker Jim Herd decided to try and mimic the WWF's success with the "Rock 'n Wrestling Connection" by tying WCW to another aspect of pop culture — namely, movies. Fortunately, he dropped that idea after the first shots, a wrestler based on The Wizard Of Oz and a Pay-Per-View appearance by Robocop, failed miserably, but it wasn't Herd's first bad idea, and definitely not his last.
- When it started in 2002, TNA was an alternative to the WWE, until over the years, they became "WWE Lite".
Naturally with the success of the New World Order every fed in the universe even your local mom and pop indy needed to have a stable trying to take over the company.
- And of course every fed including the mom and pop indy also needs to do an evil scheming authority figure whose sole reason for existing seems to be making life miserable for the babyface du jour. Naturally said babyface is almost always a badass nineties anti hero.

Dungeons And Dragons. Explaining it would take up half of this page.
- And its Trading Card Game equivalent, Magic The Gathering. The first successful TCG, it's managed to stay above the field of imitators and is still on the road while most of the rest have crashed by the wayside.

The Great Video Game Crash Of 1983 can be blamed almost entirely on this, with a gamut of companies tripping over each other to make crappy cash-in games or their own consoles during the heyday of the Atari 2600. In fact, Nintendo of America's infamous "lock-out chip" and corresponding "seal of quality" licensing scheme was designed especially to prevent the former, and thus another crash.
In an interesting turn of events, the production of Starcraft Ghost inspired productions a long line of games involving heroes fighting bizarre alien-like beings in apocalyptic environments, and, in some cases, strange abilities, such as Gears Of War, F.E.A.R., Bio Shock, and Resistance: Fall Of Man. When Starcraft Ghost was ~~cancelled~~ ~~indefinitely suspended~~ put back on the drawing board for next-gen (a month before its scheduled release), Gears of War (whose resemblances to the Starcraft world are as evident as its distinctions) was the first of this line of games, and subsequent games drew more additional inspiration from Gears' squad like gameplay and more humanoid enemies.
- Why is Bio Shock one? That's based on the System Shock series which has been around since 1994. Are these games following System Shock's lead instead?
Doom is generally considered the progenitor of the First Person Shooter genre; and Halo unleashed a flood of the genre on set-tops. Note, however, that both Doom and its predecessor Wolfenstein 3D were actually ripping off the far more advanced Ultima Underworld.
- Even if that wasn't an apples-to-oranges comparison (Action != RPG), Wolfenstein and Ultima Underworld both originally released in the same year. UU's first person POV developed from the dungeon sequences of earlier Ultima games, and the First Person Slasher they pioneered was reproduced two years later by The Elder Scrolls game Arena. Bethesda has been playing Follow The Leader ever since, releasing their own Action FPS, Sky NET, four years later.
  - Of course, Sky NET brought us full mouselook in the way we have now and had polygon-based 3D for everything but few sprites (like weapons on the ground). In the same year Duke Nukem 3D went out. Both games took Doom to a different place.
Myst sparked a slew of point-and-click CD-ROM adventure-puzzle games, arguably hastening the death of the older Lucas Arts/Sierra Online adventure genre.
Although there were Real Time Strategy games before Dune II, it was the one responsible for making it a genre.
In spite of MUDs and GMUDs languishing in obscurity for ages, their day would only really come in the rechristened form of MMORPGs. The entire MMO craze was started with Ultima Online, refined with Everquest and Lineage, then given a further kickstart by the massive success of World Of Warcraft.
- World Of Warcraft in particular has spawned a number of imitators, Tabula Rasa and Age Of Conan among them, that copy not only its gameplay style, but major chunks of its interface (right down to yellow exclamation points over the heads of quest-givers.)
- To be fair, one of the things Blizzard is known for is taking existing formula and refining them into a highly polished product. World Of Warcraft, at least in its original release, had very little that was actually new to the genre, rather it took existing aspects of MMORPGs, fleshed them out and made them more accessable. It's not surprising that these refinements have propogated themselves to later games in the genre.
- Everquest in particular had so many features in common with Diku MUD that they were often challenged by hackers and developers familiar with the MUD libaries to show their code.
City Of Heroes. When Marvel Comics realized they couldn't sue the MMORPG to oblivion, they hired the developers to make a Marvel Comics-based MMO. Then Microsoft got involved and demanded it run on the Xbox 360. There was lots of hype, but the game never materialized. Then DC Comics announced they would make an MMO for the Sony Playstation 3. Er, maybe the Champions-based MMO will be good? The guy leading it was president of the City Of Heroes development team...
- The answer to that is probably "No" as Champions Online's prices are already dropping and it's starting to be dumped into bargain bins.
Grand Theft Auto 3 is credited with starting not one, but two threads of Follow the Leader: gritty urban crime games and "sandbox games."
- And yet Grand Theft Auto 3 marked a point the franchise turned away from an isometric, comedic-violence orientation to one that completely mimicked the game ''Driver'', released two years prior. So 'GTA-clones' have even that in common with their namesake — GTA was also playing Follow The Leader.
  - This is ignoring that the orignal The Legend Of Zelda and Metroid are complete free range exploration games slightly limited by their toolset.
  - Then there came Driv3r, which b3came your av3rage op3n-world gam3 that follow3d in Grand Th3ft Auto's foost3ps.
The massive success of Capcom's Street Fighter II resulted in a massive glut of fighting games that continued well into the PlayStation years and switch to 3-D gaming. Indeed, SNK made itself a major player in the arcade market by imitating and refining the formula.
- Once Mortal Kombat made the scene, many of these knockoff fighters began featuring over-the-top gore and/or digitized graphics (including, somewhat ironically, Street Fighter: The Movie in the latter group).
- Capcom actually sued the makers of the copycat Fighter's History.
  - Which in itself was more original than most other fighters released in SFII's wake, thanks to the Clothing Damage gameplay gimmick.
Tokimeki Memorial pioneered the Dating Sim genre with a clean but lovable game, showing that these games weren't just for the hentai. This trend continued with Kanon (ironically, itself an H-game), which spawned many other H and non-H romance games that focused on the story and characters.
- This still happens with the ero-ren'ai game market — a game will come out with an interesting UI enhancement, gameplay trick, or oddball fetish, and upon being successful, will be mimicked by dozens of companies.
Nintendo's Mario Kart spawned the Kart Racer, and Super Smash Bros created the Mascot Fighter, bringing forth cute cartoony variants of two previously popular genres.
- The original Marvel Vs. Capcom came out a full year before Super Smash Bros. It invented the Mascot Fighter, Nintendo was playing follow the leader.
- According to This Wiki definition of a Mascot Fighter, it doesn't. And even though Marvel Vs. Capcom came before, it definitely wasn't the first of its kind, with the franchise starting as far as X-Men: Children of the Atom.
Tetris inspired the entire Falling Blocks genre of video games.
- Columns then inspired hordes of color-matching three-in-a-row games.
The success of the Sonic The Hedgehog games (which themselves were created to compete with the Super Mario Bros games) led to a slew of similar "animals with attitude" games on the Genesis/Mega Drive and SNES. Some of these are considered classics but were sadly overlooked, such as Rocket Knight Adventures and its sequel Sparkster, but others were simply overhyped, unimaginative tripe such as the unfortunately titled, Anviliciously environmental Awesome Possum Kicks Dr. Machino's Butt, and the infamous Bubsy the Bobcat. The testament to Bubsy's complete failure is no doubt their attempt to reintroduce him to the gaming world: Bubsy 3D, no doubt one of the worst games ever made... somehow Jumping The Shark (or not, as the game killed the series) with a series that already sucked.
The surprise of Final Fantasy VII becoming a Killer App and introducing Role Playing Games to a more general audience resulted in a slew of horrible games starring blond, spiky-haired, moody young men who turn out to be the Tomato In The Mirror — which did it without the intelligence, the subtle mockery of the RPG tropes of the time, the quirky humour or the wonderfully rich Character Development. Legend Of Dragoon was probably the most notorious of those. The quality lies somewhere between Guilty Pleasures and So Bad Its Good, but it still sold quite a bit of units on the PlayStation.
- Whoa! Who said Legend of Dragoon sucks?
- Of course, you'd never have had the Final Fantasy series without the massive success (at least in Japan) of Dragon Quest.
- And you wouldn't have either of them without Ultima.
  - Sadly, the world has forgotten Wizardry.
  - And all of you forgot Dungeons And Dragons which inspired RP Gs in general(don't hold your breath though I'm sure the list goes on forever).
  - Lord of the Rings obviously. Which itself was inspired by various myths (not to forget the Christian morality also present in the books).
  - On some level, it all goes back to Beowulf.
- And this phenomenon is coming around full circle again, with web-based gaming publications going on and on about how all JRP Gs need to be like Demons Souls or Dragon Age in order to be considered "good." When will this gen get its Skies to save us from this drudgery and teach people the lessons they should have learned 10 years ago?
The PlayStation's other killer app, Metal Gear Solid (you saw that coming), spawned a lot of stealth-game imitators that failed to realise that the glory was as much the story as the sneaking.
- Although Splinter Cell is arguably a great stealth game in its own right, and takes a more "realistic" approach.
- Bizarre aversion: Syphon Filter was widely derided prior to its release as a MGS clone and a blatant attempt to capitalize on its success...then turned out to be an entirely different type of game, being a action shooter with stealth elements not being a major part of most of the game.
You can thank the mega-success of Nintendo's Brain Age and Big Brain Academy games for the endless stream of portable Edutainment Games coming to a DS near you. We're still waiting for another company to make something comparably decent.
- This trope could have been as well called Birdman Syndrome. In short, Wii Sports was done by many of Nintendo's best developers and is a game which is easy to pick up and play but offers five completely different disciplines which have relatively deep physics and has the amount of polish you usually expect from a Nintendo game. After its rampant success many third parties only saw the pick-up-and-play nature of it and made shallow and unpolished minigame collections done by the companies' cheapest development teams.
  - Heck, Nintendo's Wii in general seems to have caused many developers to try and cheaply cash in on its success by haphazardly using motion controls whenever they get the chance.
  - On top of this, because Nintendo has shown that powerful graphics isn't what makes a game sell, many 3rd party developers seeking a quick cash in will hardly put any effort in the graphics, causing many people to say the games are N64 quality in graphics.
  - Just the devs? E3 09 had Sony announce PS 3 motion control wands and Microsoft show off Project Natal, a controller-less camera system.
  - Not to mention that due to the popularity of the Wii's Mii avatar system, many games have tried to copy off its concept and design. Even Microsoft tried to cash in on the popularity of Miis with its own avatar system for the Xbox 360 last year that looked suspiciously similar to Miis, but with more customization.
You thought this trope was bad in video games? Well, it's even worse with Casual Games! Seriously, just try and count how many Time Management-slash-Match Three-slash-Hidden Object Games there are on the Internet!
- Hell, the games made by PopCap did this for the entire casual game genre.
After the Tamagotchi fad (itself strongly reminiscent of the Pet Rock) and the virtual pet craze it inspired swept the world, hoards of Gotta Catch Them All videogames, Collectible Card Games and Mons Of The Week anime were spawned in its wake, and have been a popular market segment to this day.
- In other Mon developments, the Pokemon games were the first series to achieve mainstream success with splitting game content into two versions - which would be used by Bomberman and the Mega Man Battle Network (and subsequently Star Force) games.
Console Zelda titles since Link to the Past, sans Majora's Mask and Four Swords Adventures, have followed the same formula: Start with a wooden/training/crappy sword, do three dungeons (usually to collect three special items), get the Master Sword, do roughly 6-8 more dungeons, go to the final dungeon, then fight Ganon/Ganondorf/both of them.
Certain technologies and gameplay features became popular in video games as tacked on features for brief periods;
- Telekinesis (i.e. the ability to pick up and move objects remotely), possibly due to the gravity gun from Half Life 2.
- Cel Shading, after SEGA popularized it with Jet Set Radio.
- Stealth levels, after the success of Metal Gear Solid (these often ruined otherwise great games).
- As mentioned above, bullet time (usually done by slowing down everything, possibly while keeping the player's Digital Avatar moving at the same speed). Max Payne was probably the first video game to make use of it, and inevitably more followed.
- Simon Says minigames, popularized by Shenmue's QTEs, they've been mashifying games ever since.
- Vehicular sections in games where walking is the standard way of moving around.
The Full Motion Video "Interactive Movie" genre. While it had existed in more basic form using analog video controlled by a computer (I.E.: Dragon's Lair,) it wasn't until the fully digital Cinepak-based CD-ROM format that it became practical as a consumer format. While it was also used to add cutscenes to existing genres, nearly all early CD titles consisted of immensely similar crosses between a B Movie and a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Occupying somewhere around So Bad Its Good or unplayable depending on the cheesiness of the invariably low production values, the genre has only managed to live on in the form of the Visual Novel, and there often only thanks to its… unique content.
Tomb Raider and Lara Croft herself spawned many copycat attempts.
- Which is pretty funny considering that its road to success can basically be described as Indiana Jones meets Prince Of Persia… IN 3D. When the Prince and Indy made the jump to 3D, they were both seen as shameless ripoffs of Ms. Croft's efforts.
- As one reviewer put it, Tomb Raider was Indiana Jones... WITH BREASTS!
  - To be fair, the first POP and Indy games in 3D did take a lot from the Tomb Raider formula However, the later games for both series went some way to changing that (not that that stopped the comparisons), to the point that when that when Tomb Raider was revived with Legend many mechanics felt like they'd been raided from the tombs of a certain Persian royal family.
Diablo, which created its own genre called "Diablo clones" (since redubbed as Third Person Looter), was itself a graphical spin on another fine tradition in Follow The Leader, Roguelike games]], of which Net Hack is the most popular. As Diablo is the model of many MMORPGs basic gameplay, the combination of MMOs and Diablo clones often incites accusations of Diablo killing the western RPG genre from fans.
Also, the Might And Magic series started a new trend of Group Based RPGs in the late '80s and '90s, including the excellent Baldurs Gate. Ironically, it died off with the same series, in Might and Magic IX, thanks to the less than kind time and development constraints given by its Publisher, 3DO. Sure, some came before it, but it was MM that popularized it. It shows signs of coming back with Neverwinter 2, but more than a few wishes Ubisoft puts a X in the front of the franchise they bought.
- Speaking of bought franchises, the series Heroes of Might and Magic spin-off of the Might and Magic series also gave the kick to both Turn Based Strategy games that aren't incredibly boring and nerdy Electronic Tabletop Wargames AND to Hero-Based Strategy games, being the first strategy game to put "generals" into the equation (other than the player himself as an order giver). Warcraft 3, Age of Mythologies and listless others owe to the franchise. Strangely, many players weren't very understanding when Heroes IV remembered their audience of the Sci-Fi background of the MM franchise (mostly because a large portion of the Heroes fanbase didn't even know there was a Might and Magic franchise). Still, what really killed it was the same 3DO that killed MMIX.
X-Com gave birth to a large follow-up of Squad Based Tactical games. Some were doomed because most of X-Com's appeal (that had been just a minor title at UK) was because it came down in the middle of the X-Files hype (the game even had its title changed from UFO: Enemy Unknown to the more X-Files like name of the anti-alien corporation you play with in the game). "Honorable clones" include Commandos and Jagged Alliance.
Halo is a good example, as almost every FPS these days has copied the 'recharging health bar' thing (To varying degrees of success, it has to be said).
- It also eliminated the Hammerspace Arsenal concept that most FPS' had and limited it to a primary and secondary weapon only.
This has been around for a long time. Back when the C64 was still kicking around, the arcade conversion of Gauntlet resulted in a larger number of Gauntlet clones to appear. Some of these were actually better as they had an objective while Gauntlet was mainly aimed at making players want to keep inserting more coins.
Want a headache, try following the evolution of the Guitar Rock game genre.
- Guitar Freaks (Bemani/Konami)
- Guitar Hero I/II (Harmonix/Activision)
  - Guitar Hero III (Neversoft/Activision)
  - Rock Band (Harmonix/EA)
  - Guitar Hero: World Tour (Neversoft/Activision)
  - Rock Revolution (Konami)
If that is the truth, than Konami was doing a spectacular job failing in following the Leader, aside from Rock Revolution, they tried copying Burn Out by making the popular Thrill Drive series copy Burnout's reckless driving and damages with the Cruisin USA format of stunts.
Konami's upcoming game Magician's Quest: Mysterious Times/Little Magician's Magic Adventure can essentially be summed up as: Animal Crossing, but at Wizarding School!
Rare, in their SNES/N64 times, had great sucess imitating popular Nintendo series. Diddy Kong Racing for example pretty much built on the sucess of Mario Kart, but adding an adventure mode and more vehicles. They eventually got tired of doing that, though, birthing Conkers Bad Fur Day, originally another cutesy platformer.
Although not the first spaceflight simulator, Wing Commander spawned a lot of them, from good ones like the X-Wing series, to... well, others.
The use of isometric projection. Nobody's sure whether Q Bert, Zaxxon or Ant Attack got there first (Ant Attack might have been the first to actually use the word "isometric"), but what people are certainly sure of is that Knight Lore is the one that blew it apart into the behemoth it became, inspiring a slew of similar games from the crud (Molecule Man) to the self-recycling (Alien 8, Pentagram) to the sublime (Head Over Heels) to the just plain weird (Movie).
Gears Of War didn't introduce the concept of duck and cover shooters but they are the most famous for making such a game enjoyable. Now it seems like there are two ways to do a shooter game, traditional FPS or Gears Of War style.
Platform Hell, while first started by Jinsei Owata no Daibouken and Super Mario Forever, was pretty much codified by Kaizo Mario World, leading to a huge flood of imitators made purely for either the difficulty or to annoy people on Youtube and other video sharing websites (and half the examples on Platform Hell basically did this, complete with the exact same traps as Kaizo itself).
Mario's Picross helped speed up the amount of nonogram games to soon follow, mostly in Flash form.
Many urban-themed Beat Em Up were made to ride on the success of Final Fight. Just look at Burning Fight and Riot City.
Flat Out is often nicknamed Burnout's redneck cousin. Instead of crashes with cars only, they focus on cars crashing with the drivers being ejected.
God Of War, as well as popularising Action Commands, seems to have spawned a genre of violent, gory third-person beat-em-ups with Heroic Sociopath protagonists. Better examples include God Hand, No More Heroes and Mad World, but even the Wolverine movie based game is made in the style... which turned out surprisingly good.
- And God Of War followed Devil May Cry as an over the top brawler
The Mario Party games inspired a bunch of similiar multiplayer "party" games like Shrek Party and Monopoly party.
Resident Evil may not have invented the Survival Horror genre, but it did invent the name, and it proved the concept could sell. Cue Silent Hill, Fatal Frame, Capcom's own Dino Crisis, and so on.
There is a natural law that goes something like this: "Given continued development and infinite time, all open-source FPSes will eventually turn into Counter Strike."
Shortly after Fallout 3's success, several RPG/FPS hybrids with a wasteland setting were announced.
- So far, we have FUEL (a Open Sandbox racing game set in post apocalyptica,) Border Lands (which doesn't even try to disguise its influences,) and the upcoming Rage and Brink (Fallout IN THE MIDDLE OF THE OCEAN!)
Defence Of The Ancients, an incredibly popular homemade custom map (bordering on Game Mod) for Warcraft 3, has spawned a commercial imitator in Demigod, with more titles on the horizon.
Call Of Duty fans are instigating the future Medal Of Honor game is doing this, although technically Infinity Ward did it first by creating Call of Duty, so go figure.
- And besides that, Mo H is set in the War on Terror, in Afghanistan, while Co D 4 is set in Ultranationalist Russia.

Penny Arcade's success led not only to a swarm of gamer Web Comics, but a swarm of gamer Web Comics starring Two Gamers On A Couch.
- Bob And George and 8-Bit Theater did the same thing for sprite comics.
DM Of The Rings was the the first 'Screencap RPG Webcomic'. Once it ended, Irregular Webcomic creator David Morgan-Mar took some of the words of Shamus and Adam Bloom as a challenge, and he got the Comic Irregulars to put together to create Darths And Droids. Since then, at least three more Screencap RPG Webcomics have appeared, based on Conan the Barbarian, Stargate, and Avatar: the Last Airbender. All of them credit DM of the Rings as at least one of the sources that inspired them.
And let us not forget Order Of The Stick which inspired a lot of Dungeons And Dragons based comics in general; often using 'a compelling story with Dungeons & Dragons physics' as the premise. Even the fans have been putting this trope to use going as far as creating such comics in Burlew's stick-figure art style. A good example of this is the webcomic Anti-Heroes.
- It also inspired Keychain Of Creation, a stick-figure comic based on Exalted.
- Similarly, XKCD has spawned a few more stick figure comics.
- It's also becoming popular for non-stick-figure comics to go stick-figure for fillers. "Shirt Guy Xom" appears to be a Shout Out to "Shirt Guy Dom" (as GGC often riffs on Megatokyo)...which, in turn, was a Shout Out to "Shirt Guy Tom".
Dan And Mabs Furry Adventures spawned quite a few fancomics such as Project Future and The Foxfire Chronicles...
- And somehow also led to Last Res0rt, at least in terms of the art style. The main difference is that both Project Future and The Foxfire Chronicles use Cubi outright as a central locus; Last Res0rt, while having a few characters that appear Cubi-esque, includes them as a variant of Celeste (which have distinctly different powers).
Sluggy Freelance and Goats largely paved the way for Planet Eris webcomics like College Roomies From Hell, El Goonish Shive, and The Adventures Of Dr Mc Ninja.
Fans from Nintendo Acres are known to duplicate the premise as well.

Thanks to the success of Toy Story, Finding Nemo and other works of Pixar, the movie biz is flooded with CGI children's movies. Nowadays, any animated movie must be totally computer-generated if is to have any chance against the viewing public, or face utter commercial failure. Hence the saying, traditional 2D animation is dead… or at least not meant to be taken seriously.
- Heck, for a while Dreamworks was single-handedly playing Follow The Leader against Pixar, as part of Jeffrey Katzenberg's Take That against Disney after the success of Toy Story. A Bugs Life begat AntZ (which was rushed for release before Bugs), Monsters Inc begat Shrek, Finding Nemo begat Sharks Tale, and Ratatouille begat Flushed Away. The practice stopped when Pixar finally stopped publicly discussing their projects in advance, to John Lasseter's dismay (he felt that Dreamworks' copycat tactics betrayed the studio-agnostic camaraderie that animators previously nurtured).
- The success of Dream Works's Shrek series has led to many animated movies with lots of Toilet Humour, pop-culture references, celebrity voice actors, and/or Fractured Fairy Tales.
- One exception is the popularity of The Simpsons Movie. But to be fair, The Simpsons has been around forever, and was obviously bound to do well, thanks to its already long-established worldwide appeal.
- Ironically, Pixar is now developing traditional 2D films. The pendulum might yet swing back...
  - The success of Enchanted seems to have helped people realize that a genre/medium is not old technology, it isn't replaced just because something new and flashy comes along. Traditional animation will be coming back when people get tired of CG Animation.
Back in the late-80s/early-90s Disney animation renaissance, quite a few 2D animated features were cranked out by other companies (or finally released). Most were fantasy musicals (The Swan Princess, Thumbelina), even if they weren't initially written as such (Quest for Camelot, The Thief and the Cobbler).
Batman The Animated Series was such a hit that it led to a wave of similar [Comic Book]: The Animated Series type shows using a similar back-to-basics approach. Comic-based animated shows before would try all sorts of gimmicks and be "hip" to the times, while B:TAS was targeted towards "adult" stories that kids can still understand. It's immediate contemporaries include The X Men, Spider Man The Animated Series and several less notable ones. This is without considering the producers themselves repeating the pattern throughout the DCAU.
The popularity of The Ren And Stimpy Show led to many more Gross Out Shows, a trend that seemed to meet its end in 2001 with the canceled-after-a-season The Ripping Friends (incidentally made by the Ren and Stimpy guy).
- You, sir, have not seen Flapjack, otherwise you'd think it still lives on.
The success of Scooby Doo launched a whole boatload of other series about mystery-solving/crime-fighting teens and their talking animal/car/whatever friend. Most of these copycats were actually produced by Hanna-Barbera, the same studio that created Scooby Doo.
The success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles led to the creation of numerous other Secret Mutant Hero Team shows. Some (such as Biker Mice From Mars) were good in their own right, others (like Street Sharks and Extreme Dinosaurs) weren't.
Whilst the extent to which more adult-orientated animated shows such as Family Guy and South Park are direct 'rip-offs' of The Simpsons is a subject of bitter and acrimonious debate across the Internet, it is fairly safe to say that without the enduring popularity of The Simpsons, which showed there was a market for animated programming aimed at more adult audiences, the former two shows — plus a lot of lesser and / or more quickly forgotten similar shows — would probably have never been greenlit thanks to the Animation Age Ghetto.
After the success of The Incredibles, more and more CGI-animated movies started mirroring its method of animating human characters with caricature proportions so as to create smoother human animation and avoid freaking out the audience (with, arguably, varying levels of success).
Teen Titans set the tone for the past few years of kids' action cartoons. Comedy-action blending and Rule Of Cool became far more prominent, as did Animesque artwork (which was already gaining in popularity anyway).
An example from Italy: When the comic book Angel's Friends was adapted for TV, the characters went from looking like grade-school students◊... to looking a whole lot like the Winx.

The Land Before Time fanfiction. Considering that the series is set in a relatively limited environment (prehistoric times), whenever one writer does something different that gets respect, you can expect to see a lot of clones pop up. Such types include war stories, time travel stories, crossovers. Not that these fics are neccessarily bad, but they tend to all come at once as trends, resulting in you finding that all new fanfics lately are centred around Chomper perhaps, while you were particularly hoping for something based more on the main five characters.
Count the number of Pokemon fanfics which focus on an original trainer, who sleeps in on the morning when they're supposed to receive their first Pokémon, arrive at the lab only to find that all the usual starters are gone and instead get a completely different starter. Very often a rare and valuable Pokémon. Almost always an Eevee.
At one time, there where far too many Card Captor Sakura fanfics that blatantly copied each other; as soon as someone comes up with something unique and interesting, a wave of people start ripping it off right down to the last joke and plot point.
According to the Reunions Are A Bitch universe the Colonials of Battlestar Galactica were huge wankers before the Cylons kicked their collective arses to the curve, what with the whole starting a holy war against Earth thing. Naturally, the story was so popular that now there are dozens of different fics detailing the Colonials getting in over their heads while trying to Take Over The World. Most commonly these involve crossovers with Halo or Stargate SG 1, but other types do exist.
Cassandra Claire's Very Secret Diaries for The Lord Of The Rings fandom inspired several copycats in several fandoms, some acknowledging their inspiration coming from her. Even to this day, several years after their creation you still see some of her more infamous quotes scattered about fandom.
Seventy-five percent of all Dragonball Z fanfiction starts with an alien spaceship crashing down on Earth, and ends with a character using a new form of Super Saiyan to beat them. It will also be set during the 3 months before the Androids, the 7 years before Cell or the 10 years after Buu. Other common elements include Vegeta or Broly getting possessed by Babidi, Buu or Cell absorbing someone new or each other, Saiyans inexplicitly growing back their tails, Bardock being rewritten as an honourable anti-hero and Future Trunks travelling to New Namek to use the Dragon Balls there.
The current trend among people who write Troll Fics (or who just want a lot of reviews and attention and don't care about the quality of their work) seems to be to copy My Immortal's format, issues with spelling, My Chemical Romance references, and Goth Sue main character.
For a while, there were Gundam Seed fanfics following the lead of Brothers in Arms by having a Defector From Decadence join the crew of the Archangel at the series' start and cause changes to the canon from there.

Several video uploading sites have cropped up since the rise of You Tube.
- For that matter, video uploading sites make it quite easy for just about any schmoe with a video camera to imitate junk they saw on the Internet.
  - The success and popularity of Yu-Gi-Oh The Abridged Series inspired a number of imitators, making Gag Dubs for other popular series, such as Naruto, Avatar, Pokemon, Sailor Moon, Yu Yu Hakusho, Higurashi, and Tokyo Mew Mew. Out of all of The Abridged Series on Youtube or any other site, only a handful are actually worth watching.
  - Lazy Sunday has a number of response, from "Lazy Monday" by two dudes on the West coast, to "Lazy Ramadi" made by US soldiers stationed in Iraq.
  - Any idiot with video editing software and some raw footage can make a You Tube Poop video, and many idiots thus equipped have.
The success of Magic The Gathering caused pretty much anything that achieved any kind of popularity to have a collectible card game tie-in.
Competitive sports is very much a Follow The Leader endeavor.
- The 2003 book Moneyball (subtitle: "The Art Of Winning An Unfair Game") described the unorthodox methods of the Oakland Athletics baseball team. Oakland's ability to succeed despite financial disadvantage inspired other major league teams to copy their approach.
- American football coaches are notorious copycats, even at the NFL or elite collegiate level. Whenever an innovative offensive or defensive scheme is unveiled, it will quickly be adopted by other teams... until someone figures out how to stop it. The spread offense is king at the moment; past trends (most of which still exist in some form) include the run-and-shoot, the shotgun formation, the 46 defense, the wishbone, and the T-formation.
  - To say nothing of the players. If a player hits it big for an innovative niche, the next 1,000 guys at that position will all be compared to him. Before Michael Vick, the mobile quarterback was something of a rarity, and every halfback that catches passes will inevitably be compared to LaDainian Tomlinson. Hell, there's probably a bunch of guys looking to draft the next Devin Hester.
  - Some of the oldest techniques were even more pronounced instances of Follow The Leader: in 1892, Harvard introduced the Flying Wedge and trounced Yale (under the modern scoring system, they would have won 42-0). In 1893, nearly every play was a flying wedge. In 1894, it was banned (largely because it was EXTREMELY dangerous).
  - The modern T-formation appeared in 1939. In 1940 Stanford won the Rose Bowl using it, and the Chicago Bears won the NFL championship (73-0, still the most lospsided GAME in NFL history). Within 10 years only one pro and a handful of Colleges were still running the single-wing.
The popularity of Wikipedia caused a glut of smaller wikis across the Internet, mostly focused on specific topics of interest to the community they are set up in.*cough*
- Interestingly, the first wiki was not Wikipedia but the Portland Pattern Repository, whose goal was to catalog the patterns used by programmers—really, the programmer version of tropes.
- To be fair, they encourage and support this; the MediaWiki software is under a Free Software license.
Ever since Webkinz thought of virtual pets, it's very hard to find a stuffed animal without a virtual code.
Many websites that are animated base it solely off of Homestar Runner.
RiffTrax, created by Mike Nelson, sparked the rise of the Alternate DVD Commentary.
While not the very first Machinima series, Red vs. Blue cleared the path for dozens, if not hundreds, of followers, especially using Halo 2 as a game engine. Many of them tried to copy Red vs. Blue to the letter and failed miserably while doing it. Or simply weren't very good. Others though, were pretty darn good in their own right.
The Angry Video Game Nerd, since achieving online notoriety and fame has since had several others attempting a style similar to him (i.e. that of a foul-mouthed and pissed off reviewer of old crappy games).
- Unfortunately, because of his rabid fanbase, those who actually try something new with the idea or take an alternate approach are often ignored or flamed for being "rip-offs". Heck, even people who review ANYTHING made in the 80s such as cartoons and comics (just look at The Nostalgia Critic) get branded as rip-offs. It doesn't help that there are plenty of actual ripoffs (*coughIrateGamercough*)
  - Speaking of the Critic, the fact that he got branded as a rip-off was the reason why his feud with the Nerd started in the first place (see Nerd Rant 1 for proof).
- That doesn't mean that there aren't any quote-on-quote "ripoffs" that are actually good. Take a look at the Happy Video Game Nerd, who reviews good obscure games. I think he even has the AVGN's seal of approval.
The Newgrounds series Madness Combat has spun off countless imitators, some of which are quite popular and impressive, like Bunnykill and Maximum Ninja.
- Same to Xiao Xiao which inspired countless stick figure fighting animations and largely Madness Combat itself.
It was arguably the popularity of the Andrew Lloyd Webber take on The Phantom Of The Opera (itself inspired by a campier version by Ken Hill) that spurred the unsuccessful Vampire Musicals trend, and gave a boost to Jekyll and Hyde. In fact, since the novel is public domain, quite a few musical adaptations sprung up in the 1990s for community theatres and whatnot, as well a new lease on life for Arthur Kopit and Maury Yeston's Phantom, which was actually developed around the same time as Webber's take but got lost in the shuffle.
The restaurant industry apparently loves this trope. Think about when various chains started offering (or offering more of or emphasizing): angus, chipotle, fast food salads, chicken... the current hot trend appears to be small "slider" style burgers ala White Castle or Krystal.
The Game FA Qs Character Battles had long been dominated by Link until 2007 (he only lost one contest where he entered, to Cloud), when voters fed up with him winning every year propelled L-Block (yes, from Tetris) to victory. When the 2008 nominations came along, many, many people tried nominating a bunch of random joke characters in an attempt to recreate L-Block, without considering why L-Block succeeded in the first place.
- The [Portal Weighted]] Companion Cube admittedly done very well - going farther than the returning champion! (but proving no jokes are forever, Link still won)
  - Likewise, the Character Battle was probably the inspiration for GameSpy to do a gaming contest (a GameFAQs equivalent appearing some time later was a coincidence).
Speaking of restaurants, my city had a huge wave of mom and pop shops centered around chicken wings circa 97. We had Wing Zone, Exotic Wings, Wing out, Wang's Wings etc etc..Of course they served more than just wings but wings was their main dish. Just wings with over a dozen different flavors.
- A reverse of the above, Wing Wangs would be an awesome name for a resteraunt.
  - Or if Wing Wangs was owned by an Allen. "Get your face full at Allen's Wing Wangs!"
Similar to the previous one, the popularity of Ray's Pizza in New York led to a number of ripoffs like Ray's Famous Pizza, Original Ray's Pizza, Ray's Original Pizza, etc.
- Likewise with Tommy's Hamburgers in Los Angeles. A glut of Tommie's, Tomi's, and similar wannabe-clones came and (mostly) went.
The Las Vegas casino show scene has been and is prone to this:
- The French showgirl revue was introduced to Las Vegas in the 1950s with Lido de Paris, and the style became the default setting for Vegas for years afterward with such shows as Folies Bergere, Hallelujah Hollywood!, and Jubilee! (the only one still performing today, since 1981).
- Siegfried and Roy got their start in Vegas performing between showgirl acts in revues, but were so popular they became headliners in the late '70s and proved an magic show format could work. Especially after they opened a gigantic production at the new Mirage hotel in 1989, many casinos created their own magic-themed productions, making it the go-to genre of the '90s. Performers like Lance Burton still headline self-titled shows.
- 1983's Legends in Concert was the first all-celebrity impersonator show; the format remains popular whether it's a revue tackling many performers or one performer/group representing one act. The original is still running, and has launched several other companies elsewhere.
- Danny Gans' success in the late 1990s spawned a wave of shows based around one performer delivering a bunch of celebrity impressions.
- The country music boom spearheaded by Garth Brooks inspired several revues in the mid-1990s.
- Cirque Du Soleil was likely the inspiration for the importing of dubious foreign variety revues at the turn of the millennium, as well as mostly unsuccessful direct imitators (Imagine, Storm). Ultimately Cirque mounting (as of 2010) seven different ongoing productions in the city discouraged other stylistically similar shows from being produced, especially after the nasty reception Le Reve, mounted by a former Cirque director, received upon opening in 2005. (Said director also mounted Celine Dion's popular Vegas show.) At this point, many are fervently hoping for a new megahit show that will break Cirque's dominance, but the ongoing economic downturn has left rival producers without the means to create worthy competitors.
- Mamma Mia was a substantial hit when it opened at Mandalay Bay in 2003, inspiring several other legit musicals to mount Vegas productions - Saturday Night Fever, We Will Rock You (its only U.S. production to date), Hairspray, Avenue Q, The Phantom Of The Opera, Spamalot, The Producers, Jersey Boys, and The Lion King. Only Phantom, Jersey Boys, and Lion King caught on, however.
Over the last 35 years, the National Hockey League has seen its overall style of play change and develop whenever a given team begins winning with a new style of play, which the rest of the league begins emulating in an attempt to catch up. Whether the rough-and-tumble tactics of the Philadelphia Flyers in the 1970s, the high-scoring Edmonton Oilers in the 1980s, or the tight and defensive New Jersey Devils in the 1990s (specifically their use of neutral zone trap), all three teams helped define their eras as their opponents began copying them.
Gaia Online, Gaia Online, Gaia Online. It's nigh-impossible to find a forum featuring customizable avatars that doesn't imitate it in some way. At the best, it's simply having a similar feel, at the worst, it's copying forum names, items, and even events.
The video "8-Bit Gratuity" inspired a slew of similar videoes like "Kirby is a fucking monster" (though most of them leave the original game audio intact instead of giving it a spooky echoing effect like in the original video).
ChipCheezum and General Ironicus' retsupuraes, although Slowbeef and Diabetus have also made guest appearances in their videos. Chip has also done the inverse, Let's Recommend.
After the emergence of Paris Hilton's infamous sex video (and before that, Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee), you couldn't spit without it landing on a "celebrity" claiming to have been sold out by an ex or robbed, with the resulting porn video ending up on the Internet and giving said celebrity his/her fifteen minutes of fame before they slid back into has-been/never-will-be territory.
The site, The Million Dollar Homepage, has caused people to despair a bit because it's simultaniously an idea that was so damn obvious and will never be possible again. It's inspired hundreds of different sites, and all have fallen short of its glory.
Top 60 Ghetto Names has spawned a slew of imitators, all with the same twist at the end.

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