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As it Happens, with Randy Pinkwood
This is when certain kinds of decay are so overt and so prevalent in a work that the only thing actually tying it to the franchise is the title.
Occasionally this will expand to include the names of the character(s), setting, whatever. But the point is, you wonder why they ever bothered with borrowing the material in the first place if they felt the need to change everything.
This generally happens for one of three different reasons. They Just Didnt Care. Executive Meddling. Or it's a Dolled Up Installment; the work in question was originally intended as something completely different, but since is was slightly similar to an existing franchise, it was changed to fit in that franchise, whether to avoid liability or just to cash in. In extreme cases, a Macekre can result in this. Since titles cannot be copyrighted in common-law countries (including the US, Canada, and the UK), the project may not have any relation to a famous predecessor.
A Cookie Cutter Fic is Fan Fic that belongs to its fandom In Name Only.
In Name Only can happen to just parts of a story. You can have a Fan Fic that would be Original Flavor if only that Possession Sue hadn't been the character In Name Only. Or you can have an original work that, thanks to especially bad California Doubling and Critical Research Failure, is in Chicago or New York or Britain In Name Only.
Compare Nonindicative Name, Dolled Up Installment.
Contrast Serial Numbers Filed Off.
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Examples
Anime and Manga
- The anime Lensman OVA; it was closer to Star Wars than anything in the books. Note that there is also a TV anime adaptation of Lensman which is slightly more faithful.
- This was the point of Galaxy Angel, which turned a Space Opera into a Gag Series when the first game was delayed. See Writer Revolt.
- Even this trope has cases of Tropes Are Not Bad, as many ended up preferring the anime to the original games, and it never switched back.
- Idolmaster Xenoglossia retains *some* of the characters' personalities from the original videogame, but changes... well, everything else. This troper was just a little upset that his favourite character went from "serious and quiet" to "absolute psychopath".
- This is a frequent complaint when manga gets adapted into anime. Sometimes, the resulting show will have the character's names and designs and little else (and sometimes not even that). To be fair, this may be because the anime Overtook The Manga, and the manga ended up going in an entirely different direction. This troper often hears this about Sailor Moon, especially its final season which has almost nothing of the original plot of the manga.
- And let's not even get started on Excel Saga and its anime adaptation. Read the manga, then watch the anime, then try and tell me the two are the same.
- Although Excel Saga's example was completely intentional, as the author mocks everything.
- The manga Blue Dragon Ral Grad has nothing in common with the Blue Dragon video game or anime series, except for the presence of Living Shadow Bond Creatures which themselves are very different in nature between sources.
- Kashimashi Girl Meets Girl's anime version is pretty much in name only from the manga due to the number of drastic changes. The only real things similar are the characters, beginning storyline and characters relations to each other, and even then relations are changed sort of. For example, in the anime, Yasuna tries to avoid Hazumu as much as possible, and shows great dislike and jealousy to Tomari This is not present at all in the manga. Quite the opposite actually; She confesses to Hazumu after he changes into a girl, spends a lot more time with her then Tomari and wants to be friends with Tomari. She also seems to be quite afraid of boys in the anime, but just doesn't pay any attention to them in the manga.
- Howls Moving Castle is a completely different creature (literally) in the film than in the book. There are some things kept in common, but for the most part the book and movie cannot be compared with one another. The general consensus is that both are equally awesome.
- That consensus includes the author of the book, Or So I Heard.
- Diane Wynne Jones in fact has stated she was aware of how different Miyazaki's adaptation was going to be.
- Tales From Earthsea by the same studio, however, went completely different than Howls Moving Castle, at least in terms of how the author (Ursula Le Guin) reacted to it. The film, like the other one, only really borrowed a few ideas from the Earthsea books and made something completely different. Le Guin was not amused, meanwhile.
- One suspects this is more indicative of the personality differences between Jones and Le Guin than the treatments given to their respective novels. Note that Eiko Kodono also cried Adaptation Decay when she first saw the film version of Kikis Delivery Service but changed her mind later.
- Many think of G Gundam as an example of this. The rest of the Gundam series is a series of Real Robot wars while this one is just one big Super Robot Tournament Arc. Not that it wasn't awesome.
- Hades Project Zeorymer - Originally a hentai manga. The title mech and the name of a female character are the only thing the manga and anime share.
- Osamu Tezuka's manga Metropolis is literally and intentionally an In Name Only counterpart to the silent film. Tezuka came up with the idea for his story after seeing a single still image of the movie's famous robot woman, then used the title because he thought it sounded cool. The later anime movie is arguably an In Name Only adaptation of both the movie and the manga, essentially combining the two vastly different works and bearing little resemblance to either one.
- Ninjas are generally recognized quiet, sneaky, underhanded assassins/bodyguards that operate in the shadows and tend to operate in secrecy and subtlety. The ninjas of the Naruto world...not so much. In fact, pretty much every ninja depicted in anime (and most media for that matter) is no where near what real ninjas were like. This applies even when discounting the near-supernatural attributes given to them. Despite the black garb so deeply associated with ninjas in such depictions, there is no written evidence for such a costume. Instead, it was much more common for ninjas to be disguised as civilians. The popular notion of black clothing is likely rooted in artistic convention since early drawings of ninjas were shown to be dressed in black in order to portray a sense of invisibility. This was borrowed from the puppet handlers of bunraku theater, who dressed in total black in an effort to simulate props moving independently of their controls.
Comics
- When Vertigo Comics publish a series that shares a name with a DC Comics property, that, and a few loose concepts, will be all it shares (unless it's Animal Man or Swamp Thing). The most extreme example was Beware The Creeper! which was about a 1920s Parisian surrealist who wore a costume vaguely similar to Jack Ryder's.
- This trope is a deliberate unifying premise in DC's "Tangent Comics" line. Unlike Elseworlds, which is a re-imagining of a DC character that usually retains most of the core elements, Tangent attaches the existing names to completely different characters with different powers, costumes, origins, appearances, and personalities. Usually, the only common element is that they're metahumans in a modern setting.
- Brazil's apparently
 ◊ made an Animesque Little Lulu spin off of sorts where the characters in question are teens. The core characters of the cast seem to have been changed as well. Teen!Lulu's apparently the leader of a clique composed of Tubby, who has been slimmed down and left his violin to lead a rock band; Annie, the gang’s geek and a videogame freak; Gloria, the fashion expert; and Alvin, who has become a skater and surfer.
Films
- The Stuart Little movies. The books were set in the late 1940s, Stuart was born from a human mother rather than adopted, and only the boat race in the first movie bears any resemblance to the events of the book.
- The I Robot movie, which was actually started as a completely unrelated script named Hardwired until the studio got the rights to the book and decided to use the name. They also included very nearly every action and line of dialogue from Robot Dreams, an Asimov short that was published decades after I, Robot itself. Ironically, the movie may have been more popular if it was released as Hardwired: while hardly Shakespeare, it was smarter than your average action movie.
- The movie credits say that the movie is "suggested by", rather than "based on", the book.
- Asimov's I, Robot is itself an example of the trope, that having originally been the title of an unrelated story by Eando Binder. Asimov's original title for the compilation was Mind and Iron, and he was reportedly appalled when he found that his publisher had changed the title. (This happened a lot to Asimov - the first magazine print of Robbie was titled, to his dismay, Strange Playfellow.)
- On the other hand, Asimov was thrilled when an editor changed a title to "Buy Jupiter!", since he could never resist a pun.
- Like the movie, the Binder short story (and The Outer Limits episode adapting it) centered around a robot accused of murdering its creator. And, appropriately enough considering the trope, that's all they have in common.
- The Starship Troopers movie, which was really more of a Take That against the original book than an adaptation. It's not even a horribly-executed Take That — the producers bought the rights to the original after the script was written.
- The Lawnmower Man has nothing to do with Stephen King's short story of the same name. They had the gall, originally, to call it Stephen King's The Lawnmower Man anyway, and he successfully sued to get his name taken out of the title. The short story is about a creepy satyr who mows lawns. The movie is about a mentally deficient gardener who has his brain transplanted into cyberspace and becomes a god of computers. This was probably for the better.
- The Dark Is Rising movie. We could fill the page, but let's just direct you to The Agony Booth review instead.
- It doesn't even have the same name!
- The films of The Bourne Series have nothing whatsoever to do with Ludlum's novels, aside from the name of the main character and his amnesia. They cut out the primary villain (since Carlos the Jackal is just a teensy bit in prison at the moment), changed the time to present day, completely changed the backstory behind Bourne's skills, changed the last name, nationality, profession (and, in the second film, lifespan) of his love interest... The movies are generally considered good, mind you (especially the first one). They're just... expect to be disoriented if you read the books afterward.
- The Running Man says "Based on the novel by Richard Bachman" in the opening credits, and this is the last time anything resembling the book is mentioned. Indeed, it has far more in common with an earlier Robert Scheckley short story entitled "The Seventh Victim", but presumably, Scheckley's relatively-obscure name wouldn't sell as many tickets as the Stephen King pseudonym.
- This leads to an interesting copy right problem. The german movie "Das Millionen Spiel" (The Million (money) Game", is a far more faithfull addaption to the book. However because of having only bought the rights for the book and not for a movie based on the book, the movie was for a long time forbidden to be shown in german television or being sold. It was so far only shown 3 times (note that the movie is from the 70's).
- The Godzilla movie starring Matthew Broderick. The monster in that movie was even called "GINO" (for Godzilla In Name Only) by kaiju fans before being given the official moniker of "Zilla" by Toho (because they felt he took the "God" out of "Godzilla") and brutally beaten up by the real Godzilla in Godzilla: Final Wars ("I knew that tuna-eating monster would be useless..."). The only similarities between the US and Japanese films is that both are about giant reptiles of some kind doing things in a city.
- It wasn't always like that, though...
- In a strange case of Adaptation Distillation the animated spinoff, Godzilla The Series, was more faithful to the latter incarnations of the original Godzilla as a protector of mankind. "Toonzilla" was far more immune to human (and alien) weapons than GINO and regularly battled other Kaiju, advanced technological constructs, and aliens. Also, he had the ability to shoot "atomic breath" much like the original Godzilla, a trait Zilla distinctly lacked. Consequently, it was better loved by classic Gozilla fans than the American movie upon which it is based. Even Toho itself liked the series so much that they called Toonzilla by the affectionate nickname of Godzilla Jr.
- The Spy Who Loved Me, as we've mentioned elsewhere, had to be done this way; Ian Fleming disliked the book, and refused to allow them to use the storyline.
- Many Bond movies have nothing to do with the story they're named after. There must be a few that do...
- I've only read a few, and haven't hit a single Bond novel that resembled the movie it shares a name with. The book and movie for The Man With the Golden Gun share only Bond and a gun, that's gold.
- From Russia, With Love is one of the closest adaptations. It is considered one of the best Bond movies, if not the best. I guess the executives forgot about that correlation afterward.
- Casino Royale is apparently very close to the book, aside from the modernization and switch to poker from baccarat. It's the best Bond movie in my opinion, too.
- "On Her Majesty's Secret Service" follows the book pretty closely, "Goldfinger" isn't too unfaithful either. Thunderball's faithfulness is explained by the book being originally envisioned as a script.
- Most video game movies. The Super Mario Bros movie skirts this, as does anything by Uwe Boll. With the exception of Postal, which is just as gross, warped, and irreverent as the Postal games, if not more so.
- The one that embodies this trope is Final Fantasy The Spirits Within. The Final Fantasy games all take place in different worlds (save for direct sequels), but they all have shared elements (especially once some are established). This didn't have any of those elements. It doesn't even have Cid, just a guy whose name is a homonymn. But what makes it the embodiment is that Square themselves worked on the movie, including Hironobu Sakaguchi directing it. Yes, even the very creators can fall victim to this trope.
- Wait, what? The Doctor is called Sid. Although it is spelled differently, it was intended to follow this tradition. Also, if we compare the movie to the most popular FF game (VII), we have the theme of industrial action harming Gaia, the planet's life force, which is just like The Lifestream in FFVII.
- If you go by the original Japanese language version, Dr. Sid's name is actually Shido, like every incarnation of Cid in Final Fantasy that isn't actually named Cidolfus.
- And the monsters were ghosts just like in FFX.
- The Catwoman movie, which dumped the original character for a cheap rip-off of The Crow.
- The movie Blade Runner, while a fine and excellent movie, took the title of one book (The Bladerunner by Alan E. Nourse) and slapped it on a movie made from a completely different story (Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?).
- Very loosely based on the novel, in fact, except for a few names and concepts like the robotic animals that the movie borrowed, everything else differs from the novel.
- Andre Norton's The Beast Master series tell the story of retired veteran Hosteen Storm, an American Indian in the far future who was recruited into an elite commando force, the titular Beast Masters, which were telepathically bonded to a team of genetically enhanced animals (a horse, tiger, pair of ferrets and hawk in Storm's case) to fight an interstellar war. With Earth destroyed on the way to a costly victory, he is discharged with honors to seek his fate and sort out his life on a distant colony world. It's been adapted to other media a number of times... In a manner of speaking:
- Three films were made, recasting him as Dar, a Mighty Whitey blond He Man knock-off with telepathically linked animal companions in a generic High Fantasy setting. While a box-office bomb, the first film was actually pretty good for what it was and received a cult following on TV. The other two were pretty awful though (the second deserves special derision for its Refugee From TV Land plot).
- A Sci Fi Original Series was made, seemingly through direct Pop Cultural Osmosis from the films.
- By the way, WHY did they change the plot? Just read the above paragraph. Doesn't it sound like a pretty cool movie? You don't have to change a thing to make it successful.
- You must remember the 80s. There were half-naked guys in loincloths all over the place. This was the age of Conan, Masters of the Universe, Blackstar (who might've been an Indian), Thundarr, and so on. And it's totally not gay to enjoy looking at half-naked guys in loincloths showing off their muscles. Not gay at all.
- Roger Zelazny's 1969 Damnation Alley was set in a post-apocalyptic Nation of California in which the aftereffects of WWIII twenty years ago have spiraled way beyond nuclear winter to bring the entire earth to the brink of death, including continuous several hundred mile an hour winds that continually roar by about 500 feet above the ground to produce a blanket of radioactive rubble and garbage mixed with the contents of a good part of the world's oceans (which regularly results in a shower of horribly mutated sealife raining down to feed the giant abominations that dominate the land) in the sky. The story follows a Heroic Sociopath (the last living Hell's Angel) who has been forced into a lone suicidal medicine delivery mission through the inland no-man's-land to the east coast as the result of a murder conviction.
- Call him... Snake
- The movie was instead set in a toned down version of this two years after the fireworks, with the protagonist recast as a soldier at a missile base in the desert. After braving some drunken hillbillies and rubber cockroaches to investigate a mysterious radio signal, he and his squadmates discover a completely untouched haven and live Happily Ever After. The film was the more strongly favored of two "Sci-Fi" films being made by Fox at the time. The other film was Star Wars; this one's budget was 1.54 times larger.
- Happens all the time with comic book movies. Given that Constantine doesn't even keep the Hellblazer title, you have to wonder why they bothered. The film's not too bad, but nobody would have even made the connection if the protagonist was renamed to James Diocletian or something.
- Believe it or not, it was changed due to the similarity of "Hellblazer" to "Hellraiser" (the comic was even going to have this name before Clive Barker released the movie).
- The opening credits to Adaptation list it as based on Susan Orlean's book The Orchid Thief, to which it bears very little resemblance. But then, that was the point of the movie.
- The 1950's film version of Anything Goes bears next to no resemblance to the musical it's based on. Aside from five songs (sung in completely different contexts) and the fact that there's a boat (going to a different place), they may as well have called it something else and not stepped on anyone's toes.
- That's fairly standard Adaptation Decay compared to what happened to its Spiritual Successor, Red, Hot and Blue, which lost all of its Cole Porter tunes (including hits such as "It's De-Lovely" and "Ridin' High") when it was filmed, Or So I Heard.
- Both film versions of Planet Of The Apes share nothing in common with the novel that inspired them except the existence of a planet ruled by intelligent apes with humans as savage animals. Both movies... well, ape the Twist Ending of the novel the narrator returns to Earth after his voyage only to find that it too has been dominated by intelligent apes, though in significantly different ways.
- Oddly, the third movie in the series, Escape from the Planet of the Apes, is similar to that of the original novel (loosely), but with the roles of humans and apes reversed.
- The Natalie Wood romantic comedy Sex and the Single Girl, though it references the original Helen Gurley Brown bestseller and its author, has nothing to do with the original, which was a self-help book.
- Woody Allen performed a similar "adaptation" on the advice book Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Were Afraid To Ask).
- And somehow the book Please Don't Eat The Daisies, which was a collection of essays and articles, became a feature film starring Doris Day and David Niven.
- Rebel Without a Cause was named after a book by a psychiatrist. Otherwise, it has nothing to do with it.
- And more recently, both Fast Food Nation and He's Just Not That Into You were based on (successfull) non-fiction books, but has little in common with them other than being about fast food and relationships, respectively.
- There is the 1990 guilty pleasure film, Troll 2, which is not related to the 1986 B-movie Troll. Also, there are no trolls in this film (just goblins), nor is the word "troll" spoken once throughout the movie.
- Troll 2 was followed by a further in-name-only sequel, Troll 3. This one didn't have trolls or goblins, instead featuring the oh-so-terrifying menace of killer tree roots.
- There are actually two movies claiming the title of Troll 3. They are called Crawlers: Troll 3 (the aforementioned sequel), and the sword-and sorcery film, Troll 3: The Sword of Power (AKA Quest For The Mighty Sword), both of which were directed by Joe D'Amato. The latter film DOES feature one of the goblin costumes from Troll 2.
- Four Troll movies, all of them having nothing to do with each other. What are the odds?
- Pretty good, actually.
- It's notable that only Troll 2 was made by the rights holders of the original, making it the only "official" sequel. Doesn't make it any better, though.
- The 2003 film The Italian Job was fairly good, but any similarities to the 1969 film are closer to homages than anything else.
- The classic Ray Bradbury short story, A Sound Of Thunder and the film of the same title both involve time travelers accidentally altering the past while hunting a dinosaur — and that's literally it. The movie even kills the concept the book was based on in the first five minutes. That's like Marty getting run over by a semi before he can hit 88 MPH in the first Back To The Future.
- This troper counts the original short story as the first sci-fi story that really blew her mind, and she recently had the (um) pleasure of catching the movie on cable. The best part is how, in the original story, the possible effects of the altered past are built up to be unspeakably disastrous during the course of the story. When the Time Safari does get back, however, everything is basically the same... and then they notice the wonky spelling... The story's ending was apparently too subtle for Hollywood, so we got a city overgrown with jungle (it doesn't even make sense in context) and crawling with killer baboon-things and sewer sharks. Oh, and there's also something about a catfish-man. Of course.
- The only thing the recent Cheaper By the Dozen movies have to do with the original Cheaper By the Dozen novels is that they are both about a family with twelve children.
- The Wanted film adaptation takes out 90% of the original background (no supervillains, no parallel-dimension robbing), and replaces it with a society of assassins who kill people to save the world. It's not bad, but the changes weren't particularly Wanted either.
- 90% is a remarkably low estimate, I can only remember 4 things that were kept the same: 1) His girlfriend is a cheating whore who does his "best" friend on an IKEA table he bought, 2) He kills people (With an entirely different motivation and degree of competence from the comics), 3) There's a "love" interest that plays a role (Though a completely different one), 4) His father has some significance for his live (See point 3). Given that 2-4 are so common you can expect at least 2 of them in just about any movie of almost all genres, and point 1 isn't even used for much of an effect in the movie. Considering that this results in a story that is only slightly less ridiculous than the comics while being far less over the top to compensate (Though still acceptable popcorn cinema) AND losing all of the message the original author intended, this troper finds the result somewhat grating (Even though generally not being much of a comic-nut and not particularly concerned with adaption decay as long as the movie is watchable).
- Aside from a few throwaway lines and other minor elements — some of which don't actually match the game versions anyway (e.g. the beholders) — the Dungeons And Dragons movie is nothing more than a generic (and not very good) fantasy movie with a famous brand name attached to it.
- The second, Sci-Fi Channel original movie, however, sticks much closer to the original game content, right down to mentioning established gods, demons, spells, monsters, and even having Gary Gygax involved.
- This Troper recently saw the trailer for the Max Payne movie, and none of what he saw was in the videogame. Then again, he couldn't understand what the hell was going on.
- If it helps, This Troper recently saw the Max Payne movie, and still isn't quite sure he understands what the hell was going on.
- For the record, the Max Payne movie keeps the general concept of the games intact (rogue cop out for revenge) while making the story significantly less complicated (no specific frame job, and line between Max and his ultimate goal is much straighter). This isn't a bad thing.
- Considering that that describes any movie with a cop as a main character that doesn't have two cops as main characters, it makes it the American Cheese Food Product of a movie.
- Also Max only kills 4 people in the whole movie, all of which happen within seconds of each other. When the source material was all high adrenaline, gun-firing, pill-popping, explosionfests, and your movie has almost an entire 2 minutes of action in it, you didn't adapt it very well.
- If they'd simply changed the names of the characters/drugs/the movie itself, it would have been a fine movie. But when you take an acceptable movie and compare it to a game that it's barely tied to at all, it makes it seem even worse.
- Similarly to the page image, IGN once announced on April Fool's Day a Metroid movie... directed by Uwe Boll... produced by Troma... and set on Earth, with a plot similar to Half Life.
- The movie Doctor Dolittle, with Eddie Murphy, is named after a literary character named Doctor Dolittle who talks to animals — but beyond talking to animals itself, the two productions have essentially nothing in common with each other. The book is set in Britain somewhen in the past, the movie is set in the USA of today. The main character got a Race Lift. And that's just the beginning.
- The Nostalgia Chick, in her review of the Bratz film admits that it's only really about the toy line In Name Only. But then again, considering the source material was just about implied attitudes (How the dolls they were based off of really were was up to the person who was playing with them) and what kind of setting they existed in other than Generic High...well, let's just say they really didn't have much to go on.
- The "remake" of Day of the Dead is nothing like the original except for being a zombie movie.
- The recent movie The Curious Case of Benjamin Button only takes the basic premise and title from the F. Scott Fitzgerald story that it is based on. While the former is a good Magic Realism drama by itself, the latter is mostly a comic farce.
- Stanley Kubrick's version of The Shining uses the basic premise of the book, but not much else. He has no problem killing off the ostensible hero, for instance, or leaving the hotel intact to trap more people. Still a good film, though.
- I Am Legend. The original ending would've given it some connection with the book it was apparently based on, but that was changed too... now the only thing they have in common is a disease that turns people into monsters. And even then they didn't get it quite right. In the new movie it's a virus, but in the old book, it was a type of bacteria.
- Of course, the film I Am Legend isn't a Film Of The Book so much as a remake of the film The Omega Man, which is itself an In Name Only adaptation of the book I Am Legend.
- Except for the name, of course...
- Quite a few supposedly "based on a true story" movies fit this trope — The Exorcism of Emily Rose springs to mind. I'd include The Amityville Horror, but the "true" events of that one were something of a hoax anyway.
- The sequel to The Blair Witch Project, Book Of Shadows, is actually about some dorks, inspired by the previous (and acknowledged as fictional) film, trying to find the witch for themselves. Mind Screwiness, naked breasts, random owl "symbolism", and suckiness ensued.
- The Underdog Movie: let's see, Character Derailment, Plot Derailment, Source Material Derailment... hell, let's just chalk this up to Everything Derailment!
- The Russian Urban Fantasy movie based on the book Night Watch, itself titled Night Watch, was faithful to the book, except for the depth of the story, the ending and the fact that in the book Anton and Yegor are unrelated and Anton never went to that old witch. But the book is divided in three stories, and only the first was made into the movie Night Watch. The second movie, Day Watch was completely unrelated to the book of the same name: it was a completely new story with the beginning taken from the second story of the book Night Watch and some elements from the third one (namely, the magic chalk).
- Home Alone 3 has little to do continuity-wise with the previous films; Kevin's been replaced with an Expy, Alex. The only true connections it has to the previous films are the plot, being set in the Chicago area, and its writer and producer, John Hughes. Understandable, though, since Macaulay Culkin was 17 at the time. Home Alone 4, which Hughes had nothing to do with, was also like this, but in a different way. Kevin and the other original characters were brought back, but were all recast, looking and acting almost nothing like their original selves.
- The Deadpool featured in X-Men Origins: Wolverine is this, to the point of being fan nicknamed DINO or Dudepeel. To put this more specifically, the film has Wade Wilson as basically a sane version of Deadpool, wisecracking, badass but without the awareness or healing factor. Then he is later converted into Weapon XI AKA "Deadpool" (a "pool of dead people's powers"; unlike the comic version, named after the bet on who'd die last), who has no mouth and All Your Powers Combined. But he might have salvation - not only a Deadpool movie was greenlighted by Fox, also in one of the stingers that appear depending on your screening, Weapon XI grabs his decapitated head, who shushes the audience, in the style of the fourth-wall breaker of the comics.
- Hitchcock's suspense classic The Birds was inspired by a Daphne du Maurier short story of the same name. The only thing they have in common is that there are birds and they attack people.
- Dragonball Evolution. Adaptation Decay doesn't even cover it all.
- Halloween III: Season of the Witch abandoned the Michael Myers storyline in favor of one involving an insane Irish toymaker and his army of evil killer robots trying to take over the world (or something) using Stonehenge and rigged Halloween masks that make the wearers' head explode into a writhing mound of insects and snakes if they watch a certain commercial. It bombed horribly and the idea of turning Halloween into an anthology series was dropped, with Michael coming back in the next installment.
- It's notable that the anthology part was the original concept, it's just that the Michael Myers part ended up lasting two movies.
- The only reason that Halloween was not turned into a series of unrelated events was because the third film did badly. The Myers story was told completely within the first two films, then they moved on. It was intended to be like a bigscreen, adult Goosebumps, with a new story every year. But people responded to Myers' films better than they did to Season of the Witch, so the film makers decided that Myers should return. At one point, they also intended on having Jamie become the antagonist, but dropped it.
- The fourth and fifth entries in the Silent Night Deadly Night are unrelated to the previous three movies, which features an Axe Crazy family of Santa imposters. The fourth film is almost unrelated to Christmas and involves some kind of ancient Egyptian witch cult and the fifth has evil toys connected to an enigmatic toymaker by the name of Joe Petto. The films have homages to the original three though, with scenes of them being briefly shown on televisions and the villains dressing up as Santa at least once.
- The second Prom Night has no connection to the first outside the setting. Likewise, the fourth is unconnected to the previous three outside a brief appearance by Hamilton High. The remake is similar to the original in only the most basic sense, having a different story all together.
- I'll Always Know What You Did Last Summer, the third installment in the I Know What You Did Last Summer franchise has only the thinnest of links with the first two films; not only does it not have any of the original characters it turns into an outright supernatural horror the killer is an evil ghost!
- But the ghost was the killer from the original movies, so there's that...
- Mind you, none of the movies have anything to do with the original book. Whether this is Adaptation Decay or Adaptation Distillation depends on whether you think baling hooks are cooler than pistols . . .
- Sinbad: Legend of the Seven Seas is perhaps the most pure example of this trope: NOTHING in the movie even vaguely resembles the original 'Adventures of Sinbad the Sailor' except for the fact that Sinbad in the movie is an adventurer with a ship. If the main character had gone by any other name, the movie would have been rather creative and original. With the name, it's just plain confusing to anyone who's read the stories and detracts from the movie as a whole.
- The Never Ending Story The first movie did a fairly good job of following the first half of the book, but there were only two things in common between the second half of the book and the second movie, and let's not even talk about the third movie.
- The movie version of Ella Enchanted had almost nothing in common with the actual book other than character names and the curse on the main character.
- Pedro Almovadar's movie 'Live Flesh' was supposedly based on a novel of the same name by Ruth Rendell. Both featured a police crippled by a shot from a criminal who, when released from prison has an affair with the policeman's partner.......and that's it.
- Death Sentence the film has a different story, focused on a Papa Wolf Vigilante Man going on a Roaring Rampage Of Revenge, as opposed to the original novel, which was a sequel to the Death Wish novel. Author Brian Garfield has stated that despite the differences, the film still did get the novel's point across.
- For that matter, Death Wish the film's supposed glorification of vigilantism goes against the intended message of the novel.
- Shrek and all its sequels, though it is entirely justified - the William Steig novelty childrens story that inspired the series would barely have stretched to a five minute short.
- The Kevin Costner movie of David Brin's very fine novel The Postman is barely recognisable (starting with the fact the movie is not so 'very fine'). The scene where the main character discovers the postman's uniform is pretty much the only scene from the book to make it into the movie. Otherwise the main character and his motivation is completely different (in the book he's much less of an obvious white-hat), the love interest is completely different, the villain is completely different (in the book being a genetically-enhanced warrior, in the movie just a weird guy with a beard), there is a second 'hero' who doesn't appear at all in the movie and there is an interesting subplot about a super-powerful AI that is guiding a remote village of survivors back to civilisation that isn't even mentioned in the film. The author's reaction to the film was apparently to agree that the main theme of the book was vaguely in place in the film and then run all the way to the bank.
Live Action TV
- Many fans of the original Battlestar Galactica referred to the most recent TV remake as GINO ("Galactica In Name Only"), although the term's become less prevalent as the show's grown more popular and widely accepted. In the second season, Ron Moore included a Number Six Cylon named "Gina", a feminized version of the acronym, as a playful jab at the fans.
- The new series' highly fandom-shattering and contentious conclusion has seen a resurgence of the original series fans, who were rather unseemingly gleeful over the new series' descent in insanity with the last few episodes, especially as the original BSG ended with the utterly unsalvageable Galactica 1980, which makes the new series' ending look like a work of genius in comparison.
- The series Poltergeist The Legacy shares nothing in common with its namesake, the Poltergeist films.
- Mad TV bears no resemblance at all to the magazine that is its namesake. For the first few seasons, there were Spy vs Spy cartoons in every episode, but now that those have been removed.
- The old Japanese live-action Spider Man show. He looked like Spider-Man and had the same powers, but he was more of an early Power Ranger than a comic book superhero. He had a henshin device (that's morpher in America), a Spider car (technically the comic had one too, but it was totally different and short lived), his webshooters were voice activated (he would shout Spider String!) and last but not least, he had a Humongous Mecha. Yeah. Imagine Peter "constantly strapped for cash" Parker being able to to buy, repair, refuel and run general maintenance on a robot the size of a skyscraper.
- The success of this version of Spider-Man lead to a rush of live-action giant robot shows in Japan, as well as the famous Megazords of Power Rangers fame.
- Looked like a Power Ranger, nothing. The series actually replaced Super Sentai, the show that is adapted into Power Rangers, for a year in the same timeslot.
- It predated Super Sentai, so Super Sentai is actually a descendant.
- Never the less, Stan Lee was actually involved in the production, and has said several times that he thought the series was excellent, even praising its creativity (and thus its deviance from the character he created). There's an interview with him on the Japanese DVD box set.
- A almost-was case; in the 1980s, an American production company approached John Cleese with the intention of remaking Fawlty Towers for an American audience. When he asked them about it, they told him they'd only made one slight change from the original; they'd removed the character of Basil Fawlty. The main character.
- Friday The13th The Series was unrelated to the film series, and despite common rumor there were never any plans to have Jason appear on the show. The films get a small Shout Out in the episode "Crippled Inside" though, where the song the rocker chick from Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan plays on her guitar can be heard on the radio.
- The 2001 revival of Card Sharks had contestants predict whether cards were higher or lower than each other...but other than that? Where were the survey questions? The second player's row of cards? And what the hell are Clip Chips?!!?
- The Electric Company It's 2009 "revival" has almost NOTHING in common with it's predecessor but it's name! Bad enough they threw in a they fight crime with superpowers motif, that has little, if ANYTHING to do with phonics, but they even ruined the SOFTSHOE SILHOUETTES!! One even bothers why they even CALL it The Electric Company!
- As the series went on Robin Hood kept moving further and further away from its source material. By the time Tuck shows up (black, fit, not a Friar and pontificating on the "idea of Robin Hood" instead of spiritual matters) you begin to wonder what the point was.
Professional Wrestling
Close Professional Wrestling
Video Games
- Variant: Much like what The Angry Video Game Nerd mentioned above, there really are video game adaptations where a developer takes a license, takes an existing game, and just changes sprites in the original game based off the license. (Ironically, this did not apply to the Nightmare on Elm Street game.)
- When Data East picked up the license to The Real Ghostbusters, all they did with it was take the Japanese arcade game Maze Hunter G and replace the heroes and powerups with Ghostbusters-related themes, before releasing it to the States. Nothing else in the game involves the Ghostbusters.
- Yo! Noid for the NES is based on the Japanese game Masked Ninja Hanamaru, which involved children being kidnapped from around an island and a kid ninja setting out to save them with the help of his pet eagle. And yes, he wore a mask.
- Famously, the Western version of Super Mario Bros 2 was actually originally a totally unrelated game called Doki Doki Panic ("doki doki" being Japanese for the sound of a rapid heartbeat, so "heart-pounding panic" is probably the best translation.) with sprites, sounds, etc., changed to Mario-fy it. The original Super Mario Bros. 2 would remain unknown in the US until it was released as "Super Mario Bros: The Lost Levels.", as part of the Super Mario All-Stars anthology. However, SMB 2 is not considered Adaptation Decay: it was actually quite good and a great many of the Doki Doki Panic monsters and abilities (carrying object) are now staples in Mario productions (as much as some longtime Mario fans may still point at the game and shout, "They Changed It Now It Sucks").
- Way, way back in the waning days of the Atari 2600, Atari changed their unreleased game Saboteur into a licensed game of The A Team by changing around some text and replacing the hero sprite with... Mr. T's disembodied head. (The result was also unreleased.)
- "I pity the fool that doesn't like Mister T's game!"
- Opinion is divided as to whether Command And Conquer Generals fits this trope or not. While a good game in its own right, it's noticeably lacking in the C&C series' hallmarks, being closely based on EA's earlier Battle for Middle Earth and as such more similar in style to one of Blizzard's -craft games. Rumors abound of Generals being created as a bit of Yay America, terrorist-ass-kicking, feel-good propaganda in response to 9/11, possibly at the expense of development on another Tiberium game.
- Actually, Generals (2003) predates the two Battle for Middle-earth games, released in 2004 and 2006 respectively and was closely based on the Emperor: Battle for Dune (2001) engine. The criticism over its anti-terrorist plot is still valid, however, and we also know that a C&C3 in development at this time was cancelled, with a version by a different company (but still using the same story) eventually showing up in 2007.
- Breath Of Fire: Dragon Quarter is Breath of Fire In Name Only, sharing almost nothing with its predecessors, apart from the spell nomenclature and character names. As per series tradition, the two central protagonists are named Ryu and Nina; the other two, Bosch and Lin, take their names from Bosch and Rinpoo from Breath Of Fire II.
- In the same vein, Final Fantasy is a "series" in name, Chocobos, and a guy named Cid only.
- The Ninja Gaiden games for the Xbox have nothing to do with the NES series of the same title, save for the name of the main character. They're still very good games, even if they are Nintendo Hard.
- Word Of God say they're prequels to the NES games.
- For that matter, the original Ninja Gaiden for the NES is an example of this trope. It was advertised as "THE #1 ARCADE SMASH!", about the only thing it had in common with its arcade namesake was Ryu Hayabusa's resemblance to the nameless ninja in the arcade game and the basic premise of a ninja going to America.
- Ultima 9 is so far removed from the other games in the series, that most fans consider it to be non-canonical.
- Quake II and its sequels have nothing to do with the original Quake whatsoever, apart from being First Person Shooters, and Quake IV being a direct sequel to Quake II. "Quake II" was originally just the game's working title, until id Software found themselves unable to find a different name they could use that wasn't already trademarked. At least Quake IV is a direct sequel to Quake II.
- Don't forget Enemy Territory: Quake Wars, the prequel to Quake II. Furthermore, that game is a gameplay sequel to Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory (with the Quake II universe slapped on it.).
- The Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance games are Baldurs Gate, and indeed Forgotten Realms games, in name only. They're really Diablo with the serial numbers filed off.
- After Infocom, the undisputed master of Interactive Fiction text adventures in the 1980s, went under, Activision released a CD-ROM graphic adventure called Return to Zork, which had very little resemblance to the original Zork games outside the title. All the references to characters, items, and places from the original Zork universe sound painfully forced, as if the makers of the game Did Not Do The Research and just randomly took names and used them to fill in blanks in dialogue.
- Activision went on to release another two Zork games, Nemesis and Grand Inquisitor, both of which were much better than Return to Zork, were properly researched and (with a few exceptions) tied in nicely to the old games. Activision even promoted Grand Inquisitor by releasing a freeware Interactive Fiction Zork game, The Undiscovered Underground, written by one of the original creators of Zork.
- The 2007 Shadowrun video game.
- Kings Quest 8 is a poor man's RPG, whose only connection to the previous installments is being ostensibly set in the same location, and a couple of cameos.
- Phantasy Star Online is Phantasy Star In Name Only, for most critical points and purposes, not in the slightest connected to the Algol star system, setting for or at least critical element every previous game (including even basically disconnected side games). Then again, Dark Force being dead for good in the last game kind of sealed that plot line - and the obvious way out was already explored to its end one game previous. Phantasy Star Universe, in turn, is both Phantasy Star Online In Name And Some Mechanics Only, and Phantasy Star In Name Only, with a muchly new setting.
- Star Fox Adventures is the Super Mario Bros. 2 of the series, except worse: it's not even the same genre, tacked on Arwing sections or not. That's because Nintendo asked Rare to slap the Star Fox universe on their then in-development and completely unrelated N64 game Dinosaur Planet just because it has furries.
- Ironically, there's an unintentional example with the same series. Star Fox is completely unrelated to Star Fox, an almost universally derided Atari 2600 game released a decade before. And it was that which was why Nintendo had to market the first two games involving Fox and the crew under different titles in Europe. The irony is, of course, the other Star Fox wasn't released in Europe.
- Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel is Fallout In Name Only. Interplay took a clone of their Dark Alliance console action games and slapped on the name of their ground-breaking series of open-world RPGs. The company had just sacked the entire studio that masterminded the original series, and the new developers just didn't care about staying faithful. They took a wrecking ball to the canon and filled the game with toilet humor instead. Not surprisingly, no one was interested in the result, and the company soon tanked.
- As noted by the IGN reviewer, the plot of Far Cry 2 is not connected to that of Far Cry, although he also notes that this does not detract from its merits.
- Does anyone truly know what the new Crash Bandicoot games have in common with the originals?
- Leisure Suit Larry: Magna Cum Laude and Box Office Bust are mostly a separate series from the Al Lowe series, apart from being set in the same world. The Larry here is different (though related to the previous one), the gameplay is completely different, and the connections to the Al Lowe games feel sort of tacked on.
- An ongoing fandom debate revolves around whether Silent Hill 4: The Room is such a sequel, as it was originally intended as a separate title. On the one hand, Team Silent did make the game, it was turned into a Silent Hill project early in development, and there's no denying the similar concepts and atmosphere. On the other hand, most of the in-depth story connections to the rest of the series were only added later via an official Konami website, in Japanese, making their canonical value debatable.
- The EA FPS Golden Eye: Rogue Agent was seen by many as a weak attempt to capitalize on the much revered Goldeneye 007 for the Nintendo 64: the only connection to the movie/game is the presence of Xenia Onatopp and the "Uplink" multiplayer level. The only justification for the name "GoldenEye" is that you play as a rogue MI6 agent that gets his eye shot out and is given a golden prosthetic replacement by Francisco Scaramanga. The rest of the game involves you being a pawn in a war between Auric Goldfinger and Dr. No and fighting a bunch of iconic Bond villains in a pretty generic FPS. The only appearance by Bond lasts 10 seconds and is revealed to be a simulation.
- Total Annihilation: Kingdoms was nothing like Total Annihilation at all. Different universe, different playstyles... everything except the graphics engine was completely different.
- Is Rayman even in the Raving Rabbids games?
- Michel Ancel took note of that fact and will make the next Rabbid game, an adventure game for once, Rayman-less.
- Alundra II has nothing to do with the original.
- Street Fighter 2010: The Final Fight was a futuristic platform game for the NES that really didn't have much to do with the original Street Fighter other than its title. The localization team attempted to establish a connection by claiming that the main character Kevin, a cyborg policeman, was actually Ken from the first Street Fighter 25 years in the future.
- Contra Force for the NES is a localization of an unreleased-in-Japan Famicom game titled Arc Hound. The game has nothing to do with the rest of the Contra series, being set in present times with human enemies instead of aliens. The American localization of Contra III for the SNES did try to make a connection by establishing in the manual that the first stage of the game was actually Neo City, the setting of Contra Force.
- Final Fantasy XII is a disputed case of this. It made enormous changes to the battle system, scrapped or altered most of the recurring themes from other games, and had a far more somber, political theme than its predecessors.
- Of course, it's almost exactly like FFXI, if FFXI was a single player game. But everyone seems to ignore that one, for some reason.
- Not to mention this is a series of games known for being different from each other with only names of characters, monsters, and spells in common.
- Chrono Cross is a sequel in name only to Chrono Trigger. The battle system is completely different, the world is almost unrelated, and the links connecting it to Trigger feel tacked on at best.
- Having said that, it is a remake / canon replacement to Radical Dreamers, which was a direct sequel. (Or So I Heard. No Export For You, and this troper doesn't speak Japanese, so hearsay will have to do.)
- Interestingly enough, some of the developers have stated that Chrono Cross was actually not a sequel. It "Takes where chrono Trigger left off and continues, it is not a sequel". Right...isn't that kind of the definition of the word "Sequel" in the first place? Or was Chrono Cross Mis Blamed as a sequel when it was really a Gaiden Game?
- The Game Boy Advance version of The Revenge of Shinobi has absolutely nothing to do the original Genesis game and is pretty much a generic Ninja game with Shinobi on the title.
- Fallout 3 is considered to fit this trope by some of the more rabid fans. They may have a point though - despite the fact the game features nearly all the iconic factions, critters and weapons from the original games, it transplants them thoughtlessly to the other side of the continent. Kinda like trying to sell your audience that a movie is set in California because you photoshopped the Golden Gate into the Reflecting Pool in West Potomac Park.
- Actraiser 2: it has a slightly beefed-up reworking of the 2D platform sections, with new maps and enemies, and... that’s the entire game. No colonisation sim, no levelling up or discovering new abilities, and certainly none of the varied gameplay that made the original Actraiser stand out.
- Shining Force CD, an Enhanced Remake of the first two Shining Force Gaiden Games doesn't have a whole lot to do with the first Shining Force game. The third one, however, is a completely different story, starring the main character of the first game's nephew and setting the stage for Shining Force 2.
- With a few exceptions, many Tales of games are In Name Only with each other.
- Westwood's Dune II RTS game had very little to do with the book, movie, or the first game. This troper would argue that Westwood didn't read the book when making this game. It did not capture the Dune spirit. The later remake Dune 2000 and sequel Emperor: Battle For Dune tried a bit harder, but it still doesn't change the fact that Dune II is an RTS, and a completely different genre from the original Dune game.
- Square's Final Fantasy Legend series is really part of the Sa Ga series and not Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest was a dumbed down game designed for the American audience because Square didn't feel the Japanese Final Fantasy RP Gs were suited to them. It sucked badly.
Web Sites
- KidsWB.com, supposedly the relaunched version of the programming block from which it got its name, is more like a website for pre-1997 Cartoon Network.
Webcomics
- Over time, the comic Concession changed drastically due to the Plot Tumor of Joel's revenge plot (and college life) to the point where the Concession stand in the title was merely where some of the cast worked, not the actual focus of the comic.
Western Animation
- The 1999 animated The King and I retained most of the Rodgers and Hammerstein score and the most basic premise (a genteel British widow goes to Siam to educate the king's children and culture clash ensues), but in turning into a kid's film, almost laughably incongruous elements were added, including sentient animal sidekicks and an evil wizard (in the form of the Kralahome, a minor character in the original play) who attempts to usurp the king's throne via magic. The result is that the film less resembles the culture study the original was and more seems like a knockoff of Disney's Aladdin.
- The King and I also forms the basis of a Family Guy parody of this trope. By the time Peter gets finished rewriting the Rodgers and Hammerstein script, it's changed from a British tutor dealing with the king of Siam to a ninja robot in the future ("A.N.N.A.") battling a post-apocalyptic dictator. Initially furious at the changes, and at the audience's approval of them, Lois later admits that "anyone who could take The King and I and turn it into, well, that, has gotta be creative."
- In some markets at least, the Jetix series A.T.O.M. is being promoted as part of the Action Man franchise (granted, you've probably never even heard of that, but still...).
- That's because the toy line on which it's (supposedly) based IS a continuation of the Action Man toy line.
- Parodied in The Simpsons, where Alan Moore is said to have had a run as the writer of Radioactive Man. During his tenure, he changed the title character, a cape with super-strength acquired from exposure to a nuclear explosion, into "a heroin-addicted jazz critic who's not radioactive". Bart didn't notice.
- I dare to say that W.I.T.C.H. is such a case: the cartoon show threw out the melancholic and philosophic tone of the comic and made it a standart barbie-girl show à la Winx Club. Personalities were either flanderized or completely changed and the story only took some basics from the comic, but rewrote everything else. Season two did it a little bit better, but, still season one appealed to everyone BUT the fans of the original comic...
- Sonic Underground. The only things from the games are Sonic, Robotnik, and a few appearances by Knuckles.
- Satam Sonic The Hedgehog also fits the bill. Aside from Sonic, Robotnik, a few token appearences by Tails, and the rings, there wasn't much to tie it to the games.
- Arguably Adventures Of Sonic The Hedgehog also counts, although it does borrow a little more from the games than either of the two aforementioned titles.
- Voltron fans back in the day felt this way when the Lion series ended and they first saw Vehicle Voltron. The reason for this is because it is actually a Dolled Up Installment of a completely unrelated anime series.
- Tom And Jerry: The Movie actually starts out pretty faithfully for a little while. Then they start talking. Then they start singing...
- Not to mention the plot kind of drifts away from them and focuses on the orphan girl Robyn and they are reduced to sidekicks.
- The 1997 animated film Anastasia was supposedly "based on" the play by Marcel Maurette. Don Bluth turned it into a musical with Rasputin as an undead sorcerer with a talking bat sidekick, among other changes. (The play had already been faithfully adapted to a 1956 film starring Yul Brynner and Ingrid Bergman.)
- Disney's The Jungle Book bears little resemblance to Kipling's original except for a few character names and the basic premise of a boy Raised By Wolves. Mowgli is changed from a Noble Savage to a Bratty Half Pint, the monkeys do'nt die, Baloo goes from wise mentor to "shiftless jungle bum", and the originally benevolent Kaa becomes a Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain. An early draft that stuck closer to the tone of the books was rejected for being too dark.
- Course, trying to adapt the entire Jungle book into a single film would result in an epically huge movie most children wouldnt' be able to sit still through.
- Legend has it that Walt Disney actually told his staff to "throw away" the novel and work from scratch.
- The Jungle Book ain't got nothin' on The Fox And The Hound, though. How Walt Disney Studios managed to look at what reads like a fictionalized documentary about the life and times of a mongrel hunting dog and a human-reared wild fox who live through bear hunts, rabies epidemics, and the rise of suburbia among other things and thought it would make a wonderful talking animals musical about racism is a mystery for the ages.
- The cartoon Ghostbusters had nothing to do with the movie Ghostbusters, but was a followup to the 1970s live action TV series The Ghost Busters, although it definitely intended to ride the coattails of the more familiar movie. The cartoon based on the movie is thus called The Real Ghostbusters.
- The Secret Of NIMH basically took the "super smart rats" premise and made an entirely different movie where Nicodemus is Dumbledore, and the deserter was a murderer.
- The 1987 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon pretty much took EVERYTHING from the original comics and flipped it on it's head. Whilst the comics were aimed at those in their mid-late teens, the show was cheesy entertainment for kids. The personalities of the characters were changed quite a bit (Raphael was a jokester instead of an anger-laden badass) and the premise was made FAR more into Sci-Fi than anything seen in the comics (considering some of them included aliens and the main characters are mutant reptilians, that says something). Another thing to note is that in the comics, the 'Ninja' part of the title was actually relevant to what the Turtles activities were (moved around at night, stayed out of sight of as many bystanders as possible and actually fighting other ninjas), whereas in the 80's cartoon they were known to the general public, had no problem walking around in daylight and spent the majority of their time fighting robots.
- The cartoon Wayside only has a passing resemblance to the Wayside School book series it is ostensibly based on.
- Martin Mystery was drastically different from the comics they were adapted from. For example, changing "Mystere" to "Mystery" and changing Martin's lover into his stepsister. (Oh, and making him like 15 years younger)
- Who remembers the Animated Titanic outside of the Nostalgia Critic, anyone? Anyone? Maybe it's best you don't, then.
- Daria was a spinoff series spawned from a side character in Beavis And Butthead. Some people actually thought this was the case, especially when the title character and her family moved to a different town and only mentioned Highland Texas (Which Beavis And Butthead was set in) in the first episode. (As having "Uranium in the drinking water") Part of this of course was more or less with how Mike Judge didn't have a whole lot to do with the creation of Daria.
Real Life
- Until recently, liberal Senator Lincoln Chafee was referred to as a Republican in Name Only (RINO) and hawkish Senator Joe Lieberman as a Democrat in Name Only (DINO). Both eventually left their parties and became independents — Chafee after leaving office, Lieberman after losing his party's primary for reelection. (Lieberman went on to beat the Democratic nominee and be reelected, and continues to caucus with the Democrats.) Then there's Arlen Specter, who throughout his career has been everything in name only - he started his political career as a Democrat, joined the Republican party in 1966, and switched his alliance back to the Democrats in 2009, and throughout the whole time has generally been an independent-minded moderate.
- Really, the whole Republican and Democratic parties are like this compared to their original purposes:
- The Republican party was founded by northern abolitionists, people who wanted to dramatically reform the nation's economy but now would do anything keep the status quo, but with fewer taxes.
- The Democratic party, originally the Democratic Republicans, were founded in 1792 to oppose those who wanted a strong federal government, and were very conservative, which is why they opposed the Republican Party prior to the Civil War.
- The "Goth" subculture bears absolutely no resemblance to the Germanic tribes of the same name. They are related by the term "gothic", which originated as a description for a style of architecture that was initially meant to be derogatory because of its relation to said tribe. Basically, in its original context, calling something "gothic" was the same as calling it "barbaric".
- China has moved so far to a market economy in recent years, despite the authoritarianism remaining, that they termed their system "Socialism with Chinese characteristics", which is political speak for "communism in name only".
- A correct name would be "Capitalist Single Party Dictatorship".
- The Holy Roman Empire — Neither Holy (the emperor was not crowned from 1530 to 1806), nor Roman (Germanic, and Rome was rarely if never within its borders), nor an Empire (more like a collection of small states which joined forces; the leaders of those small kingdoms actually formed an electoral congress to elect their emperor). The Holy Roman Empire only considered itself a Spiritual Successor to the original Roman Empire.
- When done with a new model of a car that bears no resemblance physically or spiritually to previous models, this is referred to as "jacking up the nameplate." Short for "Jacking up the nameplate sliding a new car underneath it."
- Exemplified by the 2004 Pontiac GTO "revival," which was a re-badged Holden Monaro. It wasn't well-received, and other muscle car revivals (like the new Ford Mustang or Dodge Charger) buried it within two years.
- Also noteworthy are the modern VW 'Beetle' (more like a Golf with a jelly-mould on top) and the suddenly gigantic BMW version of the 'Mini'.
- The new Mini is very small by modern car standards. A real four-seat car the size of the original Mini would have no room for modern safety features and would be illegal in most of the world. There's a reason why the Smart ForTwo is around the same size as the original Mini but has only two seats and a smaller engine. Also, a European car based on the Mini's original role of an extremely cheap, basic, mass-produced car for the masses would fail because such a car is no longer needed in the target markets, and because it would be too expensive to compete with Korean, Chinese, and other Third World cars. The Tata Nano is the closest thing to an original Mini as can possibly be built in modern times—and it is still several inches longer than the original Mini and downright dangerous to drive at the high speeds of American and European highways.
- The "historical accuracy" of FATAL. The
author perpetrator openly admitted that it was only accurate on the grounds that history didn't happen like it did in real life.
Theater
- The Wicked musical can be described as this. It takes a dark, edgy, adult novel, enhanced the books LesYay and makes it not so edgy. Though, it follows a similar outline from the book..Similar.
- Guns N Roses. Actually, they have been In Name Only since 1985, two months after LA Guns and Hollywood Rose merged, when Axl Rose fired all the former LA Guns members (making the name of the band confusing) and replaced them with Slash, Duff McKagan, and Steven Adler. And now it is that band In Name Only, because, except for Face Of The Band Rose, everyone in that lineup left the band by 1997; and besides, the band's style shifted more toward industrial metal than plain old hard rock.
New Media
- There is a Flash Gordon comics series available for the iPhone, and probably other portables. Flash is a former CIA operative, and Dale a current one; they know each other from the Agency, and Dr. Zarkohv is a close friend of Flash. He's also considered a terrorist, and believed to be creating WM Ds. This troper downloaded the (free) first issue, and deleted it, then for hopefully obvious reasons, chose not to download the second and subsequent issues.
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