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"Everyone has 200,000 bad drawings in them, the sooner you get them out the better."
" I know it's an artistic cliche, but every time I look at my past work, I want to projectile vomit."
They say that you have to do bad work before you can do good work. Not just one piece of bad work, but tons of it, some so bad that it puts The Eye of Argon to shame.
Whether it's fanfiction or original published work, some really bad stories have been written. (This goes for other art forms too, sometimes just as badly.) And even though you have to do bad work before you can do good work, the fact still exists that the bad work still exists, and the creator has to deal with it. Sometimes it's published to wither and die on its own; most of the time, it isn't. If the creator tries to erase any trace of its existence, shies away from it, moves on to the next question when it's brought up, or otherwise just tells people not to care about it, it's Old Shame.
One of the leading causes of Dead Fic: authors express intent to finish their old work, read through it as a refresher, and can't get past the first chapter because of how bad they think it is. In fact, the vast majority of fanfiction in general becomes this after the author gains some age and perspective. Just one look at the Troper Tales section will confirm this. This is common place at the start of someones fanfic writing career, usually ending up with countless Mary Sues due to the author wanting to write a really good fight scene or really interesting plot, however this eventually ends up with the story having many plot holes and forgotten plot points. as the writer gets better and looks back, they cringe as they realise how bad they were and often want to erase all memory of it
Compare Creator Backlash, where the work in question gained popularity but earned the ire of their creators anyway. See also Ham And Cheese, where an individual in a movie he/she knows will at some point become Old Shame decides to have fun with it, and Took The Bad Film Seriously, where an individual doesn't even seem to realise the movie is awful, and gives all they have. The motivation behind many an Orwellian Editor. Compare Grow The Beard. I Was Young And Needed The Money is an extreme example. Generally the opposite of First Installment Wins.
Can be the source of Never Live It Down.
Examples
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Anime and Manga
- The original Suzumiya Haruhi manga, based on the light novels and written before the highly successful anime, was disowned by its publisher, most records of its existence erased — they didn't even try to capitalize on the series' newfound immense popularity from 2006 on by bringing it back. Instead, another manga was commissioned to another author in order to capitalize the phenomenon. It's said that the first author did some Hentai Doujinshi about the very same series he was drawing, and firing him and disowning his work was the only way the publishers got to manage the affair.
- Controversy aside, it could have easily just been because the first manga was just plain bad. Just compare the art quality of the two: First manga
 ◊, Current manga◊.
- Referenced in Excel Saga: In the opening to one episode, the production staff of the show confront Rikdo Koshi (the writer of the original manga) and toss down several doujinshi in front of him, causing him significant embarrassment. Those doujinshi are actual ones Koshi wrote before he did Excel Saga. Guess what the plot of that episode is based on?
- The Beach Episode of Sailor Moon R seems to have been disowned, not even appearing on the "uncut" English boxset. Their excuse was that Takeuchi Naoko hadn't liked the episode anyway. Then again, who did? Dinosaurs, people...
- Similarly, Mobile Suit Gundam is famous for having a "lost episode" which was removed from all home releases at the request of Yoshiyuki Tomino, who felt it wasn't up to the standard of the rest of the series. People who have seen the episode are split on the issue.
- Ironically, said episode is tremendously popular in Gundam video games, with entire stages revolving around it and the episode's one-shot villain becoming a (sometimes major) playable character.
- Under Tomino's orders, the Compilation Movie version of the original series had the more Super Robot-y elements excised, including the Gundam's less realistic weapons and the more Monster Of The Week-like mecha such as the Zakrello and Gyan.
- The Japanese producers of Pokemon seem to like to pretend that "Electric Soldier Porygon" never existed. This is the infamous episode that featured flashing colors, causing over 800 viewers to go to the hospital with seizures. When news broke of the story in Japan, they aired the same clip again, sending even more people to the hospital.
- It was an extremely embarrassing event that caused massive problems in the anime industry in general, as apparently something like this could have happened at any time in the previous decade due to the use of "strobe light" animation techniques, they just didn't pay it heed until then. It also nearly killed the franchise. Of course they want no reminders of it and that includes Porygon itself. Note that no major characters in the games use Porygon either (although that may just be because Porygon is supposed to be rare).
- What's bad about it is that the cause of the seizures wasn't Porygon at all—the cause was an attack from the most seen and famous Pokemon before and after, Pikachu himself, using his most famous and often used attack, Thunderbolt.
- Which is exactly why they want people to think it was Porygon's fault. They can't very well excise the series' mascot.
- The writers have even extended the "no Porygon" policy to its evolutions. Porygon2 has not appeared yet despite it being a Generation II Pokemon, and it's highly unlikely that Porygon-Z will appear in Sinnoh.
- Yuki Kaori had an entertaining way of describing her first published manga (a one shot about vampires): "I wrote this story while I was still dumb- I mean young." She laughs at its narmfullness now.
Comic Books
- Even Tintin creator Herge was guilty of this. The first, Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, is ripped off wholesale from a single book condemning the Communist regime, and, while it's very heavy-handed, there are some bits of decent artwork in there. The second, Tintin in the Congo, is flabbergastingly racist and caused a furor in the UK when it was reprinted. Tintin's psychotic maiming of wildlife (blowing up a rhinoceros with a drilled hole and a stick of dynamite) is pretty hard to take as well. Herge recognised this in retrospect and begged for them to be left out of print. Unlike the Soviet adventure, Tintin in The Congo has been published in color. The rhinoceros was spared in the Scandinavian edition and the English colour edition. There is the argument that Land of the Soviets was vindicated in retrospect as the West gained further knowledge of life in the USSR (Hergé's book came in the midst of the Stalinist purges, and two years before the Holodomor killed seven million Ukrainians)... But then, just because bad stuff happened in the Soviet Union around that time doesn't mean Land of the Soviets accurately portrays it (it doesn't, by a long shot).
- Herge actually redrew a number of scenes in Tintin in the Congo, one of the few instances where a creator has voluntarily censored his own work.
- 'Shooting Star' had the Jewish American villains (the comic was created during the Nazi occupation of Belgium) become generic villains, and the terrorist attack in 'Land of Black Gold' vanishes altogether. (Although in the latter case it was because it was no longer topical, not because there was anything shameful about the way he portrayed the scenes.)
- In another subversion, Scott Adams released a series of Dilbert strips that are really contrived to give Dogbert an arch-nemesis named Bingo the Cow Herding Dog in order to give Hollywood some material to work with, and it would have turned the strip into something only other cartoonists like. This was during strip's early years that focus more on Dilbert's antics at home than at work. You can read them here.
- In a twentieth anniversary collection, Scott Adams included some comics he wrote for Dilbert as practice before trying to find a syndicate. Before listing the examples, Adams wrote "At the time, I thought puns were the highest form of humor. Forgive me."
- Charles M. Schulz frequently said he was somewhat embarrassed by the first few years of Peanuts. As a result, several hundred strips from the early 1950s were never reprinted in book form during his lifetime, only seeing the light of day via Fantagraphics' Complete Peanuts series. They're not so bad (although the term "fuss-budget" doesn't get any funnier on the 100th use), but the characters are less well-defined and Snoopy is dull.
- Although most of his Grendel stories have been reprinted time and time again both in graphic novel and comic format, Matt Wagner has never reprinted the black and white issues that introduced the character, rather letting Devil By The Deed stand as the character's official introduction and writing new stories around it.
- This may no longer be true with the printing of the "Grendel Archives", which appear to have the very early comics printed in it. Honestly, Wagner has improved a lot since then.
- Some of today's most popular artists got their start drawing less-than-stellar comics. Tony Daniel, for instance, began with various Evil Ernie comics amongst others; now he is better known for his runs on Teen Titans and Batman. Jim Cheung, artist on Young Avengers, was one of the artists who drew the infamous "Teen Tony" storyline in Iron Man. Notably, both have changed their styles since the mid-90s, definitely for the better.
- Jhonen Vasquez, author of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, Squee, and co-creator of Invader Zim put out a single-issue "throwaway" comic called the Bad Art Collection, which was exactly what it says on the cover. When someone brought a copy to a signing event at a convention he responded with his usual good grace and humour; and commented, laughingly, "Oh my god, someone actually bought this thing," while signing it.
- According to him, the origin of the collection was him writing the cartoons back in school in order to get people to stop bugging him to draw for them.
- Mexican cartoonist Rius published many comic books in the 60-70s. Being a firm believer in Marxism, many of them are dedicated to socialism/communism and prophesized the fall of capitalism. One of the most famous examples of this is the book he made under orders of the Cuban government about the Cuban Revolution. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, he admitted that he had to eat his own words and that he never drew anything negative about the socialist states of the time because, in his own words: "Didn't want to provide ammunition for the Imperialism."
- No entry about Old Shame in comic books could possibly be complete without mentioning Super Dickery, a site that grew out of an older page that showed multiple vintage comic book covers in which one of the most typically Lawful Good heroes, "Superman is a Dick!" Literally; most of the covers show him trying to kill Lois Lane. The site then branched into showing vintage comic covers of all sort, displaying embarassing examples of outdated propaganda, blatant attempts at Fanservice and Sexual Innuendo, and covers that are just stupid, period.
Fanfic
- Pretty much every fanfic writer in existence has written such a fic at the start of their career (if they're lucky). The vast majority feature Mary Sues.
- Linkara of That Guy With The Glasses and Atop The Fourth Wall, had written "Web of Dimensions" A Self Insert Fic crossing Pokemon/Digimon/Sailor Moon under the name PsyWeedle.
- belmont2500 on Fanfiction.net has written a series of Land before time mega crossovers that a reviewer describes as "a clusterf**k of rushed plot, bad punctuation, and sheer stupidity. Seriously, it's pretty sad when events in a story are actually described by the words 'and then' over and over again." Belmont's more recent works have been better received.
- Notorious furry Sage Freehaven. As a teenager — and prior to entering the Furry Fandom — he wrote several awful Rescue Rangers fanfics called "The Dark Savior Saga", which saw various revisions over his tenure in the fandom and contained innumerable examples of bad fanfic tropes; he also made the mistake of writing them under his real name, only later changing them to bear his Furry Fandom pen name. Years later, he had the entire series — and anything else associated with both that name and his real name, including a MiSTing of the first fanfic in the series — stricken from the Rescue Rangers fandom's fan works repository. The only place you can read any of it now? Everything What Is Crap, where the MiSTing of the first story in the series (found under the "American Works" section) remains intact.
Film
Literature
- The epic poet Virgil on his deathbed order that the Aeneid be burned.
- Franz Kafka himself suffered from this. Very little of his writing was published in his lifetime; he left his papers to his friend Max Brod upon his death and instructed him (in writing) to burn them all unread. Needless to say, that's not what Brod did with them.
- There is some debate over the literary value of the "juvenalia" of Jane Austen and the Brontes, making this Older Than Radio. Some of it's pretty good...some of it not so much. In the Brontes' case, the subject matter is wildly immature, a sort of proto-fanfic that embodies the same melodramatic stereotypes they would later be lionised for rising above. In Austen's case, almost all of the stories are unfinished, breaking off abruptly just as they start getting interesting. Even the best of it all probably would have needed a few more drafts before publication.
- This is, at the very least, Older Than Steam. Ever read Titus Andronicus?
- A number of scholars feel Titus Andronicus was Shakespeare giving Marlowe (whose works tended to be rather violent) a poke in the ribs.
- Like many of Shakespeare's plays, critics that don't like it have gone as far as saying someone else wrote it, but audiences then and now love them anyway. At least, audiences who are inclided to like Shakespeare in the first place.
- H.P. Lovecraft averted this trope by burning virtually everything he'd written when he was young. While notoriously dissatisfied with even his published works throughout his life, this one might've been a good call, as the few fragments which escaped the fireplace probably didn't deserve to.
- Robert Heinlein's first novel, For Us, the Living, was written around 1939. It was not published, and Heinlein attempted to destroy every copy of it. He failed: it was published posthumously in 2004. Some people think it would have been better had he succeeded.
- In this case, it was his younger self's politics that he was ashamed of, not his writing. Compared to his early work that was actually published, For Us, the Living wasn't all that bad.
- Of the short stories Heinlein published under the pen-name "Lyle Monroe," Heinlein requested that the "stinkeroo three" of "Beyond Doubt," "'My Object All Sublime'," and "Pied Piper" not be reprinted.
- Terry Pratchett wrote The Carpet People in his non-PC youth. His approach to this Old Shame was to re-write and re-publish it to be in line with his current morals.
- A gem from Thomas Pynchon's introduction to Slow Learner, a compilation of his early short stories: "My first reaction, rereading these stories, was oh my God, accompanied by physical symptoms we shouldn't dwell upon."
- Diane Duane has said that she will probably not finish her "Tale of the Five" series, originally projected to be five novels, stuck at three currently for a very long time, because after doing some other work, she went back and read them and discovered "they were everything I ever hated about fantasy." (Quote approximate, as I can't find the original source.)
- This was George Orwell's attitude toward his novels Keep the Aspidistra Flying and A Clergyman's Daughter, which he wrote for mostly contractual reasons. He also destroyed several unpublished novels he wrote in the 1920's, before he adopted the pen name of "George Orwell" (his real name was Eric Arthur Blair).
- The Eye Of Argon by Jim Theis is an unusual example in that it is far and away the author's most well-known work. He gave an interview in 1984 expressing his disappointment at being remembered for something of such famously poor quality, but reportedly embraced his notoriety later on by participating in readings of the story at a local convention up until his death in 2002.
- Nasu Kinoko refuses to re-publish Mahoutsukai no Yoru - Witch on the Holy Night despite fan pleas to do so (since only five copies were ever made), mainly due to embarassment over "bad writing". His feelings about other old works seem to be similar.
- Apparently, he's finally ready; it was announced in early 2008 that TYPE-MOON is releasing the story.
- With several acclaimed (and pre-decline) series under his belt, Piers Anthony decided to push for the publication of his first written novel, a sci-fi/psycho-drama vanity piece called Ghost. Written in 1969, the kind of Brave New World Anthony envisioned would've been sketchy and out there by the standards of the day and absolutely do not stand the test of time. (Imagine a world where interracial marriage was statutory, as a way to foster racial understanding. Yeah...) And that's not even including the heap of cliches, plot holes, and general WTFery within those pages. He's not ashamed of it, but everyone else around him is.
- This is true of most of the old crap that Anthony got republished, such as Bio Of A Space Tyrant.
- That's actually lack of shame with a healthy splash of respect for history. He's willing to own up.
- Er, weren't the "miscegenation laws" really a population-control mandate in drag?
- Neal Stephenson was fine with letting his first novel The Big U stay out of print until people started spending hundreds of dollars for copies on eBay. He let it be republished because he felt the only thing worse than people reading the book was paying that much to read it.
- At a Sandman convention in 2004, Neil was the guest auctioneer for a charity auction. One of the items was his first book ever written, a biography of the group Duran Duran. He grew so embarrassed and ashamed of it while he was up there that he temporarily passed the auctioneer duties over to Charles Vess because Neil simply couldn't sell it in good conscience. Vess quickly declared that Neil would sign it if the bidding got over $1,000, which drew quite a horrified reaction from Neil himself.
- He later remarked that he was a little less ashamed of it after a chance encounter with Simon le Bon, who had exclaimed "Oh, we liked that one!" when Gaiman confessed to having written it.
- Edward ("The Monkey Wrench Gang") Abbey's first novel, Jonathan Troy, was published in 1954 in an edition of 5000 copies; he repudiated it at once, and it has never been reprinted. The cheapest copy currently available at Advanced Book Exchange is priced at $1300.
- Dr Seuss was said to have destroyed the majority of his work because he was displeased with it. One notable book that was published posthumously is "Daisy-Head Mayzie" which really wasn't up to par with some of his other work.
- Acclaimed hard SF writer John Ringo once wrote a blatantly pornographic, over-the-top testosterone-laden action story filled with misogyny and pointless violence, as a way to deal with stress and inner demons before getting back to his real work. He made the mistake of mentioning its existence to his fans and, more importantly, his publisher, who after reading the manuscript demanded that he let them publish it. That manuscript, Ghost, became a raging bestseller and the first book in the phenomenally popular "Paladin Of Shadows" series.
- To his credit, John Ringo himself has warmly embraced the Internet meme that has grown up around the rather shocking excess of prostitution and sex slavery in Paladin of Shadows. Google "Oh John Ringo No".
- The Spy Who Loved Me was an experiment on Ian Fleming's part; unlike the other James Bond novels, the book focuses on the Bond Girl. Fleming grew to regret that move; when the producers of the film series sought the rights, he only let them have the name, preferring Adaptation Decay to having it brought to the screen.
- Philip Pullman states on his website that he hates the first novel he ever wrote and refuses to even name it so people can't track it down.
- You mean The Haunted Storm? Pullman had better hope people forget how to use Google.
- Lynne Cheney, wife of US vice-president Dick Cheney, tried to convince the publisher of her 1981 novel, Sisters, not to reissue it in 2006. Given the alleged sexual content (including a lesbian affair) of the book, her political opponents attempted to stir up controversy.
- Sergej Dowlatov, an emigrant from Russia, forbade all his work made in USSR from being reprinted. He then wrote a novel, Compromiss, to show why (basically all of his previous writing was heavily modified by Soviet censorship).
- Stanislaw Lem said that his first sci-fi novel, The Astronauts lacks any value. He had this opinion about most of science fiction though.
- Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell of Hipgnosis, a British design studio who created famous album covers for bands such as Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin between the late 60s and the early 80s, deal with this trope imaginatively in their retrospective book For the Love of Vinyl: The Album Art of Hipgnosis. In the introduction to the (nearly) complete list of their covers at the back of the book, they admit that "There are some designs we would rather like to forget altogether"; within the list, these are marked with an icon of a turkey.
- There are the early Harry Potter manuscripts JK Rowling has given fans a glimpse into but has stated she'll never release because of their quality.
- In an interview, she mentioned that at one point prior to writing Harry Potter she was working on a couple young adult novels, which she says she abandoned after realizing they were terrible.
- Alastair Reynolds included an afterword in Galactic North admitting that his Revelation Space novels are derived in part from a much more space-opera-ish set of unpublished novels which he devoutly intends should never see print, although he regards them as a valuable learning experience.
- Dean Koontz spent the seventies writing straight science fiction under his real name, and several other genres including romance under various pseudonymns. Since becoming a bestselling author, he has refused to let many of these early novels be reprinted.
- One of the most infamous of these is The Funhouse, a novelization of a decent but forgettable slasher flick, written under the pseudonym Owen West. The book was so terrible, that when he was unable to prevent it from being republished under his real name, he wrote a lengthy introduction decrying how terrible the book is and about how he likes to imagine the life that particular pseudonym took on after its publication ending very violently soon after its completion (namely, trampled by wildebeests while on safari).
- After 14-year-old Michael Carneal shot up his school in 1997, Stephen King asked his publishers to take his novel Rage (written as Richard Bachman), about a high school kid who holds his class hostage at gunpoint, out of circulation, fearing that other young people would get ideas. King's book was connected with three other school shootings between 1989-1996.
- Though the problem certainly wasn't the quality of the work.
- Orson Scott Card refuses to reprint his short story "Happy Head" in any form, and urges his fans to "think of it as something written by an earnest young graduate student rather than anything I did."
Live Action TV
- MST3K refused to re-air KTMA episodes after they left that station and requested Comedy Central cease airing Season 1 episodes shortly before Season 4. While some of these (especially the KTMA eps) had to do with the legal issues surrounding the movies in use that has plagued the series to this day, they admitted to this very trope in the Amazing Colossal Episode Guide, likening it to becoming a famous writer and then having an old classmate publish one of your shameful high school works.
- Late in the series' Comedy Central run, the station cycled a few episodes from Season 1 back into reruns (along with an embarassing ad campaign which flatly dismissed the contributions of performer J. Elvis Weinstein and Joel Hodgson, who created the show to begin with.)
- And even if KTMA had wanted to rerun those episodes, it would not be possible, as Jim Mallon took the master tapes with him when he left (read: got laid off from) the station.
- In Brazil, famous children's television hostess Xuxa tried at all costs to retrieve old pornographic material involving her, which is understandable. After the advent of the Internet, Xuxa successfully sued a big auction website to stop sales of a soft-porn movie with her, as well as a widely circulated newspaper for showing a half-naked picture of her.
- The earlier Iron Chef episodes (Generally up until Iron Chef Morimoto came on board) were different in look and tone to the shows best known in America. After an awkward experiment in two contenders competing first to take on the Iron Chef, the familiar 60 minutue head-to-head battle format was adapted, with the prelims dropped. And frankly, Chairman Kaga seemed quite insane in those early eps, as opposed to the eccentric, but dignified Large Ham we're most familiar with. And for some reason, even the Food Network finally started airing (heavily edited) episodes of the early seasons, Iron Chef French I, Yutaka Ishinabe, and Iron Chef Japanese II, Koumei Nakamura, aren't even mentioned. (Sakai and Morimoto are listed on air as the French I and Japanese II, respectively). All of which makes things doubly baffling, when someone refers Rokusaburo Michiba (Japanese I) as the Iron Chef of Iron Chefs. We (Western audiences) never really get to see why.
- Reversed by the Australian broadcaster. They seem content to show episodes starting from some time after Sakai's introduction to up to Nakamura's term as Iron Chef Japanese but before the introduction of Masahiko Kobe. Morimoto's only appearance has been on the introductory specials for the US version. Which flopped. New Shame perhaps?
- Early episodes of The Price Is Right offered fur coats and, in at least two instances, live dogs as prizes. Obviously, this was long before Bob Barker became an animal-rights activist, and none of the fur coat episodes have ever been (intentionally) re-run per Bob's orders.
- Similarly, Barker seems to have an old shame of having ever had a NICE on-air relationship with Dian Parkinson, Holly Hallstrom, or anyone he had any falling-outs with. That is, if the Price DVD set — which goes from 1972-75 and then jumps...to Barker's last week — is any indication.
- Do not ask Barker about Dennis James' tenure on the show unless you are physically capable of either fighting a guy who trained with Chuck Norris...or running really, really far. Calling Barker an impossibly-egotistical bigot who deserved to be fired such as he was 15 years before he did will get the same result, even though it's 100% true.
- This post from Jack Coleman of Heroes, a.k.a. Noah Bennett, may utterly define this trope.
- Tina Fey apparently feels this way about the first episode of 30 Rock, saying "if I never see that pilot again, it will be too soon".
- Her character Liz appeared in an ad for sexy singles.
- In-universe example: In a 3rd Rock From The Sun episode, Mary discovered a thesis she had written years ago and which she had thought was brilliant at the time. She read it again only to find it was crap.
- Amy Jo Johnson had a recurring role on the hit show Felicity, and a critically acclaimed series called Flashpoint is now her day job. Her first big role? The Pink Ranger on Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. (She has, however, said at one point that she'd never live it down, and at another that it was a great first job.)
- Couldn't both apply? Great first job because she played a major role on a popular TV series... never living down the fact that she was the PINK RANGER.
- It's difficult to gauge what AJJ actually thinks of Power Rangers, because from 1997-2003 or so she had a flat memorandum refusing to discuss the show in interviews. By all accounts she's never been anything but gracious to MMPR fans who have approached her after concerts, however.
- Don't forget Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Joss Whedon has made every effort to make sure the unaired pilot is never seen (though as with Lucas and the Holiday Special, the internet has thus far won the conflict.)
- Speaking of poor Whedon, the Alien Resurrection movie was this for him as well. Reportedly, he can't talk about it without bursting into tears.
- In several episodes of The Daily Show, Jon Stewart refers to his previous film career in this manner. He seems particularly regretful over Death To Smoochy. He said in his opening speech at the Oscars: "Tonight is the night when we celebrate excellence in film - with me, the fourth male lead from Death to Smoochy."
- Supposedly, the audio commentary of Death to Smoochy starts with Danny DeVito (the director) saying "Well, I guess the mourning period is over"
- One episode of the Japanese TV series Ultra Seven featured Monsters of the Week who resembled atomic bomb radiation victims, complete with scars and welts. Oh yeah, and their plot was to suck blood from women and children in order to rejuvenate their polluted bodies. In the only country in the world to have nuclear weapons used on it, this sparked an obvious backlash (especially from real radiation victims, who were already suffering severe discrimination). Similar to the Pokémon incident above, the producers' reaction was to strike the episode from the canon and act like it never existed. But then again, this episode showed up in Turner's English dub of the show...
- In the early nineties, a group of amateur filmmakers called BBV, headed by Bill Baggs, thought they'd make some straight-to-video movies featuring actors from Doctor Who. One of these, The Airzone Solution, is an enviro-thriller featuring Colin Baker, Sylvester McCoy, Peter Davison and Jon Pertwee. This isn't the Old Shame however, it was a bit of fun done by people who all got on well. But in a tiny role as Evil Company Woman's Sidekick you can see... ALAN CUMMING! I mean, seriously....
- Another in-universe example can be found in the Robin Sparkles "Let's Go to the Mall TODAY!" tape from How I Met Your Mother.
- Season 1 of Elvis and Slick Monty was an attempt to parody the sitcom show format. Then came the Season Finale, where the Laugh Track was retconed into coming from voyeurs from another dimension, the Drop In Character was abducted by aliens, and Elvis revealed that he became pregnant. All of this set up Season 2, where the show grew the beard considerably while remaining a Refuge In Audacity.
- The Re Cut of Stargate SG-1's pilot was the result of Brad Wright viewing it again and realizing how much Old Shame was in it.
- Los Angeles news personality Chuck Henry has specifically requested that GSN never rerun the 1989 revival of Now You See It which he hosted. GSN has complied, though many game show fans think that Henry did a rather good job.
- Real or rumored, Gene Rayburn has to be the king of this trope, where game shows are concerned. He declared an embargo on his 1985 version of Break the Bank (he wasn't happy with his performance and the behind-the-scenes issues) and may or may not have had a hand in disallowing Match Game-Hollywood Squares Hour from being shown again (here, most fans point to his problems with Jon Bauman's green-ness as a host).
- Brannon Braga, the writer of the infamous Star Trek Voyager episode Threshold, acknowledges it to probably be the worst Trek episode he ever wrote, referring to it as a "royal steaming stinker." Despite this fact, the episode did win an Emmy… for make-up. This is somewhat "Newer Shame", as Braga also wrote the Star Trek The Next Generation episode Frame of Mind, widely considered to be one of the finest episodes of that series' run.
- Peter Tomarken, best known as the host of Press Your Luck, supposedly called his Bargain Hunters a "piece of shit." Strangely, it was the next-to-last game show that he hosted.
- Can we just name this trope for Tina Louise already, as she is the Undisputed Queen given how she feels about Gilligan's Island and her role as Ginger?
- Wheel Of Fortune. The show has, for one reason or another, decided that the versions not hosted by Pat Sajak (plus the daytime show as a whole) shall not be discussed or counted in the show's "official" history. This counts Chuck Woolery, Susan Stafford, Rolf Benirschke, Bob Goen, David Sidoni, and Tanaka Ray. The only person exempt? Edd freakin' Byrnes, who hosted two 1974 pilots for NBC.
- The whitewashing may have gone too far — it's been rumored that the show actively bans contestants who have appeared on versions not hosted by Sajak, because the producers don't want them sharing stories about when the show was actually good.
Music
Tabletop Games
- Warhammer 40000/Warhammer isn't immune. GW regards the Squats and Zoats as "things better left forgotten". However, hints of them do pop up in new material from time to time...
- In the now-defunct official Games Workshop webboard, posting anything about the Squats would typicaly result in the thread being deleted, and the thread-starter banhammered.
- Later editions of Vampire: the Masquerade did their damnedest to sweep everything from the Dirty Secrets of the Black Hand supplement under the carpet.
- Giant Vampire Frog. That is all.
- Gary Gygax has said that he regretted a number of rules that he felt pressured to put in various versions of Dungeons And Dragons, singleing out psionics, the monk class and weapon speeds and effects versus armor as egregious examples.
Theatre
- William Shakespeare's first tragedy was the absurdly violent Titus Andronicus; apologists argue that Elizabethan society, more familiar with bloody public punishments, wouldn't have blinked at it. But it's still not a good play by any means. Not a true example of an Old Shame as Will had already written two classics: the history Richard III and the comedy The Comedy Of Errors. As it was, Titus Andronicus was Shakespeare's most popular play during his lifetime.
- Is there a trope like Old Shame where other people want to forget all about it? Because Titus is a case of Your Mileage May Vary, along with many of Shakespeare's plays - while a few snobbish critics claim it cannot be performed seriously, audiences don't always agree.
Video Games
- Metal Gear creator Hideo Kojima has went on to state that he felt the original two MSX 2 games in the series, Metal Gear and Metal Gear 2, did not age very well since the original Metal Gear Solid is essentially (gameplay wise) a remake of them and even went on to state that he regretted that he made Metal Gear Solid a sequel to those games instead of a reboot.
- The original Hitman: Codename 47 seems to have — most would say quite deservedly — become this. It's the only game in the series not to have been released on a console — a more typical platform for stealth games — and is not included in the Hitman Trilogy collection, whose very name implies that there are only three games in the series. IO and Eidos haven't yet publicly disowned it, but that may be out of a desire not to acknowledge it even exists.
- Not to mention that Contracts - the third (if Codename 47 counts) entry in the series - is essentially somewhat of a remake of the first title.
- Persona was one of Atlus' first attempts to localize an RPG in the North American market, but the end result was hopelessly screwed up. As Atlus USA has gotten much better over the years, the company eventually made an announcement that they were going to attempt a proper localization of the game for its PSP Updated Rerelease, more than a decade later.
- Hudson Entertainment, creators of the Bomberman franchise, have all but disowned the utterly atrocious Bomberman: Act Zero, making fun of it in a promotional video for Bomberman Live.
Web Animation
- In-universe example: Strong Bad of Homestar Runner refers to his first attempt at drawing a dragon as the "S-is-For-Sucks" Dragon.
- However, in the Trogdor's 5th birthday toon, he sings a song about the S is For Sucks Dragon, then indicates that he's sick of Trogdor, claiming that "you Internet types" ruined him.
- An out of universe example would be "Marshmallow's Last Stand", the very first cartoon featured on the website. Once the quality of the shorts began to noticeably improve, the Brother Chaps removed "Stand" from the live version of the website and moved it to the museum (the area of the website where they archive old stuff for historical purposes), and then later removed it from the museum as well. Their reason: "The characters are completely different. Saying and doing things they'd never do now."
- They removed the Jumping Jack Contest, too. But, both the toons are archived on the HRWiki and are on the DVDs.
- Egoraptor has said that when he posted the first episode of Metal Gear Awesome on Newgrounds, he thought it would get blammed (deleted for sucking).
- of Ill Will Press, producer of Neurotically Yours has had a rather odd relationship with his work. For quite some time, he's consistently denounced and attempted to suppress much of his earliest work; typically citing the heavily Fanservice-oriented nature of it. However, much of his more recent work pushes the fanservice envelope much farther; the only difference being that it's now done "ironically" instead of straight. This appears to have happened concurrently with the Flanderization of Germaine into a Straw Feminist.
Web Original
- Although Doug Walker (AKA The Nostalgia Critic) may be slightly embarrassed by one of his first works, starring himself as a cowboy, he had the guts to upload it to That Guy With The Glasses.com for us all to laugh at, so you have to give him credit for that.
- Are you referring to Go West? That actually wasn't half bad.
- In version V3 of Survival Of The Fittest, I was foolish enough to adopt Liam Black, and make some horrible mistakes along the way. Despite managing to off him in a way that some regard as an Alas Poor Scrappy moment, I've pretty much moved on to V4 and characters of my own creation, and mostly disowned a character who shouldn't have gotten past the approval process anyway.
Web Comics
- Megatokyo author/illustrator Fred Gallagher is known for his self-deprecating remarks about his earlier work. His detractors once tried to use this to stain his reputation by revealing fanservicey early drawings of possible precursors to the comic's female characters; in response, he publicly revealed the whole "hidden" site, showing that he wasn't hiding anything - he was just embarrassed about his old art.
- Part of the reason people made such a big deal about it was his almost militant stance against people drawing pornographic versions of his characters.
- Although Order Of The Stick has always had simple art, it has gotten significantly better and more detailed as the series has gone on. Enough so that Rich Burlew has admitted that he hates having to draw the characters in their old styles (necessary for continuity purposes) when making bonus strips for the book collections. One design choice he particularly hates is the jagged lines that used to separate panels, so much so that he straightened them for the books.
- Webcartoonist David Willis ("It's Walky!", "Shortpacked!") appears to have no shame, having released original crayon drawings◊ drawn when he was 11 showing three (if you count the arrogant talking car) of the characters that would one day appear in his strips.
- He did, however, go back and re-draw (and rewrite) a large portion of the beginning of "It's Walky!" recently.
- Additionally, he tends not to mention the series of Walky video games he made unless someone on his forum brings them up first.
- On top of that, his earliest Shortpacked strips (from before Ethan and the gang were introduced) have apparently vanished off the internet.
- Raving loon/webcomic critic (you decide!) John Solomon wrote a parody of Dominic Deegan, which he later attacked, as he did to Deegan and so many other comics.
- Before his explosive popularity as a games critic, and even before his modest popularity as the creator of the Chzo Mythos series, Yahtzee ran several shortish webcomics on his site, which he has now gone on to disown completely along with every game he made before The Trials of Odysseys Kent, as well as every work of fiction he wrote before the age of 20, as he doesn't want people thinking he actually cares about said work.
- Exterminatus Now is mainly based on mocking the daylights out of a setting that attempted to make Sonic The Hedgehog Darker And Edgier by adding Warhammer 40,000 themes. Eastwood has gone on record as saying something to the effect of "...made something good out of, in retrospect, the worst idea I ever had."
- In its formative years, Platypus Comix contained no archive. Some cartoons were literally only up for one week and then banished forever. The practice was originally due to limited storage space (it began as a Geocities site) but was continued until 2006 as a means of quality control (anything the author didn't regret making was given a position in a selective archive section). Most of the pre-06 works are still offline, but lately they have turned up in book collections.
- Most webcomic artists get better with practice (thus you can see the quality of the art improve as the strip continues). Some hate their own early work so much that they completely re-draw it and remove the "old" version from their websites.
Real Life
- The Daily Mail would rather forget the fact that it used to be Oswald Mosley's mouthpiece, but its critics (who argue that it hasn't strayed far) aren't going to let it forget the headline "Hurrah for the Blackshirts" in a hurry.
- Jimmy Wales, owner and co-creator of That Other Wiki, originally made money on the Internet with a site for what he calls "glamour photography", now downplayed for obvious reasons.
- This trope is not limited to the media. Air Forces and Navies worldwide routinely run wargames where the greenest pilots are thrown into heavy, and often lopsided engagements to get their worst mission failures out of the way, while only risking the pilot's ego.
- Probably no one gets through life (they might not get though it, though...) without doing/liking/believing something which seemed very regretable in retrospect.
Exceptions
Fanfic
- Eyrie Productions Unlimited's first work was Undocumented Features, a work they are still continuing 18 years after it started. However, their second work was (Ben and Zoner get) Hopelessly Lost, something that the original authors would prefer to have you forget. They are reworking it starting from the roots as Bubblegum Crisis: The Iron Age.
- Mark MacKinnon's Shadow Chronicles, a Ranma One Half fanfiction, is still going strong despite being his first story.
Film
- George Lucas' first movie, THX-1138, created as a film school project, is regarded as a classic and an early indicator of his creative genius despite its enduring obscurity.
Literature
- Agatha Christie's first book, The Mysterious Affair at Styles is a very confident, accomplished novel, full of all the twists and intricate plotting she would come to be known for.
- Henry Roth's first novel Call It Sleep, though largely ignored upon its 1934 publication, later gained critical acclaim as one of the greatest achievements in American Jewish literature; it's even been ranked with Moby Dick as one of the greatest American novels, period. It went on to sell over one million copies. However, Roth wouldn't produce another novel (or much writing altogether) for another sixty years. When he finally returned to novel writing in 1994 with a planned six-part series, Mercy of a Rude Stream (of which he only completed four volumes before his death), critical opinion was mixed at best and sales were poor.
- Harper Lee produced To Kill A Mockingbird right off the bat. She disappeared from the writing scene just as quickly.
- The Outsiders was S.E. Hinton's first work, published when she was still in high school.
- Rudyard Kipling wrote several of his best-regarded and most popular stories, including "The Man Who Would Be King" and Plain Tales from the Hills, when he was in his early twenties.
Live Action TV
- Though he wrote scripts for other shows prior to that, Gene Roddenberry's (of Star Trek fame) first show he had a major impact on as a writer, Have Gun Will Travel (sometimes marketed and aired as The Paladin, after the protagonist) is widely regarded as a classic in its own right.
- Jeopardy!, unlike its sister Wheel Of Fortune, actively embraces its past — Fleming clips have been seen, and contestants from his era have returned in the Trebek era; the first Fleming contestant to return in the Trebek era was Karen Muranaka, a three-time champion in 1978. When did she reappear? On the 1983 Trebek Pilot.
Music
- Richard Thompson's first solo writing credit for Fairport Convention was 'Meet on the Ledge' - a song so powerful it's used today as their unofficial anthem.
- Every single one of George Strait's albums, from 1981's Strait Country onward, has consistently gotten rave reviews from nearly everybody. To this day, he still performs some of his earliest songs (including "Unwound", his first single) in concert.
- In the late 1970s-early 1980s, David Allan Coe released Nothing Sacred and Underground, two vulgar albums with songs like "Cum Stains on the Pillow", "Nigger Fucker", etc., which were out of character even given his outlaw image. However, he doesn't appear to have spoken about the albums negatively, and still sells them on his website.
Webcomics
- Drow Tales ' first few chapters were redrawn and rewritten, but just to clean things up, and 'fit' Ariel to the personality she's now known by more. They are still available for download, and still pretty nice as far as webcomics go.
- Scarcely a webcomic out there older than one year (and some which are even newer) is immune to this trope. The ones that haven't redrawn their early pages for the website use redrawn versions as buyer bait for the printed edition.
- One exception to this is the furry webcomic Las Lindas: despite artist Chalosan having improved his skills quite a bit over the years, the older strips have remained untouched, years after their original publication.
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