Overshadowed by Controversy

"Hounddog: Don't remember it by title? Don't worry, neither did we, and now the Cracked IT guys are asking why we have 'Dakota Fanning rape' in our Google cache."

— Cracked.com, 5 Ways Hollywood Tricks You Into Seeing Bad Movies

When a particular controversy, scandal, or show of extremely poor taste is the only thing most people know about a certain figure or work.

Notice the word "overshadowed". The controversial element must receive attention disproportionate to its role in the work. For example, a controversial ending goes under its sub-trope Audience-Alienating Ending, since most people would be talking about the ending no matter what it was. A nude scene featuring ten-year-old children in the opening credits? The lead actor or actress getting into legal trouble while on set? A horribly Troubled Production that escalates into creators and/or publishers wrestling for control of the work? That goes here.

"Controversial" is not necessarily the same as "bad": some controversial works have been praised by critics and audiences, and not every creator or work here is considered laughably bad or straight-up abominable. Plot events are also generally not what puts a work on the list, even when they are subjective — when a plot beat does qualify, it is usually a major twist that dramatically changes the story and greatly polarizes or alienates the fanbase.

Common sources of this include...

• From the work itself:
  • The work contains shocking, offensive, or obscene material such as graphic violence or sexual content, that serves no purpose to the story other than to be shocking, offensive, or provocative for the sake of it, drawing the ire of the Moral Guardians and Media Watchdogs in the process, be they politicians or groups^note Works that use such material for reasons beyond superficial shock value or Sex Sells e.g. a work with graphic violence that tells a story about the horrors of war, are usually able to co-exist with controversy on their own merits, unless the content is used in a manner that is so disrespectfully lurid, titillating, or gratuitous that an average audience member would call bullshit on that defence.
  • Unfortunate Implications and/or Values Dissonance that are serious enough to keep audiences from enjoying the work overall.
  • Deceptive, offensive, or patronizing marketing, especially AstroTurfing or particularly bad examples of Totally Radical.
  • Adaptation Deviation. For example, the differences between the book and The Film of the Book.
  • Porting Disasters, especially when it is clearly due to someone not giving a shit or farming it out to the cheapest developer willing to do it.
  • Intrusive microtransactions, especially freemium setups or pay-to-win, especially when they slowly creep into games that originally did a good job at keeping them non-intrusive, when they're sneaked in post-launch via an update in a way that indicates they were deliberately withheld at launch only to bypass attention from the press until the reviews move on to the next game, or when they involve lootbox/gacha setups.
  • Intrusive Digital Rights Management systems, especially always-online requirements or setups that (ironically) create massive security holes.
  • A game ships out in a clearly unfinished or barebones state, usually with numerous Game-Breaking Bugs and day-one patches to fix them, as well as DLC that is quite clearly content that was meant for the launch product that didn't make the cut (especially if it is paid DLC).
  • Pervasive balance issues, especially when they clearly overbuff popular characters, throw unnecessary buffs at characters who have expensive new skins coming out, or habitually release new characters in a blatantly overpowered state.
  • Removal of previously existing features or content from a game, app, or online service.
  • Badly-handled updates, particularly if they create Game-Breaking Bugs, massively unbalance a game or arbitrarily shift power with no regard for the established meta, force gameplay to revolve around gimmicks, or either ignore player input completely or overwhelmingly cater to a specific section of the playerbase.
  • A particularly Harsher in Hindsight moment.
  • Bowdlerization of a work.
  • Someone makes a joke or remark that's meant to be funny or edgy, but it comes across as offensive instead.
  • Changes to the work that don't sit well with the audience.
  • Particularly egregious Happy Ending Overrides or Audience-Alientating Endings.
  • Actual or perceived cultural appropriation.
  • A character is given a Race Lift which the audience does not approve of, especially if done in an overly performative, patronizing, or tokenizing manner, or if it involves heavy whitewashing.
  • A work with a hardcore cult or Geek following becomes mainstream, and as such tries to cater to that more mainstream audience instead of the original fandom.
  • The work tries to comment on social issues or current events, but does so in a clunky, Narmish, performative, or tone-deaf way.
  • The work pokes fun at religion, or something else that many people consider to be Serious Business or a Sacred Cow.
  • A work that is satirical in nature is taken at face value — whether it didn't occur to the writers that a few people might miss the irony, or the work's presentation makes it difficult to figure out if it is meant to be taken seriously or not — especially if the work satirizes a controversial social movement e.g. white supremacists, and ends up being praised as "advocating" their beliefs by the very people it was intended to make fun of.
  • A work that is satirical in nature is done in an extremely clumsy and ill-conceived manner rife with Unfortunate Implications, so that even those who realize it is not meant to be taken seriously still don't enjoy it because it simply isn't funny.
  • A Cultural Translation that comes off as more of a Macekre.
  • A work that may have been well-received at the time it was released hasn't aged well, and instead becomes dated and/or offensive.
  • A work becomes widely derided for having an incredibly off-putting premise.
  • The work is based on a Real Life historical figure or event, but treats that figure/event in a way that is viewed as disrespectful and/or offensive, particularly if it involves whitewashing or outright justifying atrocities, greatly misrepresents an extremely controversial event (especially if it attempts a "both sides" treatment of events where one side is commonly agreed to have been much worse, or pulls a Historical Villain Upgrade or Downgrade under the same circumstances), turns a grave historical tragedy or injustice into a Glurge-y morality tale, or has a (real or perceived) heavily nationalistic or fringe slant.
  • The work plagiarises content from another creator's work without their permission.
  • An independent service is acquired by a much larger entity, especially when that entity begins making sweeping changes to the service that are widely agreed to be for the worse, or outright guts the service.
  • The work uses A.I.-Generated Artwork, and people get caught up in the discussion about the ethics of it.
• From the work's creators:
  • Public catfights between the creator and the media, critics, public, or all three (such as Dear Negative Reader rants).
  • Frequent displays of offensive, embarrassing, or questionable behavior. This includes public intoxication, impulsive offensive comments, vulgarity, rudeness, political extremism, sexual harassment, etc., especially if said behavior contradicts themes in their own work.
  • Habitual poor showings on social media.
  • Habitual blame games and Never My Fault whenever an aspect of a work receives a negative reception, especially when a creator attacks fans for not accepting it (especially when Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things is invoked for situations where the backlash is completely understandable) or blame some sort of conspiracy to undermine them when all the evidence points to the fault being theirs and theirs alone.
  • Someone involved with the work is the perpetrator of a violent crime (such as rape or murder).
  • Someone involved with the work holds a view that is taboo in mainstream society (e.g. support for racial supremacy, sympathizing with perpetrators over victims in domestic/sexual violence cases, or anti-LGBTQ beliefs), or unintentionally makes a comment that implies holding such views.
  • A creator has financially predatory or exploitative practices towards other creators in the work.
  • Someone overseeing a large group of creators fails to act on or enables serious misconduct from one or more of them.
  • A group of creators becomes notorious for constant infighting and drama.
  • A creator defends or continues to work or associate with someone credibly accused of serious misconduct.
  • Troubled Production stories that become more interesting than the finished product, especially if the finished product disappoints.
  • Abusive or exploitative work environments.
  • Overly-intrusive Executive Meddling.
  • Someone involved with the work has attracted controversy for violating Contractual Purity.
  • The creator makes promise after promise that they fail to keep or botch the delivery of, especially if they fail to take responsibility for dropping the ball and/or blame someone else (especially if they blame fans for taking issue).
  • A work has a creator who has some highly questionable views that people were originally able to separate from the work, but eventually spur people to examine the work more closely, which reveals a lot of previously undetected Unfortunate Implications or outright dogwhistles.
  • Cynical, insincere, patronizing, or self-serving attempts to co-opt political or social causes, particularly as a cheap attention grab or a ploy to throw off bad press.
  • Mass recasts, especially abrupt ones.
  • Production missing previously-stated deadlines for release, especially if said release has been heavily hyped or anticipated, or a delay is announced shortly before release. Sometimes delays add up so it seems it will never get released. This is particularly egregious if the final product winds up being of poor quality, especially if it is overly slapdash or was clearly stitched together from various iterations.
  • Badly-managed crowdfunding efforts, especially when creators make lots of empty promises, fail to deliver perks, botch the release (especially if the retail launch goes fine, but the backer launch doesn't), or engage in serious financial mismanagement or outright fraud.
  • Filing Frivolous Lawsuits intended to financially harass people who criticize the work rather than to protect intellectual property.
  • Unethical behavior by the production company or the company owning the rights to a work, whether or not it's related to the work itself.
  • Purchase or investment in the company owning rights to a work by a company or person known for unethical behavior.
  • Licensing deals or marketing partnerships with an unsavory person, company, or product, particularly cryptocurrencies or NFTs.
• From critical reception of the work:
  • A work that attracts a following, most likely misaimed, amongst people who are part of a hate group.
  • A work is cited as an inspiration for a violent incident^note It should be noted that research has proved that people who decide it's a good idea to engage in violent activity after being inspired by a work are already mentally unstable. For example, Doom (among other works, like The Basketball Diaries) was blamed by Moral Guardians for the Columbine High School massacre, but the FBI concluded that co-conspirators Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold were motivated by sadism and revenge, respectively.
  • A work is cited as an inspiration for a dangerous stunt that results in serious injuries and/or death^note usually performed by young people who didn't realise that doing the same thing in real life might not be a good idea.
  • A work's fanbase becomes infamous for a significant Vocal Minority of overzealous fans who engage in hostile confrontations and death threats towards haters, other fans, and even the work's creators who disagree with them, overshadowing the more sensible fans (of which there tends to be more of) and putting outsiders off of the work who don't want to associate themselves with the toxicity. This goes quadruple if the creator encourages these tendencies and uses them as a personal army or goon squad.
  • Contentious and polarizing reviews of highly-anticipated works.
  • It got panned by an influential critic who didn't like it, found it distasteful, or just had a bad day.
  • A work, episode, scene, etc. receives a severe and widespread negative reception on the Internet.
  • A work wins an award, beating another work that was perceived as more deserving by the audience, seemingly due to biases on the judges' part.
  • Review bribery and payola scandals, especially when they lead to dismissals due to a reviewer's refusal to participate in them.

See also Colbert Bump, Dancing Bear, Just Here for Godzilla, Even Nerds Have Standards, Mainstream Obscurity, Complaining About Shows You Don't Watch, Watch It for the Meme, Ruined FOREVER, Contractual Purity, Music Is Politics, Yoko Oh No, Cowboy BeBop at His Computer, Audience-Alienating Premise, Audience-Alienating Ending, Too Bleak, Stopped Caring, Why Fandom Can't Have Nice Things, Misaimed Fandom, Serious Business, Poe's Law, Jumping the Shark, Tainted by the Preview, Role-Ending Misdemeanor, and Best Known for the Fanservice.

Compare and contrast No Such Thing as Bad Publicity (when a certain work remains popular despite the protests from Moral Guardians and other controversies or even becomes popular because of said controversies), Controversy-Proof Image (when a person is popular and still has a positive reputation despite their controversy), Vindicated by History (when a work which wasn't popular in the past/since the release becomes more liked over time), Condemned by History (when a work which was very popular in the past/since the release becomes more disliked over time), The New Rock & Roll (when a whole genre gets held under controversy), Bile Fascination (when an audience is drawn towards a work specifically because of their curiosity about the uproar surrounding it, which may overlap with this), and Walking Spoiler (an In-Universe form of this, when a specific character or object is deeply associated with an important plot point within a work that makes it very difficult to talk about them without mentioning their contribution to the plot).

Keep in mind that, despite how it is usually used, "controversial" is not the same thing as "offensive." You can have a completely family-friendly and non-political work that still provokes dissent, especially if the work is aiming for realism. Additionally, since most scandals and controversies tend to not overshadow a work in the long run, only add examples if the controversy in question is still the main point of discussion about a work after at least six months to be absolutely safe. Finally, don't use this page to complain about shows or creators you don't like.

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Examples with their own pages:
(WARNING: Some pages contain unmarked spoilers)

• Anime & Manga
• Comic Books
• Fan Works
• Film — Live-Action
• Literature
• Live-Action TV
• Music
• Professional Wrestling
• Sports
• Video Games
  • Roblox
• Webcomics
• Web Original
  • Channel Awesome
• Website
• Western Animation
• Real Life
  • Academy Awards

Other examples:

Advertising

• To promote Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters when it released in 2007, lightboards of the Mooninites Ignignokt and Err Flipping the Bird at the viewer began to appear in certain US cities. The campaign went without incident until it spread to Boston, when someone unfamiliar with the characters noticed one of the boards and called the police, mistaking it for an IED. Things escalated from there — two people involved in the advertising campaign were arrested, and highways and transit stations across the city were closed for hours over terrorism concerns until a mayoral assistant who was a fan of the show was able to clear things up. These days, if anyone brings up the campaign, it's only to talk about how Boston turned it into a terrorism scare.
• In 2013, Cheerios released an ad that featured an interracial family. Unfortunately, the ad became less known for its content and more known for the racist comments it received.
• One ad from Coca-Cola simply featured the famous "America the Beautiful" being sung by several people of various ethnicities and walks of life, some of whom sang it in different languages. Many people were outraged at the song being sung in anything but English, as well as offending those on the hard right who condemned it as "liberal propaganda" for showcasing the cultural and ethnic diversity of America^note (including some who believed that Coke showing a Mexican-American in the commercial was them promoting illegal immigration) and issued a boycott online. This only allowed the ad to become more memorable; since the initial 2014 airing, Coke has re-aired the commercial during major American events and holidays as a sign of unity.
• Discussions of the marketing for The Emoji Movie will almost inevitably gravitate towards an infamous promotional tweet that parodied The Handmaid's Tale, a TV show about sexual slavery. Needless to say, referencing something like that while trying to advertise a movie for children provoked significant ire.
• The Hitman: Absolution trailer "Attack of the Saints" quickly became known for the eponymous Saints, an all-female enemy faction dressed as Naughty Nuns, being killed by Agent 47. The trailer swiftly earned IO Interactive accusations of sexism, not helped by the fact the trailer was released in the wake of the Depression Quest controversy, which prompted heavy debate about misogyny in video game culture.
• Just For Feet was a growing shoe retailer who distinguished themselves with basketball courts inside stores, an in-store snack bar, in-store appearances by professional athletes, and a large clearance section among others. Nowadays, however, they are known for being taken down by a Super Bowl commercial accused of being racist and insensitive.^note It features a barefoot runner in the Kenyan desert being hunted by a Humvee of white men, who is drugged and wakes up to discover he has shoes on his feet, which visibly horrifies him. The ad, alongside accusations of accounting fraud, helped bankrupt the company, which collapsed not too long afterward, and it's all that they're known for now. See it here.
• McDonald's:
  • This upbeat advertisement from when they used the "We love to see you smile" slogan is pretty unremarkable and would be almost completely forgotten today... except that it was the last commercial shown before Today announced the first plane hit the World Trade Center.
  • McDonalds's former mascot "Mac Tonight" has become better known today for the unofficial parody of the character known as "Moon Man", which depicts him as an advocate for white supremacy and bigotry to the point that the meme was declared a hate symbol by the Anti-Defamation League in 2019, a far cry from the original Bobby Darin-impersonating moon in TV spots from The '80s.
• Texas mattress chain Miracle Mattress is nowadays better known for the 9/11 sale commercial that killed their business than anything else they've done. The commercial, depicting the chain owner's daughter accidentally knocking over two men who crash into two tall stacks of mattresses, went viral and got major backlash over its poor taste. A few days after pleas from the company stating it wasn't their intention to offend,^note The owner of the company had no idea the commercial was made. the company announced its stores were closing down. A few days later, it was announced they would reopen their stores under new employees and management.
• In March 2020, Marvel released a trailer for a reboot of the New Warriors series as part of Outlawed. The trailer quickly became infamous for two of the superheroes depicted, the non-binary Snowflake and their twin brother Safespace, whose namesakes and powers were based on terms often used to insult the LGBT community. The criticism was enough for Marvel to silently cancel the series, as the series wasn't out by its October release date.
• This French Orangina ad. It barely raised an issue in France, but when a few activists showed it to the U.S., people were so shocked by all the YIFF they saw that one of the later Orangina ads poked fun at it.
• In 2017, Pepsi released an ad starring Kendall Jenner where during a photo shoot, she decides to hand a Pepsi to a cop during the middle of a protest. The ad was heavily panned for being tone deaf and promoting the message that Pepsi would ease tensions between protesting factions. Pepsi would eventually pull it due to the backlash.
• While Sonic the Hedgehog (2020) was well-received upon release, it's hard to talk about the movie's advertising without bringing up Sonic's original model◊. Needless to say, people didn't particularly like it when it was first shown off in the trailers. The backlash was so big that the movie got delayed by three months just to redesign Sonic's model to be more on-brand◊.
• For most of the Turn of the Millennium, Jared Fogle was known by virtually everyone as "the Subway guy", as he appeared in many of Subway's commercials as their spokesperson (and was famous enough from that to cameo in movies like Jack and Jill and two of the Sharknado flicks). Nowadays, however, he is more known for his arrest in 2015 where he ultimately pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography and traveling to pay for sex with minors.

Art

• Rachid Lotf is a Morrocan-British artist who does nostalgic paintings of 80's and 90's gamer culture. Unfortunately, he is better known because a significant number of his works were misappropriated by alt-right commentator Michael Young (AKA Wokal Distance) in order to illustrate a series of Twitter essays on the supposed decline of western civilization, without Lotf's knowledge or consent.
• Snow White and the Madness of Truth was an item of Swedish installation art erected in 2004 that quickly garnered international attention when Zvi Mazel, then the Israeli ambassador to Sweden, vandalized it by deliberately causing a short circuit. With this act, Zvi ignited a firestorm of discussion around the piece, most prominently a debate about whether it was anti-Semitic. Ironically, Dror Feiler, one of the artists behind it, is an Israeli-born Jew.

Asian Animation

• In the English-speaking world, it is impossible to find coverage of Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf without finding news on that one time two kids in China tried to imitate something they saw on the show by having a third one tie them to a tree and start a fire at the base, seriously injuring themselves as a result. Even worse, it even seriously affected the popularity of the series, and led to increased censorship in the Chinese industry, which resulted in the series needing to be bowdlerised on digital streaming services. However, it eventually won back the crowd since Mighty Little Defenders aired in 2019.

Automobiles

• The first-generation Chevrolet Corvair was one of GM's most popular models during the 1960s, but it is better known today for its handling issues, a problem that was further compounded when it was revealed by consumer advocate Ralph Nader in his book Unsafe at Any Speed that GM executives had declined to include suspension upgrades that would have made the car safer after calculating that paying off lawsuits was cheaper than re-engineering the car.
• The General Motors EV1 was one of the first mass-produced electric cars and had a moderate amount of success when it first came out. Today, it is best known for the fact that General Motors would end up forcefully repossessing several units of the car and destroying them (with a few intact units being disabled and donated to museums)^note Only one completely intact and running EV-1 is known to still exist (though there's rumors of others), at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington D.C., believing that the car was unprofitable. The EV1's discontinuation remains controversial to this day, with many accusing General Motors of deliberate self-sabotage, and accusing the oil industry of trying to keep electric cars off the road.
• The Ford Pinto was actually a good car with better reliability than its American competitors but is remembered for the gas tank flaw from its first couple of years model that made it explode in rear-end collisions. Even the trope referring to exploding cars is called Every Car Is a Pinto.
• Google's self-driving car/Automated Automobiles project is seen like this, with some people seeing it as Reed Richards Is Useless technology (and by extension, a Job-Stealing Robot). It's also hard to talk about self-driving cars without bringing up concerns over the possibility of such a car causing a crash due to a glitch, and arguments over who should be held responsible for the accident in such a situation.
• Uber counts, not only due to the Automated Automobiles, but also being a way to steal taxi driver's jobs, as the many Uber protests show. The controversies surrounding its former CEO Travis Kalanick haven't helped matters.
• The Pontiac G6 suffered an extremely ill-considered marketing ploy in which the entire audience for an episode of The Oprah Winfrey Show was given a car for free, with the quickly memetic "You get a car, you get a car, everybody gets a car!" Just one problem: ownership of the car also meant a sizable spike in the recipients' income, meaning they wound up with a $6,000 tax hike, and with much of the audience for the episode specifically chosen because they badly needed a car, they were in no position to pay it, meaning many of the cars ended up being sold just to cover their own cost. The disaster almost certainly played at least some part in the death of Pontiac, something its Aztek was already in the process of doing. Oprah learned her lesson, and the numerous similar promotions she's done since have also included a check to cover the taxes.
• Tesla Motors has courted controversy not just for its working conditions and reports of vehicles it produces catching fire, but also for the erratic behaviour of its CEO Elon Musk, particularly after his buyout of Twitter / X. Recently, it added more controversies for its faulty self-driving systems that led to fatal accidents. And moreover, there are findings that Tesla lied about its batteries' performance, which is well below its advertised range. Tesla made considerable efforts to shoot down any complaints from customers.

Comic Strips

• While Dilbert creator Scott Adams had certainly been no stranger to controversy over the years^note Mainly over his outspoken support of former US President Donald Trump, as well as a blog post where he claimed that rape was a "natural instinct" for men and that men who committed rape were just victims of a society that criminalized their natural desires, it wasn't until February 22, 2023 that his reputation as a newspaper cartoonist was permanently tarnished when he went on a racist rant in an episode of his podcast that culminated in him telling his viewers to "get the hell away" from black people (whom he also claimed were a "hate group"). Afterwards, numerous newspaper publishers proceeded to gradually remove the comic strip from syndication. His distributor, Andrews McMeel Universal, also cut ties with him, cancelling any plans to distribute any of his future books.
• For many years, For Better or for Worse was among the most respected of comic strips, notable for its characters aging in real time and its willingness to do risky things (such as introduce an openly gay character well before such things were mainstream). Then, as it neared its end, it introduced a storyline where main character Elizabeth left behind her life teaching in a First Nations village to move back to her hometown and enter a relationship with the extremely unpopular character of Anthony (after he had broken up his marriage because his wife wanted to go back to work after having a child and expected him to live up to a promise he made). Not helping was the "going-after" sequence, where Anthony saves Elizabeth from an Attempted Rape only to immediately beg her to get together with him (leading to the memetic "I HAVE NO HOME!" moment). This decision destroyed the comic's reputation, to the point that almost all discussion of it nowadays centers on that storyline.
• It's difficult not to talk about Argentine comic strip Gaturro without mentioning the infamous vandalization of his statue at the Paseo de la Historieta in Buenos Aires, which although it was installed in 2013, it was not until 2021 that it began to be vandalized. It got to such a degree that it became a meme online, and the statue was removed in 2022. A second statue was installed in its place in 2023, and it didn't take long for it to be vandalized as well.
  • Gaturro's author Nik is highly infamous in the graphic humor community due to his many accusations of plagiarism, largely from Argentinian artists, with many of them having expressed disdain against him, including Mafalda's author Quino (and that's before mentioning that Gaturro's appearence resembles Garfield). Many of the alleged plagiarism cases were collected in a PDF file dubbed the "black book" of Nik.
• In its heyday, Li'l Abner was one of the most famous and influential comics strips in America. Moreover, strip creator Al Capp was a well-known and recognizable public figure in his own right. But in the 1960s, Capp drifted into a right-wing crank who sneered at folk singers and political activists (memorably berating a bemused John Lennon and Yoko Ono on camera during their 1969 "bed-in" in Montreal), and this started bleeding into the comic itself. Before long, his politics became a cloud that hung over his work. Then he was arrested on sex-related charges in 1971 and papers began to drop his strip in droves, contributing to the comic strip ending in 1977 (Capp was also in ill health by the end of The '70s, and died in 1979). Now, it's hard to talk about the strip without discussing its creator's prickly personality, ideological hang-ups, and the allegations that he committed sexual misconduct.

Film — Animation

• Abominable was a modest success on release, but nowadays is mostly remembered for a scene which had a map with the nine-dash-line on it, which resulted in the movie being banned in countries in Southeast Asia; the protests in Hong Kong that happened to coincide with the movie's release didn't help matters either.
• The one thing most people remember about Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters, aside from the music by Mastodon, is the Viral Marketing campaign involving LED signs displaying the Mooninites Flipping the Bird. One of the signs was mistaken for an IED, which resulted in the Boston Bomb Scare. This incident (unrelated to an actual bombing during the Boston Marathon six years later) led to Jim Samples stepping down as the head of Cartoon Network and being replaced with Stuart Snyder.
• Batman Beyond: Return of the Joker is remembered for two controversial scenes: the Bonk vs. the Joker scene in which the latter kills the former with the "Bang!" Flag Gun, and the entire flashback scene, with the very noteworthy part near the end in which Robin does the same thing to the Joker. Even before the film was released to video and DVD in 2000, movie companies were coming under heavy criticism for violence in films during the fallout of the Columbine shootings that had happened over a year ago, and WB felt pressured and afraid that Moral Guardians and Media Watchdogs would object that the movie would be a repeat of Columbine. As a result, the original release date (Halloween 2000) was postponed, and the film heavily edited and toned down for release on December 12. But even then, the Bowdlerised version (especially with the Joker's death scene changed to death by electrocution) didn't help matters, but only caused unrest among many Batman fans that lasted for over a year. That unrest was thankfully quelled when the film developers retained the original version and eventually released it on DVD as "the original, uncut version" under the PG-13 rating on April 23, 2002 (just three days after the third anniversary of the Columbine tragedy) following an online petition to have it released. The same uncut version would be digitally remastered and released on Blu-Ray nine years later.
• Batman: The Killing Joke: The original Killing Joke comic has the Joker paralyzing Barbara Gordon as its inciting incident, with little statement of who she actually is in the story itself. The Animated Adaptation attempts to correct this by expanding Barbara's role in the story, but it's done in a way that comes off as more problematic than the comic: namely, it does so by introducing sexual tension between Batgirl and Batman^note as well as implying that Barbara became Batgirl largely because she had a crush on Batman. This culminates in the two having sex, which creeped out a good portion of the audience, especially those who see Batman as more of a paternal mentor to Batgirl in other media. And that's not even getting into the debates on whether the first half of the movie, which set Barbara up as a character, should've even been made in a movie called "The Killing Joke".
• In Coco, this happens In-Universe to the Big Bad: a year after Ernesto de la Cruz is exposed as both a plagiarist and a murderer, his mausoleum is in ruins, his "Remember Me" statue has been vandalized with a sign saying "FORGET YOU", and Word of God confesses that he won't be able to experience being forgotten because he is Hated by All.
• Coonskin, Ralph Bakshi's satirical Blaxploitation re-imagining of the Uncle Remus tales. Al Sharpton famously criticized the film without even seeing it, saying, "I don't got to see shit; I can smell shit!" This gave the film some very bad publicity. Since then, professional critics and black audiences have praised it for being the complete opposite of being racist. Even Spike Lee is a fan.
• The 2019 Spanish animated feature Elcano & Magellan: The First Voyage Around the World, based on the voyage of the Iberian explorers of the same name (of which one of the most famous episodes was the Battle of Mactan), prompted major backlash in the Philippines, largely due to the poster showing Lapulapu (a native chief who participated in the battle and is widely revered as an anticolonialist hero in the Philippines) in a decidedly villainous light. The backlash was to the point that many Filipinos petitioned to ban the movie in the country. The studio in charge seemed to have gotten the hint, as they released a redesigned version of the poster where Lapulapu is replaced with a fictional Portuguese spy named Yago. As it turns out, the original poster was rather inaccurate, as the main antagonist of the movie is Álvaro da Costa, a Portuguese official, and Lapulapu is little more than a glorified background character.
• Thanks to multiple online reviewers covering the topic, the film Legends of Oz: Dorothy's Return is best known for the fact that the film's producers scammed hundreds of people into investing their life savings into the film while downplaying the risks, which ultimately led to said investors filing a lawsuit against the producers in 2019. It really doesn't help that one of the film's antagonists is also a scam artist.
• Lightyear is primarily remembered for a brief scene in which a female character has a same-sex kiss with her partner. While this would ordinarily not be enough to land the film on this page, the fact that the film came out at a time when several conservative states in the US were passing anti-LGBT legislation, chief among them forbidding discussion of gender and sexuality to children, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis dissolving the Reedy Creek Improvement District (the governing body of the area around Disney World) and Disney's subsequent lawsuit against DeSantis, as well as the film being banned in multiple countries where homosexuality is illegal, has resulted in any discussion of the film being dominated by the aforementioned kiss as well as discussion of whether or not children should be exposed to media with LGBT characters.
• Olaf's Frozen Adventure became known soon after its release less because of anything related to the film itself and more because of the circumstances behind said release: It was originally meant for a television special before being put as the opener for the Pixar film Coco, and the fact that its length was meant for television and not as an opener for a Pixar film upset many of the moviegoers who went just to see Coco. It went to the point that most Mexican movie theaters outright removed the short from their showings of Coco (as Coco prominently features Mexican culture as its backdrop) before Disney officially pulled it from all future screenings of Coco beginning on December 8, 2017. While Disney has not given an official reason why Toy Story 4 was the first Pixar film since Toy Story to not have a short subject attached to its theatrical release, the scuttlebutt is that Olaf's Frozen Adventure had a lot to do with it.
• Our Masha And The Magic Nut, even years after release, is much better known for sexualisation of the titular heroine (who's fourteen) than for its actual plot; this reputation only worsened when Masha's naked model leaked out, with creators admitting that it's genuine.
• The South Korean Fractured Fairy Tale film Red Shoes and the Seven Dwarfs probably would have flown completely under the radar had it not been for controversy over the marketing, which showed the two forms its main character would apparently take in the film (one a chubby young woman, one a more "traditional" princess look) and implied that the chubby form was ugly, drawing accusations of body shaming. The few who have seen the movie were quick to point out that this was a case of heavily Misaimed Marketing^note as well as Values Dissonance, as South Korea has some rather skewered beauty expectations.
• Sita Sings the Blues and Seder-Masochism are today mostly overshadowed by the controversies of creator Nina Paley who became infamous for her hostility towards the transgender community and followers of the Jewish and Christian religions.
• Skydance Animation serves as one of the newly added divisions of film studio Skydance Media. Formed in 2017 through a multi-year partnership with Ilion Animation Studios, the new division gained recognition as a potential contender for producing future high quality animated films. However, they came under immediate fire in January 2019, when it was announced that Pixar founder and former Disney executive John Lasseter was made head of the division. As Lasseter was struck with multiple accusations of sexual misconduct and sexist behavior less than two years prior, Skydance was met with heavy criticism for being willing to work with him, let alone having him be head of one of their divisions. As a result, both the division and Skydance Media as a whole lost a lot of support from most of the public. This also cost them Emma Thompson, who'd been set to star in one of the films placed under Lasseter's supervision and then quit over his hiring even before she'd been announced to be in the film, leading to even more attention being placed on the issue. And then she published an open letter condemning them for forcing all their employees into a choice between working with a person they may find morally reprehensible or losing their jobs.
• The Thief and the Cobbler is mostly well known for its decades-long stint in Development Hell, director Richard Williams being removed from his own pet project by the completion bond company brought on to complete it, being finished in a vastly different form in Australia and South Africa under the title The Princess and the Cobbler, and receiving an edited and partially re-dubbed North American release by Miramax Films under the title Arabian Knight.
• The Transformers: The Movie attracted a lot of criticism back in the day for its surprisingly high body-count for what was essentially a feature-length toy commerical for kids. In order to promote the new line of Transformers toys, Hasbro mandated that the writers kill off a good chunk of the show's cast, which included Optimus Prime, solely because their toys weren't selling anymore. The graphic deaths in the film reportedly led to audiences of children crying, and a letter-writing campaign led to the writers bringing Optimus Back from the Dead at the end of the cartoon's third season. While it's considered a Cult Classic today, the film still tops lists for most traumatizing children's movies because of its corporate-mandated body-count.

Jokes

• This is made light of in-universe in a classic joke about a drunken old Scotsman who vents to a younger patron at the same bar about how he'd accumulated a laundry list of accomplishments over his long life, but nobody remembers them because he once had sex with a goat.

Networks

• The Cartoon Network block Tickle U suffered from this when a group of Moral Guardians tried to get the block off the air for its false educational claims. This is likely one of the reasons the block didn't even last a year.

Pinball

• Ex-Bally/Williams pinball designer John Popadiuk is overshadowed by the Development Hell of games produced by his company, Zidware^note (Magic Girl, Retro Atomic Zombie Adventureland, and Alice in Wonderland). With millions of dollars in pre-order money collected and little results since 2011, he has been accused of defrauding customers.
• A shadow hangs over pinball designer John Trudeau's games, including Ghostbusters, after he was charged with alleged possession of child pornography in 2017 and then the sexual abuse of a minor the next year. Stern Pinball announced his firing, removed all mention of his name, and has refused to identify what projects he was working on as lead designer. Comments from the artist Zombie Yeti subsequently revealed that he was the original designer of Deadpool prior to his arrest, and his work was thrown out entirely (with the final game being designed by George Gomez).
• Kevin Kulek, the founder of boutique manufacturer Skit-B Pinball, is more known for allegations of defrauding customers with a Predator game that was never licensed by 20th Century Fox (who shut down the project).

Radio

• Shock Jock Don Imus had fifty years of experience in the radio business. However, most people know him for a 2007 incident where he referred to the Rutgers University women's basketball team (which included nine black players) as "nappy-headed hos". His apology and CBS Radio's decision to suspend him (and subsequently cancel his show, Imus in the Morning, which moved to Citadel Media a few months later) ignited further controversy, with some saying he earned forgiveness with his apology, and others saying a strong stand needed to be taken.
• KDND’s 2007 "Hold Your Wee for a Wii" contest already had issues with concerns of overdrinking water. The contest was to see which contestant could drink the most water without having to pee. According to contest participants, 17 to 20 contestants took part in the competition in a room at KDND's studios. The contest began around 6:45 a.m. as contestants were each handed 240 mL (8 oz) water bottles to drink at 15-minute intervals. Contestants also said that as the contest progressed, they were given increasingly larger quantities of water to drink. A 28 year old mother, Jennifer Strange made it to the second place but didn’t win the Wii which she hoped to get for her kids. She died of water intoxication hours after taking part in the contest and many other unfortunate contenders including the winner voiced many negative health effects as well with one going so far as to admit the contest may have shortened their life. The worst part was the radio hosts gleefully admitted they were aware this was dangerous but the contestants signed waivers. At one point, a nurse contacted the station and informed the DJs that the contest could be dangerous and potentially fatal and they responded by saying, "We're aware of that" and said that the contestants had signed releases and couldn't file a lawsuit. According to a contestant, the waivers addressed only publicity issues and made no mention of health or safety concerns. The DJs also joked about Strange's distended belly, joking that she looked three months pregnant. They were sued soon after DJs were fired, but have shown little to no guilt for the death and harm they caused in this contest.
• Shock Jock Bubba the Love Sponge Clem has held an active career in radio since 1986. However, his professional life has since taken a back seat to the revelation that he was the one who filmed the Hulk Hogan sex tape that led to Hogan's 2015 suspension from the WWE for racist language in the tape and Hogan suing Gawker Media, who publicized the tape, into bankruptcy for invasion of privacy the following year. Clem later apologized to Hogan after the suit, but remains best known among the general public for his involvement in the scandal.
• Big Finish Doctor Who cast actor James Dreyfus as an early incarnation of The Master, making his debut in The Destination Wars. However, between this and his second story, The Home Guard, it came to light that Dreyfus had made some transphobic comments, and Big Finish would put out a statement of equality and diversity. Big Finish played down Dreyfus's involvement in subsequent stories, and after releasing the final audio record that featured Dreyfus's Master, The Psychic Circus, the company has not cast him in any future Master stories.
• KEGL in Dallas, Texas is mostly known for a prank by their evening drive shock jocks Kramer and Twitch wherein they claimed that Britney Spears was killed in a car accident. The hoax led to hundreds of calls to local law enforcement agencies and a massive internet firestorm, which ended in Kramer and Twitch being shown the door by KEGL owners Clear Channel.
• Prolific Shock Jock Steve Dahl tends to be known less for his long, widespread career and more for his status as a major figure in the Disco Sucks movement, organizing the infamous Disco Demolition Night that galvanized an American backlash against disco music that, in the late 2010s, was found to have been punctuated by undercurrents of bigotry against the genre's popularity with black and gay communities. Dahl, for his part, simply held a grudge against his old radio station WDAI after it fired him to shift focus exclusively on disco, but he never expressed regret over his involvement with the movement, even after the more bigoted aspects of it came to light, allowing it to eventually go from his claim to fame to one of the most debated aspects of his career, ultimately eclipsing everything else he had done outside of his core following.
• Bayern 3 is a public radio station owned and operated by the Bayerischer Rundfunk (BR), the public broadcaster in the German state of Bavaria. Outside of Germany (Bavaria in particular), it is infamous for Matthias Matuschik, a host, making hateful "jokes" about how BTS is similar to a virus, suggesting that BTS should go on a 20-year "vacation" to North Korea, and calling them "fuckwits" for covering "Fix You" by Coldplay. All this while being on-air and during a time when racism against Asians had become a hot topic due to the COVID-19 Pandemic.
• The hosts of the Australian radio programme Hot30 Countdown, Mel Greig and Mike Christian, will definitely be remembered more for their role in the 2012 suicide of Jacintha Saldanha, a nurse they prank-called by impersonating Elizabeth II and Charles III to find out that Princess Kate was pregnant, than anything else. Saldanha even blamed them in a suicide note she left behind. While no criminal charges were filed against the hosts for her death, they were nevertheless soon fired and the programme was cancelled.
• A Hungarian community radio station called Tilos Radio (Forbidden Radio) is still popular because of its community focus, but also because of its aim to cover a wide range of music genres that commercial radio wouldn't play. However, many people outside the target audience still prefer the radio to be shut down, thanks to the 2004 Christmas incident when one of the presenters (who was found to be drunk during the broadcast) said he wanted to "get rid of all the Christians". Although the radio reacted quickly and sacked the presenter, the outcry from the Conservative Party after the show damaged the radio's reputation.

Recorded and Stand-Up Comedy

• Multiple celebrity roasts have fallen into this.
  • The Friars Club roast of Whoopi Goldberg is mostly remembered for Ted Danson performing in blackface, garnering a horrified reaction from just about everyone present. While Goldberg herself wasn't offended and said she put him up to it, public backlash was serious enough that Danson had to issue an apology.
  • The Friars Club roast of Hugh Hefner is almost entirely remembered for Gilbert Gottfried making a joke about 9/11 mere weeks after the attacks, which, understandably, went down very badly. Although Gottfried managed to rescue himself with a The Aristocrats joke, it's still hard to talk about that particular roast without bringing that little tidbit up.
  • The Comedy Central roast of Pamela Anderson is mostly remembered nowadays for Andy Dick groping Anderson, attempting to do the same to Courtney Love, and miming fellatio on Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee. This was generally assumed to have been planned at the time, but after it came out that Dick really did harass them, many people's views of the roast were soured. Factor in the #MeToo movement and public opinion turning increasingly against Dick for his rampant sexual misconduct, and you have a roast where it's hard to talk about anything else.
  • The Comedy Central roast of William Shatner is largely remembered for yet more inappropriate behavior from Andy Dick. While performing as the lovechild of Spock and Captain Kirk, he licked Carrie Fisher, Farrah Fawcett and Patton Oswalt before groping and biting New York Post reporter Mandy Stadtmiller.

Tabletop Games

• Chess:
  • Former World Champion Bobby Fischer became known in later years for disavowing his Jewish heritage and becoming an anti-Semitic Conspiracy Theorist (notably blaming 9/11 on the Jewish people), which put a damper on his legacy.
  • A lot of people mostly remember Armenian grandmaster Tigran L. Petrosian^note Not to be confused with former World Champion Tigran Petrosian for his reaction to Wesley So accusing him of cheating in the 2020 PRO Chess League: he posted an angry, poorly-spelled rant including memorable phrases like "You are a biggest looser I ever seen in my life! You was doing PIPI in your pampers when I was beating players much more stronger then you!". It didn't help that Chess.com eventually found him guilty.
  • While Grandmaster Hikaru Nakamura is a popular streamer, it's hard to talk about him without getting into the allegations of poor sportsmanship and how the community reacted to it.
  • Sergey Karjakin's support of Putin had always been a turn-off to potential fans, but it really started overshadowing his chess achievements after Russia invaded Ukraine. While many Russian top players condemned the move or at least remained silent, Karjakin eagerly supported it (going as far as calling Ukraine "stupid"), and repeatedly doubled down after being criticized for it. This earned him several bans, most notably a six-month ban from FIDE events. Now he tends to be more remembered for supporting Putin than for his chess. While some people feel that his ban set a problematic precedent, few people will defend his actual views.
• Empire of the Petal Throne was retroactively tainted by the discovery in 2022 that creator M. A. R. Barker was the author of Serpent's Walk, a neo-Nazi novel written under a pseudonym and published in 1991. Barker was also found to have been on the editorial advisory committee of a Holocaust denial publication by the name of the Journal for Historical Review, which was put out by the Institute for Historical Review, a group that claims to seek "truth and accuracy in history", but whose real aim is to promote Holocaust denial and defend Nazism.
• While Puerto Rico is an influential eurogame, it has become hard to talk about it at length without getting into its colonialist premise and whether it's still okay to play the game in the light of that: the players represent the colonial governors of Puerto Rico, and while building plantations is a significant part of the game, it makes no attempt to bring up the exploitation of African slaves in such plantations, nor does it frame the colonial governors negatively. It doesn't help that the "colonist" tokens are dark brown colour and building additional plantations directly increase the size of the next shipment of said colonists - something that's been brought up right from the game's release in 2002.
• Vampire: The Masquerade was scheduled for a much-hyped relaunch into the world of Tabletop Role-Playing Games during their Renaissance during the late New Tens. Things were looking up for the owners at White Wolf, with a launch that could rival Dungeons and Dragons in popularity. Then people discovered some unfortunate ties to alt-right ideology in the test material and Quickstart guide. White Wolf was slow to address the storm of anger brewing on the internet, and the article's writer claimed to have been contacted by White Wolf's attorneys with a threat of lawsuits if the article wasn't taken down. This went as well as could be expected. Soon the TTRPG community associated Fifth Edition with alt-right ideology, and White Wolf rushed out an apology, claimed the whole thing was a coincidence, and included a denunciation of the alt-right in the main rulebook. If White Wolf mortally wounded their brand with the Vampire Quickstart guide, they would kill it when they dropped the Camarilla Sourcebook, which treated the still-ongoing terror campaign against homosexuals in Chechnya as a plot point for vampire shenanigans. The Chechen Government threatened to sue White Wolf, claiming the concentration camps where journalists have documented the torture and murders are still taking place are actually completely normal prisons and there couldn't be a gay pogrom because "there are no gay people in Chechnya!" This was the final straw for White Wolf and ultimately resulted in it being folded into their parent company, Paradox Interactive.
• In Warhammer 40,000, the Squats (Dwarves IN SPACE) were dropped early on in the game due to a variety of factors.^note  A combination of the models not selling as well as they had hoped along with the general shift in tone made the Squats a creative dead end. It didn't help that a lot of their rules overlapped with other armies at the time, so they were seen as dead weight when third edition rolled around. However, the way GW handled their discontinuation has been infamous in the fandom; after much heckling from people who still liked them and hated the "squatting" of the squats, GW started banning anyone who made mention of the Squats on their personal forums and absolute refusal to even discuss the matter at public events. While the rest of the line was spared from this, "squat" ended up evolving into a term meaning "to be discontinued and erased from canon" within the fandom. It's only during the Kevin Rountree era that GW finally started acknowledging the Squats, likely wanting to turn this around and finally put an end to all the memes surrounding it. It was subsequently followed by the Squats being restored to canon, under a new name and branding as the Leagues of Votann.

Theatre

• Among William Shakespeare's works, the most polarizing in modern times are The Taming of the Shrew and The Merchant of Venice, which are well known for their notoriously unflattering depictions of women and Jews, respectively. Modern productions of both typically add some sort of twist to reduce the uncomfortableness, up to and including staging the plays, originally intended to be comedies, as tragedies with the female and Jewish characters as Doomed Moral Victors. Even within Shakespeare's own lifetime, there was a Take That! play called The Woman's Prize, or the Tamer Tamed where Katherine's abuser Petruchio gets a taste of his own medicine from his next wife Maria. Titus Andronicus is also well-known for being an extremely dark and violent Evil Versus Evil revenge tragedy very much unlike any of the Bard's other works, including cannibalism and the only rape scene he ever wrote.
• The mid-Victorian play Our American Cousin would forever be remembered for the Lincoln assassination instead of the witty characters like Lord Dundreary. The fatal shot was actually timed to what was famously the play's funniest moment, in the hope that the roar of laughter would cover the noise of the gunshot. In addition, John Wilkes Booth was a well known and critically acclaimed stage actor at the time. Nowadays, he's only remembered, obviously not without reason, as one of the most notorious criminals in American history. On top of all that, Ford Theater is now known only as the place where Lincoln was assassinated, to the point that one may get the impression it was built solely so Honest Abe could be shot in it.
• While The Rite of Spring is cherished for its avant-garde music and choreography, its premiere night in 1913 sparked a near-riot inside the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris when the audience turned against each other on whether it was groundbreaking or sheer crap, with the latter throwing stuff at the orchestra and the dancers. It didn't help that inside the curtain, the composer and lead choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky had cooperation issues during the production. You might say that the premiere night had been a near-literal Broken Base.
• Nord-Ost, a Russian musical, is better remembered as the target of the 2002 Moscow theater hostage crisis than as a work in itself.
• Theater director Julie Taymor won the Best Musical Tony for her adaptation of The Lion King, has adapted Shakespeare and Greek tragedies, made a foray into film with the Cult Classic Beatles tribute Across the Universe (2007), and throughout all her work has received acclaim for her use of elaborate costumes and puppets. What's she best known for these days? Her major mishandling of her Spider-Man adaptation Turn Off the Dark, which was plagued by, in addition to bad writing and prima donna antics by Taymor herself, numerous accidents involving the aforementioned elaborate props and costumes, some of which even resulted in serious injuries. In the end, she was unceremoniously given the boot from her own show and has done little of note since.
• Andrew Lloyd Webber's Love Never Dies, the twenty-years-later follow-up to his smash hit The Phantom of the Opera, was never able to rise above the stigma of being a sequel that nobody but Lloyd Webber himself really wanted. It was based on a poorly regarded Fan Sequel novel called The Phantom of Manhattan and contained cliches that have appeared in fan works of dubious quality for decades, including Christine giving birth to the Phantom's illegitimate child after a one-night stand and deciding he was her true love after all, and her kindly love interest Raoul having become a neglectful drunkard who's blown his fortune at the gambling table. All of this resulted in considerable fan opposition before it even came out (including a Twitter / X campaign called #LoveShouldDie) and a general sense that the show was Lloyd Webber's terrible Draco in Leather Pants fanfic that he forced onto the stage with his piles of money, and despite having the Phantom name and Lloyd Webber's own behind it, the initial run received mediocre reviews and closed at a loss — though the show later picked up a cult following in Australia, where a more polished production was staged and filmed.
• Aaron Sorkin's stage adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird is best known for leading to a lawsuit months before its debut from Harper Lee's estate, who accused it of straying too far from the source material against Lee's instructions from her will. This includes some already controversial elements from Go Set a Watchman, like Atticus having some racist leanings.
• While Carousel has several individual songs that have become classics, such as "If I Loved You" and "You'll Never Walk Alone", if you haven't seen it yourself, most likely the only thing you know about the actual plot is its extreme level of Values Dissonance: the main character is a sympathetically-portrayed wife-beater, and the play includes a scene where his wife defends his actions.
• Eve Ensler's The Vagina Monologues is still a very popular play, but the vignette "The Little Coochie Snorcher That Could" is best known for its highly controversial depiction of an underaged girl's sexual encounter with an adult woman. The segment has become rather infamous for driving many theatre groups to rework it to avoid alienating the audience; some productions change the narrator's age from 13 to 16, others have omitted the controversial line "If it was rape, it was a good rape", and still others have elected to cut the entire segment.
• The only real impact left by the play All in a Row is the outrage it caused for having an autistic character portrayed by a creepy puppet contrasting a cast full of humans.
• Annie Get Your Gun is another one now known almost entirely for its Values Dissonance. It was created at the end of World War II specifically to encourage women who'd joined the workforce while their husbands were fighting the Axis to go back and Stay in the Kitchen, and thus reworks the true story of sharpshooter Annie Oakley to have her future husband Frank Butler refuse to be with a woman who's a better shot than him, so she ends up throwing a contest between them and retiring, when in real life it was actually Butler who gave up his sharpshooting career to support hers. It also features some horrific portrayals of Native Americans, with the reveal that they're not just mindless savages intended to be played for surprise laughs, and the song "I'm an Indian, Too" which brutally mocks their naming style. A 1999 revival heavily revised it to fit contemporary attitudes, cutting the insulting Native material and having Butler catch on to what Annie's doing and throw his own shots to end the contest with a tie.
• The Death of Klinghoffer, an opera about the murder of Leon Klinghoffer by Palestinian terrorists who hijacked the Italian passenger liner MS Achille Lauro, is better known for accusations of being anti-Semitic and/or too sympathetic to the hijackers than for its actual content.
• Much of the talk about Ivo Van Hove's 2019 revival of West Side Story revolved around the casting of a sex offender, Amar Ramasar as Bernardo, not even a year after being (temporarily) fired from City Ballet for his offenses. The changes to the story and staging were also controversial, but most reviews also mention Bernardo's casting (especially regarding a graphic Rape as Drama scene) since it attracted numerous protests during the show's short run. The revival did not reopen after the COVID-19 Pandemic, likely due in part to all the bad press. Ramasar himself announced retirement in 2021 due to how the controversy overshadowed his career.

Theme Parks

• It's impossible to talk about the infamous New Jersey theme park Action Park without mentioning its numerous safety hazards, which resulted in hundreds of injuries and six deaths. Problems included poorly designed and maintained rides, untrained teenage employees, terrible communication with its (often non-English speaking) visitors, lax safety rules, and high levels of drunkenness among both staff and riders. Its abysmal safety record led to the park gaining the nicknames "Traction Park", "Accident Park", and "Class Action Park". Case in point: Action Park's most notorious ride was Cannonball Loop◊, a water slide with a complete vertical loop built into it. Crash test dummies sent down the slide supposedly came out the other end decapitated and dismembered. Nevertheless, the slide remained operational for a whole month.
• It's become very difficult to discuss anything pertaining to SeaWorld due to the massive controversy surrounding the orcas and the Blackfish documentary that only worsened said controversy. Things have gotten slightly better following SeaWorld announcing the termination of the orca breeding programs, but some grievances still remain.
• Marineland Canada is an independent marine mammal park similar to SeaWorld owned by the Holer family in Niagara Falls, Ontario, known for its "Everyone Loves Marineland" advertising jingles played throughout Southern Ontario and Western New York, even having a commercial with that jingle dating from 1998 still airing to this day. However, thanks to a Toronto Star exposé published in 2012, it's now infamous for allegations of severe animal cruelty against several of their captive species. Even before the exposé, animal rights activists had protested against the park's treatment of its animals, but this controversy caused attendance to the park to drop and the Holer family to file a lawsuit against the Toronto Star for defamation. Since the death of founder John Holer in 2018, the park has shifted their focus from the animal exhibits to the rides. The Walrus and the Whistleblower, a CBC documentary released in 2020, elaborates upon this controversy, telling the story of how former Marineland trainer Phil Demers chronicled all the animal abuse that happened in the park.
• The Schlitterbahn water park chain experienced controversy in August 2016 after the death by decapitation of a ten-year-old boy (the son of a local politician) on the tallest waterslide in the world (called "Verrückt") at its Kansas City location, thus leading to the permanent shutdown of the slide. But it got worse after an indictment of park higher-ups was released in 2018. It implied that the slide's designer had no official engineering degree, the ride was known to be dangerous well before the fatality happened, and it was intentionally kept that way so the park could chase money from TV networks regarding their record-breaking attraction. Schlitterbahn Kansas City closed in 2018.
• Despite being one of the most popular theme parks in Europe, Alton Towers has had a number of controversies associated with some of the attractions at the resort.
  • The Smiler holds the world record for the most inversions in a rollercoaster, a staggering 14, but is more remembered for a devastating crash that happened in 2015 which led to multiple injuries and two leg amputations as a result. Even when the ride reopened the following year, with far more safety checks in place to make sure another crash wouldn't occur, many kept on referencing the crash when discussing the rollercoaster.
  • Th13teen opened with the world's first vertical freefall drop, on which the track and train freefall approximately five metres in darkness. What is it best known for? A case of false advertising on Alton Towers' part, with the coaster's pre-opening hype claiming it would be the scariest rollercoaster of all time, along with a range of promotional stunts that included suggesting that guests would need to sign a waiver to ride it or that it was a new type of ride known as a "psychoaster", only for it to turn out to be a family coaster with a single neat surprise element. Even after the ride's reception warmed with time, many kept on bringing up the false advertising within its marketing campaign whenever the coaster is discussed.
  • Nemesis: Sub-Terra is a dark ride that tied in with the lore of Nemesis, Alton Towers' most famous rollercoaster. The original version closed just three years after opening due to budget cuts resulting from the Smiler crash. Nemesis: Sub-Terra is mostly remembered for fans' disappointment that it wasn't another rollercoaster in the Nemesis line (Thorpe Park also has one, Nemesis Inferno), and controversy over whether a TV advert for the ride was racist. The advert in question showed an alien egg hatching and then cut to an extreme close-up of a black man's face; seen by some as implying he was the monster within the egg. Alton Towers had to clarify that the man was scared of the alien. Since its eventual re-opening in May 2023 — to notably more positive reception upon its second debut — though, only time will tell if it can shake off the reputation.
  • The now-defunct rollercoaster Corkscrew is still beloved among fans of the park and was the signature roller coaster at the park when it first opened back in 1980. As the years went on though, Corkscrew developed an infamously uncomfortable ride experience. Riders would often hit their heads on the safety bar at a certain point, and would have their heads jerked around all through the ride. It wasn't unusual for people to complain of headaches and/or neck pain for an hour or so afterwards. Concerns over safety were part of the reason why Corkscrew was removed in 2010. The Corkscrew element was later installed at the parks entrance and served as a tribute to the iconic but rough attraction.
• Disney Theme Parks:
  • For a very long time, Disneyland Paris (or "Euro Disney" as it was originally known) was, unfortunately, most known in and outside of the Disney fandom for having an absolutely disastrous opening year to the point of directly affecting almost all of Disney's other theme park plans for the next two decades, as well as being absolutely despised by the French people at first for a number of reasons, mainly strongly opposing its poor (by French standards) working conditions and viewing it as an example of American cultural imperialism. The resort's early struggles were notorious enough that it ended up becoming a common subject for parodies at Disney's expense in many works throughout The '90s and even into the early 00's. While the resort had a much needed recovery in popularity after the addition of Space Mountain: De La Terre À La Lune in 1995, the long-term effects of its disastrous opening arguably came back to haunt it when its second park managed to bomb just as spectacularly (albeit for slightly different reasons). After Disney bought back most of the resort's shares and initiated various expansion/refurbishement efforts, the resort has been a lot more profitable than before and even sees some of the largest attendance numbers of any European theme park resort (rivaled only by Europa-Park and Efteling) but despite all that, its initial failure still tends to get brought up a lot.
  • A big part of why Stitch's Great Escape! got so much backlash was because it controversially replaced the much-beloved Cult Classic attraction ExtraTERRORestrial Alien Encounter. Even now, after the ride's permanent closure and dismantling, discussions of the ride are often focused on that fact.
  • It is impossible to discuss the Disneyland attraction America Sings without bringing up the death of 18-year-old hostess Deborah Gail Stone. Nine days after it opened in 1974, Stone was caught between a rotating wall and stationary wall and was crushed. The attraction was temporarily closed and modified to prevent further accidents. America Sings would continue to operate without further major incidents until it was permanently closed in 1988, but a shroud of morbidity still hangs over it to this day.
  • Habit Heroes at Epcot has been mainly overshadowed by its Unfortunate Implications and the negative reception it endured, which led to the attraction's closure and Disney to not develop any further Epcot attractions not tied to existing IPs in the process.
  • The short-lived "Journey Into Your Imagination" Retool of "Journey Into Imagination" is far more well-known for the negative reception it received from fans of the original incarnation and its myriad of widely-disliked changes. The ride was later reworked further into the better-received "Journey Into Imagination With Figment," but some controversial changes (such as the shorter ride length and overall lower-quality theming) still remain.
• Now-defunct Christian theme park Heritage USA, which was built and owned by televangelists Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, is now known largely for two things: that time Jerry Falwell went down one of its water slides while wearing a suit, and the fact that some of the money used to build it was collected from members of the Bakkers' audience under the pretense of funding overseas missions.
• The Mindbender, a rollercoaster at the West Edmonton Mall's Galaxyland Amusement Park, holds the record for the tallest, fastest, and longest indoor rollercoaster in the world. Despite that, most people know about it because of an accident in June 1986 where a derailed car crashed into a concrete pillar, killing three of its four passengers and seriously injuring the fourth.
• RollOver, an attraction at Norwegian amusement park Tusenfryd, is mostly remembered for being involved in the park's worst accident after a wheelchair user fell out of it and was injured. While a subsequent investigation revealed that there was nothing wrong with the attraction, guests still fled from it, contributing to its closure two years later.

Toys

• My Friend Cayla, and by extension all Internet of Things toys, had their reputation destroyed when security experts noticed a glaring flaw with the toys — that is, they had nothing to prevent the toys from being hacked. With no safeguards in place, a malicious party could commandeer a Cayla (itself a Bluetooth speaker in the form of a doll) and make her say nasty things or listen in on children's conversations. The manufacturers were quick to state that all hacking incidents took place in proof-of-concept demonstrations, and it requires people with the know-how to do so (not that a determined creep couldn't do it), but the reputation of the toys was completely tarnished. Additionally, the audio advertising and data collection by the dolls caused another controversy by parent groups who were uncomfortable with their children being monitored 24/7. Now, whenever the doll is brought up, it's always in relation to one or both of these controversies.
• Sky Dancers were popular dolls at the time, but now they're more well-known for causing injuries when used improperly, which resulted in the toys being recalled 5 years after their release. When Play Along re-released the toys four years later, safety instructions were printed on the box to prevent any similar incidents from occurring.
• The Entertech line of water guns boasted "The look! The feel! The sound, so real!" on their commercials, in reference to its close resemblance to actual firearms, on top of them being far more powerful than the cheap hand-powered squirt guns played by children. While not the first toy guns to closely replicate their real-life counterparts, this selling point led to its downfall, thanks to highly publicized incidents of children getting shot and killed by police officers who mistook the Entertech toys for actual guns, as well as real criminals utilizing Entertech guns in bank robberies. This led legislators to impose stricter rules on the manufacture and sale of toy weapons, specifically the Federal Toy Gun Law requiring them to be visually distinct from real guns by giving them a blaze orange color. This controversy spilled over to the NES Zapper, which while made to more closely resemble a Star Wars-esque futuristic blaster gun than an actual pistol to begin with when it was first released to coincide with the NES's North American debut in 1985, was re-released in 1989 with an orange color scheme to comply with federal gun safety laws.
• If anyone brings up lawn darts, chances are it's to bring up the many people who were injured or even killed by them, which resulted them being banned in the United States and Canada.
• Teen Talk Barbie was a doll that had a whopping 270 phrases recorded, with each doll including four selected at random. Of all these phrases, the only one most people know is "Math class is tough!", due to accusations of discouraging girls from pursuing education in mathematics. In response to the controversy, Mattel removed the line from the pool, and offered to exchange any doll that had it.

Web Animation

• Eddsworld: Three characters suffer from this, Tord, Helucard, and Patryck. Tord for his real life counterpart/first voice actor being harassed off the internet by stalkers and toxic fans upset with his and the character's departure from the show, or for his second voice actor being fired after it came out that he groomed and sexually abused a then underaged Kiki Palmer. Although he remains a fan-favorite, the former reason makes fans skeptical of a comeback of the character. On a similar note, Helucard was based on and voiced by Dominic Сharbonneau who himself was accused of grooming underaged girls. Patryck because his real life counterpart/voice actor, Patryk Dudlewicz made an angry Tumblr post where he ranted about how that character he played was frequently shipped with another character named Paul, (also based on a real person) and shippers used their real names, much to his discomfort. Fans usually keep this mind when referring to the character, often changing his name to simply Pat or keeping the extra c that isn't in Patryk's actual name.
• Regarding the flash series Madness Combat created by Matt 'Krinkels' Jolly:
  • It's hard to discuss Cethic, creator and collaborator of both multiple fan projects and her involvement as an artist in the main series, without talking about her being accused of, and later confessing to, being a chronic emotional and sexual abuser and zoophile. The majority of discussion about her revolves around her actions, and it's hard to find any resource talking about her without also mentioning her allegations, although this may have something to do with her being kicked from the main series (along with Fleetwire) and all fan projects, most notably Green Pepper Studios, and seemingly retiring from Madness-related works indefinitely.
  • Fleetwire (real name Corey McKenna), is best known both for the song 'Eidolon Step' from DedmosRebuilt.fla, and for being exposed as a groomer and a zoophile by the aforementioned Cethic, and subsequently being kicked from his musician role on the series and deleting all social media.
  • If you don't know Danish fan animator Kelzad from either his REALM series or contributing the head sprites of Scrapeface for the 'An Experiment' episode of the main series, you either know him from being accused by fellow fan animator Kryy of concept theft from the non-canon Incidents side-series, or his immature Discord outburst over Green Pepper Studios, and by extension, himself, being denied an administrative role on the MADNESS: Project Nexus 2 Discord server over the moderators of the game's Steam community page, with the community being quick to label him as an outright manchild and his creator page on the MC Tributes Wiki having more information on his controversies than his past as an animator.
  • It's also hard to have a discussion on the wider Madness Combat fandom without bringing up its reputation as being one of the more extreme examples of The Law of Fan Jackassery on the internet, with a plethora of animators in the community engaging in egotistical behavior, petty rivalries between other creators, stealing of concepts, and prevalent gatekeeper mentality and hostility to 'outsiders' and a large Vocal Minority of purists who frown upon newer, more unconventional animators who do things differently from the established style. Not helping matters is that Krinkels himself admits he avoids addressing the drama out of concern it'll only cause more problems, and prefers to instead focus on putting out content.
• DollyFlesh, also known as MiseryMagic (real name Leighton Labute) was a Canadian animator and sculptor known for his violent and excessively gory claymation animations akin to Lee Hardcastle or David Firth. He also did vlogs where he showed some disturbing behavior such as wanting to lose his virginity to a limbless sex doll and eating spaghetti out of a clay baby. He later became more well known for a video where he tortured and murdered three hamsters in various ways. He was given an 18-month conditional sentence, four to five years of supervision, was prohibited from using social media, placed under curfew and banned from pet stores. His channel was terminated two years later after many protests from people who thought he got off too lightly.
• Super Mario 64 machinimist Starman3 was formerly revered for his influence on the early SM64 machinima community, most famously for founding The YouTube Rangers. However, his reputation started derailing in 2012 when accusations of pedophilia, control freak tendencies and victim blaming started coming forth from both random online users and his fellow SM64 machinimists which led to, among other things, his character being removed from fellow machinimist SMG4's Mario series. While he did eventually fess up and express a desire to change, he ultimately continued this behavior through the decade, with accusations flaring back up every year starting in 2017, carrying evidence from over 100 of his victims. This culminated in July 2020 when, at the height of the Smash community allegations, veteran SM64 machinimist MATTHEWGU4 posted a video further exposing his behavior. Most talk about him now centers on his bad behavior and absolute refusal to genuinely take responsibility and change, overshadowing any former influence and merit he and his channel had on the early SM64 machinima community.
• Lenstar Productions (real name Jacob Lenard) was an indie animator notable as the creator of various webtoons such as Mugman, Pike's Lagoon, and Loose Ends, all of which were famous for their Deranged Animation and surrealism. While he had already gained bit of a negative reputation for his prioritizing of style over substance (which some people found hypocritical given his deliberately amateur-ish art direction), Lenard's reputation took a nosedive in late 2020/early 2021 when many of his former peers came fourth detailing years of abusive treatment while working under him. Most notably repeated instances of homophobia and transphobia that led to the suicide attempt of one of Mugman's former voice actors. With the exception of his YouTube (where he disabled the comments for all his videos), Instagram and Discord accounts, Lenard deleted all his social media profiles shortly after the controversy struck.
• Animator Emily Youcis was always a polarizing figure, but was well known in some parts of the Internet (particularly the indie animation and horror scenes) for her Black Comedy and for creating Alfred's Playhouse. Nowadays she is best known for becoming an open neo-Nazi, which resulted in her losing her job and support from Troma.
• My Pingu TV, an Indian YouTube Kids' Channel featuring animated fairy tales, is mostly known for their video "Dina and the Prince", about an angel named Dina who is forbidden from speaking with the human prince she's fallen in love with, does so anyway, and is punished by being turned ugly. While this sounds fine on the surface, the channel decided to depict her "ugly" form with dark skin and curly hair, while her "beautiful" form had light skin and straight hair. This led to claims that the video was teaching children to view black people as inherently unattractive, and a massive backlash ensued. While My Pingu TV took down the video and issued an apology, the channel remains better known for this video than any other they've uploaded.
• While CartoonMania was fairly divisive due to its stiff animation and hit-and-miss writing, the series still garnered a cult following due to its interesting premise of a cartoonist living with his own creations, in addition to the show's usage of slapstick humor and homages to popular cartoons such as Animaniacs and Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends. The series' fanbase dissipated in the summer of 2020 when screencaps and other evidence of creator Matthew Littlemore drawing suggestive artwork of some of the series' underage characters (as well as acting perverted in general on Discord, even after others made it clear that they were uncomfortable) were revealed, on top of people coming forward with stories of emotional abuse at his hands. This led to many involved in the then-upcoming reboot to publicly cut ties with him, and Matthew himself deleted several of his social media accounts and labeled his YouTube channel as "inactive" (though Matthew would eventually return in February 2022), seemingly putting the show on permanent hiatus.
• The web animation series The Red Ape Family is best known for being a promotional tool for the "Bored Ape Yacht Club" line of NFTs, making it nearly impossible to discuss the show without getting into the highly controversial politics of the NFT market. It doesn't help that the show openly advertises its connection to NFTs, with its story containing blatant pro-NFT messages—making the connection nearly impossible to ignore, even if you watch the show without knowing its background.
• The creators of The Rodfellows, Dan, Alex and Darren, were exposed for pedophilia and grooming in the early 2020's, as they noticeably hire minors to work on projects that feature questionable scenes, fetishes and sexual content. Although some of the evidence were all fabricated by Jason Animates as well as the Sparky Furryton account and supposed suicide "incident" being all lies, their questionable pedophilia and grooming behaviour are the first things people know about when mentioning The Rodfellows or its creators.

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