"I don't know what the big deal with Hamlet, it's just one famous saying after another. "
— Old Joke
There are certain shows that you can safely assume most people have seen. These shows were considered fantastic when they first aired. Now, however, these shows have a Hype Backlash curse on them. Whenever we watch them, we'll cry, "That is so old" or "That is sooverdone".
The sad irony? It wasn't old or overdone when they did it. But the things it created were so brilliant and popular, they became woven into the fabric of that show's genre. They ended up being taken for granted, copied and endlessly repeated. Although they often began by saying something new, they in turn became the status quo.
Remember how Isaac Newton said, "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants"? This trope is when those giants have been stood on so much that they're stomped flat into the ground and don't seem nearly so impressive anymore.
Named after the sitcom Seinfeld, which many people won't watch anymore because everything about it has been copied. Most likely will result in Fan Haters and accusations of Rule Abiding Rebels. This can also occur in countries that get the shows years after they originally come out.
Compare Older than They Think, Discredited Meme, Unbuilt Trope, Hype Backlash. This is a special case of Older than They Think, when the Trope Codifier is still around or still highly regarded. The same principle applied to ethical or cultural issues is Fair for Its Day. Perhaps the exact opposite of So Bad, It's Good, and Nostalgia Filter. The worst outcome is Deader than Disco. Occasionally overlaps with Values Dissonance.
Not to be confused with the opinion that Seinfeld wasn't funny even when it was original, or with The Comically Serious.
(When adding an example, be sure it's not just something that aged badly. This trope is specifically about things that have become lost among their own imitators.)
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
Cutie Honey will make you cringe, until you realize it created the template for anime fanservice. If you don't remember it's from the early 70s, you'll think its just another typical high-schooler gone superhero story.
Doki Doki School Hours got hit by this hard. The manga is one of the early examples of the "Wacky Homeroom"-format, up to and including a childish teacher, and likely formed the inspiration for other mangas like Azumanga Daioh and Lucky Star. Alas, the anime got released after those other series, which made a lot of viewers cringe at the "tired and old" jokes.
Dragon Ball for that matter. It seems horribly cliché now (even more so than Fist of the North Star, if only because it was copied more, or at least more directly) but it was refreshing at the time. One of the big ones is the Idiot Hero, which has been done to death in Shonen, but Goku was more or less the first (and besides that Goku is more naive than stupid. That's the Theme Park Version for you).
Fist of the North Star seems like horribly cliché shonen, but keep in mind it more or less helped create many of the shonen tropes that exist today.
Ghost in the Shell. The English dub of the original most likely comes off as Narmy to most modern-day viewers, but in the 90s it was considered a major step forward for anime dubbing, featuring a reasonably faithful translation of the source material, correct pronunciations of Japanese names, and semi-believable voice acting.
Since the standards for anime dub voice acting have improved so much in recent years, many dubs that were considered huge steps forward in quality for their time have become increasingly unpopular among modern viewers. Examples include Ranma ½ and Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Hayao Miyazaki. Many of his movies have been copied so extensively by both anime and manga that people complain about them being "cliché". No, Laputa isn't just "another ancient civilization on a floating island", it is THE ancient civilization on a floating island. Ironically enough, even though it was this movie that really started Japan's fascination of highly advanced, extinct ancient civilizations, both the name and the concept of the floating island of Laputa comes from Gulliver's Travels, written more than two centuries earlier.
Love Hina. Yes, if you just started reading or watching it today, it just seems like another cliché harem anime. This mainly comes from the fact that the show redefined nearly every rule of modern anime romance/harem comedy, and has been copied relentlessly since.
Magical Girls. If you're not an old-school, die-hard fan, you'll probably think that everything in the genre is a ripoff of Sailor Moon. Pleasedonot mention this to said magical girl fans.
Sailor Moon itself gets this as well, as it created a sub-genre, and in many countries also contributed to make Anime popular in the first place. When compared to somemoremodernshows, it can look overly cheesy, Filler-ridden, and low-budget.
Maria-sama Ga Miteru is gradually getting there; the series has been copied and especially parodied mercilessly, to the point where viewers suspect it to be a parody itself. Admittedly, the romantic entanglements between the girls of the depicted all-girl school do get rather fluffy and melodramatic at times, but it mostly kept in check by the tight storytelling and outstanding voice-acting in the anime.
Mazinger Z, the Trope Codifier for Super Robot Genre shows, never got that much love outside of Japan, due to the fact that it was usually picked up sometime after successive shows, such as Voltron and even Grendizer got popular, leading to Mazinger often being called a ripoff of it's own derivatives.
Neon Genesis Evangelion, quite possibly, won't be considered that much of a Deconstruction by a modern viewer, as opposed to those who watched it when it first aired. Especially if you compare it to various series which have be called the "Anti-Evangelion". Examples? Look no further than this wiki.
Osamu Tezuka falls victim to this in the American market. His characters look much closer to Disney and Fleischer cartoons than modern anime and manga, making his art look quaint to modern manga readers. Additionally, it's hard to spot the sheer innovation in his page layouts and stylized pacing when they've more or less become the norm after around fifty years (though to be fair, his manga still has more thought put into the layout than most modern mangaka).
Robotech. With its dramatic tone and unvarnished depictions of the death and destruction caused by war, it was the first localized anime to really display Japanese animation's capacity for weighty, dramatic stories to a western audience. With uncut translations of space opera now a dime a dozen, and with the series' multiple flaws now harder to forgive, many now ignore the series' achievements and instead focus on the compromises made in the franchise's creation—namely, the stitching together of three distinct and unrelated anime series into one narrative, necessary for the series to get a syndication deal. The Macekre page goes into greater detail about the significance of Robotech, despite the title being a Take That to Carl Macek for said compromises.
Saint Seiya suffers from this quite badly if one were to watch if after seeing more recent Shōnen series, especially during the Gold Saint arc. It pretty much created the Rescue Arc, and if not, it certainly was what popularized it.
Katteni Kaizo, a comic about a boy who believes his world to be a Fantasy Kitchen Sink and forms a club based around it, in the end it all turns out to have been a Cuckoo Nest. That description makes it sound like a parody or a Deconstruction of Haruhi Suzumiya; thing is, Kaizo predates Haruhi by a couple of years.
Sister Princess. When you watch it in 2010s, it seems to be incredibly cliche. But it's one of the Trope Codifier of "otherworldly harem" anime.
Comic Books
The Adventures of Tintin are liable to come across as cliché to younger modern readers who've read other adventure comics. Furthermore, Hergé was one of the first comic book artists to pioneer the use of speech bubbles rather than captions, and we all know how widespread they are these days.
Donald Clarke, a film critic for the Irish Times, and other critics cited this as a flaw with the Watchmen film adaptation: twenty years after the original graphic novel started the trend, deconstructing superheroes and showing them acting like real people with real personalities no longer seems like anything new. He used the example of the Parr family in The Incredibles by means of comparison.
Throw in Squadron Supreme as well. It actually beat Watchmen to the superhero deconstruction idea.
The Authority was revolutionary for its violence and political themes. Today, it fits right in with most modern comics.
Batman: The Killing Joke, also from Alan Moore. Nowadays it probably seems like a typical Batman vs. Joker story (aside from the infamous fridging of Barbara Gordon) but that's largely because theadaptations as well as numerous later comics reused some of the more famous themes from it such as Joker's Multiple Choice Past or Batman being tempted to break the OneRule.
The Dark Phoenix Saga. Before Jean Grey's death was retconned a dozen different ways and the concept of "dead is not dead in comics" became a punchline for critics and comedians, a story where a main character becomes a morally-grey antihero who sacrifices herself to save the life of her team was virtually unheard of in comics. It's become almost commonplace to kill off superheroes in "event" storylines these days (to the point that some comic fans take bets to see how long the character will stay dead). To today's average reader, Jean's death isn't all that shocking.
Deathlok. The comic book character debuted in 1974. In 1974, the idea of a man who has been turned into a cyborg and struggles to keep his humanity while fighting against those who transformed him was relatively fresh and original. Nowadays it seems clichéd, and like a ripoff of Robocop and many other sources.
Doom Patrol. Very shortly after Fantastic Four debuted, Detective Comics tried their hand at "superhero angst". It was also the first title to pull a Kill Them All ending for the entire team. Now, it's more or less known for the youngest (surviving) member, who went into the Teen Titans.
The Fantastic Four are considered by some to be the lamest Marvel superheroes out there. But, they were also the characters who introduced the concepts that revolutionized the genre in the early sixties. It was unimaginable for readers back then to have a superhero with a monstrous appearance like the Thing, or dysfunctional team dynamics (that became so popular, the FF looks normal in comparison with most other groups). That's not to mention the villains, which included a dangerous leader of a foreign country and a Cosmic Horror entity bound to destroy the universe. And they didn't have secret identities, which were a staple for all superheroes then (and are still common even today).
Legion of Super-Heroes. The Great Darkness Saga is considered one of the all-time best Legion stories. The villain is Darkseid—a plot element that seems trite nowadays because of Darkseid's overexposure. But the story is from 1982, when that was a new idea.
Spider-Man was a unique deconstruction of supeheroes when he was first created. The idea of a superhero who was a normal teenager like the readers and who had a normal life hadn't been done before. Nowadays, this is nothing special.
"The Night Gwen Stacy Died". Today, especially with The Dark Age of Comic Books, it's not uncommon for characters to be killed off left and right, but back then, the thought killing off such a beloved and popular character was unfathomable. It's often credited with ushering comics into the Bronze Age.
Superman. Many people complain that he is too generic or boring compared to recent superheroes, forgetting or not caring that he was the Trope Codifier for many Super Hero tropes. The complaints usually revolve around the ridiculous amount of powers he has had over the years (Silver Age Superman was practically a God Mode Sue), his perceived lack of relatibility due to his supposed lack of personal flaws or personality despite that being a clear case of Depending on the Writer. Not to mention the predictability of someone ALWAYS using kryptonite on him. This still creates problems for marketing the character today — despite the fact that everyone knows who Superman is, many still don't like him as much as Batman and Spider-Man, or some flavor-of-the-month. As a result, some people forget that it's still possible to read a Superman comic because it's fun to see him fly around and beat up bad guys, and ignore attempts (successful and unsuccessful) to depower him or make him more relatable.
The Disney Ducks Comic Universe comics of Carl Barks. He invented most of the characters and concepts, most notably Scrooge himself, and is regarded as a classic by people old enough to have the right kind of perspective, but these days some may think his comics aren't really that different from those not very high quality same-old-same-old stories the average Duck artist produces easily and constantly (except maybe slightly dated compared even to them), and the few modern innovators, particularly Keno Don Rosa who himself adores Barks, have moved on to somewhere quite different. (Well, Don Rosa builds a lot on Barks's ideas, but his comics look much more impressive on a technical level, and the themes are treated in a way that allows them to be taken more seriously.)
Back in the 1980s, Crisis on Infinite Earths and Secret Wars were big stuff — while characters had crossed over with each other before, earth-and-universe shattering perils so huge that not just one or two, but every single superhero (and-or villans!) within a given publisher's universe had to combine forces to defeat them was novel and exciting, completely unheard of. Nowadays, the Crisis Crossover is a standard part of the superhero comic book publishing schedule, with at least one big event (sometimes more) happening every year, with the result that going back to the originals can be an underwhelming experience.
Fan Fiction
This effect can happen a lot with online fanfiction as well; any particularly well-executed fanfic that takes source material in a new direction is likely to spawn a horde of imitators, rapidly turning the original author's new and innovative take on the source material into a tired cliche. With fanfics that are Long Runners or suffer from Schedule Slip a story can actually go from innovative to cliched before the author is even done writing it.
A lot of older fanfic suffers from this, especially in large, well-trafficked forums like Harry Potter, when a fic that invented or popularised a popular piece of fanon is examined in light of what went after.
Likewise, the old apas and zines seem quaint and silly in comparison to the internet. Many younger fanfic writers never heard of the days when it was incredible to get four or five novel-length fanfics circulated in a year.
This is a notable problem with many old Redwall fics, particularly The Urthblood Saga, that deals with the theme of "noble vermin". When these fics where written back in the late 90's/early 2000's, the concept of including good foxes, rats and weasels in a story based on a series that is so strictly black-and-white was fresh and challenging. Nowadays however, it's rare to find a fic that doesn't include it, or that plays the Always Chaotic Evil mantra from the official books straight.
A vast majority of Ranma ½ fanfics written after 1998 or so were built almost entirely upon Fanon established in earlier works by notable authors; the absolute worst case of this being the Flanderization of Akane into a brutally violent, abusive raging bitch with a hair trigger and no rationality whatsoever—which was first established in the very dark "The Bitter End", a story which painted a darker picture of the Ranmaverse. After TBE, "psychotic Akane" became one of the biggest cliches in Ranma fanfiction to the point that most people roll their eyes and groan when they see a story going in that direction.
Also, the amusing parody crossover Sailor Ranko spawned an entire subgenre of Ranma fanfiction.
In Total Drama Island fandom this happens a lot; Total Drama Comeback popularized Ezekiel, Bridgette and pairings without any relation in canon like Katie/Noah to the point of this has became clichés in most TDI fanseasons (many of them could be rightily called TDC fanfics, not TDI fanfics).
Harry Potter has inspired one of the most prolific fanficcer communities ever. As a result, tons of clichés have formed over the years. A modern reader might find a fic way back from 2002, filled with clichés and not realize those he's reading the first fic to use some of those ideas.
Film
Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Happy Gilmore: It seems hard to believe that movies such as these were actually considered raunchy, filthy films when first released in 1994 and 1995. Today, they seem pretty tame compared to most comedy films being released right now.
Airplane! was originally an intentionally corny, funny comedy, and was a huge hit in its time. However, its corny style of humor has been imitated and parodied so many times (often poorly) since that today it may be more likely to be seen as the bad kind of corny humor than the good kind.
On that note, up until 1980 Leslie Nielsen was a respected dramatic actor, and the whole joke with his character was seeing him bring his usual gravitas to this kind of material. And of course, afterward his career took a hard right turn into doing nothing but these kinds of films, until they completely eclipsed his public image.
This is the case with so many actors from that film: Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, etc.
The film Wrongfully Accused can also suffer from this. At the time, it was actually part of the joke that the film cast such a wide net in the material that it parodied. Nowadays, every parody movie is like that, and the worse for it.
Alien and its sequels. It looks like a clichéd movie, but invented or popularized most of the relevant tropes for that genre (though even at the time it was intended to do little more than ride the coattails of Star Wars), as well as propagated its xenomorph alien designs throughout many other films.
However, the fact that Alien still looks excellent today (great sets, lighting and practical effects), has great pacing and has seven good actors wearing non-dated clothing reduces its potential to underwhelm younger audiences. Aliens actually feels slightly more dated, despite having been made seven years later.
An interesting move on the part of the producers of Alien, that served to heighten the tension at the end, but which cannot work now, was to kill the characters off in reverse order of the fame of the actors playing them. It is difficult now to realize that John Hurt was probably the biggest box office name in Alien, having just done I, Claudius for the BBC, and the film Midnight Express, and that both Veronica Cartwright, who had been acting since childhood (she was Violet Rutherford on Leave It to Beaver, and the sister of Angela Cartwright of Lost in Space), and Harry Dean Stanton, a well-established character, were both much more bankable than Sigourney Weaver, who, at the time, was unknown. She had a single film credit, other than a brief role in Annie Hall, and a few TV appearances. Alien made her career. So, at the end, when no one is left alive other than the actress the audience had never heard of, it seems very unlikely that she will survive at all, let alone heroically. However, now, in the 21st century, she is Sigourney Weaver, Sigourney Weaver kicks ass, and the film could not end any other way. Knowing that she appears in all of the movies as the main hero also helps kill any sense of fear for her safety.
Alfred Hitchcock. This trope could just as easily be called Hitchcock Is Not Suspenseful. Anything of his was the defining work in suspense when originally produced, but looks sad and overdone now that it's been copied to death.
Alfred Hitchcock's suspense films have had much of the suspense removed due to the rampant parody. On the other hand, the Rear Window trope has been parodied so many times that some viewers are taken by surprise when the old film plays it straight instead of turning into a case of Stab The Salad.
American Beauty inspired so many other "dark heart of suburbia" dramas that the film has lost a lot of its initial impact. In particular, the "dancing paper bag" scene has been parodied/taken out of context so many times that the original sequence can come off as Narm.
Interestingly enough, American Beauty is quite similar to The Ice Storm, another "dark heart of suburbia" movie, which came out two years before American Beauty. (The similarities between the two might be coincidental, though, as Alan Ball wrote the original version of The American Beauty's script before The Ice Storm – or the novel of the same name it was based on – had been released.) This would make The Ice Storm the original Seinfeld Is Unfunny example, except that The American Beauty is much better known, and therefore the likelier inspiration for the various films that followed.
Animal House. The falling-ladder scene has little effect for the children of Generations X and Y, who saw it copied in countless cartoons and teen movies.
Tim Burton's 1989 take on Batman was considered dark and edgy at its time: perhaps not compared to the Batman comic books of that era, which influenced it, but certainly compared to the campy1960s live action show or the 1970s animated Superfriends, which was how most of the public was familiar with Batman. Now it seems tame, especially when compared with the Christopher Nolan films.
The Birth of a Nation invented or popularized many features that are standard in modern cinema, such as cutting between different locations to increase suspense during action scenes. Someone watching the film nowadays won't think twice about these innovations, while the blatant racism and hero-worship of the Klan are unfortunately a lot more noticeable.
Blazing Saddles is rumored to be one of the first, perhaps the first film ever, to include a fart joke. Take a wild guess.
Broadway Melody, the second film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture and the first all-sound musical, was a huge deal when it was released. However, its look at the goings-on on a Broadway musical became clichéd by the mid-'40s, thanks to nearly every movie about Broadway copying its basic set-up. Add the fact that as it was the first movie musical, Hollywood still had a lot to learn about blocking musical numbers to avoid looking 'stagey'.
Bullitt was considered the definitive car chase movie in its time, but was soon supplanted by The French Connection and others.
Blade. The rebirth of the Super Hero movie genre also comes to mind. Most people credit X-Men's smooth cinematography and darker take...and completely forget that X-Men borrows heavily from it. At the time it was a sleeper hit and probably the film that truly revitalized the comic book movie market after Batman & Robin single-handedly killed it.
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. A lot of stuff regarding it. Many modern audiences have never even heard of it, but they've certainly felt its presence through imitation.
More than a few critics and film scholars regard Citizen Kane as bloated, pompous and self-indulgent, although they don't dispute that it pioneered much of the visual vocabulary and storytelling techniques of cinema, or how it was trying quite a few new styles of film-making for the time.
This was the prevailing opinion of Casablanca at the time of its release. All involved with the production viewed it as just another picture, albeit one with a slightly better-than-average cast. In a documentary about the making of the film, one of the technicians said something to the effect of "We were responsible to the studio for making fifty movies a year. Casablanca was just number thirty-eight." The talk of it being a great American film didn't really begin until a couple of years after Bogart's death.
The ending of Carrie is often ranked up there with some of the greatest scary moments of all time and many people wonder why without knowing that it was the first horror film to have a shock ending. Nowadays it's practically expected to shock the audience one last time and the scene in Carrie doesn't seem so scary anymore. In something of a subversion, the shock ending of Friday the 13th which blatantly ripped off Carrie is still considered quite scary to modern audiences.
Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Silent comedians like them were hilarious for a very long time. These days they're still funny, even to audiences who have seen their routines imitated countless times already. Chaplin's tramp was also subversive and constantly undermined any authority figure he came into contact with, including the police, who arrested him pretty frequently. Nowadays many people don't find Chaplin that funny, but he pioneered many jokes, situations, gags in comedy films and in comparison with many other slapstick comedians of his time his work was groundbreaking.
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the first truly successful (in western markets) Chinese Wuxia (periodic Kung-Fu) movie, suffers from this. It's much harder to screen such a movie nowadays because people can't look past the "tacky" kung-fu with its flying about and running on walls - which has been imitated repeatedly in many "Hollywoodian" action films for the past 10 years. Of course, it wasn't original per-se, as Wuxia films were already seen as tacky in their homeland (China), but in the west this was regarded as a new phenomenon and therefore taken with more respect. It won an Academy Award and still lingers around the middle of the IMDB's Top 250 list - and for many good reasons other than the dazzling fights.
Daredevil, the 2003 film, despite its shortcomings and disappointing box office performance, it was praised as a superhero movie done right, compared to each of its predecessors which gives out a varying degree of surrealism throughout each scene as if telling the viewers that they should never forget that they're watching a superhero movie. Viewers who enjoyed watching Daredevil in the theaters noted that certain scenes made you almost forget that this is a superhero movie. This apparently became a measuring stick for the superhero movies that followed, which used higher levels of realism, thus overshadowing this movie that, so to speak, took a dare.
Debbie Does Dallas. To modern eyes it watches like a porno Cliché Storm. That's because it was more or less the comedic template for the porn industry. Likewise, The Devil In Miss Jones for more artsy-fartsy dramatic fare.
John Holmes. Or specifically, John Holmes' massive penis. During Holmes' time in the porn industry, he truly was a unique specimen, a marquee name the likes of which only Ron Jeremy has matched among male porn stars. He wasn't very good looking, smart or a particularly good actor, but the sight of his penis was enough to carry any scene he was in. Of course, now there's a half-dozen guys in the industry of similar or greater size, so Holmes' main strong point was neutralised in the eyes of younger viewers, leaving many to wonder what's the big deal about him.
Die Hard. Eleven years before The Matrix, this movie revolutionized action movies to a similar degree, with a shift toward grittier and more realistic action, heroes that suffer from human weakness and distinct character faults, and a solid blend of humor, drama, and action. It reached the point when movies could be sold by the phrase "Die Hard on an X" — for example, Speed is "Die Hard on a bus."
Fritz Lang. Ditto the sci-fi tropes in Metropolis. And the criminal mastermind/underworld tropes in the Dr. Mabuse films. And the backwards countdown in Woman in the Moon. In fact, this might as well be called Fritz Lang Is Unoriginal.
By the way, the countdown didn't just influence movies. NASA stole it too! (Either from Fritz Lang, or more likely from Irving Pichel's Destination Moon, which was mainstream at the time NASA was being founded.)
Godzilla, the original 1954 film. At the time of its release, it was groundbreaking for the Japanese film industry. Many people today ridicule older Godzilla films for the reason of them being "Man-in-suit!!!" made films. What they fail to realize is that had it not been for suitmation, most special effects as we know them today (such as motion capture CG, which utilizes similar techniques to suitmation) would not exist.
This is despite the fact that Godzilla actually contained very few suitmation shots. Like other films at the time, it mostly made use of stop-motion and clever editing. (Although later films in the series were almost entirely suitmation.)
That said, the original may still shock modern audiences who expect something akin to the Lighter and Softer versions of the creature that were often aimed at children. The franchise went through a heavy case of Cerebus Syndrome. The first movie was very dark.
Even though the film's quantity of violent scenes was actually fairly low even in 1999, Fight Club was very controversial at the time for its brutally realistic depiction of hand-to-hand fighting. More significantly, it was controversial for its morally ambiguous ending, which was virtually unheard of at the time, since most movies ended with the main character saving the world or learning a morally satisfying lesson of some sort. Since then, far more violent and morally-questionable movies and television shows have been released, so Fight Club's general theme actually seems pretty run of the mill today.
Great Expectations. Modern viewers watching David Lean's adaptation of the Dickens classic might roll their eyes upon seeing Magwitch pop out of the frame at Pip in the graveyard like a cheap horror movie jack-in-the-box, genuinely startling though it is — because they won't know that this was the first time that ever happened in a movie. The same thing might occur with a seemingly dead Alan Arkin suddenly lunging out at Audrey Hepburn in Wait Until Dark. It shocked everyone at the time because they weren't used to the villain doing that after he'd been apparently killed off, but today most people will likely see it coming.
Halloween seems today a clichéd, formulaic slasher film. But it created the clichés and established the formulas.
See also: Scream. It lampshaded every horror movie cliche while still paying loving tribute, creating a tongue-in-cheek slasher/comedy genre that has been aped multiple times over nearly two decades.
When House Of Games came out in 1987, the idea that everything that happens in the movie is a huge con was still relatively fresh. (Though similar plots had been used in earlier movies, such as Sleuth.) Since then it has become such an established cliche of con artist movies that the viewers pretty much expect it, which is why the Plot Twist is much easier to guess now than it was in 1987.
The Italian Job. If you were to see it today, you'd think it was a fairly standard heist movie with a very literal Cliff Hanger. In 1969, however, it was positively groundbreaking. The chase scene with the Mini Coopers in Turin was the first of its kind on film. The focus on the crime, while not original, was highly unusual. The cliffhanger at the end was due to the film codes of the era, where criminals couldn't be shown succeeding.
Jackie Chan. Through the 1970s, Chinese martial arts films were a deadly serious business, with grim plots and frequent Downer Endings probably best known today from the films of Bruce Lee. Then Chan came along with the idea that you could make a martial arts film that was supposed to be fun, or even a straight-out comedy. Chan's autobiography gives a fascinating view of just how powerful a mindset he was up against when making his early comedy films like Half a Loaf of Kung Fu, with the public at large pretty much calling him a heretic. Today, these films can be pretty disappointing to people used to his later works where he felt much more comfortable throwing in jokes and wild stunts.
James Bond. Many, many of the things from this series. Some Bond tropes became so pervasive that most people accept them as natural parts of life without thinking about it. "The Name Is Bond, James Bond" is a good example. It had become so overdone that in the Continuity Reboot, they made sure to save it until the very end and to make it a Crowning Moment of Awesome instead of just tossing it in every time James met someone new.
When the movies starring Sean Connery first appeared in the early '60s they were the sexiest mainstream movies at the time. Coming out of the uptight Fifties and years before the sexual revolution in the later part of the decade Bond was incredibly risque. The credits sequences alone were hotter than most movies during that period. The first, Dr. No premiered in 1962 and made a big impact with Bond having casual sex and that famous -- and much-parodied -- scene of Ursula Andress coming out of the surf in the white bikini. From Russia with Love had a catfight between two scantily clad gypsy girls. Goldfinger one Bond girl was found dead naked and covered in gold paint, and another was named "Pussy" Galore! Now while Bond still does sleep with many women in each movie, all that's ever shown is the lead-in kiss and then cut to the next morning. As the years have gone by and sex scenes become more graphic, the seduction scenes in even the more recent Bond movies seem almost chaste. Also all the sexual innuendo and jokes that were part of Bond from the beginning now seems corny.
Bond was even receiving this treatment by the late '60s, thanks largely to countless parodies and ripoffs. When reviewing You Only Live Twice in 1967, a critic for Time magazine not-so-ironically compared the Bond franchise to that of Frankenstein, saying that "there have been so many flamboyant imitations that the original looks like a copy".
John Hughes. When he was making teen films, it was rather rare for there to be films based purely on teenagers and their inner angst. It was actually unique to take the usual school archetypes and see what makes them tick. Nowadays, with at least three generations of teen dramas that have replicated or even advanced from the analysis of such films as Sixteen Candles or The Breakfast Club, Hughes's bite doesn't seem as sharp. Ferris Bueller doesn't seem much like a suave troublemaker when compared to recent characters such as Tony Stonem.
John Woo. In similar vein to Jackie Chan, back in the 80s some guy from China created an entirely new genre labeled 'Gun Fu/gun ballet' and similar. He pioneered the idea of choreographed two-gun action scenes, popularized slow motion gun fight sequences in the west, and generally brought Guns Akimbo style into the mainstream. Nowadays films like Face/Off and Mission: Impossible II are criticized as copying The Matrix style of gun fights (even though Face/Off is older). Hang on, who was that guy who the Wachowskis were hugely influenced by when making The Matrix?
King Kong (the 1933 original). At the time of its release, people thought it had the greatest effects in film. Now, with almost 80 years of technology advancement, two remakes of which used it, the power is somewhat lost on most people.
On the other hand, the trope is reversed if you try to view Kong as a typical 1930s film. Most aficionados of Thirties cinema are more familiar with the mid-'30s and late '30s classics, made after the Hays Code against portrayals of sex and violence in American movies began to be officially enforced. As such, it can be shocking for modern-day viewers to see things like Fay Wray being stripped nearly nude by Kong and blood gushing from the bodies of the dinosaurs after Kong kills them. Indeed, quite a few viewers of pre-Code (1930-1934) Hollywood films have felt their jaws hit the floor at what they are seeing.
Koyaanisqatsi. Slow motion/time lapse footage of things like factories and traffic and clouds, put to music, was a new thing in the early '80s.
La Dolce Vita is a film where the "hero" is an amoral Casanova Wannabe journalist type who hangs around lots of decadent celebrity parties and can't get no satisfaction. Precisely what made it seem so racy and different in 1960 and so long and ordinary now.
Les Diaboliques was widely considered to have one of the most shocking original twist endings of all time when it was first released. But after fifty years of films copying this ending, modern audiences are often able to predict what will happen.
The Longest Yard (1974) or Slap Shot (1977). Anyone who sat down and watched these today would immediately groan. "Oh no, not another scrappyunderdog team struggling to overcome their personal issues as emphasized by their chosen sport and antagonized by a wealthier, better-equipped team of entitled (but excessively-pressured) jerks. I can't wait for the second act, when the team falls apart due to the captain's arrogance/the coach's inadequacy/the stars' rivalry and, in order to fixeverything and win the Big Game, the team needs to call in a ringer/go on a vacation/listen to a Rousing Speech/use the Power of Friendship."
The Lost Boys, when it first came out, was the first of its kind: An often very scary horror film that was also willing to make light of its roots. In a time when vampires were still commonly seen as Hammer HorrorChristopher Lee types, Joel Schumacher showed them as grotesque, sadistic monsters. Since then shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and True Blood have gone much further with the concepts — even adopting phrases like "vamp out" — leaving the film remembered for its retro cast, funky soundtrack, and Jack Bauer as a vampire.
In addition, Schumacher helped to birth another oft-imitated vampire trope: the "teen" vampire.
M. It's gotten to the point where a criminal saying "It's not my fault: I'm crazy!" is a tired and annoying cliché.
Mad Max 2 aka The Road Warrior. Pretty much every post-nuke movie since has featured crazed marauders on motorcycles and dune buggies fighting it out in the desert.
The Magician, a silent film from 1926 featuring a Mad Scientist Hypnotist. At the end of the movie, when the Big Bad's castle blew up, you may think to yourself, "Hey, they stole that scene from Bride of Frankenstein", but then you realize that Bride wouldn't be made for another nine years. While The Magician may seem like a hopeless Cliché Storm now, (borrowing liberally as it does from Mary Shelley, Svengali, and Victorian Melodrama,) it did go on to influence many horror films that were to follow in the coming years.
The Matrix, heavily influenced by anime, religion and the western, caused such a major shift in culture — and Special Effects, with the proliferation of Wire Fu and Bullet Time in action sequences — that it was imitated constantly. The "bullet dodge" scene in which Neo bends over backwards to avoid being hit by the Agent's shots has been parodied to death, such that we don't realise (or remember) that it actually was cool for the time. Interestingly enough, it also suffered from Older than You Think when it premiered to a young audience who were not aware of the multitude of Eastern and literary influences in the movie.
Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead George Romero's original "Dead" trilogy is credited with pretty much inventing, or at least solidifying, the modern Zombie Apocalypse story: the Dead rising to feast on the flesh of the living, the total breakdown of society as a result, a small group of humans forced to work together to survive but generally failing due to Humans Are Bastards, and fairly bleak endings stressing the Inferred Holocaust, etc. Many of these elements have been imitated so closely by imitators that they have gone on to become clichés of the genre, meaning that later viewers will often view these movies as being derivative themselves.
Porky's once had a reputation for being a definitive sex-comedy, with its "shower scene" having a memetic level of hotness ascribed to it. In retrospect though, the film isn't really that funny or that sexy. This is strange as some of its contemporaries (eg Animal House) have held up very well.
The Poseidon Adventure. Just try to watch a Disaster Movie and not spot any scene, plot, or subplot that hasn't either been spoofed, homaged, recreated, or otherwise by even any action movie. It can be quite hard to believe that this movie was so novel back in the 70s (even today, it's an unlikely premise), or that several scenes in The Towering Inferno had people on the edge of their seats. Heck, nowadays, people can probably point out how the elevator scene in The Towering Inferno is actually quite silly.
Psycho was groundbreaking for its time by essentially founding the slasher film genre, but now the infamous shower scene has been referenced (and often parodied) by other horror films to the point of saturation.
Rashomon. Rashomon Style is always exactly the same trope they used in that other damn movie.
Revenge of the Nerds. Being a nerd used to mean something. Originally seen as the first movie that was made specifically with the intention to empower nerds. Now the movie is seen as a weak analogy of nerdy social ostracism to the genuine prejudice faced by racial minorities. One could understand questioning how the films most memorable characters (the openly gay Lamar and the pothead pervert Booger) actually qualify as nerds. With passing time, it's been realized that "true nerds" (as opposed to the caricatures in this film) are still not considered any cooler. All of the so-called cool nerds were never true nerds to begin with.
In almost a bizarre case of Life Imitates Art and thanks to computers and the internet becoming not only mainstream but a way of life, it's this caricature of "nerds" that 'has' become cool. Unfortunately for "true nerds", this caricature is closer to being Hollywood Nerd (Type 1) than an accurate depiction. The entire image of a shy, skinny pale guy with glasses doing cool things has started to get a bit of romanticism attached to it; however, even in those cases, those with that view fail to realize that the reason why a nerd can do all these cool things, is because of the sheer amount of time spent on learning and working on those things.
Saturday Night Fever. There was a time when this movie's dance with the diagonal pointing was actually a new idea.
In an early scene in the 1955 comedy The Seven Year Itch, Richard Sherman (Tom Ewell) is apparently trying to be witty by noting offhand that the two men who live in the apartment upstairs from him are "interior decorators, or something." That just might have been a funny and shocking innuendo at a time when such jokes weren't often made. But now that just about every Camp Gay stereotype has been rammed clear through the ground, Richard sounds more like a naughty preteen boy trying to irritate his parents.
Sin City, at least in regards to its coloring techniques, quite possibly might be the fastest film to ever gain this status. At the time it was released, it was hailed for the unique way it isolated certain colors while the rest remained in black and white. With how fast technology has moved, with every new film trying to color itself in an eye-catching way to draw the audience in, it seems almost bland not even a decade after first being shown in theaters.
It was also one of the first movies to ever be shot with fully-rendered CGI backdrops alongside Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow and The Immortal. These days, the effect is no longer as exciting as it once was.
Not to mention the witch Maleficent screaming "HELL!" (albeit not in a profane context, and with the word mostly drowned out by a fiery explosion). In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, released 37 years later, there is an entire song entitled "Hellfire," and in it the h-word is sung several times.
John Ford's Stagecoach, to paraphrase the Halloween review above, "seems today a clichéd, formulaic Western film. But it created the clichés and established the formulas."
After having seen Luke, I Am Your Father parodied a million times, experienced the Expanded Universe, and gotten to see villains like Exar Kun or Darth Revan, and particularly after the two-plus decades of pulp sci-fi blockbusters that the film (directly or indirectly) inspired, coupled with the largely underwhelming response to the prequel trilogy, how many younger people are still able to watch the original movies completely seriously and see Darth Vader as an awesome villain?
Superman: The Movie was the first superhero blockbuster and its sequel, Superman II set the template for a superhero sequel. And yet, not only is it likely that younger audiences might find them boring, but many fans of the modern comics and animations blame the films — which create "the Donnerverse" — for the entirety of Superman's hatedom.
DocumentaryThe Thin Blue Line was one of the first documentaries to actually dare to produce reenactments in order to provide greater information about events, not to include narration, and not to identify people speaking on camera. While revolutionary in its time (and, more importantly, its effect of having the case reviewed and eventually overturned) even the most basic of television non-fiction programs have since adopted many of its techniques making it seem trifling to some modern audiences. An acknowledged groundbreaking classic of the genre is now made to seem almost amateurish.
TRON introduced the concept of cyberspace (a virtual world) to most audience members for the first time, something that subsequently became entirely routine, such that by the time of The Matrix (1999), it only needed to be explained THAT Neo was inside a virtual world, not what a virtual world was. Tron's use of computer-generated graphics was revolutionary, and served as midwife to the modern visual effects industry. The film even helped popularize the word "user" for a computer operator. (There was no consensus of terminology at the time; the word "computerist" was another popular term.)
3-D Films. For many early ones the plot was poor or non-existent, and many scenes were shoehorned in just to show off the 3D. They wouldn't be at all worth watching in 2D, and those flaws are jarring now that 3D is becoming popular again after Avatar. Thankfully, a lot of modern 3D movies tend to be quality on their own rights, since 2D versions are often released alongside. Even Avatar, the trend-setter for modern 3D Films, is perfectly enjoyable without 3D.
One would be hard-pressed to find a scene from any Stanley Kubrick film that hasn't been parodied/homaged to death.
WarGames. More than half the world's hacker films are sons of this one. Yet, some of those who see it now thinks "another hacker-boy-saving-the-world movie". No, he was the hacker boy who saved the world. (After nearly precipitating its destruction. Way to save on major characters.) It doesn't help that much of what gave WarGames its punch is fading from collective memory. Having a plucky young hacker almost precipitate World War III was an allegory on how nonsensical the Cold War was to the average person.
The Rambo movies seem almost cliched by this point, having seen all the action movies inspired by them.
Literature
Amadis Of Gaul is the most important knight-errant Chivalric Romance of all time, but today it seems dated, to the point that it has been all but forgotten and replaced in importance by its extremely angry Deconstruction, Don Quixote. Note, however, that Amadis Of Gaul is saved from the fire for its merits in the chapter where the library of Don Quixote is being burned.
Are You There God Its Me Margaret is seen as a pretty tame book by today's standards, but its frank discussion of puberty and religious issues were controversial in the 70s when it was written and resulted in it being banned from many schools.
Ball Four, a 1970 book by Major League Baseball pitcher Jim Bouton, was so controversial that MLB commissioner Bowie Kuhn called the book "detrimental to baseball" and tried unsuccessfully to make Bouton sign a statement saying the book was fictional. Today, its revelations about the behind-the-scenes activities of major league players, which made Bouton extremely unpopular among many in the baseball community for violating the "sanctity of the clubhouse", don't seem nearly as shocking. One particular example is the book's revelation of widespread amphetamine use by major league players, which seems quaint compared to the steroid scandals of recent years.
The Catcher in the Rye: J.D. Salinger's novel started a Wangst revolution in literature that it's never come out of. As a result, those who've read similar-style books before reading Salinger's book often write Catcher off as okay at best, a poor man's Chuck Palahniuk at worst.
The use of a casual, first person writing style definitely contributes heavily to making it dated as well. The use of slang and turns of phrase that are alien to newcomers makes it strange to a reader.
Try since Homer. Achilles sitting in his tent sulking, even after Agamemnon apologises, because he's the hero.
The Chronicles of Narnia nowadays seems just like a lot of other books you've probably read several times by now. Kids discovering a mysterious pathway to another world, finding their arrival to this strange new world to be predicted in prophecy, some of the residents are pleased to find them while others want them all dead, and soon everyone embarks on a large adventure to save the world... Yeah, it doesn't sound too original today. It almost sounds kind of like some children's stories, shounen manga series, a few video games, and a typical Fan Fic plot. Oh, and as for biblical references? * Yawn* . Name something today that doesn't draw from The Bible heavily.
The same goes for the inventors of "classic" detective fiction, Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie in particular. Many of the stories and novels by both are stuffed with clichés and twists that a modern-day reader has seen a bit too often - but they invented them.
The Discworld novel Equal Rites was originally a subversion of the "witches = bad, wizards = good" trends in fantasy. However, the conventions used have since become so commonplace that today the book just sounds preachy.
Terry Pratchett was amused to be told he was 'following in the grand tradition of J. K. Rowling', given that he's been writing and published for two decades longer.
Dr. Seuss. When he started producing books for children featuring nonsensical word usage and surreal art, he was considered both genius and highly controversial, which tends to go right over the heads of modern readers.
Dracula being the ultimate vampire Trope Maker, has been so thoroughly ripped off, parodied, retooled and revamped that even many Goths are sick of him.
To a lesser extent, this happened to Dracula's precursor, Varney the Vampire, which invented the idea of a vampire with fangs, puncture marks on the throat, and the sympathetic vampire. However, despite its influence it was never a particularly good book to begin with.
Dracula is an interesting case, in that he has become so Lost In Imitation, those who read the original novel are generally shocked by his inhuman appearance, total amorality (Stoker's Dracula never showed any signs of guilt or love), and clever schemes, rather than the endless tales of tragic beauty and Vampire Vords that he is incorrectly remembered for.
The Dungeons & Dragons books. People new to it (and in particular the Forgotten Realms novels) and who scoff at Drizzt being the emo badass rebel from an evil society don't realize just what hot shit those books were in the early '90s—and that they inspired a lot of the clichés they deride the books for using. Author R. A. Salvatore has even had readers come up to him at conventions to say "A good duel-wielding Drow ranger? How cliche!"
Ernest Hemingway. Read any other novel or watch a movie on wartime experiences before reading A Farewell to Arms. It'll end up looking like just another run-of-the-mill war story.
Howard P. Lovecraft. Compared to some of the tropes they've arguably spawned, certain stories of his can come across as charmingly old-fashioned and not necessarily all that horrifying to the modern reader. Or, in the case of his obvious racism, not-so-charming.
Jane Austen and to a lesser extent the Bronte sisters suffer from this. Their novels have had a massive influence on romance novels to the point that they may appear hopelessly clichéd and even a bit low brow because of the countless imitators.
The Joy of Sex and Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex* * but Were Afraid to Ask weren't trite when they were published.
Lost Souls. While Poppy Z. Brite's novel probably didn't originate of a lot of vampire clichés — bisexual, seductive vampires, New Orleans, Goths, Ho Yay — these tropes were a lot fresher when she and Anne Rice wrote their books.
Rice's Vampire Chronicles suffer from this even harder, if only because she was more prolific than Brite and she's much more well-known in the mainstream. Lestat in particular is the poster child for this. The "sexy Eurotrash rebel-without-a-cause in literal leather pants" character is so cliche in modern vampire fiction that people groan when they see it. Somewhat hilariously, it was a major criticism of the Queen of the Damned movie.
J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings: This book popularized most of the cliches found in fantasy today, but modern readers may well find it unspeakably boring, purely because everything in it has since been subverted, inverted, parodied, and otherwise done to death. Aside from that though, it also has lots of Unbuilt Trope which are actually not like what non-readers think the book contains.
Tolkien might be an aversion to this trope. While there is no question he was influential in many regards to fantasy, very little of how he described various parts of his fantasy world actually survive in what is now considered generic fantasy. This also isn't factoring in that Tolkien was very inconsistent with a lot of his own lore. Depending on what you were reading, orcs and goblins ranged from being different words for the same exact creature, different tribes of the same creature that are identical, different tribes of the same creature except the goblin tribe was slightly shorter on average, two related species, or completely different and unrelated creatures.
But this still leaves us with, well, defining the stock races as mostly used today (elves existed prior in many different forms in different mythologies, from little wingy tinkerbells to something you'd call a dwarf in modern fantasy, while now everyone thinks "pointy ears"; orcs were new, at least the name; elf-dwarf relations; dwarfs as always bearded miners) as well as other more general formulae. Actually, quite a bit survived, especially in the common aspects of most fantasy.
Michael Moorcock. A good bit of his work falls into this, especially The Elric Saga. Like Lord of the Rings he created or expanded upon many fantasy tropes that are commonplace now. Hell, even one of the introductions to the new paperback collections of Elric's tale states this. Also all that crazy-ass, sexually deviant, creature-of-their-time, lone wolf super spy stuff (different from the way James Bond does it, mind you)? Well, that's Jerry Cornelius, possibly Moorcock's second most famous creation.
Neuromancer by William Gibson was hailed as a radical departure that overturned science fiction with its noir mood, gritty realism, and dystopian outlook. Now Cyber Punk looks old-fashioned and passe to some, and Shiny Looking Spaceships are back in vogue as unironic extensions of modern consumer products.
The Neverending Story. Similar to The Chronicles of Narnia, it can seem an awful lot like a rather standard read, albeit a long one for children. A child finds a mysterious book that appears to be a gateway to another world. He appears to have found himself written into the story of this mysterious new world, and finds himself embarking on all sorts of adventures in a realm of fantasy powered by human imagination, becoming part of it all along the way, then finally departing home at the end after almost losing himself to his own fantasy and defeating the Big Bad. Even if the entire story wasn't replicated too too much (Final Fantasy Tactics Advance comes close, however), a lot of the book's themes seem a bit...well, cliché. The plot itself doesn't seem to be anything new either.
Paul Clifford. Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton's fifth novel, was an immense commercial success when first published. Today, it is remembered only as the origin of the notorious "It Was a Dark and Stormy Night".
Sherlock Holmes. Some argue that he qualifies as a "stock character", arguing that even though he was the origin of various clichés, to a modern reader they are just clichés.
There was a Holmes story in which Holmes is sure that he got the right guy, but the guy has an alibi. What could possibly be going on? Can you figure it out? Turns out the guy had an identical twin. Bet you never saw that one coming, did you?
Holmes is a fleshed-out version of Edgar Allan Poe's Auguste Dupin. Dupin can extrapolate from tiny clues, scoffs at the clueless police and has a narrator friend who worships him. There's actually a Lampshade Hanging on this in the very first Holmes story.
The Snow Crash physical manifestation of the internet can come off as either a brilliant, eerie prediction of the future or a "I know this already" unsurprising setting depending on whether you read it before or after Second Life proved everything.
"A Sound of Thunder", a short story by Ray Bradbury, was about time travelers who went back to prehistoric times, killed a butterfly, and accidently caused a fascist candidate to win the presidential elections. Which was a really original plot, when it was written. However, those story elements are so trite now that when the movie loosely based on the story was made, it was criticized for using old, tired cliches.
Stephen King's books have fallen into this due to so many modern horror writers copying his style. When he first published 'Salem's Lot and Carrie, the idea of bringing horror out of gothic castles and into average New England towns revitalized the genre.
Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein features a Jesus-like human from Mars who can perform telekinesis, telepathy, and miracle healing simply by meditating. He spends most of the novel trying to "understand earth behaviour" and ends up bringing his followers sexual liberation. Most people nowadays tend to forget that Heinlein wrote the novel in the fifties but that it was published in the sixties, It was deemed publishable only when the hippie movement was already well on its way and ended up as a huge influence on the mentality of the '60s and '70s (predating Jonathan Livingstone Seagull by over a decade). Many attitudes in modern New Age philosophy are taken directly from Heinlein's work, often disguised as ancient Eastern wisdom.
A lot of Heinlein's works have ended up as this simply due to the sheer amount of influence he had on science fiction at the time. Starship Troopers and The Puppet Masters are two especially good examples.
Uncle Tom's Cabin: The characters seem incredibly stereotyped to modern eyes because the popularity of the book — and the minstrel shows inspired by or at least named for it — established those very stereotypes.
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: This book heavily influenced geek humor during the 1980s but now the humor seems too cerebral to today's audience. Also, Douglas Adams' humor doesn't translate well from the written page to the spoken-out-loud format due to his verbosity and the lower attention span of the modern audience. That would explain the 2005 movie which either didn't include most of the iconic lines from the book, altered them to sound more American, or substituted visual humor.
The Shannara franchise, particularly The Sword of Shannara. People today tend to look at it and see a blatant rip-off of The Lord of the Rings. At the time, people wouldn't have, due to Brooks' other innovations, including Elves that were human and fallible, a Mentor who was a whopping example of Good Is Not Nice, the aversion of Always Chaotic Evil, and of course, the twist ending (The Sword convinces The Big Bad of his Dead All Along status), and the After the End setting. Nowadays all those things are so common that modern readers tend only to notice the flaws and the similarities to Lord of the Rings, instead of the differences.
Well, possibly there were a few people who wouldn't have, but many people absolutely did view The Sword of Shannara as a blatant rip-off of The Lord of the Rings when it first came out. Jokes predicated on its derivative nature were extremely common in fandom circles at the time.
Annie on My Mind. The villains are one-dimensional, the romance develops in a short time (a month or so), and the heroes, Woobies or not, make some stupid decisions. These tend to turn people off the to the book. They forget that this was the first book to portray lesbians in a positive light, without having them turn straight or die.
One of the show's biggest indicators of this effect is the episode "The Chinese Restaurant". Now, it looks like a rather standard, funnier-than-average sitcom episode. In fact, in 1990, the idea of three characters standing around in a restaurant, complaining and bantering as they waited for a table in real time for 23 minutes, was considered almost completely unworkable by the network executives. They actually thought that there were pages missing from the script they were given. They fought the episode tooth and nail all the way to air date, fearing that it would be a disaster. Anyone who watches an episode from season 3 onwards of Seinfeld, then an episode from season 2, then "The Chinese Restaurant", would be unlikely to catch the brilliance of that episode, but they will undoubtedly notice a massive shift in quality and humor between the two seasons.
As explained by TV critic Jaime Weinman, a number of jokes common in television were originally subversions of other jokes, but have since become just as stale and formulaic, to the point of being parodied themselves. For instance, a character complaining about another character, then asking "He's Right Behind Me, isn't he?" was originally a clever Lampshade Hanging on the older recurring device where a character would walk within earshot just as another character was complaining about him or her. Now it's considered hacky, leading to parody on Futurama and CollegeHumor.
When Norman Lear made the pilot for All in the Family, he decided to use videotape instead of film to give the viewing audience the sense of being in the studio. Then every sitcom used videotape for the next twenty years and it became associated with hackneyed, lowbrow productions. All in the Family is neither hackneyed nor lowbrow, but the production value tells a different story.
Babylon 5 has slowly seemed less and less innovative as the traits it pioneered or popularized spread among sci-fi shows:
It was the first major sci-fi show, not counting anime, to have major long-term story arcs planned in advance. Babylon 5 was written from a full outline for all five seasons, nearly unheard of at the time.
It was the first sci-fi series (and one of if not the first series whatsoever) to be filmed in widescreen.
It gave the Darker and Edgier future and Used Future, in contradiction to Star Trek's utopia, a heavy boost of popularity (though it was nowhere near first with these).
It intentionally avoided (former trope) "Cute Kids And Robots." In fact, the term was coined in reference to B5 in order to describe what J. Michael Straczynski was declaring war on within TV sci-fi.
Blake's 7. Before there was Babylon 5, The X-Files, Firefly, and the Darker and EdgierBattlestar Galactica reimagining, there was this. In 1978, your sci-fi show protagonists were heroic, and landed firmly on the "good"moralityscales. The villains looked like idiots at the end. Everything was supposed to be shiny, and the future was supposed to be better. Even if you had rebels fighting an evil empire, they were supposed to strike and win! Instead, we had a bunch of criminals, mercenaries, and a failed revolutionary stealing a ship and using it for a personal vendetta. The "rebellion" never got above seven people, the villainess was one of the most Dangerously Genre Savvy characters to strut across a screen in stiletto heels, and the whole thing ended on one protagonist murdering the other and getting a summary execution from the Federation troops. However, it doesn't seem like anything shocking after gorging on anything made past 1992, where every sci-fi setting is a Crapsack World, the "heroes" are dubious at best, and the best ending you'll manage is a Bittersweet Ending.
Yes, but the 1992 movie had already tread that ground in establishing the origins of Buffy herself. (Then again, not as many people saw that flick at the time.)
The Buffy/Angel romance. Back then it was pretty unusual to have a romantic relationship between a heroine and a vampire. Then we got Twilight, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries...
The Cosby Show suffers greatly from this. With all the shows that patterned themselves after it (if not ripping it off outright), younger viewers might openly scoff that this is the show that saved the Sitcom format when it debuted. (Especially if they've seen only the latter seasons, where Seasonal Rot set in.)
CSI: Crime Scene Investigation. With the ongoing slew of crime procedural TV shows, it's difficult to realize that when it came out, a plot involving crime forensics and laboratory work was considered as fresh and clever.
Then you realize that Quincy was doing that long before CSI came out, predating both that and Bones by decades, just without all the gratuitous gore tossed in.
David Letterman. His whole comedic sensibility (Middle American pop-culture-obsessed smartass, with a dash of intellectualism) was incredibly fresh and innovative in the early 80s, and exactly the kick in the pants that the stale TV talk show format needed. These days it's hard to find a talk show not heavily influenced by Letterman (even his short-lived 1980 morning show has Spiritual Successors like Ellen), so people really take him for granted now.
Degrassi Junior High (and its sequel series, Degrassi High) were critical and commercial darlings when they premiered in the '80s. Degrassi was the first Teen Drama that dealt with teen pregnancy, underage drinking, and other such issues without censorship, Deus ex Machina happy endings, or the over-the-top melodrama of an After School Special. It also amazed critics that the adults aren't always right, or that when they are, a teen might not listen to the Golden Moment speech. Plus, it put in just enough Soap Opera and continuity to make you care about the characters. More recent Teen Dramas (largely influenced by Degrassi itself) go much further with all of this, until the older show looks like a bunch of strung-together moral fables. Fans of Degrassi: The Next Generation often find the older show quaint.
The sequel series ended with a Darker and EdgierGrand Finale, "School's Out", that attracted controversy for showing nudity (a single shot) and a famous use of a swear word ("You were fucking Tessa Campanelli?") during pre-watershed hours. In the intervening years, cable television has gone much farther with swearing on television, to the point that anyone watching "School's Out" would fail to see what the big deal is. Better yet, the mature subject matter (exemplified by two of the characters getting into a car crash and a man cheating on his girlfriend with another classmate) has been continually topped by Degrassi: The Next Generation.
The Dick Van Dyke Show is a well-written, well-acted classic American sitcom, but modern audiences would probably find major cliches in every episode because every plot involves many major sitcom tropes and conventions. However, those tropes still would have been pretty new in the early '60s, and the plots develop the sitcoms tropes a little more than later sitcoms would.
Doctor Who. Some of the older stories were thought-provoking, mesmerizing, and quite frightening to their audience. But now, they might be looked at as having poor pacing and production values.
And anyone who thinks Doctor Who is a very lame sci-fi cliché and dumbing down of the genre should be asked to remember that it premiered in 1963.
Friends is beginning to fall into this. While it is still regarded as funny, and a benchmark that other comedy sitcoms try to reach, the impact it had is largely forgotten after the slew of other shows that followed.
At the time, it was unique for a show to have a cast of young people who could be romantically paired up in all different ways. Pretty much every heterosexual combination between the main cast was explored during the series (except for Ross and Monica, of course). This type of series premise has since become the norm.
Things like the coffee house, now a cliché, were actually considered 'too hip' by the executives, and they had to be talked into accepting it.
Homicide: Life on the Street. When it started, it was acclaimed for its gritty, realistic depiction of police politics, rule-bending and personal lives, as well as for making good use of arc stories. Nowadays, all of these things are pretty much standard in TV dramas in general, not just Police Procedurals. And compared to its spiritual descendant, The Wire, it practically looks like Keystone Kops.
Much the same could be said for that other acclaimed '90s police drama, NYPD Blue. Not to mention the show that really inspired all of these, Hill Street Blues, which was revolutionary in 1981 but can seem downright quaint to the modern viewer.
The Honeymooners was groundbreaking when it was created. But it has produced so many imitations, including ones aimed at demographics far younger than what the original was aimed at, that most new viewers of the show are likely to be familiar with the ideas behind it before they ever see it. This naturally dilutes the humor.
Particularly the pairing of Jackie Gleason and Audrey Meadows. Gleason himself said people would never believe a pretty woman like Alice would marry a guy like Ralph. It's so common nowadays, it's a trope.
I Love Lucy is perhaps the oldest surviving television sitcom. It was the first one recorded on film for posterity...
Kamen Rider. There's a similar argument for this franchise as well, or maybe a subversion. The Showa era formula (cyborg destroys the terrorist organization that rebuilt him) has been done to death and is now avoided the Heisei era shows, to the point that either part of the phrase "Masked Rider" sometimes doesn't apply to a specific series. Which makes the Showa Riders revival manga Kamen Rider SPIRITS so appealing: it takes the phrase "Kicking it old school" and runs with it.
When Law & Order first appeared in 1990, it was unthinkable to have a show so willing to discuss controversial topics such as abortion, racism, corruption and child abuse. Since then, shows like The Wire have gone further with the "Crime Drama as a social platform" concept than anyone could have imagined.
Lizzie McGuire: Nowadays it seems like a boring show, especially since Disney has copied its format (female protagonist, female best friend, male best friend/possible love interest) for every one of their shows, but it was different from all the shows on Disney Channel back when it came out.
The Monkees, believe it or not, was extremely influential, as the group’s television-music combo format was seen back then as a brand new way to market music for their teenage audience. It worked almost too well (they sold over 35 million records in 1967 alone, beating out The Beatles and The Rolling Stones that year…combined!), as nearly every other popular music franchise would copy this. Their televised “music videos” or “romps” are considered by many to be the first of their kind.
In fact, The Monkees had influenced a lot more in this genre than most people realize. In the late 1970’s, Monkee Michael Nesmith took this concept and created some of the first music videos, leading to the very FIRST music video program PopClips, which aired in 1979-81 on a then (very) young Nickelodeon. Apparently, Nesmith’s ideas were so brilliant, that the powers that be stole and warped his series to create a "certain network" which was launched in 1981.
Monty Python's Flying Circus was, in its day, a genuinely innovative, intelligent and surreal sketch comedy show which pioneered several comedy techniques, including subverting the form by running credits at the "wrong" point in the show and putting spoof entries in TV listings magazines. Those that it didn't create, it certainly popularized, to the extent that plenty of others lacking the panache and originality of the original ensemble have shamelessly aped their work. It says much that a highlight and selling point of a twentieth anniversary compilation was that it didn't contain the (in)famous Parrot Sketch which many people can quote by memory, even if they would at this stage rather forget it. Also, much of the verbal humor doesn't translate cross culturally.
This trope is explained as well as anywhere by Terry Jones:
"One of the things we tried to do with the show was to try and do something that was so unpredictable that it had no shape and you could never say what the kind of humor was. And I think that the fact that 'Pythonesque' is now a word in the Oxford English Dictionary shows the extent to which we failed."
The Muppet Show. When it first started, defining the area of the action with the camera's frame of view instead of the physical set was innovative for a television show. During the late 1970s and early 1980s the show was both aimed at adults and children, while nowadays it has become exclusively a children's show.
Oz. Aside from being HBO's first one-hour drama, it was shocking in 1997 to have a show which was so blatant about depicting drug use, male rape, extreme violence and deeply reprehensible protagonists. Since then both The Sopranos and The Wire have outshined it in acclaim thus dooming the brilliantly acted, well written series to being known for its more superficial elements and retroactive recognition of famous cast members.
The Real World, among the very firstReality Shows, just a Reality Show, no other gimmick, just a bunch of kids sitting around in a house, acting pissy at each other. Revolutionary in 1993, every Reality Show you've ever seen only more boring today.
Saturday Night Live. In its early days, it was considered revolutionary, groundbreaking, and taboo due to its willingness to just say and/or do anything crazy, stupid, and/or controversial and hope the censors don't crack down on them. Through modern eyes, now, not so much, thanks to SNL's many dueling shows that try to capture its humor (i.e., Fridays, In Living Color!, MADtv, Mr. Show, etc), the show's near-constant change of cast and crew members, and the fact that the show puts itself on a cycle of Golden Age, Seasonal Rot, Dork Age, and comeback in order to stay alive. While some modern seasons have their moments of being that outrageous show it was in the 1970s, a lot of fans (particularly the ones who loved the original cast from the 1970s) will argue that "It's just not the same."
SCTV. Speaking of network TV sketch shows that suffer from Seinfeld Is Unfunny syndrome, when it premiered in Canada (and later, the United States), the sketch comedy show was a critical and commercial hit. By mixing deconstructive parodies of popular and lesser-known works with absurdly specific Canadian-centric humor, the show won over a lot of fans (it also helped that SNL had plunged into Seasonal Rot in the 1980s, so shows like SCTV and Fridays became favorite substitutes for SNL). The show was lauded for having a stellar cast (who would all go on to successful movie and television careers, making it a who's-who of comedy talent, much like SNL), and being a trailblazer for new concepts in sketch comedy (i.e. running gags that spanned the entire episode, long camera shots in sketches, and more absurdist humor than what one would find on SNL or even Monty Python). Today, many viewers would look at the series and think it's either too quaint or boring (because the nature of the sketches and jokes - which reference late 70's and early 80's subculture - fly right over their heads), even though the series essentially created the foundation of modern Canadian comedy shows.
Laugh In. Although these days it seems pretty predictable and safe, at the time at the time it was very decidedly neither. Moreover if there wasn't Laugh In first, we probably wouldn't have had Monty Python or Saturday Night Live.
Sesame Street. Every single children's television show today owes a tremendous debt to this program for blazing the trail. Now that everybody does it, it's hard to remember that Sesame Street INVENTED quality, research-based, curriculum-based, entertaining and educational children's TV that has an ethnically diverse cast and doesn't talk down to its audience.
The Sopranos. In 1999 when it came out it was rather unusual for a television show to feature a morally questionable protagonist, especially a criminal. It was so unusual that David Chase had to fight HBO about whether or not Tony could commit a murder in the fifth episode of the series because HBO was scared of putting off fans. Over the years series with anti-heroes and villain protagonists have become dime a dozen with popular series like The Shield, Dexter, and Deadwood all featuring protagonists that commit criminal acts including murder on a nearly weekly basis.
Star Trek: The original series has a camp reputation, and has been endlessly parodied and mocked. People forget that Star Trek was THE trailblazer that has influenced every science fiction series after it (and even influenced non-sci-fi shows as well) up to this day. In 1967, three of the five nominees (including the winner) for the Hugo Award (awards for science fiction and fantasy) for Best Dramatic Presentation (which at the time included both television episodes and movies) were episodes of Star Trek. In 1968, the show did even better: all five nominees for Best Dramatic Presentation were Star Trek episodes.
In fact, society has changed so much that some of the most radical and innovative things it did are now almost entirely overlooked. A black woman, as a military officer? Said black woman, kissing a white man, at a time when that kind of thing would get you arrested (or worse) in large parts of the U.S.? The show's portrayal of race was so far ahead of its time that when Nichelle Nichols considered leaving the show to return to musical theater, Martin Luther King Jr. himself insisted to her that she needed to stay, telling her that the show's depiction of race relations was not only unprecedented, but exactly the kind future he dreamed of, and that Star Trek was the only show he and Coretta let their children stay up to watch.
It also avoided (see Babylon 5 above) "Cute Kids And Robots", at least among the regular cast, which was one reason science fiction fans at the time considered it a better, more serious show than much of the science fiction on television.
On the other hand, the German(-French) seven-part series Raumpatrouille - Die phantastischen Abenteuer des Raumschiffs Orion (French title: Commando spatial), which was produced at the same time (its first episode was aired on German TV nine days after that of Star Trek in America), is regarded by many German fans as equal to the original Star Trek in many respect and superior in some, most notably the roles played by its female characters. Raumpatrouille also gradually acquired a bit of a camp appeal as due to its budget limitations some prominent spaceship parts are not hard to recognize as household implements.
Hell, even The Next Generation hasn't really aged that well. At its time, it was noted for taking everything about the old series and modernizing it (as well as adding some twists of its own). Nowadays, with spinoffs doing the same thing and other shows going further where it could never go, the only thing it has going for it is Patrick Stewart.
The State was actually a pretty controversial show for its time, and pushed the envelope for what could be shown on TV, even cable. It actually attracted quite a few negative reviews in the media for this alone, of which it marketed itself off. Today though it looks pretty tame, and not much worse than the more raunchy sketches on Saturday Night Live. In fact despite the horrendous Network Decay since it's been on, The State doesn't really go much further in controversy than most current programming on MTV, and it's safe to say anyone in the target demographic today probably won't see what the big deal is.
The Super Sentai franchise (and to a lesser extent, tokusatsu shows in general) suffers from this, but not because of imitators but rather, itself: it has lasted for so long that it takes genuine effort to create an original premise and sustain it. This is likely why so many of the newer series eschew tech-driven stories in favor of fantasy, along with the advent of CG over People in Rubber Suits.
Survivor. A decade after its first American broadcast, it's hard to imagine that it was ever considered shocking or innovative. Viewers found it horrifying that people were Voted Off The Island based on politics instead of merit, with the "evil alliance" being some of the most hated people in TV history. Every media critic in America, whether they loved Survivor or hated it, regarded it as a sign of deep troubles and neuroses within modern Western civilization. After all the Follow the Leader clones, people take it for granted that you can get people to do disgusting or amazing things just by waving one million dollars in front of them.
Even amongst Johnny-come-lately Survivor fans, it can be difficult to get into the earlier seasons. If you watch Borneo and The Australian Outback (the first and second seasons, respectively) you'll notice the game was majorly different back then than it is now... The Tribal switch was actually seen as the big twist of Africa (season 3). Nowadays it's in almost every season of Survivor, partly because it made things a bit less one-sided at the merge. (The game was dominated by the remnants of one team at the merge in Borneo and The Australian Outback. When the power shifts, it becomes more interesting to watch.) When one takes into account that there was nothing like hidden immunity idols or Exile Island... the first two seasons were actually kinda bland, weren't they?
Borneo and The Australian Outback were fair for their day, since at the time, the main draw of the show was the premise itself (being stranded on a deserted island, being stranded in the wild, etc). Since the emphasis wasn't on shocking twists and "blindsides", they can still hold up to the modern viewer who simply likes the adventure and/or voyeur aspects.
Jerri Manthey references this phenomenon in the Heroes Vs Villains season. When Jerri first appeared in the Australia season, American viewers hated her - she schemed against other players, and was the first certifiable "villain" of the show (so much so that when she appeared on that season's reunion show, she was booed off the stage). In the following seasons, other players would up the stakes in terms of villainy (arguably culminating in Russell Hantz's run in Samoa, whereupon he insulted fellow players, sabotaged his own team multiple times, tricked everyone and generally acted like an entitled savior). Jerri's "villainy" is now run-of-the-mill - practically every player backstabs their fellow teammates at this point.
Corrine from Gabon also helped take away Jerri's infamy from Australia. When someone openly disses another contestant's dead father (and refuses to apologize during the reunion show), that crosses the Moral Event Horizon beyond a point that any contestant can cross, female or not. Jerri, even at her worst, never acted that nasty.
The American version of Big Brother also gets this said about it, especially since there originally was no "power of veto" and there were almost no "twists" to speak of in the first two and three seasons. Considering how radically different it is, it can be very hard to appreciate the concept of the early Big Brother seasons. And not just in the American version where it's more competitive. (There was some degree of competition in the Brazilian Big Brother still.)
The Twilight Zone. The original was shocking. The best episodes still are, but once the show was known long enough for everyone to expect a Karmic Twist EndingOnce an Episode, the writing had to be that much better for the episodes to still work than they needed to be first time around. And the ante keeps getting upped, because viewers get savvier with the conventions and because other works go ever farther...
The Ultra series suffers particularly bad from this. To some it looks goofy and stereotypical, but it established so many reoccurring elements in Japanese Cinema (from Humongous Mecha to Kamehamehadoken), that its impact can be difficult to appreciate.
Millionaire also popularized dragging out The Reveal to increase suspense, and especially using a Commercial Break Cliffhanger to do so. The masses of imitators doing the same has turned this technique into a cliche and a Discredited Trope.
The Young Ones was considered anarchic and subversive in the early 1980s. In comparison with their successor Bottom many of the violent scenes (Vyvyan destroying something or hitting Rick over the head) can seem rather tame today.
The concept of professional partners eventually developing a romantic relationship is almost a requirement in crime dramas/FBI procedurals nowadays, but in the days of The X-Files' Mulder and Scully, it was a new idea.
Rich Man, Poor Man was the first miniseries, an exploration of long-form storytelling that's become completely standard today. As well, one of its biggest selling points was its frank depiction of sexuality, with the Moral Guardians up in arms over characters talking about "nailing" each other and a white woman considering an affair with a black man. Nowadays, of course, all that seems remarkably tame.
On Hogan's Heroes, "CBS presents this program in color." Viewers who have grown up on color TV are likely to have a reaction of, "Um, okay?" In the mid-60s, however, many shows were still in black-and-white, making Hogan's Heroes somewhat unique in that aspect.
The real motivation for this kind of thing was to let people who still had black and white TVs know just what they were missing.
More recent years saw programs boast, "Now in High Definition" for exactly the same reason.
Music
At The Gates's riffing style has been copied so much that AtG's album Slaughter of the Soul might seem predictable to a first time listener who's already acquainted with the over 9000 knockoffs.
Barbra Streisand, Cher, Madonna, ...three leading ladies of the music industry, almost all possessing huge gay followings, who also spent a fair bit of time doing things in the movie biz. Hard to believe they're some of the most innovative girls around, considering (at least in Madonna's case) every blonde pop singer from the nineties onward is compared to them or called their Successor.
The Beatles pioneered and popularized so many of the recording and musical techniques commonly heard in rock and pop music today that it can be hard for newcomers to truly appreciate how ground-breaking they actually were. In particular, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band can suffer from this. (It was particularly impressive for being recorded with only 4 tracks. In today's digital world, where everything can be done on a computer, most people don't understand what that even means and why it's so impressive.)
The Beatles do, for the most part, avert this trope, though - while people may not always recognize today how groundbreaking they are, they continue to be one of the most popular and beloved bands of all time, and their albums continue to sell out nearly a half-century after they were originally released. And every generation of teenagers seems to re-discover The Beatles (most recently, there was the popularity of Across The Universe and the Beatles edition of Rock Band). And it's rare to find anyone who actually denies The Beatles' influence. Even a lot of the Hype Backlash will still admit The Beatles were innovative, just that they weren't the only ones pioneering those things and don't like how they're often discussed as though they were.
The Beach Boys' "Pet Sounds" used groundbreaking techniques that are so common now listeners unfamiliar with their history might not recognize how revolutionary the album is.
Memphis power pop band Big Star's debut album #1 Record drew inspiration from The Beatles and The Kinks. It now sounds incredibly conventional but was astonishing around its 1972 release.
Bob Dylan. In the documentary No Direction Home, Dave Van Ronk tells a story about "House of the Rising Sun," which Dylan recorded on his (self-titled) debut album. The version he recorded was arranged by Van Ronk and Dylan had learned it from hearing him perform it live. After Dylan recorded it, so many people accused Van Ronk of ripping it off from him that he finally stopped performing it. Later, when the Animals covered Dylan's version the song, the same thing happened to him.
Boyd Rice. Play an old record by him to someone today and they might think that it's someone trying to learn to make a loop. They might not realize that Boyd was one of the earliest pioneers of sampling and record scratching.
Breaking guitars (or any other instrument). In the 60's, breaking your instruments on stage was seen as the epitome of badassness, rebellion and edginess. Today, breaking guitars is so overdone it's a rock n roll cliche.
Big & Rich. Although they never had much in the way of big hits, they brought a very rock-influenced sound to the genre, which spread once John Rich began producing and/or co-writing for other artists (most notably Gretchen Wilson) and record producer Dann Huff began playing up his own rock influences. Now, Loudness War is as commonplace in country music as it is anywhere else, and many people think that there's too much of a rock sound in mainstream country... but how quickly those same listeners forget that Garth Brooks and Shania Twain were just as rock-influenced in the 1990s, making their songs seem less "out there" in comparison. And if you go further back to the 1980s, you'll see these influences in Alabama, who won Artist of the Decade for that time because of their rock influence.
Before Big & Rich, there was Conway Twitty. Now seen as a lynchpin of classic country, he was never part of the Grand Ole Opry in part due to his "rock and roll sound".
Billy Ray Cyrus became popular in 1992, at a time when there was a trend toward "traditional country", and his very rock- and pop-influenced "crossover country" style (complete with the ubiquitous novelty hit "Achy Breaky Heart") and mulleted, musclebound, hip-wiggling pretty-boy stage presence was both very uncommon in the genre, and polarized many country purists who saw him as a Scrappy. His success, however, brought a younger, hipper, more rock-influenced audience to country music, and helped to give the genre more mainstream attention and airplay. You can see more exaggerated influences in stars like Blake Shelton or Kenny Chesney topping the charts, but Billy is still not acknowledged, and his daughter is now more well-known than he is.
Chely Wright. All the buzz about her coming-out as a lesbian and its impact on country music and its listeners has caused people to forget that she is not, actually, the first out lesbian in country music - K.D. Lang preceded her by a good 20 years or so.
k.d. lang was a bit of an outsider in country music, who was never quite accepted by the Nashville establishment as one of "their own" even before she came out as lesbian; it's not just a coincidence that her first album after coming out was a pop album rather than a country one.
Faith Hill. When she hit it big in late 1999-early 2000 with the massive crossover hit "Breathe", every single female act in the genre was cutting Power Ballads with a similar sound and similar incentive to cross over. These attempts usually were met with failure (except for Martina McBride getting a few huge crossover hits — albeit in 2004, after the craze died down), and what's more, Faith ended up hoist by her own petard when country radio shunned her very heavily pop-influenced Cry album.
George Strait. When he first hit the charts in 1981, he was markedly more country than his peers, most of whom were following the pop crossovers of acts such as Alabama, Ronnie Milsap and Kenny Rogers. The rise of similarly "neotraditionalist" acts like Randy Travis, Alan Jackson, and Clint Black in the late 1980s-early 1990s followed in George's footsteps. While many of his contemporaries have faded, George has somehow managed to keep his A-list status with minimal change to his sound, sometimes making it quite hard to remember just how much of a pioneer he is.
Gretchen Wilson herself seemed to spark not one, but two examples of this: besides being a rock-influenced creation of John Rich, her Signature Song "Redneck Woman" sparked a wave of spunky women-with-attitude types and anthemic songs about southern pride. The former trope has died down considerably thanks in part to Taylor Swift and Carrie Underwood's death grip on the genre, but the latter is still prevalent.
Johnny Cash and other acoustic music in general gets this treatment these days. Most teenagers think singers like Johnny Cash are boring. In his day, Cash was shocking to the Moral Guardians. These days, the acoustic guitar seen as a starting point for learning the guitar. It's had to imagine what music would be like today without the instrument.
Dance music. Most of it falls victim to this eventually. Not so long ago nobody had heard of acid house, rave, big beat, gabba, trip-hop, drum'n'bass, jungle... Anything that's new is so easily taken up and copied by imitators that it soon sounds totally conventional and often technologically primitive. (Think of MARRS "Pump Up the Volume", "Out of Space" by the Prodigy, or anything by Fatboy Slim for example).
Very few people nowadays might hear Suicide or Silver Apples, the two bands that arguably spawned electronic music, and guess that their origins are pre-disco.
The Doors are something of an aversion of this. They came from an era when music was populated by bands like The Beatles and The Beach Boys - bands whose music was light and (relatively) friendly. The idea of a band singing 11 minute apocalyptic tracts with Oedipal themes, who also wrote songs about serial killers and who were willing to acknowledge the horrors of the Vietnam War (who also happened to be led by a leather clad poet/filmmaker) was practically unthinkable. Forty years on, although Morrison is occasionally viewed as pretentious, their music still sounds as fresh today as it did then (if it sounds dated at all, that's only because of Ray Manzarek's ballpark-style organ), even if it's viewed as a major influence on many bands since, such as Pearl Jam, Echo & The Bunnymen, Nine Inch Nails...the list goes on.
Dr Dre's "Nothin' But a 'G' Thang". At the time, a hip-hip video with low riders, backyard parties and lots of posing in front of the camera was something new and different. Needless to say, it was certainly influential.
Eiffel 65 sounds a lot less fresh today after thousands of rappers ran the Autotune gimmick into the ground.
Eric Clapton. Although he was never as experimental as his contemporary, Clapton was a major influence on all rock after 1966. He almost single-handedly resurrected the Gibson Les Paul, one of the most ubiquitous guitar designs today. Not only that, he created (or popularized) rock guitar as we know it. His playing during this era inspired the "Clapton is God" graffiti. Hendrix himself was an admirer. Today, although he's still a skilled guitarist at 64, Clapton is mostly known for the light pop he recorded from the 70's onward. Even his watered-down acoustic version of "Layla" is arguably more familiar to younger generations than the original. He influenced just as many guitarists as Hendrix (usually both are cited), so his playing is often considered tired and clichéd. But he used to be kind of cool.
"Funk" effects in rock music (the "wah-wah" pedal, etc.). When these first appeared in the late '60s in works by bands like Cream, they sounded dangerous and even diabolical. But then, in the '70s, so many TV shows began to use mild funk flourishes in their theme songs that today a style that once offended so many people just sounds ridiculous. This was partially fixed in the early '80s, when (if only in that one instance) Michael Jackson's Thriller managed to make funk sound Badass again.
Gang Of Four's trademark sound to some extent: Starting around the Turn of the Millennium, a lot of post-punk/New Wave-influenced bands like Franz Ferdinand and Maxïmo Park started using minimalist, choppy guitar riffs and stiff but funk-influenced rhythms in a similar manner. This actually led to a resurgence of interest in Gang Of Four (and eventually, a partial reunion), but it also can make their debut album Entertainment! seem less innovative than it was at the time. The key thing that still sets Gang Of Four apart is that these newer bands usually lack their overtly political lyrics and occasionally really harsh guitar feedback.
Grunge suffers from this:
Nirvana and Pearl Jam making it big in the early '90s is rightly heralded as a breath of fresh air, breaking the stranglehold hair metal had on mainstream rock and paving the way for grunge and alternative rock's ascendance from the college radio ghetto. Today, however, it is hard to avoid Nirvana, Pearl Jam, or their millions of rip-offs on the radio for even 15 minutes.
By the time Pearl Jam released Riot Act, quite a few younger music fans accused the band of being a Creed ripoff. (helps that Creed singer Scott Stapp has a voice which sounds exactly like Eddie Vedder's)
Even Nirvana, and a number of other popular alt-rock/grunge groups, were highly influenced by The Pixies. Kurt Cobain even admitted that "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was his attempt at ripping-off of a Pixies song. Listen to that song, then listen to "U-Mass" by The Pixies. The former is a sped-up version of the chorus of the latter.
Black Sabbath is often considered the first metal band. Take a moment and consider how weird that sounds.
That title is often given to King Crimson, which just sounds all the weirder.
It's kind of weird to hear that in the late '70s/early '80s, metal bands like Iron Maiden and Metallica were mistaken for punk. This was because "heavy metal" in the late '70s was seen as the slow or midtempo fare of Black Sabbath and Judas Priest, and it was punk bands that were known for playing at fast tempos. Thus, the early '80s genre of "speed metal" doesn't seem that fast compared to later shred-metal, power-metal and extreme metal bands, but in its day, metal played at the speed of punk rock was a novelty.
A serious casualty of this trope was NWOBHM pioneer Diamond Head. They were barely famous, in comparison to Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and Saxon, but their influence on Metallica was profound. Metallica's earliest recordings were covers of Am I Evil, Blitzkrieg and It's Electric. However, Diamond Head never became as famous as the band they influenced, and ended up opening for them at the National Bowl event in 1993, and chose songs covered by Metallica to get accepted by the crowd. However, a relatively subdued performance and Diamond Head not being so famous made them look and sound like a band covering Metallica. They split up shortly afterwards.
Helmet virtually invented the start-stop metal riff that dominated the late 90's. You'd never know it to hear their successors (e.g. KoRn, Deftones, etc.) but the idea came from jazz.
Isis and their blend of post-rock and Sludge Metal. One mixed review of their album In The Absence of Truth remarked "it's not Isis' fault that they sound unoriginal these days. All you have to do is pick up a copy of Decibel, open it to any page, and you'll find someone counting the group as an influence..."
James Brown. The beats and breaks of many of his songs have been sampled or imitated so many times that his music would sound very cliché now, if it wasn't, you know, James Brown.
Jazz. In an example of Older than They Think, it was considered radical and subversive when it came out, and many of the pioneers of the genre managed to push the limits of what their instruments could do farther than it was thought possible. Now, the genre as a whole is often overlooked as "old people's music," and the once-groundbreaking work of the likes of Louis Armstrong is basic stuff that every jazz student learns. (Student? They'd never teach this stuff, as recently as The Seventies!) Jazz first came to be in The Gay Nineties and arguably peaked in The Roaring Twenties, so this is Older Than Television and about as old as radio.
Jimi Hendrix, though to such a minimal extent that it's almost a subversion. He's been copied by almost every rock guitar player who followed ("There are two kinds of guitar players: those who'll admit to be influenced by Hendrix, and liars"), and while he no longer sounds quite as fresh as he did in the Sixties, there's a good fraction of his material that still just sounds out there.
The Kinks. Known in America mostly for "You Really Got Me" and "Lola", at the time they were a big hit in the UK, pioneering not only guitar hooks, but intelligent songwriting that would eventually lead to Britpop. Not to mention their riff for "Picture Book" getting ripped-off by Green Day. The fact that they were banned from the America for most of the 1960's didn't help.
Kraftwerk. In the 70's, they were mind-blowing, because few people had heard pure electronic music before. These days, the band's early work sounds primitive, simple, and just plain dated compared to the legions of bands it inspired.
KoRn. Many considered this to be the case with them, referenced by the band itself when they titled their third album Follow the Leader.
Larry Graham. When he first came out, his bass style of slapping and popping was new and refreshing. Now people (bass players excluded) complain it's boring and flashy.
Led Zeppelin suffers heavily from this. In particular are John Bonham's drum beats. (Especially on "When The Levee Breaks") His influence is so pervasive in modern rock that many younger listeners are legitimately baffled as to what's the big deal about him.
Jimmy Page, aside from influencing many guitarists of the era, also is credited with changing the way producers would record in studio. His technique of using multiple microphones and different distances created an "ambient sound" with more dimension than was conventional at the time.
Ludwig van Beethoven makes this trope Older Than Radio. The Mark Steel Lectures profile of Beethoven focused on this effect since his work is so old that it can't help but be merely another part of the classical repertoire. Beethoven was one of the first composers to write autobiographical tunes, one of the first to be independent of royal patronage, was unprecedentedly loud, and in behavior was the spiritual ancestor of the moody modern rock star. Mark imagined the same thing happening to today's pop music: (In an affected very posh BBC Radio 3 accent) "It's fascinating to note how the composer Mr Fifty Cent, blends the pianoforte with lyrics as they begin: 'I'm a cop killa, gonna shoot you up the ass'". And also notes how quickly the effect takes hold. Even now the kids can't really understand what was so different about punk rockers saying they were pretty 'vacant'.
Beethoven does mostly avert this trope, though, as far as classical music fans go. People still find his music earth-shattering centuries later, even those who had heard all the increasingly wilder and weirder stuff that followed in his footsteps. Richard Wagner is a much better example of a composer who was revolutionary in his time (one of the first to really push at the boundaries of tonality, to give just one example) and yet is considered hackneyed and clichéd now.
Marvin Gaye is remembered by many as a Memetic Sex God thanks to his hit songs "Let's Get It On" and "Sexual Healing." What people forget is that his signature is all over Motown, soul and R&B as we know it.
Michael Jackson. In the U.S. anyone who grew up after the first round of child molestation charges in 1993 grew up in a world where radio stations would avoid playing his music for both fear of controversy and the general opinion that his new material was inferior to the old, where the only time he ever appeared in the media was with whatever shocking and disturbing antic he came out with next, and where he was a far too easy target for comedians. After his death, hearing his Glory Days music played over and over again on the radio, and seeing his videos re-run on MTV, they fail to see anything unique about his style, as the best aspects of it have been standard pop music fare for the past 20 years. Add to this the fact that his big-budget music videos often look cheesy and/or low-budget by today's standards, and the datedness of the fashions, and synthetic sound, well, they could be forgiven for saying "Why was he ever famous to begin with?"
Even the moonwalk looks dated and cheesy now compared to all the dance innovations that have come since; so much so that it's easy to forget that almost every one of those newer dance moves was created by someone who started dancing precisely because of how well and truly blown their minds were by Michael Jackson doing the moonwalk.
The Misfits, a 1980s punk band that was considered edgy for their lyrics inspired by horror films and other horror related imagery. Now this, and their pop punk sound, would be considered mainstream emo.
The Ramones and the Sex Pistols were a reaction to the largely overproduced and masturbatory progressive rock genre, and decided to do the exact opposite by never really learning to play their instruments. The punk scene exploded into the mainstream in 1977, and to modern day listeners, both of the aforementioned bands sound either sloppy or overly melodic, depending on what you listen to.
Inversion: early punk music is now viable radio material, which it absolutely wasn't — indeed, was intended to not be — when it was current.
The ubiquitous Ramones t-shirt on every wannabe "edgy" C-list celeb is borderline example in its own right. Some Guardian music journalist claimed that "the kids" were turning to wearing previously shunned Nirvana/Grunge-era logos as a kind of backlash against '70s rock t-shirts.
As mentioned above, the original punk rock was a rebellion against the traditional rock 'n' roll sound. But after hardcore punk came with its extremely short songs, simple music and aggresive lyrics, the original punk rock looks like rock 'n' roll.
Ray Charles' fusion of R&B and Gospel vocal stylings in the 1950s (at a time when most R&B singers had more of a smoother show tunes vibe, a la Nat King Cole) was revolutionary and ground-breaking. Even controversial (Many Blacks saw such music as blasphemous). Sixty years later... Charles' sound sounds bog standard, if catchy.
Richard Wagner is one of the best examples of this in classical music/opera. There was nothing like what he was doing at the time. He pushed at the boundaries of tonality in a way no composer had done before; he invented the leitmotif (basically, a "theme song" for a character, object or concept), the staple of just about every film score ever; his writings about the Gesamtkunstwerk (the "total art work" that combined music and drama) had a huge influence on the development of not only opera but also musical theater. But these days, with over a century of increasingly weirder and more boundary-pushing work inbetween, Wagner's work sounds increasingly hackneyed and overwraught. Plus, pretty much every stereotype of opera in general - from fat ladies in horned helmets (though they were winged in the original), to the idea of opera as super-complex and daunting (previously, opera was divided into either lighthearted rom-coms or hammy melodrama) - comes largely from his work.
U2 When they first arrived, they were praised not only for being the first Irish band to hit it very big abroad, but also for the pure defiance in their lyrics. To have a group from Dublin speak so convincingly about issues that affected them was unheard of. Their music was like nothing else around. Years later They have become better known for Bono's preacherman antics while their political lyrics seem tame compared to bands like Rage Against The Machine.
The sound of U2, and in particular the guitar work of The Edge, eschewing solos and rock guitar conventions for an atmospheric/rhythmic, textural, chiming approach relying heaving on delay and effects was equally influential, but it's hard not to find an Edge-infuenced guitarist in a rock band (or generally U2-inspired group) since at least The Nineties.
Humorously, Velvet Underground was not terribly popular at the time, so people now theorize that every single person who liked Velvet Underground must have started a band.
The Who. At the time, the "sloppy" drumming by Keith Moon was revolutionary. Now it's a standard part of the rock landscape.
Yet, in turn, fans of The Who think Keith Moon invented the stereotype of the "wild and crazy drummer," when in reality it started much earlier with jazz drummers, particularly Gene Krupa.
It was, however, certainly a new thing in rock and pop music of the time, to approach the drum kit with ferocity and athleticism, and to use double-bass drums and more than five or six-piece drum kits and multiple cymbals on a pop or rock record.
The Compact Disc, introduced in 1982, was a revolutionary breakthrough in The Eighties, offering a cleaner, clearer way of listening to music than the vinyl formats of the previous sixty or seventy years. It brought, even in its 8-bit sound, more intimacy and detail, and captured the whole of the record, uninterrupted by record sides or weird formatting like the eight-tracks of The Seventies. It may have influenced the way new music is recorded, mixed, mastered and produced, as well, as music grew in complexity and digital precision to cater to CD listeners. The 78-minute storage capabilities might have led to longer albums (for better or worse). Nowadays, it (and the mp3) are the industry standard, and the novelty of it seems lost to newer generations.
Newspaper Comics
B.C.. When it started in the late 1950s, its use of blatant anachronism was fresh and original. Characters used modern slang and Stone Age equivalents of modern technology, and this was a source of much of the humor. Over the decades this approach became the fallback for comic strips set in the past, which hurt BC's reputation. (As did Johnny Hart's Creator Breakdown when he started inserting his religious views into the strip, but that's another story.)
Doonesbury. Many subsequent comic strips have imitated its dry wit. Indirectly if not directly, it had more influence on web comics than anything other than manga.
Doonesbury was the first newspaper comic to regularly have two punchlines in the last panel: a primary joke, and a secondary one which built off the first. It was special at the time. Now almost every comic does it, making those old strips seem run-of-the-mill instead of groundbreaking.
The Far Side by Gary Larson. The comic strip's format has been imitated so much and so badly over the years that it's kind of hard to appreciate his originals and just how groundbreaking they were.
Garfield. Yes, believe it or not, some of the style of the strip was considered risky at the time, and the published books of the series was some of the first to utilize the 'mini-sized' formats that many newspaper comic collections use today. Oh yeah, and quite a few of the strips in the early years were actually controversial and Jim Davis received many complaints for some of the gags he pulled. A lot of younger people would think you were joking if you told them this fact.
Professional Wrestling
The ladder match. At Wrestlemania X, it was very exciting and revolutionary for its time. Fans who grew up watching TLC matches may find this match boring.
The DDT was once a devastating maneuver but it is now a standard move so watching an older match end with one stretches fan's willingness to suspend disbelief.
Ditto for moves like the Power Bomb, Superplex, Stampeder (running power slam), and — going back even further — the Thez Press.
Watching old AWA matches, moves like the Clothesline and Dropkick were also match enders back in the day.
Also common among lucha libre and cruiserweight wrestlers. As the style becomes more popular, more wrestles add more flippy stuff. At Bash at the Beach '96, Rey Mysterio Jr. and Psicosis created the "highspot of the night" when Rey hit a huracarrana on Psic in mid-air. But nowadays, with Jack Evan, Ricochet and PAC and the like on the indy circuit doing double rotation corkscrew shooting star presses, that just fails to impress as it did at the time.
The Dynamite Kid vs Tiger Mask series in the early 80's seems slow-paced and short by modern standards. At the time, those matches more or less established the notion of "high-flying" wrestlers.
The brawling-based "Main Event" style used by WWE. While trite and cliche now, when it was first introduced in 1998 (to cover for Steve Austin's neck injury), was seen as revolutionary for allowing 90's style fast-paced action (as defined by wrestlers such as Bret Hart and Shawn Michaels) from sub-par wrestlers.
The Brawling Based style akin to WWE's "Main Event Style" can be attributed to Bruiser Brody's then innovative style in the 70s and 80s. Also, at the risk of being informal, how could the style Steve Austin "innovated" help Shawn Michaels and Bret Hart if they were gone (left or were semi-retired) shortly after he debuted it?
It didn't. It helped other, slower wrestlers have action-packed matches on par with what Bret and Shawn had done in the preceding years.
Back in the 1980s, even title matches were considerably shorter than they are today (Hulk Hogan's famous victory over The Iron Sheik, for example, was barely five minutes long!) and were filmed in long shot, making you feel that you were actually in the arena, thus causing the novelty of watching a wrestling match at home on TV to come off as rather pointless. Add in the general lack of music, pyrotechnics, and so forth, and modern-day fans might think they're watching a Stylistic Suck!
This isn't universally true; Hogan title matches were short, but there were many long matches in the early days (especially at the arena shows). One of the WWWF (now WWE)'s early huge gates was a Shea Stadium show headlined by a rare babyface vs. babyface match. Bruno Sammartino and Pedro Morales went to a 90-minute draw. Also most television matches weren't filmed at the arena (WWWF was a rarity in that regard), but rather at local television studios, and featured quite a bit of camera play. Most of the "so forth" associated with modern TV wrestling was actually invented by the von Erich wrestling family in Dallas. In 1982.
Trish Stratus was a huge success story during her career - WWE had brought in various models to build its women's division into more about T&A than athleticism (Sable, Terri Runnels, Debra) but Trish herself was the first (in WWE at least) to develop onscreen from an eye candy valet with patchy mic skills to a charasmatic star who is now regarded as one of the best female wrestlers in North America. These days at least 60% of the women's division in WWE (and some of TNA's roster too) is made up of former models brought in and trained to wrestle in the hopes of replicating Trish's success. Due to this and comparison with women's wrestling on the indie circuit, many purists label Trish as "overrated" and resent her for not wrestling on the indies.
At the time of her debut in WWE, Lita's style of wrestling was very innovative for female wrestlers at the time as moves such as headscissors, hurricanranas, and moonsaults were barely used by women in WWE. These days (see the Trish example above) due to having to work extremely short matches all the time, the models brought in by WWE will often learn flashy moves like hurricanranas to make their matches appear more exciting and cover up their lack of wrestling ability. If the models are former gymnasts this can work fine and they eventually develop into competent wrestlers (Eve Torres, Kelly Kelly) or they can just come across as sloppy spot monkeys (*cough* Ashley Massaro). When watching a WWE divas match, if a girl is doing only flashy moves and throwing weak punches and clotheslines then she hasn't been wrestling that long. If there's proper groundwork and chain work in there, she's a lot more experienced.
Also, moves such as moonsaults and hurricanranas are more staples of women's wrestling these days than men's in WWE at least due to the retirement of the Cruiserweight division.
Speaking of Lita, she isn't as innovative as she gets credit for. ECW had a female wrestler named The Prodigette who was doing moonsaults and headscissor takedowns and such, and unlike Lita, she rarely messed her moves up (Lita's moonsault was notoriously botch-prone). Unfortunately for Prodigette she was in Simon Diamond's unnamed stable, and TNN didn't like Diamond's character, so they didn't allow ECW to use him on the TNN show. So Prodigette got almost no exposure and was never picked up by any big name promotion after ECW folded. She's still working the indies under the names Angel Orsini, Angel Riptide, and Riptide.
Lita was innovative for WWE as while Chyna and Sable had managed to pull off the occasional flashy move, Lita was the first to do them regularly. While Gail Kim, Kelly Kelly, AJ Lee and Velvet Sky might do better headscissors and hurricanranas than her now hers had more of an impact because WWE fans were not used to seeing women pull them off. Ditto for Eve Torres and Tara in regards to the moonsault.
Averted with regards to Natalya and the Sharpshooter. Aside from a one-off Trish Stratus match, fans had never seen a woman do it before and while it's not as amazing now to see her use it, she still gets great reactions whenever she does use it to win matches.
Comedy team Bob & Ray are subject to this to an extent: now that the Deadpan Snarker is ubiquitous and subversion an essential part of the American comedy landscape, it's hard to realise just how cutting-edge hip B&R were considered for popularising and refining those elements back in The Fifties. Partly because of their unassuming style and partly because, as one commentator put it, they influenced a lot of people who've become a lot more famous building on their innovations, not incidentally including Seinfeld himself.
The Howard Stern Show. What once was an audacious, subversive breath of fresh air among radio DJ shtick, only Stern himself stands out from his many, MANY imitators because of his reputation, and even that's taken a hit in recent years. Even the move to uncensored satellite radio hasn't stemmed the tide of "So What?"
Many, perhaps most RPG tropes are actually originally from Tolkien. The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit are basically prototypical D&D campaigns. And they may be even older than Tolkien, given how much he borrowed from even older sources.
Many of the mechanical RPG elements that are tropes/clichés today, were also created or popularized by D&D. The Class and Level System, Hit Points (arguably present in the tabletop wargames that preceded D&D, but named and popularized by D&D nonetheless), Character Alignment, the "+ 1 magic sword," and so on.
D&D is very likely the single most influential game ever, in terms of what it started and popularized, stretching even outside of the RPG genre. Its influence on video games was enormous and not to be underestimated.
Conversely, more tropes in High Fantasynovels work as codified in D&D, instead of as seen in Tolkien. You're more likely to see Magic A is Magic A than Tolkien's deliberately mythical and mystical style, for instance.
Magic: The Gathering single-handedly invented the Collectible Card Game. Games like Yu-Gi-Oh and Chaotic owe their very existence to a man named Garfield. Yet, because of those games, Magic is sometimes dismissed as a children's card game. This despite the fact that many big-time poker players began honing their skills on Magic, and a small but significant group of people make their livings out of tournament winnings and appearance fees.
Magic's dismissal as a Kid's Game has less to do with successor TC Gs and more to do with the fact that the vast majority of its players started as kids.
For Warhammer 40,000, their eponymous Space Marines are considered something of an unfunny by some of the fanbase. The Space Marines and their incarnations are arguably the most popular faction, and thus a lot of ire is directed at them from players of other armies. Reasons for Space Marine popularity include: the easy difficulty curve and relative forgiveness of the army book, the regularity with which the main codex is updated, being one of the 'more acceptable' armies for children to play, and in general receiving the bulk of support from Games Workshop. Thus it is that Space Marines can sometimes be considered an 'unfunny', 'scrub', or 'kiddie' army.
Don't forget that the small army size and inclusion in every starter set ever also make them among the cheapest.
The large metallic surfaces of the power armor that the space marines wear is also a lot easier to paint than the flesh and bone of many of the other armies (imperial guard, orcs, tyranid, dark eldar).
Admittedly the reason the Marines are comparatively kid-friendly is that no less than three of the other armies consider mass murder, and rape while torturing people a fun way to pass the time.
Warhammer 40k is also possibly one of the most prolific sources of inspiration for video game sci fi leading to many to think things it came up with as been done.
Theatre
West Side Story. Today this musical seems like a terrible conglomeration of clichés on top of the material it takes from Romeo and Juliet (which itself was a fresh take on a clichéd story in its day). But West Side Story started a lot of musical conventions which became clichés, including its (for the time) grittiness, its use of street slang and cursing, its (relatively) sympathetic portrayal of minority characters, and its use of ethnic musical conventions.
West Side Story has arguably aged very well, particularly since its characters look a lot less stylized and stereotyped than most 1950s "delinquent" characters. In fact, it probably influenced street-gang fashions (particularly the wearing of the bandanna) for decades afterward!
William Shakespeare. From the introductory paragraph to chapter 6 of Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture:
I once overheard someone commenting on Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of Henry V: "I liked it, but Shakespeare is so full of clichés."
Henry V is particularly susceptible to this, as it's been mined, deconstructed, or outright stolen from for basically every war movie ever made.
In fact, it's a common joke amongst theater folks: a woman (for some reason, it's always a woman) sees Hamlet for the first time and complains, "I don't know why people make such a big deal about it. It's just a bunch of quotes strung together."
Oklahoma!: Broadway musicals like this one may seem quaint, dated, and silly now, but compared to the typical showgirl fare of the time, their integration of music, dance, and plot, as well as their darker themes, were ground-breaking. Both Show Boat and Oklahoma! were written by the same librettist, Oscar Hammerstein II. Whichever show one chooses to credit, Hammerstein was instrumental in this development of a kind of musical based more on narrative and character than entertaining numbers. And without Hammerstein there would certainly have been no Stephen Sondheim, who took that development even further. Sondheim has pointed this trope out as well (Allegro is another, less well known, Rodgers and Hammerstein show): "People don't understand how experimental Show Boat and Oklahoma! felt at the time they were done. Oscar is not about the 'lark that is learning to pray' — that's easy to make fun of. He's about Allegro."
Bürgerliches Trauerspiel (Bourgeois Tragedy). During the Age of Enlightenment this sub-genre of drama arose, in which virtous commoners were shown as victims of the machinations and depravities of aristocratic villains, which at the time was considered daring and subversive, sometimes even seditious and revolutionary. Some of them are still performed today, most notably Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Emilia Galotti (1772) and Friedrich Schiller's Kabale und Liebe (1784), but are often now seen as dated and quaint. This is not an entirely new trend, as the bourgeois values propounded in "bürgerliche Trauerspiele" became subject to criticism themselves, which in the 19th century led to the writing of Realist dramas with bourgeois villains.
Video Games
Video Games in general tend to be more susceptible to this trope than most other media for the simple reason that the next generation always has more robust hardware, and thus is capable of more innovations, hence the existence of the Polygon Ceiling trope. Graphics seem to be especially vulnerable to it. Some games age better than others, but it happens to all of them. Games have a tendency to utilize mechanics from previous games. Most people can not pinpoint where mechanics come from and attribute them to the most famous game of the genre, which may not have been the originator.
Changes in game design can make a game age badly too, especially if it was made in the era where Nintendo Hard was the norm; many of these games contain design solutions which would now be considered ridiculously sadistic and unfair to the player...or weren't actually from the game at all, but from shortcomings in the game code/engine/system hardware.
Controls. Playing many old-school controls can lead to a Damn You, Muscle Memory when played today, because we're so used to an unofficial control-scheme of standardization. Especially for some games like Ape Escape. (mentioned below)
With modern processing technology, it can be hard to believe that Myst was once the most beautiful game on the market. The graphics aren't the only thing that haven't aged well.
Marathon, a 1994-1996 First-Person Shooter trilogy by Bungie Studios has a unique and immersive plot, overall fun and ambitious gameplay, and is one of the first games to have allies that can actually assist the player. However, it is not very popular simply because it has DOOM-level graphics and stock sound effects. That said, with the release of Halo, a lot of Bungie fans have decided to give it a try and became die-hard fans.
Adventure for the Atari 2600 makes this Older Than the NES. Old codgers and video game historians recognize the game as revolutionary. Your character is graphically represented on screen! He can pick up graphical representations of items! The items can be left anywhere in the game world and the game will "remember" where they are! Graphically represented enemies with AI that changes based on the environment! And the game has an actual goal and ends when you complete the goal, instead of going on forever!
This applies for most Atari games. As the Angry Video Game Nerd pointed out, the majority of Atari games suffered from bad sound effects and repetitive gameplay (Copy And Paste Environments for instance), but still were revolutionary for the time.
Final Fantasy VII in particular tends to suffer from this. Oh, sure, having a moody protagonist (who may have amnesia) chase around White-Haired Pretty Boy homicidal maniac might seem played out, but at the time you would've been hard-pressed to find a large amount of JRPGs with that formula. While earlier Final Fantasy games had troubled heroes, Final Fantasy VII was the first to truly run with the concept to the point of presenting a hero that turns out to be an Unreliable Narrator questioning his existence. As a very specific example: the first few seconds of the opening sequence, with the camera panning out slowly from a classic piece of shiny magic rock to a dark futuristic city, were initially meant to be shocking. Can you imagine?
Final Fantasy VI. Getting rid of the Crystals, which were a key staple of Final Fantasy before this game, was highly controversial at the time, and the game paved the way for the Anachronism Stew and Schizo Tech that the series is most widely known for. The exclusion of the Crystals is lost on most modern fans, and a common criticism is that the cast is shallow and unexplored and the gameplay is easy and simple. The game's Big Bad Kefka is frequently written off as a goofy Joker knock-off, but prior to Kefka Final Fantasy villains fit the generic Tin Tyrant/Evil Overlord mold, and Kefka's insane wise-cracks and clown-like appearance were a huge departure. Similarly, rather than turning into a generic monster as the Final Boss, Kefka became a Physical God, and the final battle had many parallels to The Divine Comedy. These days, JRPGs including Final Fantasy frequently have angelic and divine final bosses, and Faux Symbolism is par for the course, especially with Final Fantasy.
How about the original Final Fantasy? For its time, it was groundbreaking. Instead of just saving a princess, you save the world. You have a fully customizable party. And most importantly, it saved Square from going bankrupt, even though Rad Racer came out around the same time and sold five times as many copies. These days, it shows its age, with the clunky interface, Save Game Limits, repetitive Random Encounters, and a variety of Game Breaking Bugs that render many spells either not as effective as they say on the tin, or worse, outright useless. Even its remakes don't get off much more easily.
Rock Band 2 came out in the US at the same time as Rock Band 1 did in Australia, so anyone playing RB 1 online in Australia had no one to play with save for a few Aussies that bought it.
Dragon Quest deserves a special mention. Many of the early games weren't even as customizable as the later ones. (Even Dragon Quest VIII had a much more flexible cast than some of the previous games that didn't have job systems.)
Plus the fact that Dragon Quest essentially invented the console RPG. And after the complicated epic plots of Dragon Quest V and the massive, breathtaking world and dozens of hours of gameplay of Dragon Quest VIII, a player who didn't grow up in the 8-bit era who decides to try the original game is in for a hell of a shock/letdown: a total of three boss battles, a total of four game objectives (save the Princess, round up the legendary equipment, build the bridge to the final dungeon, and beat the Big Bad), and a metric assload of Forced Level Grinding.
The series has been doomed to almost-niche status abroad due to the following: long localization holdups with the 8-bit generation games rendering them either obsolete or in competition with the new 16-bit generation, the temporary foldup of Enix's American wing, and last but definitely not least, the game to break the genre in the west and define it, Final Fantasy VII, stood in stark contrast, being more about outrageous battle systems and cinematic spectacle.
Golden Sun has a hatedom that has pretty much attacked the game for being a "generic Game Boy Advance RPG" - without realizing that there wasn't really that much else available on the Game Boy Advance at the time (maybe in Japan). Considering that the Game Boy Advance was a new format in itself, Golden Sun still had some rather detailed environments and perhaps the best use of the Game Boy Advance sound systems for a while — it was perhaps one of the first games released on the format to actually use a lot of the potential technology it had, other than a few others like Bomberman, Advance Wars, and maybe Mario Kart, amongst a slew of remakes (like Breath of Fire and Super Mario Bros.) and licensed games.
The original Half-Life, being the first modern, highly scripted first person shooter with adaptive AI, now seems somewhat typical after being endlessly copied, ripped off and modified by just about every first person shooter that came after it.
Hydlide, originally released in 1984 for the PC 88, was one of the first Action RPGs ever (along with Dragon Slayer from the same year), but by 1989, when the NES version was first released in North America, it was much more primitive than other similar games (especially the Ys series).
The first Megaman Battle Network game definitely fits this trope, especially if you've played even the second and third games (considered the best with the fifth and sixth often competing). It was released in 2001, when the Game Boy Advance was still a very new format. Nowadays, it can practically pass for a Touch-screen telephone game with how bare-bones it is compared to even the second, which introduced style changes for replay, the third which added customization outside of and in addition to style changes, and so on and so on until you get the Surprisingly Improved Sequel of the fifth and sixth. It can only compare to the franchise-killing fourth. It practically seems like an Obvious Beta when you play it, nowadays. (Very few wood chips, HP gets recovered, bosses top out at a thousand HP, game just gets disgustingly easy.)
Atelier Iris. In an odd combination of Seinfeld Is Unfunny and No Export for You, when it finally came over to the U.S. in 2005. "So it's a standard JRPG with "alchemy crafting"?" While the "standard JRPG" bit is, well, not exactly false for Iris, what a lot of Western consumers fail to understand in shrugging off the crafting system is that the progenitor of the Atelier series, Atelier Marie, was the first JRPG to not only feature a very robust (in the case of Marie, absurdly robust) crafting system, but was the first JRPG to feature alchemy heavily. After Marie and its sequel sold a quarter million copies each, you suddenly had alchemy coming out of the woodwork in Japanese pop culture and nearly every JRPG in the wake of Marie has featured some kind of crafting system. The problem is, due to some poor business decisions on the part of multiple parties, practically everything else that was influenced by Atelier crossed the Pacific before it did, and the original games never came over at all. So the Atelier series is regarded as punctuation in the story of RPG history in the West, when in fact it seems to have had nearly as much influence on game design in Japan as other staple series.
GoldenEye 007, one of the first Video Games based on movies that didn't suck (in some ways, it was better than the movie), now suffers from this. At the time, the game was basically the first console First-Person Shooter done right and is, in many ways, the reason why the genre became so popular on consoles (before, it was almost entirely PC based). But by today's standards, its lack of online play (not its fault, since it was on the Nintendo 64), crude aiming system, heavy dose of Escort Missions, lack of voice acting (again, not its fault, it was on the Nintendo 64 and was an early game on the console to boot), large amount of linearity (which is ironic, since at the time GoldenEye was possibly the least linear game on the market) and dated graphics. Ironically, there was a James Bond FPS for the N64 that vastly improved graphics, control, missions, and plot. Anyone remember that one... anyone?
GoldenEye was the first time many, if not most, gamers of the day ever had something like a sniper rifle to play with. Today, it's hard to realize how cool it was to take your buddy out from 300 yards away in ANY FPS, not just a console game.
Among the PC gaming crowd, Halo itself may count as well. Most shooters nowadays have regenerating health *
Halo is one of the few that accounts for regenerating shields in its story; health is depleted separately in the first game and Halo: Reach and does not replenish on its own
, let you carry only two weapons at once, use the weapon you're holding as a melee weapon instead of using a separate weapon that you have to switch to (e.g., a crowbar), allow you to throw grenades without making you switch to them first, have enemies drop their weapons and equipment when they die instead of just having weapons pre-placed on the stage, etc. All of these elements were around before Halo, but never all in the same game. Halo was all that in one game, and on a console. It was also the first console game to include networked multiplayer, which soon gave birth to online multiplayer.
Wolfenstein 3D: The first FPS as far as most people are aware.
Double Dragon, when it came out, was extremely popular, and fresh, to the point that it more of less CREATED the side scrolling Beat 'em Up genre of games. Well, all you have to do is look through your old SNES and/or Genesis library to see how influential it was. In fact, some estimate that as much as 90% of the early 90s 16-bit console games were side scrolling Beat Em Ups. Now that the genre is Deader than Disco, it's quite understandable that nobody really remembersDouble Dragon as anything more than a generic Beat 'em Up.
SimCity was at one time considered to be a great achievement for gaming, bringing in the whole Wide Open Sandbox and Simulation Game genre in, as well as providing interesting gameplay. Later versions in the series would up the ante and make the game even more intriguing (and provide odd sense of humor withllamas. Now these days, most people won't want to try it because they find it too boring and difficult to get interested in.
Then again, The Sims and Spore have taken over the Maxis game scene, so much that many people will actually assume that Maxis was created when the The Sims was. Most people tend to forget that ultimately, if it weren't for Sim City, there would be no Sims.
And before there was Spore, there was Sim Earth, which is almost unheard of.
Plus, the original SimCity can quickly get boring because there are a very, very limited number of things you do in that game, unlike its sequels, but then when you get up to 4, you'll find it very overwhelming.
The Sims itself. The original version of the Sims, without any form of mods or expansion packs seems quite dull in of itself. There's no form of direction to what you can do (And you don't have to follow your Sims' wishes, you know), several meters like "Comfort" and "room" that meant absolutely nothing, you were rather limited in how much you were capable of doing compared to even a bare-bones The Sims 3, and there was no aging whatsoever.
Elite. David Braben and Ian Bell's game was completely groundbreaking when it was published in the mid-80s with its open-ended trading/shooting gameplay and massive universe of stars and planets to the extent that it's still talked about with fondness by those who apparently spent hours at a time playing it back then. And yet to many who didn't play it in the '80s it's hard to see what all the fuss is about.
The immediate successors, however, either due to slightly improved interface (or perspective shift), customization, or storyline, did not suffer so terribly. Chalk most of it up to youngsters these days being untrained to deal with vector graphics and unable to gauge depth properly. It is still a commonly used and cherished game mechanic, since it's tough to mass-produce this sort of thing to the point of disgust without sinking a company. Star Flight and Privateer to name just a pair of the oldest.
Super Smash Bros.. The original game is often considered just normal now, even though no fighting game like it had appeared at the time.
The remake of the first Fire Emblem game ever created (Shadow Dragon), received a lot of criticism about how "The plot is cliché," "The game is very simplistic," and "There's not a lot of character development" on top of the cries of "Where are the supports?", "What happened to branching classes?", "Why's Marth not promotable?", "Why are the magics just linked into one family?", and "Why is my priest able to use fire and ice magic when they could use only Light magic in other games?" from fans of the game. (Both long-time fans who've been playing since the No Export for You era, and the fans who joined in at Fire Emblem 7 when a lot of elements were added or refined.) It's rather quite amazing how even old-school Fire Emblem (even ones who first started with a ROM of the NES or SNES versions) fans criticised the game for being loyal to the 1990 version, when at the same time, if Nintendo and Intelligent Studios had taken the time to completely overhaul the game, their Unpleasable Fanbase would complain that it isn't loyal to the originals. Sure, it's not by any means the best game in the series, but there was a time in which 90% of the stuff that it and Shining Force did was an incredibly new thing for gaming, combining turn-based strategy gameplay one is used to seeing in wargames and adding fundamental RPG elements and a story that was more than just-another-recreation-of-a-historical-battle.
However; the game actually was praised for changing a couple things, such as how the game could be made almost unwinnable if you missed a key item (The Falchion) and with how many units were actually usable because in the original, only some units could promote.
And it isn't just the ancient parser adventures - even the most advanced of Interactive Fiction games get overlooked now, because who wants to type their commands in, after years of You Can't Get Ye Flask leaving a bad taste in peoples' mouths?
DOS games in general have this partly due to incompatibilities with todays' computers*
Starting with XP, no consumer-oriented versions of Windows were based on DOS at all anymore as with the 9x line — XP and later run DOS programs via emulation, not unlike the previous business-oriented NT-based operating systems (XP, which merged the home and business lines, was the first version to use the NT code base for home versions as well as business versions) such as NT 4 and 2000
Star Ocean. This happened primarily to the first two games when they were each given an Enhanced Remake. The first Star Ocean game was actually, for the most part, drastically different in story than most other RPGs (with a few exceptions like Fallout and a couple Shin Megami Tensei games who often used elements of Science Fiction) and the fact that this game was actually credited as the one that pushed the SNES's technology to the limit. People often criticized it as "There isn't enough Sci-Fi, there's magic so it's not Sci-Fi", "It's Short, so It Sucks ", or "They Changed It, Now It Sucks" regarding the changes to their PSP versions. The plot for the first Star Ocean game is very similar to an episode of Star Trek, and the plot for the second one (called a Cliché Storm by some reviewers who had played the PSP remake) was actually far more original for the time than it was. The entire skill system (which was actually pretty in-depth and thorough) is often ignored, and the amount of recruitable characters and somewhat complex recruitment-branches (giving some more replay value than the typical "You get these eight characters but can use only three or four at a time"-RPG) is considered just one part of a Cliché Storm. Let's also not forget that it was one of the first games that featured optional "Private events" to develop characters since the plot was written with only the required characters needing to be involved.
However, some justified criticisms of the game are that it's an Obvious Beta; and the PSP remake doesn't really help it too much. It's possible to beat the main story in about 15-20 hours. For a handheld game, that's not bad, but compared to games like Pokémon or even Final Fantasy Tactics Advance that can take much much longer, it was criticised for being short.
Tales Of Phantasia. This was a complaint when it had finally been localized, even though part of it was the fact that Namco had pretty much tried to port a Playstation game onto a Game Boy Advance and lead to some "Chugginess" during battles. The first two Tales Of games (Destiny and Phantasia) may also be somewhat hard to get into with how their battle systems (which was actually a rather major change in what RPG gamers have been accustomed to since the days of Dungeons & Dragons and what was just showing up in action games like World Of Mana and Secret of Evermore) are much slower and simplistic than in the more recent games in the series like Vesperia and Dawn Of the New World. You were restricted to just a 2D plane, there wasn't a lot of comboing, and the action froze to display spells & Special attacks. Also added was the fact that in Japan, Tales Of Phantasia was called "The game that sings" for having a theme song, unlike most other games at the time. Nowadays everyone more or less expects the games to be fast-paced action or else they don't fulfill the Action Quota produced in part byPhantasia and Destiny. And having a theme song? Psssh... nearly every game's got one of those now.
Some of these were subverted by the Enhanced Remakes the two had. (The Playstation version of Phantasia is considered the best version of Phantasia.)
Dragon's Lair. When new technology opened up new potential doors for media for the video games' storytelling, it can be rather hard to appreciate some of the early attempts at adding voice and cutscenes to games beyond this game's rather simplistic gameplay. Especially games like King's Quest V and VI or the first two Lunar games. King's Quest V was a rather early example of adventure games and RPGs using more media to spread information and the story. Nowadays people will probably view the cutscenes on YouTube and just laugh at the stiff animation, the voice acting, or the syncing (Usually a fault of the software used to put the file on YouTube), often praising games like Daggerfall for "doing the FMVs right" without acknowledging that even the most recent of those games (Eternal Blue) was made at least two years before Daggerfall was even finished. (And even then, Daggerfall's videos could all be counted on one-hand.) Despite how rather laughable the cutscenes and voice acting is nowadays, one may have to consider that with the exception of Lunar: Eternal Blue (which was made in 1994), all of those games were released within the range of 1990-92, and even then, the technology was rather new for the time. (King's Quest V, for example, showed a lot of people the potential of using CD-based games as opposed constantly switching out floppy discs.)
Another funny example are the people saying that Ghaleon is just another silver-haired pretty villain who is a result of developers trying to create another Sephiroth. Now take one look at the release dates mentioned above and try reading that again with a straight face... By the time people watched Sephiroth burn down Nibelheim, the exploits of the Magic Emperor Ghaleon were already five years old. And when he returned for round two? Three years old... and don't even get some of these people started on the rather effeminate looking Zophar (who really isn't that effeminate looking on the Sega CD until he absorbs the power of Althena) who is also considered another Sephiroth ripoff... despite trying to take over the universe of Lunar at least three years before Sephiroth did.
Full-motion video. Many early attempts in the 90's are seen today as really, really corny. (Morgan Webb of X-Play said on one episode that there was once a time in which community theatre actors could find work in games.) Heck, the full-motion video games nowadays have this really "Grainy" appearance, while the old attempts at CG-I now look like everything is made out of plastic and rubber. It can be hard to appreciate some games like The Seventh Guest, which was one of the first games period to even use the CD format, let alone combine live-actors acting out scenes and pre-rendered CG-I. (Of course, the game in question may be hard to get into for otherreasons beyond how dated it is.)
Not to mention, take one look at Dark Forces 2: Jedi Knight. At the time, seeing actual actors in a Star wars game made it seem more like an entry into the Star Wars canon rather than just a Gaiden Game.
Voice Acting. Many classic games from the late 90's such as Silent Hill, Resident Evil, and to a lesser extent, Metal Gear Solid have some pretty Narmy voice acting by modern standards, but at the time they were considered revolutions in video game story telling. Indeed most of the best remembered video games of the PlayStation Era where hits because of the then fresh and exciting "3D graphics, voice acting, movie inspired plots" formula.
This was actually what one of the criticisms when the Sega Saturn version of Magic Knight Rayearth came out. The reviewer found no problems with the game itself, he considered the localization of a game that was 3 years old already a wasted effort.
Hydro Thunder has fallen victim to this. It's very hard to imagine how it was innovative when pretty much every aspect of it (outside of the boat racing) has been immitated (mostly very poorly) and used. Mention it to anyone who wasn't around or into the arcade scene in the late '90s and you'll be bound to hear a bunch of groans complaining how they've seen it all before.
Warhammer. In a sign of Fan Dumb there were a number of people that accused it of being a rip off of Warcraft. This was particularly common when Warhammer Online was released. More likely Warcraft was influenced by Warhammer, but they could just share some similar fantasy clichés.
There were rumours that Warcraftstarted off as a Warhammer spinoff. The Warhammer universe came about before the Warcraft universe, but World of Warcraft came out before Warhammer Online did. The same thing happened to The Lord of the Rings Online (which also came out after World of Warcraft did), even though its source material long predates the Warcraft universe.
Hilariously, the same rumor exists for StarCraft - this time that it was supposed to be an adaptation of War Hammer 40000 instead.
Don't forget most Power Armour wearing Space Marines like the Master Chief from Halo and The Terrans of Starcraft fame owe their inspiration to the Space Marines - ironically, fans of those franchises and others often accuse Games Workshop of copying them.
And said Space Marines were based off of the MI of Starship Troopers...
Metroid. Samus Is a Girl. So what's the big deal? It's quite forgotten that the original was released at a time when female protagonists (or any female fitting any trope besidesDamsel In Distress) in video games were essentially unheard of, even the trend of required token females in fighting games hadn't started yet. A rather dull twist today was one hell of a shocker at the time.
Mortal Kombat. The violence of the first game, and its depiction of digitized characters mutilating, decapitating, and just plain murdering each other with their Fatalities caused quite a stir during the early-1990's with both, players and parents. Nintendo caved in to the Moral Guardians when it came to "their" version of the game for the Super NES, which had all the blood removed and some of the FatalitiesFinishing Moves changed, resulting in significantly less units sold than its uncensored Sega Genesis counterpart. Arguably, Mortal Kombat could be cited as the game that single-handedly created the ESRB. Nowadays, the violence of the Mortal Kombat series seems cartoony and tame compared to some of the more disturbing games released since the rating system has been established, such as Manhunt and Silent Hill.
Mortal Kombat 4 specially suffers from this. While the game was nothing specially in the gore department, the use of swift good-looking 3D graphics made it a successful game. If you check the reviews of the time, it usually got pretty decent scores (6.5/10 to 8.5/10). Most people nowadays considere it a horrible game, forgetting that it was the first Mortal Kombat 3D game not to hit the Polygon Ceiling.
Night Trap also helped cause the ESRB to be formed, or was one of the prime motivators. Seeing it now it's amazing to think of how it was supposed to be so offensive on the Sega CD. Of course, even then, there wasn't any actual violence (implied, not actually shown), and many of the things that were shown were so fantastical people couldn't possibly replicate it. (As it was filmed) However, the sex... oh boy... a girl in a nightgown that looked like something in the 50s. SCANDALOUS!!! (However, the game's biggest criticizers at the time were people who hadn't actually seen it.)
Admittedly, Mortal Kombat did drift from its harsher origins over the course of the series. Fatalities in later titles were less about the raw violence and more about the spectacle. Kano went from ripping people's hearts out in the first game to using his Eye Beams to blow up his enemies by the third. It's still a finishing move, but the extremeness of the MK3 fatality just lacked the cold-bloodedness and disturbing vibe the first game had.
Phantasy Star. A lot of the tropes of JRPGs in general come from this series, including the mash-up of sci-fi and fantasy elements, customizing party lineups by swapping out party members, and the emotionally shocking but dramatically effective storyline deaths of important protagonists*
Technically, Final Fantasy II had protagonists meet their demise over the course of the story but they were the fourth party member and not any of the main three
. Now it's all par for the course.
It does technically hold onto one claim to fame, though it is unfortunately at home in the 'Dark Horse' of the original quadrology. And that is a branching storyline caused by marital succession. Granted, such a thing is probably a massive pain in the arse to script then implement, so it is no surprise few others have a constantly refreshing cast of characters.
Most of the early Western RPGs (such as Heavy on the Magick on the European 8-bit computers, or Dungeon Master on the Amiga and Atari ST) had little plot intrusion in the game with much of that sort of thing being in the "The story so far..." section of the instruction manual. Nowadays, while there are still segments of the gaming population that prefer games to have as little story as possible, even a story-lite game like The Elder Scrolls still has a main plot thrown into the game with a few token cinematics.
Amusingly, early RPGs copied each other so much there was little effective difference between them: Dragon Warrior/Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy were, if not the same, at least very similar thematically. Now, due to the proliferation of the RPG format, there are any number of different RPG genres. Which sort of makes it the reverse of Seinfeld Is Unfunny: earlier RPGs copied shamelessly, newer RPGs are much more diverse. Sort of. (The Hate Dumb for JRPGs tends to point fingers at games that have mere similarities, while ignoring their own similarities as "part of the genre".)
Early western RP Gs were so mechanically similar that you could frequently import parties developed in other games. You could play Bards Tale 2 with your Wizardry party.
Final Fantasy Legend has its leveling system (an improvement of Final Fantasy II's), which was improved in the following games, making it look rather old by comparison.
Quake. The original game was an immense hit in its day due to its technological innovations. But its once-shocking 3-D graphics now look... underwhelming, due to low polygon counts and lack of texture filtering.
Similar deal is with the graphics of Alone in the Dark. Or 4-D Boxing.
Secret of Mana was quite possibly the most aesthetically rich video game to date at the time of its release.
Also one of the first action RPGs to support multiple players. (In fact, still one of the few... it just didn't catch on. More recent action RPGs with multiple characters like From Software's Forever Kingdom and Bandai's .hack either go for AI characters or character-swapping.)
Street Fighter. The ORIGINALStreet Fighter. Back then, arcade games were almost universally simple affairs. Punch, kick, jump, shoot, duck, defend on occasion, maybe if it got really wild you had an alternate weapon. Large sprites, one-on-one gameplay, a pair of analog buttons which produced a variety of strikes (later replaced by the now-standard six-button grid), holding back to block, super-lethal attacks unleashed by secret joystick movements, and unique opponents with a variety of styles and attacks... all of these were amazing innovations. Especially for Capcom, which at the time had almost nothing but platformers and various 3rd person shooters. No one had ever done a bosses-only action game before, and Capcom, of all companies, made it a reality. Oh yeah, it was a HUGE success, better than anyone could've imagined. Today, good luck finding someone who remembers that this game existed, much less will admit to liking it.
Street Fighter II ACCIDENTALLY introduced animation cancelling, and as a result, the entire concept of combos in fighting games. This small mistake single-handedly extended the life of video arcades for a decade. Today, the system seems clunky and sometimes unresponsive; then again, it was a bug, and not an integrated component of the game engine.
Super Mario 64. A lot of people complain that it is unwieldy and unimaginative, unaware that, outside of a couple crappy (even for their time) games, there really didn't exist 3D platformers in 1996.
Or, hell, even the original Super Mario Bros for the NES. This one's famous enough to avert a lot of this, but there's still some people who don't realize that one game kickstarted Nintendo's juggernaut of a series. There was no such thing as jumping on enemies' heads to kill them before SMB. The number of people who have ripped off Miyamoto and Tezuka's work likely ranks up there with Shakespeare, Mozart, Disney, Rodgers/Hammerstein and the Beatles. And let's not forget the fact that it was one of the first, if not the first platformer to feature a moving screen.
Not to mention, platformers in general. Look say... Ape Escape. Nowadays, the game is plagued by Damn You, Muscle Memory and what is now considered terrible camera controls (in part because a standardized control scheme is "Right analog stick for camera, left analog stick for movement".) However, at the time, that game was a huge experiment in 3D control... as well as for the Playstation in general. For one, it was the first game to require the dual-analog controller.
Tomb Raider. Before this game most women in video games were only there to be rescued or be sidekicks (sometimes both). In other cases where you could actually control a female character, she would only be an option to the main, heroic male lead character. Lara Croft started a trend of women becoming the sole protagonist in action games. The game was also praised for its detailed, realistic interactive 3D environment and use of set-pieces, which was groundbreaking at the time. Nowadays, the original game rarely gets the respect it deserves, and even then it's mostly the Fanservice that is mentioned rather than the many other things it did and the major part it played in establishing the 3D Action Adventure genre in general.
The System Shock games, System Shock 2 in particular. Despite being one of the most undersold games ever, never really moving beyond Cult Classic, System Shock 2 was a very well put together and innovative PC game. It was so good it has at least 2 Spiritual Successors. Both BioShock and Dead Space copy its sold blend of Survival Horror/shooter in a Sci Fi environment with vending machines, upgrade stations allowing for a good deal of customization, and special powers (often used in puzzle solving), and a plot where everyone's turned into monsters and the only normal people are either on the other end of the radio, die five seconds after you meet them, or are the villains. However, improved graphics and gameplay, combined with the fact that not as many people played System Shock create such moments as Dead Space being described as "like BioShock, but on a spaceship." Uh, excuse me, where exactly do you think BioShock came from?
Ultima. Yahtzee once described the series as "needlessly obtuse", which would make sense if there was anything better available at the time the games were released (which is only true for Ultima IX and perhaps Ultima VIII).
The early Ultima games were often described as "RPG/adventure hybrids" at the time, because they brought into RPGs such revolutionary elements as talking to NPCs and solving puzzles beyond "use key on door".
The Ultima Underworld games, along with The Elder Scrolls Arena, revolutionized RPG's with 360 degrees of 3 dimensional freedom, before the term FPS had even been coined. It looks less impressive compared to today's RPG hack-n-slashers.
Virtua Fighter is horribly bland if you've played any 3D brawler game that came later, yet words fail to describe how innovative and astonishing it was when it came out. Of course, the very name indicates that it was made to demonstrate something new at the time.
Welcome To Pia Carrot. The first game was made in 1995. Like many other adult games and dating sims, it lingered in No Export for You territory. By the time a Fan Translation of the PC-FX port was made in 2009, the art style looked quite old. (On the other hand, only a few other similar games in English in 2009 had simulation-style gameplay.)
The originalLegend of Zelda. Compared to the newer games, it would look like it's missing a lot of the elements that are staples of the series (such as towns full of NPCs, traveling by way of a horse or vehicle, and lots of dialogue and cutscenes) but at the time, it was an epic adventure the likes of which was almost completely unheard of in a console game, just because you had a more free-range environment, a whole arsenal of inventory items and needed a save feature just to finish it (this was an early NES game, and most of those games at the time were the kind you could finish in a single sitting (at least in principle)).
For that matter, theNintendo 64games. They were a spectacularVideo Game 3D Leap at the time, and are the base for every third-person game that exists now, having introduced features such as the now ubiquitous Lock On. However, just like Super Mario 64, the low-poly graphics and mostly square environments don't look nearly as good today, especially when compared to newergames.
But still, the good things people say about Ocarina of Time and Majora's Mask kinda make up for it. Don't forget that Ocarina of Time is still considered the best Zelda game by many, and even considered one of the best games of all time.
Sonic the Hedgehog evokes this trope in two ways: firstly, the speed which the eponymous Blue Blur ran through the levels in the first game in the series really seemed quite blistering to gamers of the day, even if nobody would think twice about it now. Also, in order to truly see the heavily promoted "edginess" of the character, you really need to be aware that when Sonic first appeared in 1991, the vast majority of platform heroes were promoted as squeaky-clean and cutesy. A teenage hedgehog with a spiky hairstyle and a self-confident smirk was enough to seem uber-cool by comparison.
Actually, many fans nowadays feel like Sonic has slowed down in recent games.
Logistics and diplomacy in a wargame. From the west came Virgin Interactive with Overlord, M.U.L.E. with trade, military pacts, and planetary bombardment, and from the east came Koei, with Nobunaga's Ambition. Both were the first in their genres to combine obsessive resource management with the trappings of a standard setpiece wargame. How much your troops had trained and with what. How much food you had. The market of the food itself. The market behind your weaponry. Spying. Assassinations. Treaties. Aid pacts. Black markets. Taxation. Dividends. And in Nobunaga's case, even marriage was accounted for, as an alternative option to uniting your empire with another's. The information overload was staggering for its time, possibly even for some now. This was not merely there to bolster the wargame part ala Total War either. It was vitally important to do all these things at once lest you fall behind and face unexpected defeat in the coming battle.
The Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series is a microcosm of this trope. When the Marine player character in the first game is permanently killed by the nuke in "Aftermath", it was a huge break from other FPS games of the era. The fact that you controlled a dying character in the middle of a nuclear blast zone (and had no say over whether he lived or died), and that all your efforts in the American campaign were for naught was a huge deal then, and flew in the face of conventional video game tropes. The sequel, however, does the same thing 3 separate times, and for players who played MW2 before the original, the effect of the "Aftermath" level is lost.
The original Battle Arena Toshinden was one of the most highly-rated games for the original PlayStation when it originally came out. It was one of the most advertised launch titles for the platform in America, as well as the third game to ever get a score of 98% from Game Players magazine (the other two being the SNES port of Super Street Fighter II and Final Fantasy VI). However, the sequels got progressively worse reviews (the fourth one wasn't even released in America) and the original game is now seen as a joke by hardcore fighting game enthusiasts compared to the original Virtua Fighter and Tekken (which had its console releases around the same time).
Graphics-wise, they're comparible (with Toshinden arguably a notch above). Gameplay wise, VF and Tekken hold up. BAT... doesn't.
The SOCOM series lately looks like a candidate for this trope. Back when the PS2's internet play was available, the SOCOM series blended the best aspects of PC tactical shooters (mainly Counter-Strike, Delta Force and Rainbow Six) and made the gameplay palatable for console gamers. Combine this with the ultra-popular PS2 and the result? Six million total sales between the first two games alone (with SOCOM 1 getting the 3.45 mil bulk.) Unfortunately, SOCOM's relevance was mostly symbiotic with Sony's problematic online gaming support, which worsened overtime. Xbox Live's reputation eventually surpassed the PS2 online service, thanks to the lack of a built-in hard drive causing numerous issues (mainly with cheaters and being dropped from games). Then Halo 2 exploded in popularity. And then the worst combination for the series: PS3's problematic launch handicapping sales for years, and developer Zipper not making a SOCOM game for years after the PS3 launched, all while many different tactical shooters have flooded the console market (e.g., the Tom Clancy line of shooters, Metal Gear Online, Gears of War, Battlefield variants, and especially Call of Duty). With that, SOCOM became increasingly niche and dated in comparison. By the time SOCOM 4 was released, only longtime fans remained interested, while everyone else moved on. Worse, SOCOM 4's attempts to convert new fans was a failure, and the remaining fans are caught into a bitter civil war with the franchise. Give or take a few more years, and the franchise's impact on console online gaming will be mostly forgotten.
The first Persona game. It was made in 1996, and... quite honestly hasn't aged very well. It kicked off a series, and was a cult hit, but the sequels (even the second games, which followed the original formula, not the madly popular dating sim) polished the franchise so much better the first game is much much harder to just pick up and play than the later installments. This is one of those games where you spend either a couple hours poking around constantly finding the items... or five minutes with a guide.
If you think that the Literal Split Personality or the escapism are cliche, it's worth noting that you'd be hard pressed to find any more of that back in 1996.
The Second Reality Project was one of the first major Super Mario World hacks. Completed in 2002 (around Lunar Magic's really early years), the game just had level edits and nothing else. But the creator did do a remake incorporating newer graphics, levels, and other things.
Heck, Rob-Omb's Quest probably looks lousy today compared to other Super Mario World hacks, but around the time it came out, (many) people were impressed by the custom Super Mario Bros. 3 music, overworld, and level ideas.
Even the SMB 3 music seems bland compared to the custom music that can be inserted in a SMW ROM hack now.
Ex GFX? Well, although some people still like playing Super Demo World: The Legend Continues, it still doesn't have all the ASM and custom music that newer SMW hacks nowadays have. It's still a great hack to play though.
The first hack that demonstrated what ASM editing is capable of? Brutal Mario was pretty famous for the custom bosses, sprites, and other things that were contained, but had bad level design. Nowadays, there are many other hacks that incorporate ASM.
Kaizo Mario World. Remember that at the time, all those cruel tricks were actually original, and even things like the Kaizo Trap or invisible coin blocks were used sparingly and in a clever way. And things like invisible/underwater Bowser, that Big Boo boss in the second, the final Reznor fight and many of the levels were actually fairly well designed, it's just the imitators that came since copied so much of it that the game itself is old hat.
Web Comics
Bob and George. The author admits to wincing at this strip with a self-depreciating Author Avatar, even though he knows it's the first use, because it's been done so often since.
Web Original
The Abridged Series phenomenon. When LittleKuriboh debuted Yu-Gi-Oh! The Abridged Series, the format of re-editing a series into mini-episodes and the style of quirky, self-referential parody were fairly original and amusing, and while Gag Dubs were certainly not anything new, YGOTAS massively popularized them. Nowadays, there are so many imitators that neither the format nor the humor seem innovative anymore.
However some jokes were just so well timed and became memes it may be hard to see where it came from originally. (Screw the Rules, I Have Money! / Green Hair)
Flash movies. Browse any website full of them and then point out how many cartoons that were "hot stuff" back when they were made now seem rather generic, loosely drawn, or poorly animated. Especially sites like Newgrounds.
Many of Newgrounds' flash games suffer from this, as well. In a time where the site is full of much more complex games, looking back at a time of arcade-y shooting games can be rough for newer users. Stamper even mentions this in the description of his 2000 game Street Life, which was a top rated game at the time, telling new people that it's not worth playing by today's standards.
YouTube Poop even. Granted, some YTPs are still quite as funny today as they were back in mid 2007 when the fad was new (like where Link decides to toast spaghetti for dinner and Hilarity Ensues), but some jokes have been used so much people may think "Oh, look at the use of the word 'Come', and Robotnik is saying something that sounds like Penis" when they view a few YTPs that came up with it.
Some other early YTPs that were simply screwing around with Windows Movie Maker or other such effects also come off as boring today because we've only heard everything in G major by this point.
Don't know if there's a better section to put this, or if many others can relate, but an iTunes app was recently released of the Fairlight CMI Series II, designed by one of its inventors. The Fairlight, for the uninitiated, was a $100,000 machine invented in 1979 in Australia which is considered both one of the first major digital workstations and the first commercially available digital sampler. Its "Page R" sequencing was also revolutionary. It was 8-bit, took up a lot of space, but there was nothing else like it at the time. Fairlights were used in The Eighties by many top artists with the cash to buy one, most notably producer Trevor Horn (with Art Of Noise, ABC and Yes), Devo, Paul McCartney, Erasure, U2, Queen, Stevie Wonder, Fleetwood Mac, Elvis Costello, Thomas Dolby, Howard Jones, Hall And Oates, The Cars, Def Leppard, Michael Jackson, Pet Shop Boys, Peter Gabriel, Herbie Hancock, Kate Bush... It basically set the stage for modern synthesizer technology that we take for granted now. In today's world, where $1,000 can get you a decent workstation that can wipe the floor with the Fairlight (which has an '80's charm to it in terms of its 8-bit sounds and the feel of Page R sequencing), the app is getting mixed reviews, partly on being seen as "generic" and "more of a toy".
Diary Of A Camper is a Quake movie, the first Quake demo with an actual plot beyond simple gameplay footage — and the very first Machinima movie ever made, thus a launching point for an entire new form of art. Its success in the Quake community quickly spawned a lot of other movies from other people. Special websites for reviews of Quake movies cropped up soon. ...And Diary Of A Camper nearly universally received very low scores there, due to how primitive it was compared to what came afterward.
Not to mention, Red vs. Blue was one of the most original uses of games at the time, helped to make Machinima popular, too. While still going strong, it doesn't look that new.
Geocities. Think about it — anyone, even you, can make their own site on this new, exciting "Internet" thing, and write anything they want, for the entire world to see! Geocities is the place where early Internet culture bloomed. Today, it's mainly remembered (and derided) as that deleted webhost with all the cheesy MIDI background tunes and ugly layouts.
Western Animation
Beavis And Butthead debuted in the very early nineties, at a time when the Animation Age Ghetto was still very strong, and The Simpsons was just breaking through, while still remaining relatively family friendly. Beavis And Butthead on the other hand was shocking and caused a panic among the Moral Guardians, being one of only a very very few animated programs for adults only. Nowadays we have Family Guy, South Park, the entire [adult swim] lineup, and countless other "Late Night Cartoons", to the point that Beavis And Butthead looks tame, and downright corny by comparison.
On top of that, the main reason it got such a diehard fanbase was because of all the shock and panic it caused (a lot of it undeserved). Now, years removed from the hype, explaining to today's kids what's so great about it is flat-out impossible. Why Mike Judge made any attempt to relaunch it is a mystery.
MTV's president said that today's culture is so weird that we need the duo's POV (they'll even riff Jersey Shore on the revival!).
Let's face it: before B and B, the "ignorant 14-year-old with no future" trope had virtually disappeared from popular fiction. Not only that, but this show was maybe the first on television to accurately portray the average 14-year-old's sex drive.
When Bugs Bunny first said, "What's up, Doc?" in the 1940 short, A Wild Hare, it was a shock in ways modern audiences simply can't imagine or appreciate. In 1940, audiences saw the hunter (Elmer Fudd, of course), heard the hunter say he was hunting wabbits (er, rabbits), and then they saw the rabbit. 1940 audiences were expecting that rabbit to scream, run, pick a fight, play dead, anything except strike up a casual conversation with the guy trying to kill him. So, when Bugs did that, he brought the house down - a response that led to it becoming his Catch Phrase. Nowadays, not only does nobody find, "What's up, Doc?" funny, most people don't even realize it was ever supposed to be funny in the first place. It's just that thing Bugs always says in every freakin cartoon he's in.
Disney movies. A few can appear rather corny today. Especially the ones where the characters were similar to their original fairy tale inspirations, before the writers decided to adapt some more characterization to the princesses. Especially some of the ones that had some experimental animation techniques, that look rather sketchy today. (Namely the stuff in the 60s; which was a pretty new technique for Disney then. Before, they mostly rotoscoped).
Disney princesses. Snow White, Princess Aurora, and Cinderella. Boy, they were rather shallow characters, weren't they? Especially after Belle, Mulan (considered a Disney princess), and Tiana had way more traits and conflict between other characters.
Genie in Aladdin. A-List actors did not star in speaking roles before this. They all did afterwards.
Mickey Mouse: As one of Robert Smigel's Saturday Night Live shorts pointed out, it's hard for modern viewers to believe Mickey Mouse was ever funny, or even intended as such. The problem with this character might be that, after his late 1920s/early 1930s heyday, Walt Disney turned Mickey Mouse into a Mary Sue after he decided to promote the character to studio mascot. As a result, he didn't want the character to be portrayed negatively, and he became a straight man to characters like Donald Duck, Goofy, and Pluto (much to the consternation of the production staff, who felt the changes had made the character boring) — he just isn't believable as a mischievous character anymore.
The relative tameness of old cartoons is lovingly parodied on The Simpsons with "That Happy Cat", an early Max Fleischer-style "Itchy and Scratchy" cartoon, in which all Scratchy does is walk along a street. Even the 20s and 30s Mickey could be subject to this after the rise of Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry.
This is not entirely true. While it is hands-down one of the most ripped off cartoons ever, the DVD boxes for said series still sport parental guidance labels on them, and the website commonsensemedia.org rates it as unsuitable for viewers below 15. Many commenters on youtube who watch this show, most of them who hadn't seen it since childhood, often point out how "screwed up" and "insane" it is. Honestly, how many cartoons these days show characters pulling out their nerve endings with a pair of tweezers?
Shrek. Back in 2001, this iconoclastic take on Fairy Tales and use of pop-culture references felt like a welcome reprieve from the usual animated fare. Now, with several films, including a few from Shrek's own studio Dreamworks Animation, following the same formula, the sheen has worn off the franchise.
Most consider this trope to have reached Up to Eleven with the misleading ad campaign for Disney's Tangled, which tried to portray a more traditional fairy tale as a hip spoof of fairy tales—meaning, in essence, that the Trope Maker for such traditional movies is now scared to admit they're still making them.
ReBoot was the very first fully CGI television show that came out in the early nineties and was a pretty big success at the time. In this day and age, shows with CGI are completely common, and most people would consider ReBoot pretty tame in terms of computer accomplishments, although it had a great story, wonderful characters, and is still hailed today as one of the best, if not the best, CGI show of all time.
The Simpsons as a whole is very much a case of this trope by this point. During the shows golden age of the early to mid 90's, the show was extremely original, and not only because it was an animated program intended for adults. Its particular style of satirical, subversive humor made it stand out not only as a television cartoon, but as a comedy. To younger people who have spent their adolescent years watching shows like South Park and Family Guy, whose brand of humor is very much derived from The Simpsons, it is probably quite hard to appreciate just how groundbreaking the yellow skinned family and their show were back in their heyday.
And how controversial it was back then. The first season seems pretty tame, yet there were groups devoted to banning this show and its merchandise.
And don't forget the numerous film references in The Simpsons. They started this trend in animation and back then when they did it was often surprising, not done that often before and very amusing. Soon Disney movies like Aladdin, the Dreamworks films like Shrek and Shark Tale and every adult cartoon series, from South Park to Family Guy have been including references to popular films ever since.
Itchy and Scratchy's violent cartoons were originally intended as a parody of traditional cartoon violence like in Tom and Jerry and Looney Tunes, which was often very painful, but never bloody or fatal. So Itchy & Scratchy's gruesome battles surprised and shocked viewers because you never saw violence this extreme in mainstream animation. Nowadays, thanks to controversial and often gory shows like South Park, Family Guy, and Happy Tree Friends, the violence in Itchy and Scratchy doesn't seem that noticeable. Also, the disappearance of all classic 1930s-1950s cartoons on television means that the original reference target and thus the joke is lost on younger generations.
Celebrity guest appearances. Before The Simpsons, high-level celebrities didn't make appearances on animated programs. In fact, they generally didn't make appearances on TV at all, if their careers were going well. So, it doesn't seem like all that big of a deal that Michael Jackson voiced a character in the episode "Stark Raving Dad." However, in 1991, with Jackson at the height of his career, this was a HUGE deal, with much media speculation over who "John Jay Smith" actually was, and whether Jackson would actually voice a character on a cartoon. By 1994, a guest spot on The Simpsons had become a badge of honor, and is fairly passé today.
The concept of the trope itself is brought up in the first "Treehouse of Horror" episode. Lisa reads Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven to Bart as an example of a truly scary story. Bart is naturally unimpressed and wonders why anyone would find a poem scary. Lisa theorizes that people in the mid-19th century were just easier to scare, having not seen any of the modern day's gore-fests.
Bart: Oh yeah! It's like watching Friday the 13th: Part 1. Pretty tame by today's standards.
While Toy Story still holds up remarkably well, the graphics that were state of the art back in 1995 pale in comparison to what's being done today. The humans look almost as plastic as the toys, there's an airless quality to the outside scenes, and the animation is not as fluid and nuanced as what we see today. Not that the movie has now become unwatchable, far from it, but compare it to Toy Story 2 just four years later and the improvement is remarkable. And then compare that to Toy Story 3 eleven years after, and you appreciate how much CGI has evolved in such a short time. Also, consider the fact that before Toy Story, the number of fully computer-generated feature films was exactly zero, and it would be another two years before there was another one. With CGI so ubiquitous today, it's hard to imagine how mindblowing an experience it was to see Woody and Buzz for the first time.
When you watch the behind-the-scenes features about Toy Story, it's clear that John Lasseter and the late Joe Ranft were aware of this issue. They made sure they put as much effort into the story and the characters as they did into the technology. Which is why people will probably still be watching Toy Story in fifty years, long after its technology has become outdated.
Tex Avery created many jokes and situations in animated cartoons that were once surprising and hilariously funny, but have been imitated and plagiarized so much by other cartoon studios that these jokes can make a modern audience yawn because they are so predictable and overdone. Examples are eyes flying out of their sockets, enormous long tongues, endless chases, characters using sticks of dynamite or dropping anvils on each other, characters walking on thin air before realizing that there's nothing beneath them whereupon they fall down, painted tunnels the hero can drive through while the villain simply crashes against the wall, and so on.
Other
Artistic movements. Numerous ones like impressionism, surrealism, dada and postmodernism. While they were very modern (or even postmodern) and controversial when they were introduced, the fact that they've been around for ages means that its often hard to understand why the movements were so important.
The infamous "chicken joke" would be a brilliant subversion of the concept of a punch line, if only it weren't one of the first jokes most people heard. Some people miss the point so completely that they try to make it a real joke — claiming, for instance, that "the other side" is double-entendre for death. (Link NSFW.)
High-end computer technology in general. What's cutting edge can become mainstream and even low end very quickly by other companies doing it a lot cheaper. Just ask SGI or Cray.
Robin Williams and his mastery of Rapid-Fire Comedy were once new and exciting. (Mork and Mindy never would have survived without it). Thirty years later, this same style of comedy has become a punchline in and of itself, most notably in a SNL Celebrity Jeopardy sketch where "he" is told "For the love of God, SHUT YOUR MOUTH!".
It was the combination of rapid fire physical and verbal humor that made him famous, like having Groucho and Harpo in the same person.
Stand-up comics. Most original and groundbreaking ones seem less so a generation later — or less — when their styles and gimmicks are widely reproduced. It can be difficult to understand what makes, e.g., Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor so important when stages are saturated with comedians who do approximately the same thing, many of them at least as well.
In Britain, comics like Billy Connolly and Jasper Carrott were radically different from the traditional working men's club comedians in the 1970s who stood at a mike with a beer in hand and told jokes. Now their observational comedy and conversational style is the norm. Not that they're unfunny now, but they can seem like very conventional establishment figures when once they were radical.
Similarly, the work of many of the comedians of the "alternative comedy" set of the 1980s now often looks as quaint as the earlier comics they were reacting against, when viewed in context of later work.
Surrealism, non-sequiturs, and a rambling rhetorical style are so widespread among stand-up comics of the late '90s / early '00s that it's easy to overlook how influential Eddie Izzard was when he first coined that style. And even he simply imitated what certain American stand up comedians and Monty Python did decades earlier.
Jerry Seinfeld again. His observational stand-up was insanely popular in the late seventies and early eighties and it was widely recognised as fresh and original. Johnny Carson famously gave him the "OK" sign, when he first appeared on the Tonight Show. Fast forward a few years and Seinfeld had become the go-to-impression of a lazy hack comedian, due to being copied to death by lesser comedians. As early as 1985, a recurring sketch on Saturday Night Live featured a group of these, dressed alike and beginning and ending nearly every sentence with "What is the deal with..." and "I wanna know!"
Unix seems to fall victim to this trope. Multitasking and on-line documentation are now standard, and the command-line interface is admittedly difficult. But clunky as it was, a person using a computer interactively was a major breakthrough in the early-mid '70s when the computer world was still based on batch-processing.
Linux was considered revolutionary because it was a full UNIX system that could run on a single off-the-shelf PC. Since then every UNIX-like OS has been ported to the platform.
USENET. In a world where any schmuck with an Internet connection can start a blog or a message board, this has gone from "groundbreaking innovator" to "place where only spammers frequent" very quickly.
The Gopher Protocol, which organized content on the internet into a browseable (by a text menu interface) hierarchy of sites, files and folders, complete with a search engine has been all but lost to current generations of web users as the direct predecessor OF the web, however a decent sized gopher space does still exist on the 'net to this day.
People these days, with handheld computing devices such as smart phones, kindles, ipads, etc.. probably don't remember the Newton Message pad, the grandfather so to speak of many of these, and direct ancestor of the ipad and quite a few of them more then likely would think of them as unwieldy or clunky, but when they were introduced in 1994 they were far ahead of the time.
They were too far ahead of the time, which is why they were unwieldy and clunky (even by 1994 standards). When Palm came along and did the same thing, with much less ambition, they were unbelievably successful.
Technologies in general. Remember how a bunch of gigs were supposed to take up area the size of a floortile? Yeah...take one look at modern terabyte storage devices and hard-drives and try not to laugh at those prospectives.
If you're too used to DVD and Blu-Ray, watching a movie on a VHS seems...weird. The quality might seem grainy, the sound is lower quality, etc, and there's all sorts of damage that could have been done. Not to mention, having to fast forward if you wanted to see a certain scene...and knowing they weren't that accurate as most VCR-systems would play about a second of silence and then pick up when you fast-forward or rewound.
And in this day in age, the fact that theatres or rare TV-showings were the only way to see old movies seems kinda silly.
Reading stuff written or set in the past could make people wonder just how the heck we even survived today - because in many Older Than Steam, you could hear mentions of people dying of diseases that are today almost completely unheard of. Smallpox, Scarlet Fever, Scurvy, Beriberi, Dysentery, Cholera...Yeah.
A YouTube comment on the Animated Adaptation of The Velveteen Rabbit asked why on earth they would burn the boy's toys and beddings after he had Scarlet Fever. At the time, scarlet fevor being transmitted by personal effects was considered scientific fact. Science Marches On.
Most of the reason Dysentery is known nowadays is because of Oregon Trail.
