The lighting is so bad you can see the shadow of the boom-mike on the wall. The zippers and seams are visible on the People in Rubber Suits. The editing looks like someone playing with the wipe feature on Windows Movie Maker. There are times when you really start to wonder what is going wrong with a movie; in theory, they should be trying to make the best product they can.
But that's not what happens. A strange combination of the lack of money, time, expertise, enthusiasm, and simple talent sabotages the production. This is when the production values of a work are just so far below what should be expected that you can't help but figure that "They Just Didn't Care."
Despite all of that, this trope is generally a mindset, and not one that is universally bad. If someone didn't care about one aspect of the production, the reasons may be that they were more worried about something more important. Nearly every fan of the originalStar Trek knows of the continuity flub of Khan recognizing Chekhov when the Ensign didn't appear in the show until the following season. Obviously it isn't a horrendous mistake to begin with, and Nicolas Meyer admitted to not caring about that mistake. (A light dose of Fanon fixes it anyway.)
The trope name can be used as a stock phrase, something that can be applied to a wide variety of issues. Examples for this trope are all about the production values. It is possible to "Just Not Care" in regards to other aspects of making a story, but we have another set of tropes for that. Compare:
The Funimation English dub of the first Dragon Ball movie used an almost completely different voice cast from the TV series, with only two actors returning to reprise their roles. This had nothing to do with budget or actor availability. It had to do with whoever was on-hand at the exact time of production. The original actors from the TV series weren't even contacted for the project, and most of the actors used in the movie didn't even do a good job sounding like the TV series actors. This can also be an example of The Other Darrin, but it's an easy example of this trope.
It should be noted, though, that by the time Funimation finally dubbed the first movie (they'd previously been unable to because of rights issues, since the previous studio that released the edited dub retained them for the longest time), most of the voice cast for the TV series dub had long since left, and the replacement voice actors had already been doing the roles in other dubs as well as the recent video games. And that doesn't even count the original characters created for the first movie since they weren't even in the TV series anyway.
This does very much count for their English dub of the Rebuild of Evangelion films. Several ADV voice actors who worked on the dubs of both the TV series and the original movies and work with Funi's studio now even offered to reprise their roles, and most were flat-out refused.
An episode of Yu Gi Oh The Abridged Series had Yugi guess that the animators didn't even care about the size of Kaiba's nose. Another episode noted that they apparently turned Tristan's skin black in one shot where the whole gang is in profile. Hilarity Ensues.
Tristan: "Don't be hating on my blackface, playa!"
When Digimon Adventure was released on VHS in the UK, volumes 1-5 contained the first 15 episodes of the original series, but volume 6 skipped straight to Digimon Adventure 02.
And for the Western version of the Digimon movie, the producers just grabbed the three existing movies, crammed them all into a single film regardless of whether it made sense or not (it didn't), and replaced all of the music with Smash Mouth songs.
The Pokémon anime is infamous for instances where the writers and dubbers clearly did not pay attention to their own video game, such as a scene where a trainer orders his Pokemon to "Finish it off with False Swipe!" (a move that can never defeat, only reduce to 1 HP.) However, the biggest one has to be from Pokémon: Mewtwo Returns, where a father Rhyhorn and mother Nidoqueen are seen with their children of both species, Rhyhorns and Nidoqueens. Baby Nidoqueens. Not baby Nidorans, Nidoqueens. As in a third-stage Pokemon. A third-stage final form baby.
Comic Books
For a positive example: early in his career, Steve Ditko spent a lot of time writing and drawing comics for Charlton and other low-budget DC imitators. While this meant the comics rarely had much of an audience and were only intermittently readable, it also meant his editors and publishers didn't much care whether he was doing comics the "right" way, so he was pretty much free from Executive Meddling and could be as inventive as he liked. This would later make him the artist and writer who made Spider-Man and Doctor Strange the entertainingly offbeat characters that they were.
The first year's worth of the original Gold Key Star Trek comic books, done by people in Europe who never saw the show yet were hired to draw and write the book. One horrific example has some guy named Captain "Kurt".
There were also the Power Records comic book/record sets, one of which featured a white Uhura and a black Sulu, complete with a fabulous 'fro. They were recognizably drawn based on the actors, but then altered in the coloring phase. This wasn't so much lack of research as lack of clearance for the actors' likenesses, something which famously got them into trouble with Leonard Nimoy.
Reginald Hudlin's tenure as head writer of Black Panther is full of this. Hudlin's Panther is so different from everything that came before, and ignores so much of his previous adventures and characterization, it would have fit better in Ultimate Marvel as opposed to the main 616-verse.
Panther's supporting cast, one of the best in recent comic book history - gone, or changed beyond recognition. Goodbye Queen Divine Justice, Monica Lynne, Hunter, goodbye Everett Ross' personality, goodbye Kasper Cole. Black Panther's backstory? Butchered. So he wasn't the real Black Panther all those years? All he has to do to become Black Panther is win a wrestling match? No spiritual communion with the Panther god through the heart-shaped herb... just a knock down fight? Where the hell did his younger sister come from?
When Jeph Loeb started writing for Ultimate Marvel, fans noticed some odd continuity errors cropping up. The Wasp, an Asian in the Ultimate Universe, suddenly turned white like her mainstream counterpart. Meanwhile, Ultimate Pyro, who was a hero instead of a villain like the 616 universe's Pyro, and the duo of Forge and Longshot, heroes in the standard universe but villains in Ultimate Marvel, suddenly switched sides with nary a Hand Wave as to why. Pyro even wanted to rape a knocked-out superheroine, and lost the horrible scars that had been his most striking feature in Ultimate X-Men. Nobody knows exactly what went through Loeb's head, of course, but the most popular explanation is also the simplest - he didn't bother reading their appearances in other books before he wrote his own.
The Ultimate Universe in general is plagued by this trope, apparently being seen as the branch of Marvel where continuity doesn't matter. One of the first Ultimate books was Ultimate Marvel Team-Up, which ostensibly existed to create Ultimate versions of characters who didn't have their own books. Unfortunately, those versions were roundly ignored as soon as someone felt like using those characters in a different book. They included Ultimate versions of the Hulk, the Black Widow, and the Fantastic Four that bore far more resemblance to their 616 counterparts than to what would later become the canon Ultimate versions.
As an added "bonus", it also shows Frank Miller also stopped caring about his own continuity. According to him, all of his Batman stories coexist in the same universe/continuity. And while the events of the comic would definitely explain why Robin hates Batman so much he turns into a villain in The Dark Knight Strikes Again, there's no way, as Linkara pointed out, that Gordon would allow such a despicable person as this Batman is to roam around care-free.
In Jason Aaron's run on Wolverine, he had the demonically-possessed title character stab Colossus, drawing blood. Apparently he missed the memo that Colossus can turn his entire body into organic steel, not just his skin.
While the writing may be subject to debate, some of the artwork in Archie Comics' Sonic the Hedgehog shows that whoever was in charge couldn't really give a dang, with issue 113 and the main story of Sonic Super Special issue 15 being so poorly done artwise that one has to wonder how they even got published in the first place.
And then there was a issue in the Sonic Quest miniseries in which they forgot to remove one of the notes left by the artist to the colorist, so there's a hand-written line outside of a panel that reads "REMOVE RED LINE'S" in one of the pages found in the printed version of the comic. It must be seen to be believed.
Film
Attack of(the)the Eye Creatures is the Trope Namer, but honestly, you can apply it to any of Larry Buchanan's films, especially any of the remakes of old AIP films like Invasion of the Saucer Men, or Zontar, Thing From Venus (It Conquered the World).
Crow: Get ready to give chase to an injured eye creature; as you can see, he's wearing his Jack Purcell athletic shoes! Folks, they just did not care!
In another MST3K experiment, Red Zone Cuba, Servo groans, "I see the movie has finally thrown up its hands and said, 'I just don't know'."
This trope seems to apply to the works of Seltzer and Friedberg in general, as they are so concerned with pumping out the next year's installment to lampoon the current crop of movies that their film trailers will feature scenes parodying the movie you are waiting to watch.
This is parodied in UHF with the fake trailer for Gandhi II, where Gandhi's character suddenly resembles Shaft.
The Seeker, The Film of the Book of The Dark Is Rising. When the screenwriter freely admits he didn't even read the book, you know right off nobody cared. The director also admitted he hated fantasy, and the movie reflects their attitudes. Possibly the only person who did care was the kid cast as Will, who unfortunately Took The Bad Film Seriously. The result was a film that still holds the record for the fastest theater drop (that being the number of theaters that dropped it from their lineup after the obligatory three weeks), and also holds the distinction of having the second-weakest debut of any movie ever.
The infamous "Glock 7" scene from Die Hard 2, involving a mythical handgun that isn't detected by airport scanners. They were informed by their firearms consultant that the entire concept was nonsense, but they didn't care and insisted on keeping the scene.
The entire movie qualifies, as air traffic and airports do not work that way. Anyone with even the most cursory knowledge would known that every plane could have just gone to another airport. Among the many other They Just Didn't Care aspects of the film.
Monster-a-Go-Go originally started as a monster movie called Terror at Half-Day, directed by Bill Rebane. However, Rebane was forced to stop production when the film's budget ran out. Terror at Half-Day then remained unfinished for a few years until infamous splatter film director Herschell Gordon Lewis came along and bought the footage from Rebane.
H.G. Lewis needed a film that could be sold as part of a double feature with one of his own films, which was the more profitable move at the time. And so, he decided to "complete" Rebane's movie by directing several scenes that would later make up the second half of Monster-a-Go-Go, adding the pretentious narration, and then hastily piecing it all together.
The resulting film, despite being a terrible mess, was still released to the public. It has since then gained a legacy as being one of the worst movies ever made.
The Resident Evil movies are this, considering that they completely disregard everything about the games they're based on except for a few names, introduce a God Mode Sue main character out of nowhere, take a scene directly from Resident Evil 5 and it actually has worse special effects, and turn the Nemesis into a complete pussy. The fact that the original script (which would have been by George frigging Romero) was much more faithful and well done only adds salt to the wound.
Soulja Boy: The Movie is a documentary about the titular rapper with little effort put into it. How little effort? During his interviews, Soulja Boy is surfing the Internet on his laptop at the same time! He also delivers such gems like "I don't like to do interviews" in the middle of an interview, or "I'm not into computers" while using his laptop.
Which is worse when you consider the first film was based off a book.
Inheritance Cycle. No, the author himself put his all into his series. In this case it was the editor who was lazy. Aside from making sure that nothing was misspelled there are tons of minor and major continuity mistakes, Purple Prose abound, and somehow didn't notice that a sentence containing the words "descended upwards" doesn't make any sense.
The publishing company that picked up the series. Basically the CEO gave his kid a copy of the book, the kid said it was "okay" and instantly published the book as-is (and made sure it was released before the latest Harry Potterbook).
Mass Effect Deception is the fourth Mass Effect novel, written by William C. Dietz. Despite not being part of the BioWare team, Dietz was contracted to write Deception. What resulted was a book filled to the brim with poor characterization, numerous plot holes, terribly childish writing, and not several but dozens and dozens of contradictions to a well established and consistant lore, all of which the previous novels avoided entirely. Mass Effect fans compiled a list of the vast amount of mistakes, and BioWare has since essentially declared Deceptionnon-canon.
Live-Action TV
Documentary series Wild West Tech includes some lackluster reenactments. The worst are the scenes where the actors are exchanging money. They are clearly using modern notes despite the fact that the scenes are set in the Old West. What puts this example over the top is that the same episode included a CG rendering of money appropriate to the era. They obviously had an example of period money, but just didn't care enough to click "Print."
In the second season finale of Robin Hood, Maid Marian was brutally murdered by Guy of Gisborne in a move that writer/creator Dominic Mingella described as an attempt to "rock the show" and "open up new storytelling possibilities." Translation: shock value. Interestingly enough, Mingella didn't stick around for the third season, being credited as a "creator" but contributing nothing to the script-writing or directing. The BBC obviously realised that the show had self-destructed, which led to a general attitude of "We Don't Care Anymore" for the broadcasting of the third season. There was very little publicity regarding the show (far less than previous seasons), the official website wasn't updated until a few days before the premiere, a "closed-mouth" policy seemed to be in place on the reasons behind Marian's death, it was given a terrible time-slot, detailed plot synopses were released to the press which contained massive spoilers, and the premature release of the DVD box set ensured that the final episode was leaked on YouTube a good three days before it aired on television (not that many people saw it on television anyway: the BBCpulled it in favour of tennis and plonked it on a different channel only a few hours before it was scheduled to air). The icing on the cake is the poor build quality of the DVD boxset, which along with the minimal amount of extras further emphasises that series 3 was only shown at all just to get it over and done with; it's quite possible yours has fallen apart on the shelf.
Furthermore, the new batch of writers brought in for the third season clearly didn't bother to watch the previous seasons. Fan speculation is that they were simply handed a note that said "Marian got killed", since this is the only major plot-line that is carried over from the past two seasons (and even that is more of an afterthought than any kind of sustained story-line).
The network that currently shows Top Gear in Australia has an editing policy that is best described as 'schizophrenic'. For the past few seasons, after the airing of the Australian version of the show (which may just be a coincidence), the British version has received numerous cuts to their airings. The thing is, there doesn't seem to be any definite logic or pattern to their cuts. They cut out the news most consistently, but have left it in on occasion, and have also at various times cut the Stig's power laps, the Star in a Reasonably-Priced Car, and the Cool Wall (the last is particularly noticeable in the season 13 finale - when suddenly Hammond was stuck on top of a scissor lift at the end of the show for no apparent reason). Strangely, it doesn't seem they even have time constraints or advertisements to blame - entire episodes have been cut.
Ditto the American broadcast, cut for time and commercials. Many of the cuts described above have happened, sometimes they only have half of the SIARPC (a particularly baffling example was cutting an anti-drunk driving PSA shown during one), and BBC America refuses to acknowledge that the first Stig ever existed. Most cuts, however, are to to cultural/political jokes or references that would be lost on American viewers.
Near the end of the third season of Alias, the official ABC.com recap included a plot point (the reveal that Vaughn had been brainwashed by Lauren) that was deleted from the episode (when the season was released on DVD, it was included in the deleted scenes, though). The summary was fixed a few hours later. In the next episode, Vaughn refers to "Whatever Lauren did to me," which was never revealed on screen. In the season finale, the cliffhanger involved Sydney being alerted to secret documents about how she was some sort of pawn. When Syd read the file about the CIA's secret "Project SAB-47" (SAB = Sydney's initials, 47 = the show's recurring magical number), created by her father, Jack, with a starting date of the day she was born, she cries, and then her father appears and tells her that he was hoping she'd never find that. The implication is that her life was some massive CIA project started by Jack. When the website recap went up, they included deleted plot points AGAIN, this time from shots of the documents that were deleted to not reveal as much in the cliffhanger. Again, the recap was fixed within a few hours. After a long wait (the new season was moved from September to January), the first half of the season premiere ends on the reveal that (spoilered because this actually was official continuity) Jack recently killed her mother with CIA approval... even though they used the Season finale scene as a flashback, which the new reveal didn't make sense as an extension of due to the date and project name. The writers decided that it was the best move essentially because they thought that they wrote themselves into a corner by making Jack potentially too evil, and they did it as haphazardly as possible. The show had a ridiculous amounts of dropped plots and other weird stuff at various points, but the sloppiness over the course of these few episodes really made it look like they just didn't care.
Oh, and then about half a season later, there was a two part episode where Sark went from knowing that Vaughn killed Lauren in the first half to "learning" it in the second half and being shocked by the information.
One example that straddles the line between They Just Didn't Care and Screwed by the Network is Power Rangers Wild Force. The series was being produced when the franchise was bought by Disney, so the former people in charge were gone, the new people in charge had no clue what they were doing, and the left hand didn't know what the right was doing. This caused Wild Force to be considered by the majority of fans the worst season ever. What parts that weren't directly lifted from the Sentaisource material were flimsy, there was no direction, the acting was bad even by PR standards, and the writers gave the Zords more characterization than the Rangers.
On the other hand, Wild Force started to look a lot better once Ranger fans saw what Disney was doing to the series. They didn't outright hate the series, but Power Rangers RPM's producer said they did seem ashamed of it. (It should be noted that Disney never wanted the series, they wanted to buy the Fox Family Channel, and Power Rangers just kind of came with the deal somehow.) The violence of the show didn't work well with Disney's ultra-wholesome image, so they weren't really sure what to do with it, gave it very little promotion, and essentially left it to wither away.
When it was expected that Power Rangers RPM was to be the final series, the creators put out all the stops to make sure the franchise would end with a bang. It probably would've had the same effect In Space had in saving the franchise... had the TV networks not put it on five o'clock on Saturday mornings. Who is up at that time? Oh well, at least now Saban bought back the franchise...
Of course, RPM is a positive case of They Just Didn't Care. Disney point-blank told the producer, "The show is ending, do what you want," which led to the creators to just swing for the fences. It didn't work to save the show (at least in Disney's eyes), but it did become one of the best Rangers seasons so far.
ABC's short-lived game show Set For Life omitted the qualifying rounds that determined how much each contestant would be playing for in the rest of the game — resulting in a lame Deal or No Deal knockoff with arbitrary cash values.
When Fox doesn't care, they really don't care — not only did they cancel the much-loved Wonderfalls and Firefly ahead of their time(s), but they aired their respective episodes out of order, leading to confusion and a lack of continuity.
The writers of 24 notoriously admitted that they started each season with no idea where that season's complicated conspiracy plot would end up. This led to characters who would end up being in on the villains' plot being performed and written as though they were good guys, because it hadn't actually been decided that they were bad guys yet. Which, of course, led to them doing things that made absolutely no sense when you knew where their loyalties truly lied. Hey, why would you expect a series whose episodes are supposed to be taking place over the course of a single day to have tighter continuity?
The Loudness War is based around trying to get all parts of music to the same volume, thus effectively exposing the brain to a solid tone. This is not only fatiguing, but can also lead to people trying to listen to brickwalled music and not understanding why they're not getting any enjoyment out of it. The reason is that the differences in volume and sections in a song are what makes music exciting for people. In other words, brickwalled music is literally noise.
Newspaper Comics
Many newspaper comics pages print strips extremely small, thus rendering certain details almost completely illegible. Some don't even resize the strips properly, so they're stretched and distorted. This manhandling of strips is often joked about in others, such as this quote from Fox Trot:
Andy: This says a cartoonist in Mississippi got a group of school kids together to help him make the world's largest comic strip. It was 135×47 feet. (beat) 6×2 inches probably would've been big enough.
WCW itself at the twilight of the Monday Night Wars. The management of the owning company Time Warner, as described in many books, despised professional wrestling and actively wanted it to do so badly that it had to be taken off the air. Ted Turner, who had been WCW's protector, had gotten older and lost his position of power after the AOL/Time Warner merger, and thus was no longer able to exert influence over it. Internally, WCW had no effective management, no bosses who were able to actually control the egos of the wrestlers and hand out effective punishments. Instead it was run by Vince Russo, who chronically misunderstands everything about how pro wrestling works, and a bunch of smaller names who argued with each other and deliberately sabotaged the shows to keep anything besides their pet ideas from getting over.
At Wrestlemania XX, a truly Godawful match between Bill Goldberg and Brock Lesnar occurred. Goldberg and Lesnar were, at the time, two of the biggest names in the WWE. However, both were also leaving the company, and thought they could phone in their last match, so instead of a great battle, the fans got a slow-paced, boring match.
There's been a lot of discussion on why that match was so bad. The fans had started booing both men vociferously before the match even started, so neither likely felt inspired to perform. It's also been claimed that the WWE match planners deliberately designed the match to be as boring and shitty as possible in an attempt to sabotage their careers. Also, Steve Austin, who was more popular than either of them, was involved in the match as a referee because he wasn't in physical condition to work a match, but this irritated Austin fans who wanted to see him do stuff.
A large part of the problem (tied in with the Austin thing above) was that Goldberg hadn't been on TV for a month prior to the PPV (Real Life contract dispute, kayfabe suspension), which shot the build up to the match (which, up until this point, had been some of the best build up of any feud going that year) in the foot. This left Austin and Lesnar carrying the feud, making it more about Austin and Lesnar than Goldberg and Lesnar. Hell, it was more about Austin vs Goldberg (a long-wished dream match) than Goldberg vs Lesnar, leaving the whole thing dead in the water.
This entrance video for Greg Helms. It's incredibly obvious that the higher-ups don't care about a guy when the best they can do for a character and entrance is "sunglasses" and "tilts head to the left."
Ditto for Gail Kim's final entrance video. Neither side was really interested in attempting to care. Gail was there solely for Money, Dear Boy, and, if you believe some of the rumors online, the only reason WWE hired Gail back was to keep her from turning TNA's Knockouts Division into any kind of credible threat. It's very telling that nowhere in her entrance video is she actually seen to wrestle.
Sports
The Atlanta Spirit Group wanted to sell the Atlanta Thrashers (now the second generation Winnipeg Jets) since day one of owning the NHL franchise; however, legal in-fighting amongst the partners prevented the group from being able to sell the team until December 2010 at the earliest. The group was only interested in the NBA's Hawks and the operating rights to Philips Arena. The aforementioned legal battles as well as the group spending the bare minimum to operate the team caused the Thrashers to slip to the bottom of the league in average attendance and team valuation. Atlanta Spirit even considers the Thrashers an Old Shame, erasing any and all reminders of the team.
The league also didn't seem to care about keeping the Thrashers in Atlanta, as they would have not collected a $60 million relocation fee if they found a buyer willing to keep the team in Atlanta. This is particularly egregious considering the league made significant efforts in recent seasons to keep the Pittsburgh Penguins, Nashville Predators, and especially the Phoenix Coyotes in their respective markets after their own turbulent ownership experiences and threats of relocation.
Regardless of whoever owns the Florida/Miami Marlins, high quality players are almost guaranteed to get traded away in fire sales. Current owner Jeffrey Loria (also the ex-owner of the former Montreal Expos) is particularly hated in this regard; he'll spend the bare minimum on a roster simply to save money and has fired two well-regarded managers because they couldn't win on a shoestring budget. The team is so desperate to fill seats for the 2013 home opener, they've resorted to Groupon of all places.
After the 1994 season, the fire sale of several star players along with several other front office factors spelled the doom of the former Montreal Expos. For the last years of their existence in Montreal, fan support dwindled after the team could not secure English language TV and radio broadcast rights and negotiations to build a new baseball-specific stadium fell through. After Jeffrey Loria's mismanagement of the team, the Expos were sold to the other clubs of Major League Baseball, with the intention of disbanding the team along with the Minnesota Twins after the 2001 season; however, legal action by various parties delayed this until 2006 at the earliest. Ultimately, the Expos were moved to Washington, DC to become the Nationals in 2005.
Tabletop Games
Exalted has a number of examples. While which splats would qualify are the result of huge internet knife fights, two that virtually everyone agrees on are the Sidereal Charmset's pre-errata state and the Mountain Folk mechanics. The Sidereals had the significant issue that their writer actively hated the mechanics that made them good in first edition, resulting in powers that literally did nothing and stuff that didn't interface all that well with the Exalted system. The Mountain Folk... well... they had one keyword (Leadership) detailed but no Charms using that keyword actually written, and another that provided Overwhelming equal to the user's Essence... in a system where everyone gets Overwhelming equal to their Essence score automatically, and in which Overwhelming values do not stack.
Video Games
Action 52 for the NES. $199.99 buys you 52 games that are cheaply done, buggy, or plain don't work. It's obvious that the amount of effort that went into Action 52 was almost nil.
Interplay tried to cash in on its Fallout franchise by creating Fallout Brotherhood Of Steel, a knock-off of its successful Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance series. The gameplay bore no resemblance to the original Fallout roleplaying games and made only passing references to the Fallout world. At the same time, Interplay canceled the highly anticipated Fallout 3 game and jettisoned its entire Black Isle Studios division, which had masterminded the real Fallout series. Fans reacted in outrage before the game even released, prompting the developers to insert a snarky Take That into the credits. The fans had the last laugh, however, when the game performed poorly and the company folded soon afterward. Interplay did recover from that... by selling the Fallout franchise to Bethesda, who went on to release an actual Fallout 3 game to enormous critical and commercial acclaim.
The amount of negativity from the fans reached such heights that Interplay locked their own discussion board for the game, possibly the only time ever that has happened with any game and developer.
An unusual medium for an example is the Madden NFL franchise. It has had a bug for years on end that stops players in simulated games from getting tired, so the backups never play. This means that about five running backs break the all-time rushing record each season, and there are all sorts of other silly consequences. The makers cannot possibly be unaware of the bug, and they just don't care.
That error is prevalent in a lot of sports games - backup goaltenders in hockey games and bench players in basketball and football don't play nearly as much in simmed games as in real life, because there's no such thing as a "day off" in the simmed version.
The Madden games include injured reserve, a real NFL device which allows teams to open a roster spot by disqualifying an injured player for the rest of the season. In the game, unfortunately, placing a player on IR does not open a roster spot. It still prevents the player from seeing the field the rest of the year, making IR a worse-than-worthless feature. This has been pointed out to EA countless times and would seem a remarkably easy fix. The bug continues, however, and the only possible explanation is laziness.
None of that is direct evidence that the developers didn't care: Nintendo Hard is a trope for a reason, and the Silver Surfer was somewhat well known for weeping like a crybaby during the 80's. No, the real smoking gun is that after fighting the likes of Dorrek VII, Firelord, and freaking Mephisto, the final boss of the game is Mr. Sinister, an X-Men villain who's never met the Surfer in 30 years of comics history. Except the enemy sprite is some purple alien that looks nothing like Sinister, or Galactus, who would at least make some sense.
This trope is becoming a dominant present-day interpretation of the unforgiving nature of older Nintendo Hard games.
While we're on the topic of Marvel Comics games, Wolverine for NES. The title character loses health whenever he attacks using his adamantium claws. And not only is he vulnerable to attacks from others, the game doesn't even offer Mercy Invincibility. Oh, and his Healing Factor is powered by food scattered around the level.
Some have speculated that because Iron Lore Entertainment — the company responsible — was closing down after all, they literally didn't care (others hold that Iron Lore wanted to go out with a bang, but were hampered by Executive Meddling; only the ex-staff know for sure).
Thedevelopers of Wild Arms: Alter Code F cared. Agetec, the company that localized it in America, did not. Agetec picked up the rights to localize the English version a few months after the game was released in Japan (November 2003), a move that was welcomed by fans considering their work publishing the Armored Core series, which included adding extras that weren't in the Japanese release. A year later, no one had heard a word about any work that had been done with the localization and absolutely no word of a release date. Small details trickled out through one insider, but even he expressed frustration when the game was finally released in America, in November 2005...without voices (the Japanese release had grunts and shouts in battle, and vocals in a few songs, all of which were cut out entirely without any replacement dub), without fixing the Game Breaking Bugs, without any extras (except a DVD of the first episode of the questionable-quality WA anime, Twilight Venom)...and worst of all, a "Blind Idiot" Translation that was barely any better than the original game, and certainly wasn't up to the standard of 2005 PS2 games. Agetec went mysteriously silent and didn't respond to any inquiries, even from the insider, as to how they managed to release a gutted version of the game after sitting on it for two years. Subsequent games in the series were localized by XSEED Games, who are widely agreed to have handled the process better.
Vergil mode in Devil May Cry 3: Special Edition. While some may have been satisfied just to use him as a playable character, others were hoping for a complete deal - cutscenes showing Vergil's interactions with the bosses, fights against Dante, Vergil's own take on wielding the weapons Dante gains etc. Regrettably, the only cutscene on Vergil's side made sense only as part of Dante's story, with no pre- or post-bossfight cutscenes or gaining the bosses' weapons. The "Dante" fights were with a mere Palette Swap of Vergil, sometimes Fan Nicknamed "Vante". It's playable, yes, and there is a certain amount of Squee to using Vergil... but it isn't exactly an expected complete package.
Similarly, Mortal Kombat Shaolin Monks has the unlockable characters of Scorpion and Sub-Zero, as well as the versus mode. While the two as well as the other playable characters in that mode do have their own movesets and fatalities, in cutscenes and in-game contexts they wind up playing the exact same roles as Liu Kang and Kung Lao, which means not only talking in their voices but such oddities as a cutscene where Sub-Zero conjures a hat out of nowhere to cut a clone of himself's eye. As for the versus mode, it has access to a good few of the characters in the game, but despite having full movesets programmed in for them (playable via hacking) certain characters like Kano, Goro, and Shang Tsung are not usable for no apparent reason. Also none of the characters playable in that mode besides Scorpion and Sub-Zero are usable in the story mode, again for no clear reason.
Also true for the Castlevania games from Symphony of the Night onward, some of which have an extra mode allowing you to play with another character. True, the other characters have different sprites and movesets and require different playing strategies, but in those modes there aren't even cutscenes or dialogue, some gameplay elements are removed and some parts are unreachable. You could argue it presents a more traditional, NES/SNES era gameplay, but after playing with the new style, the old one is not as welcome. Also, for a 2D game which uses its "engine" for the cutscenes, adding a few cutscenes/lines of dialogue is very little work.
Chaos Wars' obscenely bad English dub. Wanna know how cheap the CEO of the company responsible for this is? He used his own family to voice act the game. This would be understandable if they actually had some sort of acting talent, but... Holyfuckballs. There are no words.
The PC port of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. First, LucasArts claimed they would never bother doing it as "no PC is powerful enough to run it". Then they changed their minds. Did they fix the horrible bugs? No. Did they optimize the gameplay so an average PC could run it? No. Did they cut it down to optimize it for a PC release? No. They tacked on a little bit of content, and called it the Ultimate Sith Edition. How big was it? 23 gigabytes. That's Blu-ray big. Problem is, few PCs have a BD-ROM drive. A Steam release fixed part of that issue, but also made the 23 gigabyte size all the more apparent, especially for those with slower connections or limited bandwidth.
Pretty much every instruction manual put out by Konami USA was like this during the NES and SNES eras. Apparently, the copy editors vastly overestimated their collective sense of humor, and that manifested in their tossing out the actual plots and character names from Konami's games so they could fill the manuals with all sorts of stupid jokes and Incredibly Lame Puns.
In the manual for Super C, the following statement is made: "Red Falcon has also shuttled in The Babalu Bestructoid Mechanism, a giant alien attack tank, which was the primary weapon used to disintegrate the innocent solar system of Tralala." It must be noted that the European port Probotector II has no such inane gibberish. A retrospective also noted:
What happened to Bill and Lance? The two guys who fought and destroyed Red Falcon in the original Contra? Who the hell are Mad Dog and Scorpion? Also note the typo that made it into the manual: "Mad Dod and Extrodinare," hah!
The manual for the Super Nintendo game Cybernator had gems like calling the enemy capital city "Suburbionsky, Uzbekistanksi".
Many console-to-PC ports fall into this. A prime example is Metal Gear Solid 2 Sons Of Liberty. You know how in most PC games over the last fifteen years when you press the Escape button, you get a menu that has things like "save game", "load game", "settings" and "quit"? None of that for this game! Pressing Escape immediately quits to desktop without even a yes/no confirmation prompt. The saving system has not been altered in any way from the PS2 original, so the only way to load a game is from the main menu or dying on purpose. Changing the game settings is done by a completely separate program from the main game executable. This is all especially strange since the first Metal Gear Solid had an excellent PC port with none of the aforementioned shortcomings, though it did miss out on the fun of the Psycho Mantis fight.
Valve Software has a tendency to leave beta textures in their retail products. Examples:
In Half-Life, the Black Mesa Research Facility has posters of various locations and staff. What's the problem? They're using beta models/textures.
Team Fortress 2's gib textures, Ubercharge effects, and HUD icons for the classes and weapons use beta textures as wellnote most notable with the Spy's icon, which has a pair of team-colored armbands that are nowhere to be found on the actual model. The worst part about this is that the beta Ubercharge textures are misaligned on the final models.
The Original, a recreation of the Quake rocket launcher, uses a centered model that switches to the side of the screen for reloading. The problem is that the model isn't compatible with a modified weapon FOV on 16:9 or 16:10 displays, in which, during reloading when the weapon is shifted to the side of the screen, a zoomed-out rocket launcher will be shown floating in mid-air, cut off in the middle. The only possible remedy for this is to play on a 4:3 monitor, which were already on their way out upon the game's release in 2007.
The reload animations in Team Fortress 2 are incredibly lazy as well. With some weapons, like the Ambassador, Scattergun, and Direct Hit, the animation clearly doesn't show actual ammo being put into the gun. With others, like the Enforcer, the bullets just magically float in, with the developers not bothering to animate the arm.
Almost all melee weapons use the same animation. This is very noticeable when said animation is awkward for what the weapon is, and when the "equip melee weapon" sound doesn't match the skin of the weapon because they just re-used a sound effect (taking out a stick with a railway spike driven through it makes the sound of a shovel unfolding, for some reason).
In the Left 4 Dead games, the pair of legs left behind from a blown-up male Boomer have the wrong pants and sock colors. Female Boomers use male Boomer arms when you control them in VS mode (Male Boomers have boils on their bodies while females don't). Females Boomers also use a voice clip from their male counterpart when they are falling.
On the topic of Valve, the German version of the TF2 short Meet the Sniper was left entirely uncensored, as opposed to the other shorts, which were censored and edited quite ridiculously over there (due to Germany not allowing blood or gore in video games). Also, you'd think that since the TF2 characters are basically robots over in Germany because of the way the game and its shorts are censored, Sniper's pee jars would be jars of oil instead, but surprisingly, no.
WWF Warzone by Acclaim for the Nintendo 64 had better looking visuals than the Playstation version, due to its higher resolution, but the music is atrocious. The Playstation version contained pre-recorded music for the wrestlers' entrances. Due to the limited memory, the N64 naturally used MIDIs, but they only bear little resemblance to the real music. Later games by THQ had surprisingly high quality MIDI-style songs, and their previous WCW games had versions of the Nitro theme that were very faithful to the real recording.
The US arcade version of Dance Dance Revolution X came with a truly awful new arcade cabinet that eventually ended up being recalled. The construction of the pressure panels and sensors within the dance stage was so bad that sensors would start sticking within hours, the HDTV display had a considerable amount of lag, the cabinet was covered with very gaudy strips of LEDs, and the computing hardware for this entire setup was a Dell Optiplex PC. Japanese arcade operators were provided with much better quality new-style cabinets, and they also had the option of purchasing upgrade kits for existing arcade cabinets instead, neither of which, of course, ever made it Stateside.
Dragon Ball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi reuses a lot of voice clips from Dragon Ball: Raging Blast, which is fine and dandy in the Japanese version considering that each DBZ game tends to tell the same story over and over anyway, but in English half the characters had been recast for Dragon Ball Kai since then, leading to characters like Freeza and Gohan having their voice actors change constantly mid-game.
In Pro Cycling Manager 2011, a lot of stage races, even Pro Tour ones, uses the Tour de France scheme for jerseys (Yellow for leader, green for points classification, white with red dots for mountains and white for youth competitions). Most of this could have been found by using an extra 10 minutes on The Other Wiki.
Where do we begin with Big Rigs: Over the Road Racing? First, there is no way to lose to the other truck you're racing against, as pre-patch it goes nowhere, and post-patch it stops before the finish line, there's no collision detection, so you go right through most things, like bridges and buildings, and if you hold down the reverse key for long enough, your truck will exceed the speed of light and instantly stop the second you stop pressing the key. It can't even be called an Obvious Beta, because that would imply that it had reached the point of beta testing.
The same developer behind Big Rigs also produced a game called The War Z, which boasted huge open-ended levelswrong! which actually only measure out to a few square kilometers, boasts hundreds of players being online at oncewrong!! many servers are capped at 50 simultaneous players, and other features that never actually made it into the released version. The complaints got so bad that Valve offered refunds, something they have rarely done, and the game was pulled off Steam. It also did not help that the developer behind the game banned people from the forums if they openly criticized him or his game and he openly mocked them as well.
Sega usually treats its mascot character, Sonic the Hedgehog, with great care. But when they screw up, they've screwed up big time:
Sonic the Hedgehog Genesis was Sega's attempt to port over a Sega game to the Game Boy Advance to celebrate the hedgehog's 15th anniversary. The port retains all the levels exactly as they were... and that's it. The sound and music are completely butchered, the physics were altered to the point where controlling Sonic off ramps or springs can be a nightmare, and the game suffers constantly from massive slowdown for no reason (in fact, it can get so bad that short music clips like the drowning theme can actually finish before the action on the screen is finished, making it out of sync) on a system that is technically more powerful than the Sega Genesis. It's as if Sega wanted to cash in on the milestone and bug testing be damned. The saddest part? A romhacker fan later ported the game accurately and released it as a ROM on the internet.
The main reason for the slowdown, pop-in, and general visual wonkiness is that instead of simply porting over the Genesis engine, Sega put the Genesis art and sprites onto the Sonic Advance engine, which was not meant to handle such things. The slowdown and pop-in is caused by the Advance engine struggling to put all of the Genesis sprites and effects onto the screen.
While Sonic the Hedgehog is on the mind, Sonic Chronicles. BioWare wasn't exactly trying to make an epic game, and while what we got was certainly playable (Disappointing mid-game aside), Bioware evidently had fulfilled their contract to Sega and had wanted to work on futureprojects so much they just released the game as-is and downloaded music from the internet.
Sonic The Hedgehog 2006 was rushed out to stores before Sega and Sonic Team could even fix the glitches, because they wanted the game to be out before the year was over (it was the series' 15th anniversary, after all). What's even stranger is the fact that the PS3 port came out in early 2007, months after the 360 version, and yet it still ended up being a glitchy, unplayable mess!
Adding insult to injury, some of the achievement descriptions are written in Engrish. One example is the achievement of having Sonic buying all skills at the item shop which says "Super Sonic, obtain the all moves." With all the issues in the game combined, Sega clearly didn't give a shit about the quality of the game or the Sonic 1 GBA port as they just wanted to cash in on Sonic's 15th birthday.
The vast majority of NES games released in Europe fall into this, as in most cases no effort was made to optimise them for PAL televisions. As a result, the music is lower-pitched and the game plays a lot slower than usual. This is done to a much lesser extent with 16-bit releases.
The American release of Astal, an underrated platformer/beat-em-up for the Sega Saturn. When dubbing the cutscenes, they didn't even bother to re-record voice clips during gameplay with Astal's English VA, thus he constantly switches between two voices: A high-pitched voice during gameplay that sounds similar to Young Link, and a deeper voice during cutscenes. Also, they apparently forgot to print the game's logo on the side of the case, because all you see on the side of the case is the console's logo (this has lead Sega enthusiasts to believe that the game sold poorly all because of this).
Battletoads in Battlemanics for the SNES initially appears to be a decent sequel to the original Battletoads, but proves to be merely a half-assed semi-port of the NES game with improved graphics and sound. To start with, the game only has six stages which are all borrowed from the original which featured twice as many, plus two “bonus” stages which are nearly as long as the levels themselves (and identical to each other save for swapping bowling pins for dominoes and changing colors). Out of the six stages, only the first and the last have a boss at the end, and the final boss is practically a recolored cut-out of a statue in the first stage with music from the first bonus stage playing in the background. As far as the plot is concerned, a major villain introduced in the opening cut scene never actually appears in the game, and is only mentioned in a tacked on mini-game at the end.
Syd of Valis renamed Yuko to Syd for no good reason (the translated manual still refers to Yuko), but left the Japanese credits completely unaltered. Apparently, the marketing department was not familiar with the term "Super-Deformed" and just assumed that the initials were the character's name.
As mentioned on the Porting Disaster page, Jet Set Radio's Steam port only lets you configure keyboard controls, and it was a straight port of the X360 port (a port of a port), thus using the 360 buttons as reference (i.e. "Hold down LT to center the camera"). You can, in fact, use a controller, but the controls will most likely be screwed up (for example, if using a PS3 controller, the A button will be Triangle, the Start button will be R2, etc.), and there is no option to configure them anywhere. If you want to have proper gamepad support, you will have to download a fan-made patch. Emphasis on fan-made patch.
X Men Destiny, developed by Silicon Knights, was such a tremendous victim of not caring by company head Denis Dyack that the company itself is pretty much dead. Staff was constantly taken away from the project and shuffled off to try and make a proof of concept for Eternal Darkness 2 to shop around to publishers, as Dyack had no interest in the X-Men franchise. Activision finally got tired of SK's delays and gave them a shipping date ultimatum to meet, resulting in a mediocre beat-'em-up which sold horribly, as well as several top SK employees jumping ship.
As a final nail in the coffin, Silicon Knights has been ordered to delete the X-Men Destiny source code and recall and destroy all unsold copies at their own expense, due to their Frivolous Lawsuit against Epic Games backfiring spectacularly.
The PSP release of Final Fantasy IV and its sequel Final Fantasy IV The After Years has tons of sloppiness and cut corners. Both games blatantly reuse sprites from the PSP releases of Final Fantasy I and Final Fantasy II, especially The After Years. Furthermore, the depictions of characters in the game has always varied Depending on the Artist and been subject to graphical quality, but this port has vivid depictions of the cast and makes no attempt to be consistent, giving them radically◊ different◊ designs◊ between the field sprites, battle sprites and menu portraits. Finally, the original game is a port of the Gameboy Advance release with no new features, while the sequel is a port of the original Japanese mobile release with a new Bonus Boss added in. The only new features of the port is an "Interlude" mini-chapter that connects the two games, which itself is poorly thrown together, explaining few of the Plot Holes in the sequel, having enemy formations ripped straight from the original game, and you can play through it in a few hours.
The PC version of Final Fantasy VII had numerous issues due to the game not working for players whose computers didn't specifically meet the requirements (their computers could be powerful enough to run the game but the game may not work on certain hardware). Despite the PC version being sold in circulation for years (including way past the year 2010), Square made no attempt to release patches or at least an updated version of the game. The game also uses MIDI for its music, which sound terrible compared to the original Playstation tracks. While there are many fan patches to fix most of the issues, Square did not make any attempt to make official fixes themselves.
Square released a digital re-release of the game in 2012 and while the game runs a lot smoother on most computers compared to the original PC port, the music, while slightly improved, are still MIDI quality. Square could have easily put the original music into the game since practically any computer today can run a game released in 1997, but they didn't. Luckily, there are fan patches that help fix the music.
Alright, let's get this straight, Squaresoft of old. You bring Final Fantasy X to the PAL-region, a game that already had borders in the NTSC original, and you do absolutely no border-reduction optimization? Borders times borders equals massive borders. The bonus DVD showing footage from the almost-full screen NTSC version just rubbed it in!
Aliens Colonial Marines was first announced in 2006. Allegedly, Gearbox used funding from Sega to finance its own IP, Borderlands, and then Duke Nukem Forever, rather than work on Colonial Marines. Four years later, they subcontracted out to Timegate studios, who allegedly threw out all of the work Gearbox had done (Timegate's side of the argument is that Gearbox's work was irreparably broken), who worked on the story and single player. After the launch of Borderlands 2, Gearbox returned to the project; Timegate's work had also been severely underwhelming. By this time, Gearbox was in danger of breaching its contract to ship the game, and quickly fixed the worst flaws and shipped it in 2013, knowing nobody would like it. Colonial Marines has been savaged by critics and gamers for poor gameplay, an overreliance on fanservice nods to the film, dozens of glitches, and poor AI.
Power Gig Rise Of The Six String tried to take Rock Band and Guitar Hero head on with its "real guitar", but failed spectacularly, in both hardware and software design. Said real guitar was awkward to use as a game controller and worked with mediocrity as a standalone instrument. Power Gig did not use its six string guitar to its potential since the gameplay was largely identical to RB & GH. In contrast to its real guitar, the AirStrike "air drum" peripheral, which uses motion sensing instead of drum pads for input, simply didn't work, since drumming relies on actually hitting something. One can use RB or GH peripherals with Power Gig, but that doesn't make the game enjoyable by any means. The game itself was criticized for its dated graphics, questionable UI design, lack of bass guitar gameplay, long load times, nonsensical story mode, nonfunctional DLC, and having two-thirds of the on-disc soundtrack locked from the start. The game sold so poorly, developer Seven45 Studios erased all mention of the game from its website.
Web Originals
The email button of Homestar Runner's Main 15/Powered by the Cheat contents page gives three different random remarks from Strong Bad, and in one of them he says The Cheat's visual style "looks like you just don't care".
IGSRJ made a review of Duke Nukem Mobile while going over his emo phase. At the end, he admitted that it was made so YouTube did't cancel his show.
Web Comics
Living with Insanity's artist, Paul Salvi, takes this attitude. He cuts a lot of corners on the art by rewriting dialogue, cutting down the number of panels and even ignoring whole strips. This causes a lot of plot holes or makes jokes fall flat.
Western Animation
Clerks: The Animated Series was shafted by ABC who could only be bothered to air two of the six initial episodes and made matters worse by inexplicably airing them out of order starting with the fourth episode followed by the second, the latter of which contained jokes that only made sense if you had seen the first.
Poor Richard Williams was so unhappy with the tragic fate of his magnum opus that he refuses to speak of the movie or acknowledge its existence.
Another version of the film was later released featuring much of the unfinished and unpolished content Williams originally intended for the film, which despite not being completed still makes the film vastly superior to what we got on the original rushed release.
On networks where classic episodes of The Simpsons run in syndication, they are almost always cut to the bone to make room for more commercials. While this rarely compromises the storyline, many Funny Moments that give the classic episodes their charm are lost in the shuffle, exiled to the DVD box sets.
Aside from that, the Simpsons series writers are well known for making numerous past episode contradictions and continuity errors. The most famous one of these is the episode, "That '90s Show".
There is also the matter of the decline of touching moments. Episodes that previously ended with Maggie's first word, Homer and Marge bicycling into the sunset, and where the Simpson family hug Apu as he lies in a hospital bed now end with Homer blowing a tranquilizer dart into Marge's neck, the Simpson family banned from 48 out of 50 states, and Lisa handing out Mapple pamphlets and telling people to "Think Differently."
And when someone asked in 2007 how the series' longevity is sustained, Scully gives this cop-out answer: "Lower your quality standards. Once you've done that you can go on forever."
A minor point, but the gender of the Simpsons' cat tends to change from episode to episode. One would think that it would be a relatively simple thing to make a decision and keep a note somewhere, but apparently no one bothered.
Similarly, the names of the Flanders children will flip every now and then (for the record, Todd was originally the older and Rod was the younger). In the DVD commentaries the writers and showrunners say they can't remember which is which.
This trope was used many times during the early episodes in Family Guy. A character learned nothing after going through a life changing experience. The writers admit that this was their way of ending an episode without really adding much detail to it, simply because they didn't care how it ended.
Disney XD airs episodes 20 onward of The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes with an opening that promotes the movie The Avengers in a manner containing several inconsistencies compared to the show. First of all, Nick Fury narrates, even though SHIELD and The Avengers start out as two completely separate groups of crimefighters. Secondly, his speech mentions Iron Man, The Mighty Thor, The Incredible Hulk, and Captain America (who's referred to as "The First Avenger" even though in EMH he's not even one of the founding members), but omits the other members. Depending on the time in the series' course, the number of Avengers ignored ranges from two to six. Finally, the editors managed to keep three lines of the original theme song, but they don't rhyme at all.
Making the inconsistencies even more blatant, a subplot running through some of these episodes involves SHIELD trying to pressure the Avengers into registration, in Fury's absence. Also, each of these heroes makes a prolonged disappearance in the second season, but this intro always speaks of all four as full-time members.
Though according to Word Of God, it wasn't done to promote the movie, but rather to help EMH's sagging ratings by making it seem like it would be closer to the Avengers film.
Played up intentionally for humor and parody in the Ren and Stimpy episode "Stimpy's Cartoon Show". The premise of the episode being that Stimpy wants to be an animator and make a animated film short to impress his idol, the old and nearly decrepit "godfather of all animation" Wilber Cobb. Ren is jealous and bitter towards this, so Stimpy crowns him as the "producer". It soon becomes apparent however, that Ren Just Doesn't Care about the production and his only real effort is to work Stimpy to the bone while presenting impossible challenges to him. (i.e: Taking month-long vacations, ripping up storyboards and tossing them in the trash, price gouging him on the cost of art supplies, forcing him to rely on shaving logs for animation cels, etc.) In the end, Stimpy's cartoon becomes an ineptly produced, incoherent, nonsensical, badly drawn, horribly animated, ridiculous and baffling load of gibberish called "Explodey The Pup" which demonstrates the very definition of this trope. For those curious, here is the ensuing result.
The toy department, which is separate from the writers and animators of the actual show, claims that they're at the mercy of the toy stores in a classic "the client is always right" relationship, and if anyone isn't caring enough, it's the toy stores. Or they care about the wrong things. ("If it's for girls, why isn't it pink?")
It seems to be getting better, now that the toy department actually has a "pink pony princess" to market (Princess Cadence).
The European comics also catch a lot of flack, accused of being written and drawn by people who have never seen the original show. The storylines are trite, OOC behavior abounds, and the artwork relies on a handful of duckfaced vectors almost always showing ponies in full profile with no sense of depth. When amateur fan artwork looks better than the licensed product, you know there's a problem.
The game Adventures in Ponyville has similar problems. Being a bit limited of gameplay is only expected of a browser-based game made on the side of the real product, but there's still the graphics and writing. A lot of the graphics are directly based on the show and thus adequate by definition (though even some of those manage to be out of scale to each other), but as for the rest, well, you can easily find better on Deviant ART by the truckload. As for the writing, there's OOC and no particular sign of understanding of the source material, and blatant inconsistencies in what character is supposed to be talking about whom. Also, the player character is constantly looking behind herself.
You're in the Super Bowl, Charlie Brown, the next-to-last Peanuts animated special in which Bill Meléndez had a hand. They don't have quite enough plot for 25 minutes, so they do cutaways with Woodstock's football team curb-stomping teams of various animals. The animation is exactly the same all three times (except with new species slipped in over top the existing ones — cats, dogs, then bison), meaning that the third team consists of bison who are no bigger than cats.
Despite being the source of most of the series' charm and humor, (most of) the VHS and DVD releases of Beavis And Butthead have the music video segments cut, despite the show being owned by MTVnote although Mike Judge retains the film rights. Presumably this was either to keep costs down, or remove dated content, or fit more episodes on each disc, or because they were just too lazy to get all the clearances.
The first one. MTV made a deal, way back when, that they could, for little to no cost, use the music from videos in shows made for their network, something they gladly did, giving their nineties shows the coolest soundtrack. The deal never counted for home releases, which was barely a thing back when the deal was made, and the cost of securing the rights would simply be prohibitive.
Young Justice: The tie-in comics had one panel Bio's for many of the characters on the show. The Bios used events and teams from comics, to broaden the readers perceptions. Some are pretty inaccurate, like Bane's. It says that he's associated with the Suicide Squad, but the picture shows the line-up from The New 52, which he isn't part of. Even worse is that the other team it shows him associated with is the Secret Six, but the picture is of The Legion of Doom from Justice League: Doom
The official site for Dino Time still uses the earlier models for the main characters.
The Spanish animated film Daddy, I'm a Zombie. First of all, the cover shows a pirate zombie and a zombie wearing a pumpkin as a mask both standing in the same place, the problem with that being they're the same character! Second, the heroine's father has a saying that goes "You attract what you put out, like a magnet" which anyone who took 3rd grade science will tell you is wrong! Lastly, the goth girl heroine is mocked for wearing nothing but black, even though she wears mostly purple and hardly any black.
Other
One episode of the radio countdown show Bob Kingsley's Country Top 40 played back an interview with Carrie Underwood about her difficulty with a very high note in "All-American Girl"... then played an abridged version of the song that left out the note in question.
Dial Global's "Hot Country", a programming service for radio stations that don't have their own DJs, often edits songs for time. Most of the edits are inoccuous enough, but their edit of Taylor Swift's "Back to December" abruptly cuts from the first chorus to near the end of the second verse ("I go back to December all the time / [cut] / And then the cold came, the dark days when fear crept into my mind…")
Wizards of the Coast stopped caring about Dungeons & Dragons third edition when fourth started coming out. The Tome of Battle errata changes mid-freaking-word into Complete Mage errata.
It may have been worse than that. In a couple of early interviews about the new game system, it sounded suspiciously like the designers actively disliked 3rd edition, the system they'd been selling us for the prior eight years, and wanted to make sure we stopped liking it too. Some of their folks practically went on record as saying "Yeah, our last product totally sucked. We can't believe anybody thought it would be fun. This new one, on the other hand..."
That's fairly common in design - after all, there's a reason it's 4th Edition and not 3.Xth Edition. They likely suspected that any attempt to "patch" old rules to fit (as they routinely do in Magic, fixing up old cards with new template wordings) was doomed to failure from the start. Which, of course, doesn't rule out them Just Not Caring about 3rd any longer.
The folks who actually wrote 3 and 3.5, meanwhile, went on to create the Pathfinder system that further refines it.
Salem, a gothic/"witch house" group from Michigan, played at Levi's SXSW fest in 2010. Not only was their performance disappointing (and a missed opportunity to give the audience a good introduction to their unique sound), it was god awful, bad enough to elicit comparisons to that one garage band on Youtube trying to cover "The Final Hour". One member (Jake, the long-haired one), looking rather weathered with a slight resemblance to Chester A. Bum, raps/mumbles in a drunken haze during one song and lackadaisically hits electronic drums during another, clearly not giving the slightest fuck about keeping time with the other musicians. You really have to see it for yourself to understand... This came as a big shock to many fans of the group as their studio material is actually pretty fucking awesome. To the band's credit, it was an awkwardly intimate outside stage that would be more suited to a stripped-down punk band than one that relies on mystique and clandestine ambiguity as heavily as they do.
The Pan and Scan versions of TV movies and shows produced in the HDTV aspect ratio of 1.78:1 might have a greater chance of losing important details than the cropped versions of theatrical movies. The people in charge of cropping those TV movies and shows often focus entirely on the center portion of each scene, never panning to the sides, unlike the people who crop movies. This thread contains a handful of examples from High School Musical.
Publishers of public domain films and TV shows tend to fall into this — low-quality picture and audio (even when better prints are available), cheap packaging, etc. Especially true of the packages like those that promise you "100 <type> Films" — by the end of the set, they've often counted TV episodes rather than theatrical films.
These shows didn't "jump the shark." That doesn't do them justice. No, these are shows where the creators simply said "fuck it", flew out of the water, broke the bounds of the earth's atmosphere and set a course for the center of the Sun.
It should be noted that the article itself fits the trope, with a glaring, easily fixable error still there in the Roseanne entry: The article states that the show's finale rendered the entire series All Just a Dream: it was just the final (admittedly batshit) season that was the dream.
Maybe, maybe not. Some of the things that she changed for her book were way earlier than the final season (namely, she rearranged the Becky/Mark and David/Darlene relationships). Fans can't seem to agree whether it was only the final season, from the first appearance of her writing desk (essentially, season 2 onward), or if it was the whole series.
Cracked in general doesn't care enough to fix factual errors in its articles.
DVD copies that come with Disney Blu-ray combo packs. Unless it's a new-to-DVD release, or a major catalog title, if a DVD comes with a Blu-ray, chances are it'll be the same disc that's been available for years on it's own. It's very odd buying a supposedly new DVD in 2013 that says Treasure Planet is coming soon to theaters. The most Egregious example would have to be the release of the Who Framed Roger Rabbit Blu-ray, which uses disc 1 of the 2003 DVD release... which wouldn't be so bad if disc 1 wasn't a pan-and-scan version which means unless you have disc 2 of that set and you want to watch the widescreen movie somewhere a Blu-ray player isn't connected, you're screwed.
to prove that the makers of the movie had little concern for the quality of the film. This includes forgetting to adjust the camera to properly shoot day for night, giant zippers running up the back of the costumes for the People in Rubber Suits, and after running out of monster suits and monster boots, using the excess actors stomping around in their monster masks, black wool sweaters, and sneakers. And the fact that it's called Attack of The The Eye Creatures.
Contrast Shown Their Work and Doing It for the Art.
