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 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 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 They Just Didn't Care.
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.
Comic Books
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. 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? Hudlin's Black 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.
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 Regular 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 on All-Star Batman & Robin The Boy Wonder 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 turns his entire body to organic steel, not just his skin.
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'."
"My city screams"? In the original Will Eisner comics, the Spirit's city doesn't "scream". It kind of chuckles, with a slow, sad smile. On a more serious note, the movie gives Denny Wolverine-style healing abilities that kind of take away from the whole idea of the Spirit as a relatively down-to-earth (though with occasional flights of fancy) mystery/adventure series starring a likable everyman. Also, they changed the Octopus's gimmick from being a criminal mastermind who has never shown his true face to wearing a series of bizarre costumes and having eight of everything.
What makes the film's end result more inexplicable is that the comics work of its director Frank Miller was heavily influenced by Eisner (most obvious in Daredevil), and the two were good friends. (A book was published transcribing some of their conversations). On that basis, we might have expected Miller to care a lot...
After seeing his Twitter feed, it seems he enjoyed the movie and considers it a good tribute to Eisner because he thinks it was good. So it's not so much he didn't care about the character, just that he didn't care about what anyone else would have thought.
"My city screams" is actually a quote from Miller's own The Dark Knight Strikes Again (where it is said by Superman) which sort of tips off that the movie has more to do with Miller than Eisner.
After the obligatory crushed butterfly, A Sound of Thunder drops all pretense of following Ray Bradbury's original plot and instead turns into an action-thriller about people fighting off monkey-lizard creatures. The video game adaptation of the movie goes a step further, giving the hero time-controlling weaponry that isn't mentioned in either the movie or the book. The special effects weren't that good either. Thunder was made in 2005, yet the Special Effect Failure makes it unbelievable that Jurassic Park could have been made 12 years earlier. Oh, and Baboon Lizards?
That was because during filming, flooding in Prague severely set back production and caused the film to go over budget, and by the time post-production came along, there was pretty much no money left for special effects, so there was little to choice but to do them as cheaply as possible.
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.
The second Swamp Thing movie is of course, your standard case of Adaptation Decay, but what's interesting is, the author of the novelization hated the script so much, he almost completely rewrote, drawing more from the comics, and making the tone more horrific. The producers were truly consistent with their just didn't care, as they were fine with the book.
There's not really any need to throw in any examples, as everyvideogameadaptation that Uwe Boll has ever made have little to nothing to do with the source material, just replaced with nothing but gratuitous sex, bad fight scenes, horrible special effects, and overall, is never able to get the story correct. His excuse for not caring about the source is just baffling.
Uwe Boll: You go for it, to please the game fans, but on the other hand if you have the hard core gamers, they live in their own world. And you cannot fulfill their ideas from a video game based movie, it's impossible. And to be honest, the real gamers are the typical download guys, right? They don't pay anything for movies, because they illegally download the movies. So why I should please these guys? I need the normal audience."
Which is why Blizzard Entertainment's response to Boll's request for the World of Warcraft film rights should be exceptionally pleasing to ... just about everyone:
"We will not sell the movie rights, not to you ... especially not to you."
This is parodied in UHF with the fake trailer for Gandhi II, where Gandhi's character suddenly resembles Shaft.
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). It also holds the distinction of having the second-weakest debut of any movie ever.
How is Freddy resurrected after seemingly being Killed Off for Real (obligatory Sequel Hook notwithstanding) at the end of A Nightmare on Elm Street III: Dream Warriors? Well, in Nightmare IV a dog pisses fire onto his grave. End of explanation. If that doesn't scream "they're not even trying anymore", nothing ever has.
When Disney updated the Vanity Plate at the beginning of The Lion King for the 3-D and Blu-Ray versions, they also removed an auditory Logo Joke. The movie originally began with serene animal sounds becoming interrupted by a bombastic African chorus. Now, it begins with a bombastic instrumental of "When You Wish Upon a Star", followed by Mickey Mouse whistling "Steamboat Bill", and then the epic-sounding African chorus.
Also, sometimes Disney's removal of even older movies' opening RKO Radio Pictures and Buena Vista logos results in the opening credits songs losing their instrumental intros.
Averted in Troy; after all the liberties they took with the ancient source material, they had that bit at the end with Aeneas. A brief scene, that could have been cut easily, and which makes absolutely no sense to any viewer who doesn't have a Classical education and would therefore know that Aeneas took the Trojan refugees to Italy where they became the ancestors of the Romans. This Classically-educated troper was able to forgive a great deal of the rest of the movie because of that.
The Inheritance Cycle. No, the author himself put his (albeit incompetent) all into his series. In this case it was the editor who was lazy. Aside from making sure that nothing was mispelled 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).
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, and 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?
Professional Wrestling
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 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.
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."
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 Elder Scrolls developer Bethesda Softworks, 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.
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.
The old Valis series was an epic tale of strong female Magic Knights with swords. Unfortunately, its original publisher went under and sold the rights to a porn game company. The resulting Hentai enraged fans and left everyone else cold.
The Dawn of War: Soulstorm expansion was outsourced to another company that closed down partway into development, and then released anyway. The result was "SPESS MEHREENS!", "We should take away theirMETAL BAWKSES!", and a few Game Breaking Bugs including one that could result in infinite resources...in multiplayer. All this is understandable, if hilariously awful, but then there were things like having the only recurring character's voice actor still on staff and giving the role to someone else, then only having him grunt a few lines and leave. Or a backwater factory shipping out the oft-cited "tank so big its guns have smaller guns attached to them and is only produced on the most technologically advanced planets in the galaxy" by the hundred (it isn't just game mechanics either. At the start of the said mission it is mentioned that there is a company of the said tanks deployed on the planet. Actually, getting three would be considered extremely lucky). Or, y'know, of the script writing. Of course, some have speculated that, because Iron Lore Entertainment — the company responsible — was closing down after all, they literally didn't care. Perhaps only the ex-staff know.
The developers of Wild Arms: Alter Code F cared. The company that localized it in America, Agetec, 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 have had their localization handled by XSEED Games, who are widely agreed to be handling 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 we got 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 conjours 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 useable 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 on, 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.
However, Dawn of Sorrow actually averts it. Julius Mode has it's own story, has a couple of cutscenes, and has it's own final boss. Some of the music is changed in places too. Also averted in Portrait of Ruin. Sister's mode again, has it's own story, and it's own ending.
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.
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 ZERO 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!
The PC port of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. 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 added in 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.
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!
Pretty much every instruction manual put out by Konami USA was like this in the NES era. 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 shitty jokes and Incredibly Lame Puns.
Many console-to-PC ports fall into this. A prime example is Metal Gear Solid 2. 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 well. The worst part about this is that the beta Ubercharge textures are misaligned on the final models.
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.
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 LE Ds, 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 Z Kai since then, leading to characters like Freeza and Gohan having their voice actor 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.
Web Originals
The email button of Homestar Runner's Main 15/Powered by the Cheat contents page gives three different random remarks from Strongbad, and in one of them he says The Cheat's visual style "looks like you just don't care".
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
Felix the Cat: The Movie has almost nothing to do with the original Felix the Cat shorts, either from the 1920s or the 1960s, aside from a couple of references. The plot makesabsolutelynosense, the final battle with the Master Cylinder is one gigantic Anti-Climax, characters appear and disappear at random, and there's a ton of blatant exposition. Couple this with a bunch of really bad jokes from Felix (who never shuts up), and the whole movie comes across as one giant train wreck. The movie was apparently made to be the pilot for another Felix TV show, but the film was so bad that it never came to be. And if this movie is any indication of what was to come, animation fans can be thankful the series never saw the light of day. You can watch an Animated Anarchy review of the movie here.
Not to mention the noticeable banking. Clearly they thought that they could get away with recycling pieces of animation since it's a kiddie movie. Not the case.
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.
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 aired episodes 20-26 of Avengers Earths Mightiest Heroes with an opening that boasts several inconsistencies compared to the show. First of all, Nick Fury narrates, even though SHIELD and The Avengers function as two completely separate groups of crimefighters in this season. Secondly, his speech mentions Iron Man, The Mighty Thor, The Incredible Hulk, and Captain America, but omits four other members. Finally, the editors managed to keep three lines of the original theme song, but they don't rhyme at all.
Though, to be fair, the Fury/SHIELD intro is probably to (sort of) tie it in to the Avengers movie out next year (which does feature Iron Man, Thor, Captain America, and the Hulk as part of a SHIELD-backed Avengers team).
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 Dosn'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, ect.) 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.
They don't sound like them, either. Pinklestia's lines ("I love it when you brush my hair!") have led some to joke that it's actually a Molestia doll.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The Atlanta Spirit Group wanted to sell (and have sold to True North Sports and Entertainment of Winnipeg as of 31 May 2011) the Atlanta Thrahsers since day one of owning the NHL franchise. The ownwership group made it clear that they only wanted the NBA's Hawks and the operating rights to Philips Arena.
To make matters worse, in a press conference during late-stage negotiations between Atlanta Spirit and True North, Atlanta mayor Kasim Reed made it seem that losing the team was almost a certainty.
Also, the group spent the better part of their ownership tenure of the Hawks and Thrashers fighting amongst themselves in court, particularly with ex-partner Steve Belkin.
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 from That Guy With The Glasses, 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.
