Newer Than They Think / Film and Television

• The first movie sequel to have the same name as the first with a number added was French Connection II (1975). Adding "Part II" or "Part 3" is much older (e.g., Shakespeare's The Second Part of Henry IV or Little Women, Part Second); FC2 was the first to add just a number. And the use of Arabic numerals for the purpose is even newer: Roman numerals were more common until the (late) 1980s.
  • The "Kraut Western" Winnetou I (1963) was followed by Winnetou II (1964) and Winnetou III (1965), but all three movies were based on Karl May novels of the same names.
• Disney Animated Canon:
  • Princesses are among the most recognizable characters in the Disney studios' wheelhouse, but it hasn't always been that way. Of the nineteen animated films that Walt Disney made during his lifetime, only three of them were "princess" films: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937), Cinderella (1950), and Sleeping Beauty (1959). Walt felt that he had nothing else to contribute to the genre after Snow White and wanted to spend his time working with other genres. He only made Cinderella because Snow White was popular and his studio really needed the money, and he made Sleeping Beauty because he felt that he could bring something different to the table (an adaptation that focused more on its villain and side characters than its main characters). After the latter’s then-tanking, the Disney studios would not release another "princess" film until The Little Mermaid (1989) ^note  an unconventional example in that the character filling the princess role wore hardly any clothes and in fact was not even human (and barely humanoid, at that) , and the Disney Princess franchise would not actually exist until 2000.
  • Similarly, the concept of a set lineup of Disney animated films didn't exist until 1985.
  • Villain Songs are one of Disney's most beloved traditions today, but they didn't really become a staple of the Disney Animated Canon until The Great Mouse Detective in 1986. Before Ratigan's "The World's Greatest Criminal Mind" set the standard, it simply wasn't common practice for the main antagonists of Disney films to wax lyrical about their evil plans and their most unsympathetic qualities - simply because most early Disney films only had a handful of musical numbers apiece, and the writers generally didn't feel the need to give every major character their own song. Sure, there are a few early movies with songs sung by antagonistic characters, but they were either extremely fleeting (like "The Elegant Captain Hook" in Peter Pan, in which Captain Hook has barely 30 seconds of singing) or sung by minor characters (like "We Are Siamese If You Please" in Lady and the Tramp, which is sung by a pair of Siamese cats who come out of nowhere and are never seen again).
  • Disney musicals as we know them started in the 1980s with Oliver & Company and especially The Little Mermaid. Their earlier films sparingly featured songs. Many of the songs were short, and most were sung in-universe (rather than being artistic interpretations of dialogue like in future films).
• The popularized act of kissing the ring of a Mafia Don does not seem to have any basis in reality prior to the 1972 movie The Godfather. It is said that it was barely practiced in Real Life even after that, except among posers. Kissing a bishop's ring or the Pope's Fisherman's Ring is a Catholic tradition called baciamano that is(/was) common among Catholics.
• Credits didn't usually come at the end of movies until the 1970s, with The Godfather seen as the first major movie to do so. Virtually all movies in the 1960s and earlier put most or all their credits in the opening title sequence, which usually listed only the principal cast and the most prominent crew members (including the director, producer, and writer), though some also threw in a full cast list at the end. The modern practice of listing absolutely everyone involved with a movie's production only became standard in the eighties.
  • For animated projects, it wasn't common to properly credit the voice actors with their respective characters until around the early nineties, and it wasn't standard until 2000. Before, most projects only listed the actors in alphabetical order. In pre-1960s shorts, voice actors were rarely credited at all, unless they were Mel Blanc.
  • When the very first Star Wars film, A New Hope was released in 1977, it was so controversial that the film didn't have opening credits. The Director's Guild of America let it slide for George Lucas only because they thought it would tank in the box office. It obviously didn't, but despite this, when Lucas did it again for The Empire Strikes Back in 1980, he got a huge fine from the DGA, which he paid before he quit the guild altogether. Today, many filmmakers forgo traditional opening credits or even opening titles that now, the DGA overreacted.
• The now-ubiquitous practice of wide releases was invented by Jaws. Before 1975, movies were treated more like road shows, released to a few theaters first, and gradually rolled out to the rest of the world for as long as they continued to be successful. This custom led to movies having much, much longer theatrical runs than they do today; a blockbuster like The Sound of Music or The Exorcist could easily spend over a year or two on the big screen, even before re-releases. Jaws bucked convention by instead releasing to thousands of theatres immediately; this strategy was so successful that the rest of the industry quickly followed suit.
• Prior to the mid-1960s, movie theatres didn't have showtimes, nor did people typically watch movies from start to finish in the way we're accustomed to. The standard experience was to simply "go to the movies", watch through all the reels shown that day—typically consisting of an A-movie, a B-movie, a few trailers, a cartoon, a newsreel, and a serial chapter or short subject (i.e. a documentary) —and then leave once it looped back around to where you came in (this is where the quip, "This is where I came in" originated). It was normal practice to walk in during the middle of a movie, watch to the end, and then back to the middle. Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, released in 1960, is credited as the movie that changed this practice, with Hitchcock requesting that no viewers be admitted to the movie after it had begun, so that the Halfway Plot Switch could be a surprise.
• Merchandise-Driven shows were unheard of before the 1980s, due to FTC regulations against advertising to children, which were mostly repealed in the early 80s as part of Reagan-era deregulation initiatives. Before then, cartoons almost never had corresponding toylines and vice versa. He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, which debuted in 1983, is considered the first half-hour toy commercial.
• Elmo, Sesame Street's Series Mascot, was a mere background character with no personality, voice or name, simply being an "extra red puppet" to fill out scenes when needed, until Kevin Clash first performed him in 1985 (16 years after Sesame Street initially debuted), he turned him into a Breakout Character thanks to his popularity with children.
• Doctor Who:
  • Younger Doctor Who fans are surprised to discover that the Doctor Who Christmas Episode is only a 21st-century revival phenomenon. (There was one before in 1965, but at that time British TV didn't usually do "event" television at Christmas and broadcast whatever shows were normally scheduled with a Christmassy twist.) There were Christmas broadcasts of the original Doctor Who, but they were neither Christmas-themed nor specially made; they were simply all six/four episodes of an existing story broadcast all together.
  • The "celebrity historical" type of episode - where the Doctor and friends meet some well-known Historical Domain Character in a science-fiction story - is newer than you might think. The series originally did "historicals" where the characters met real-life figures but phased those out when William Hartnell left^note Patrick Troughton did just one which featured no major historical characters and was more a demonstration of why his Doctor didn't work in that kind of story., and they never had any science fiction elements besides the characters showing up in a TARDIS. The first story to feature a historical celebrity getting mixed up in an aliens-and-monsters plot was "The Mark of the Rani" in 1985, which featured George Stephenson. The only other historical celebrities to make an appearance in the original run were H. G. Wells in "Timelash" (who is barely recognisable and the reveal of "Herbert"'s identity is a last-minute punchline) and a few historical mathematicians (including Albert Einstein) who get exactly zero lines in "Time and the Rani". It would be the Doctor Who New Adventures books that would really make the story type a standard part of the series' toolbox (the first twelve books alone have appearances by Gilgamesh, Adolf Hitler and William Blake), and many of those writers would go on to revive the tv series, bringing the "historical celebrity meets aliens" trope with them.
  • Many details of the Doctor's background that are now viewed as foundations of the series took surprisingly long to be established. We didn't learn he was a "Time Lord" until 1969 and his home planet was only named as "Gallifrey" in Jon Pertwee's last season, ten years after the series began; as a matter of fact, we didn't definitively learn he was an alien until 1970, after learning he was a Time Lord.^note In his very earliest appearances he only ever says he and Susan are from another time and world; for most of the 1960s, the series wobbles between him being human, more than human due to extensive time travel, or alien, depending on the writer. Additionally, the iconic Time Lord costumes with the huge collars weren't introduced until 1976, in their third major appearance.
  • On that note, regeneration as it's known today - the Time Lord ability to change into a new body when dying or dead - isn't established in that form until "Planet of the Spiders". In "The Power of the Daleks", the Doctor refers to it as a renewal, a part of the TARDIS he can't survive without, while in "The War Games", the Time Lords describe it as a change of appearance. The twelve-regeneration limit that hung over the show until 2013’s "The Time of the Doctor" wasn't established until 1976's "The Deadly Assassin".
  • The Daleks' Absolute Xenophobe tendencies are now considered their defining trait, but said tendencies weren't firmly established until 1975's "Genesis of the Daleks", twelve years after their debut. Before that, the nearest the Daleks had gotten to being Absolute Xenophobes was in "The Power of the Daleks", when they plotted to wipe out all the human colonists, but otherwise they were quite happy to just subjugate people, and sometimes even entered into alliances with other races (albeit usually while intending to pull a You Have Outlived Your Usefulness as soon as possible). Even after "Genesis of the Daleks", the Daleks still had human slaves or mercenaries on occasion for their remaining classic series appearances, with their "exterminate every non-Dalek on sight" characterization not being firmly established until the relaunched series.
• Star Trek:
  • When making fun of Star Trek's famously devoted fanbase, it's now pretty much obligatory to make a crack about nerdy Trekkies being fluent in Klingon. It might surprise some people to learn that the Klingons didn't even have a language in the original series (although it was alluded to in the 1967 episode "The Trouble With Tribbles"), as the first words of Klingon weren't spoken on-screen until Star Trek: The Motion Picture in 1979 (thirteen years after the original series first aired). A full language wasn't created until Star Trek III: The Search for Spock. It wouldn't have been possible for fans to learn Klingon until 1985 (nineteen years after the original series), when Dr. Marc Okrand published The Klingon Dictionary.
  • The quadrant designations of the galaxy (Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta) weren't standardized till the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode "The Price", which aired in 1989. Prior to that, "quadrant" was used alternately with "sector" or "system", which makes Kirk's line in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan that the Enterprise was the only ship in the quadrant available to stop Khan sound extremely strange today.
  • Section 31, the Federation Secret Police, were introduced in 1998 in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "Inquisition". Prior to this, covert ops were usually depicted as being handled directly by Starfleet with clear oversight by the Admiralty (see "The Enterprise Incident" on TOS or "Chain of Command" on TNG), but their subsequent appearances in the Star Trek: Enterprise-era (predating the Federation itself) and then in Star Trek Into Darkness and Star Trek: Discovery (showing that they were active in Kirk's time despite TOS and its movies making absolutely no mention of them^note Their absence from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, a movie focusing on a treasonous conspiracy between rogue Federation and Klingon agents, is particularly glaring), makes it seem like they've been around forever.
  • The stereotypical Trekkie as typified by Comic Book Guy on The Simpsons took a while to form. During the show's original run, most Star Trek fans (going by convention statistics, anyway) were women, and more entrenched sci-fi fandoms looked down on it as dumbed-down faff.
  • The franchise's reputation for being terrible at comedy is surprisingly recent: TOS was (in keeping with its optimistic outlook) a lighthearted series which produced several (deliberately) comedic episodes which are very fondly remembered today ("The Trouble with Tribbles" and "A Piece of the Action" foremost among these). The most financially successful Trek film for decades was Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, a straight-up comedy with a body count of zero. It was a combination of the critical drubbing another comedy film, Star Trek V: The Final Frontier (released in 1989) received, coupled with the general ineptness of attempts at comedy by TNG and especially DS9 (both of which had a more serious, humorless and, in DS9's case, darker tone than TOS) in The '90s that cemented Trek as "not funny".
• Star Wars is famous today for its extremely resolute fan community, but it didn't really have a fandom until at least a decade after the original movie hit theaters. For most of the franchise's early history, it was just a highly successful series of Summer blockbusters that nearly everyone in America had seen, and even its most diehard fans couldn't claim to know more about the mythos than the average moviegoer—because there was no information about the mythos outside of the films themselves. This didn't really change until the late 1980s at the earliest, when the RPG sourcebooks from West End Games started to flesh out the universe with more details about the alien species and minor characters. And the fandom didn't really take off until the early 1990s, when Bantam published the first of their Star Wars novels (Timothy Zahn's Thrawn Trilogy) that continued the saga, creating a clear division between "casual fans" and "serious fans".
  • As Justin B. Rye points out, very little of what that the franchise is famous for actually originated in A New Hope, pretty much limited to the main cast (save Yoda, Lando and even Palpatine), the Death Star, the concept of Jedi and the Force, and the name (but not the spelling) of the planet Alderaan. Nothing else was set in stone in 1977.
• This dramatic, instantly recognizable poster◊ for Gone with the Wind is among the most iconic in Hollywood history, used as cover art for the film's soundtrack, several of its home video releases, and other merchandise, but it wasn't actually created until the film's otherwise notorious 1967 re-release (which was crudely altered for widescreen and stereo presentation) nearly 30 years after its original premiere. This◊ was the (comparatively blander) poster from when it was originally released.
• Game shows revolving around cooking contests seem like they've been around forever, but the first one, MasterChef, came out in 1990, and the format wasn't really popularized until Iron Chef first made its way over to the states.
• When most people think of Jason Voorhees, they think of a man in a hockey mask going killing people with a machete. While it has slowly become common knowledge that he doesn't actually do any of the killing in the original film (thanks largely to Scream), many people are still surprised to learn that he doesn't actually gain the hockey mask until Part 3. Even more surprising is the fact that the actor most associated with the role, Kane Hodder, didn't play him until 1988, by which point there had already been six installments in the series. Additionally, Jason nowadays is almost always portrayed as wearing a jacket of some sorts, but he only started wearing one in Jason X ^note The last Jason solo film until the reboot and didn't have one at all in the films produced during the series' heyday in the 80s.
• The now-ubiquitous practice of music specifically composed for television newscasts was started by Al Ham's Move Closer to Your World. Until then, newscasts had to rely on film soundtracks, library music or previously recorded popular or classical music (mostly instrumental) for their presentations. Case in point: the most famous newscast theme of all time was originally part of the soundtrack for Cool Hand Luke.
• While the term "Film Noir" was first used by a French film critic in 1946, the genre and its associated tropes remained largely unbuilt in Hollywood movies for a decade after that, and the term itself was virtually unknown in English until the 1970s. In particular, the now-stereotypical jazz soundtrack was unheard of in 1940s movies and seems to have been only codified with the 1958 release of Elevator to the Gallows (a French film, by the way) and reinforced by Noir-influenced TV shows like Peter Gunn.
• The Wolf Man is generally seen as one of the "classic" Universal Horror films, but it was actually one of the franchise's later efforts; it wasn't produced until 1941—a full decade after Boris Karloff's turn in Frankenstein and Bela Lugosi's turn in Dracula. It's also one of Universal Pictures' few "classic" monster movies that wasn't based on a novel; while legends about werewolves date back to Ancient Rome, Lawrence Talbot (the werewolf) didn't exist until 1941. Notably, though, the film's central concept is also Older Than They Think. Contrary to widespread belief, it wasn't Universal's first movie about werewolves; that was The Werewolf released in 1913, a now lost film.
  • Similarly, the Creature from the Black Lagoon is often thought of as one of the classic Universal Horror monsters, and yet its first movie wasn't released until 1954, well after the franchise's heyday.
• Although Marvel Comics adaptations go far back, Marvel co-creator Stan Lee hadn't started making cameo appearances in any adaptations till 1989's The Trial Of The Incredible Hulk (a TV movie sequel to the 1970s series The Incredible Hulk), and he didn't have his first speaking appearance in a live-action adaptation till 2003's Hulk.
• Many shows that are remembered as having defined the decade in which they were produced came along late in that decade, and often ran much longer into the subsequent decade:
  • Leave It to Beaver, remembered alongside I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners as iconic and emblematic of '50s television, didn't begin its run until 1957 - it premiered on the very day Sputnik launched. In fact, I Love Lucy had already ended its run earlier that year (and The Honeymooners the year before). The Korean War, Brown v. Board of Education, the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the opening of Disneyland, and the breakthroughs of Elvis Presley and Little Richard were all things of the past before Leave it to Beaver came on the air. The show continued to run until 1963, lasting longer in The '60s than it had in the '50s.
  • Saved by the Bell is considered quintessentially '80s, and it did technically premiere in 1989, but it continued to run until 1993, making it far more representative of the early years of that decade. Still, the show's garish set design, makeup, and costuming, the Totally Radical dialogue, and the deliberately simplistic, cliched characterization and plots helped the show feel more "old-fashioned" especially in contrast to two other titans of pop culture which also premiered in 1989 but are definitively considered works of The '90s: Seinfeld and The Simpsons.^note In both cases only their first episodes actually aired in 1989: Seinfeld's as a summer burnoff of a pilot that wasn't initially picked up, and The Simpsons as a standalone Christmas Special before the series began airing in its regular timeslot in January of 1990.
• One reason the 1983 M*A*S*H finale is the highest-rated program in American history is that until then it wasn't common for TV shows, even long-running popular ones, to end with a Grand Finale. One exception was the 1967 finale of The Fugitive, which is also one of the highest-rated series finales ever.
• The word "anime" is first attested in English in 1985, and it didn't become the dominant term for Japanese animation until the late 1990s, before which it competed with other terms such as "Japanimation".
• Several moments from The Simpsons are newer than most people think.
  • A scene with an adult Bart sleeping with Ms. Hoover in bed, which is often seen on several "jokes that you didn't understand as kids" lists, is from an episode from 2014.
  • Several "Smithers is gay" jokes on said didn't-understand-as-kids lists have similar fates, with some clearly being from HD episodes.
  • Ralph Wiggum's memetic "I'm in danger" quote is from the crossover episode with Family Guy, which aired in 2014.
  • The Memetic Mutation favorite "at least you tried" cake was from the 2007 episode "He Loves to Fly and He D'ohs".
  • The Simpsons' home address wasn't always 742 Evergreen Terrace. In the earlier seasons, the addresses 94 Evergreen Terrace, 1094 Evergreen Terrace, 555 Evergreen Terrace, 723 Evergreen Terrace, and 430 Spalding Way were all used. In season 4's "Homer's Triple Bypass" from 1992, 742 Evergreen Terrace was the address of Snake's hideout, and Reverend Lovejoy's house, which the Springfield Police mistakenly raid, was next door.
• While most people know that SpongeBob SquarePants began in 1999, its popularity that rocketed it into the Cash-Cow Franchise it is today didn't begin until a year after the show's debut. In its first year, SpongeBob's popularity was like that of other cartoons at the time.
  • Few episodes of Season 4 are sometimes mistaken as episodes of Season 3, with the most notable cases being "Have You Seen This Snail?" and "Krusty Towers". It comes as a surprise for some people that those episodes came out after SpongeBob's acclaimed "golden age".
  • Karen's iconic mobile form first appeared in The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, and it didn't appear in the show until Season 5.
  • Several SpongeBob Memetic Mutations are newer than most people think:
    • The meme of Squidward looking out the window at SpongeBob and Patrick running by came from Season 7's "That Sinking Feeling".
    • The fish hitting the floor screencap came from Season 7's "Squidward in Clarinetland".
    • The "Squidward Listening to Music in Bed" image originated from Season 8's "Are You Happy Now?".
• Television infomercials became a thing in 1984, when the FTC repealed its long-standing regulations prohibiting program-length advertisements; they remain mostly an American phenomenon.
• In the UK, Channel 4 began broadcasting in 1982, but didn't become a UK-wide service until 2010. Similarly, its Welsh-language equivalent S4C (Sianel Pedwar Cymru, Welsh for "Channel 4 Wales"), also launched in 1982 and intended to broadcast exclusively in Welsh, didn't become Welsh-only until 2010. When the service that eventually became Channel 4 was considered, a movement emerged in Wales for a dedicated service to air Welsh-language programmes. The result was that Channel 4 as seen in the rest of the UK was replaced in Wales by S4C, run by a separate public authority. Limited frequency space meant that Channel 4 could not be broadcast alongside S4C; also, for that reason, S4C would air a few English-language content from the main Channel 4 during off-peak hours. When Wales became the first part of the UK to fully transition to digital TV in 2010, S4C finally assumed its intended role as a fully Welsh-language network, and the main Channel 4 finally became available in Wales.
• The Price Is Right:
  • "Plinko" is one of, if not the most popular games on The Price Is Right. But it didn't make its debut until 1983, just over a decade after the show premiered.
  • Longtime host Bob Barker's Signing Off Catchphrase, "Bob Barker reminding you to control the pet population. Have your pet spayed or neutered.", started in the show's 1981-82 season, as he became an animal welfare activist in tribute to his late wife Dorothy Jo, who was an Animal Lover, and he would have the show stop giving away fur coats as prizes afterwards. His successor, Drew Carey, would subsequently adopt that as his own signing-off catchphrase out of respect to Barker.
• The Muppets: Most people assume that Statler and Waldorf always said "dohohohoho" when laughing. However, that specific laugh started with this film after Dave Goelz and Jerry Nelson took over the characters and was first seen in 1992's The Muppet Christmas Carol. Prior to that on The Muppet Show, their laugh was closer to "ehehehehe".
• Petunia Rhubarb feels like such an indispensable part of the VeggieTales cast — as indispensable as other female characters Laura Carrot and Madame Blueberry — but she didn't make her debut until 2005's "Duke and the Great Pie War".
• Regarding the Academy Award (Oscars):
  • The notion of an Oscar-winning film being an Acclaimed Flop nobody outside of film snobs and critics have seen is a recent one. For most of Oscar history, popular movies have done very well indeed, with the list of Best Picture winners including some of the highest-grossing films of their day (Gone with the Wind, Ben-Hur (1959), Lawrence of Arabia, and The Sound of Music are all Best Picture winners). Even with the rise of New Hollywood in The '70s, Oscar continued to recognize popular movies (The Godfather, for all the acclaim it received, was also hugely successful at the box office; famously, the smash-hit crowd-pleaser Rocky won over the more cerebral and challenging Network and Taxi Driver in 1977). It was Annie Hall, a film which made very little money and hardly anyone outside of film buffs in the major cities had seen, winning over Star Wars, which everyone had seen (often multiple times) that marked a major turning point in the kinds of movies Oscar recognized for the big trophies. (This became a major problem for Steven Spielberg in The '80s, when two years in a row he saw his massive crowd-pleasers Raiders of the Lost Ark and E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial lose out to Chariots of Fire and Gandhi respectively. Only when he started making "serious" movies did Oscar finally recognize him.) Only once in the '80s did the highest-grossing film of its year win Best Picture (Rain Man in 1989); this had happened four times in the '70s. Ironically, The '90s, remembered as a golden age for independent film, saw a bit of a return to form for Oscar, which awarded Best Picture to blockbusters like Forrest Gump and Titanic (1997) over more self-consciously "artsy" competition. It has only been in the new millennium that blockbusters have basically had no hope to take home big awards, with the last top-grossing film of its year to win Best Picture being The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in 2004, and the last to make a serious run at the trophy being Avatar in 2010 (and to be fair, The Hurt Locker winning Best Picture instead was considered a bit of an upset at the time). This in turn has resulted in viewers (who have little interest in rooting for films they've not seen) abandoning the ceremony in droves, leading the Academy to attempt an Obvious Rule Patch such as the infamous "Best Popular Film" category to drum up renewed interest, to considerable controversy.
  • The phrase "And the Oscar goes to..." only dates to the 1989 ceremonies; before then "And the winner is..." was always used. In the years since 1989 a number of ceremonies have made a point of ditching "And the Oscar goes to..." and returning to "And the winner is..." but this has never stuck, showing the seeming permanence of the phrase despite its recency.
  • Ceremonies over three hours long have only been a mainstay since The '70s, though once it cleared that threshold in 1974 it has never since gone back under it. The show's reputation as an interminable slog established itself very quickly after that, with first-time host Johnny Carson legendarily quipping in 1979 about "two hours of sparkling entertainment spread out over a four-hour show".
  • The Oscars ceremony taking place on Sunday night is a "tradition" that goes back only to 1999. Before then, it was customarily a Monday night show.
  • The award for Best Animated Feature only dates to 2002. It is usually seen as a reaction to Beauty and the Beast getting nominated for Best Picture in 1992... ten years earlier. For much of the Academy Awards' history, AMPAS was resistant to the idea of a regular award for animated features, considering there were simply too few animated films produced to justify. Instead, the Academy occasionally bestowed special Oscars for exceptional productions, usually from Disney, such as for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs in 1938, and the Special Achievement Academy Award for the live action/animated hybrid Who Framed Roger Rabbit in 1989 and Toy Story in 1996.In fact, prior to the award's creation, only one animated film was nominated for Best Picture: 1991's Beauty and the Beast, also by Disney.
  • A comedian being the host and providing jokes during the opening would also not happen until 1934 being hosted by Will Rogers.
  • It would not be later when actors get awarded for starring one film. Before that, an actor could be awarded for multiple films: Emil Jannings won Best Actor for his work in both The Way of All Flesh and The Last Command, while Best Actress winner Janet Gaynor was honored for three films.
  • While the red carpet has been a fixture of the Oscars since the early days, the extensive coverage of celebrities arriving and being interviewed about their fashion choices has become a significant tradition in recent decades, especially with the rise of television coverage and social media.
  • The tradition of honoring industry figures who have passed away in the past year with a special "In Memoriam" segment didn't become a regular feature of the Oscars until the 1990s.
  • The practice of gifting elaborate swag bags to Oscar nominees and presenters began in the early 2000s.
  • While the nominees for Best Original Song have always been performed during the Oscars, the tradition of having live performances of all the nominees didn't become standard until relatively recently. Previously, only select songs would be performed live, with others being showcased through pre-recorded segments or brief clips.
• Looney Tunes: Several characters marketed as members of the main cast now were minor characters in the classic shorts. While characters such as the Tasmanian Devil and Marvin the Martian are now seen as Looney Tunes mainstays, they only appeared in a handful of the theatrical shorts (five shorts each to be exact!). In fact, Marvin the Martian was never named in the classic shorts, with Chuck Jones referring to him as "Antwerp" on model sheets. Funnily enough, Marvin's Canine Companion, K-9, received a name before him.
• The Razzie for Worst Screen Couple/Combo/Ensemble only dates to 1994, which is a surprise since it's hard to imagine the Razzies without it; it is by far the most irreverent and obviously comedic of the awards handed out, with the most memorable list of nominees. It is the only award that has been given every year since its inception that was not awarded at the inaugural ceremony.
• While the MPAA letter rating system for movies (G, PG, PG-13, R) has been around since 1968, its television counterpart, the TV Parental Guidelines, was first proposed in 1996, and implemented the following year.
  • The PG-13 rating didn't exist until 1984, in response to the controversies over Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and Gremlins being considered very dark for PG-rated films. The first film to receive the PG-13 rating was Red Dawn that same year.
• Godzilla's robotic duplicate Mechagodzilla is one of the most iconic characters in the Godzilla franchise, having appeared (in some form or another) in more films than almost any other monster in the series, and he's a major character in at least four different continuities. As a result, it can be surprising to learn that the character's debut film was released in 1974—a full two decades after the release of the original Godzilla, when the series was well past its heyday (it went on a nearly decade-long hiatus after the next movie was released).
• Real time weekly box-office reporting only dates back to 1981. Prior to that, the only chance to find weekly box office reports was in Variety but it only covered 25 major metropolitan areas in the United States and Canada.
• The first season of The Jetsons didn't originally use episode title cards; they were added during reruns in 1985, right when the show was revived for two more seasons which also had them.
• Many younger people think of the Sailor Moon anime (or all 90s anime) as having a pink tinted color palette as a deliberate stylistic choice. As anyone who watched the show on TV or VHS in the 90s and early 2000s will tell you though, the original series has a much brighter color palette and the pink tint is actually the result of poor preservation of the original masters causing the film to degrade and turn red. Said degraded film is the one used in newer, HD releases of the series, which younger fans are more familiar with. The same goes for the yellowish tint in Dragon Ball Z causing the skies to appear green.
• Multiplexes (i.e., movie theatres with multiple screens) were almost non-existent up to the 1970s, dual-screen setups being unusual enough until then to be treated as a novelty. The first theatre with three screens opened in 1967 in Boston, and the first megaplex was the 18-screen Cineplex in Toronto Eaton Centre, which opened in 1979; at that time, it was by far the largest theatre in the world.
• The last analog TV broadcast stations in the United States didn't sign off until 2021, and then only by FCC fiat.
• Movie trailers did not include a Vanity Plate until at least the 1980s, however Paramount began using its actual on-screen logos since at least the 1940s.

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