YMMV / Soul Train

• Broken Base: Regarding the eras:
  • The '70s are well liked while The '90s and The '80s are polarizing. Maybe or maybe not related to nostalgia, and the shift in musical trends and genres. Either way discuss at your own risk.
  • Also some hated the 90's, but not because they were the 90's, but because it never fully embraced the 90's to their satisfaction. The 90's era never really fully embraced Hip-Hop (neither did the 80's for that matter). The hip-hop representation was there though. Your milage just may vary about if it was represented enough. However, the Dance show did much better with other urban genres like New Jack Swing and Hip-Hop/Soul. Either way, younger audiences found MTV and especially Yo! MTV Raps (or, for some viewers, MuchMusic and RapCity) to be far more relevant to their hip-hop interests, and the new viewers that the show needed simply didn't arrive. Didn't help that Don Cornelius more or less admitted that he didn't "get" hip-hop.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The best known is Cheryl Song aka "the Asian chick with the hair". Another famous example would be the other Asian chick with the long hair who replaced her, Sally "From the Valley" Achenbach.
  • "Monoque Chambers"
  • The cute Filipina girl from the late 90's who went by the name "Apple".
  • Lou "SKI" Carr
  • Rosie Perez
  • Leonette Scott
  • Robin Power a.k.a. Robin Herron
  • "Sapphire"
  • Barbara, the "Cuban Barbie". Though her detractors point out she couldn't dance, and people only liked her for other reasons.
  • The cute black guy with the Pig Tails, Freddie "Flexx" Bell.
  • Shann "The Body" Johnson
• Memetic Mutation:
  • THE SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOUL TRAIN!
  • Cornelius' tendency to sway when MCing, lampshaded on MADtv once.
• Never Live It Down: Although outlasting the genre by two decades, the show couldn't escape its connection to disco (particularly big bellbottoms and bigger Afros).
• Older Than They Think: Cheryl Song had been a Soul Train Dancer since at least the late 1970s.
• Questionable Casting: Some of the white rock acts that made it onto the show made sense because of their R&B, soul or funk influences, particularly with some of the British new wave bands that were able to get on... But then there was the inexplicable 1985 appearance of Don Henley, who performed the decidedly non-soulful "The Boys of Summer".
• Real Song Theme Tune: Many people think "TSOP (The Sound of Philadelphia)" was written specifically for Soul Train... and actually, it was. In an interview for a VH1 documentary about the show, Cornelius stated that he hired the Philadelphia-based songwriting team of Gamble and Huff to write a song for the show. He liked it, but he was adamant about not calling the song "Soul Train", so they called it "TSOP" and he approved. Cornelius went on to say that he regretted that move.
• Replacement Scrappy: After Don Cornelius stepped away from hosting, every subsequent host was tolerated at best by the fandom.
• The Scrappy:
  • Any white male dancer in the Soul Train Line. Bro, give it up — you can't dance.
  • White women tended to avoid this Trope, holding their own on the dance floor.
  • White singers were tolerated, but only a few of them (including Elton John, Michael McDonald, David Bowie ^note  hilariously, the first white man on the show and while transitioning to his aristocratic, "emotionless Aryan superman" "Thin White Duke" phase , Hall & Oates, Pet Shop Boys and Teena Marie) were deemed worthy.

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