Your 'Seinfield Is Unfunny' moment

Enderspy - the worst part for me about most dystopian fiction is how often people seem to think that is how <select government here> operates. There's only one government which really functions anywhere close to 1984, and that's North Korea.

For all we know

I never understood all the hype about Doctor Who. I tried to watch it, but I didn't like it.

edited 28th May '15 7:51:13 PM by AHI-3000

I'm starting to dislike two common "sci-fi" and superhero tropes:

• First the whole "aliens plot to rebuild earth with their sci-fi dohickey". First off, I get that terraforming Earth is a thing, but it would take so long that turning Earth into alien-planet with purple oceans with a MacGuffin the size of a small car/necklace/small child reeks of lazy writing. It's worse when this is supposed to take place over the course of the movie/tv episode etc. The G1 Transformers cartoon did this plot better over the course of several episodes. When a movie or tv show is bested by a cartoon from The '80s that's not a good thing.

• A lot of films seem to be fond of the "heroes" fight before they team up and the "hero is forces to Turn in Your Badge" then brought back. It's tired and cliche. All to often the so called Heroes are bickering like teenages over who drank the last soda. the Turn in Your Badge then come back and be a hero thing was popular in The '80s and The '90s. So was neon shoelaces and dial-up. Just let the Heroes be heroes and get on with the story, there is more to character development that just argueing.

edited 28th May '15 10:55:13 PM by TairaMai

Pewdiepie is awful largely because his fanbase thinks rape "jokes", barrels, obnoxiously exaggerated accents, and hideously loud screeching overreactions are the gold standard of comedy.

I like Joss Whedon but sometimes his witty writing tends to grate me. Action movies need to turn down the one liners.

It's not just that, Wheldon is falling into the studio traps: action movie cliches, effects driven scenes and the Conflict Ball...

@Enderspy, Twentington, Demetrios Sadly, I'm deadly scared of distopias, because of the bad management of my country (Venezuela).

However, since the country is more chaotic than oppressed, and the politicians have the brain of a mouse, I found 1984 not that frightening, because it implies humans are smarter than they are, and, as nihilistic as this sound, is not the case.

There are a lot of bastards, though.

Another blasphemy, but, I don't see the big appeal in Final Fantasy VII. I'm more of a IX kind of guy. and is because of the lighthearted mood but with the strong message about death and war. It was a perfect touch for me, even after all these years.

The tributes to other final fantasy games is a nice touch, too.

And Saint Seiya is boring.

edited 4th Aug '15 12:01:35 PM by Tomodachi

I might had said this before but Daria seems to be a bit of a strawman when it comes to high school tropes. Daria herself seems to be a Jerk sue.

Digimon Tamers is a good kids' show relatively speaking, but what a lot of people don't tell you when they talk about it is that a large chunk of it is really uninteresting. mainly when the kids go to the digital world and fight the devas, the show is really boring until Leomon dies. at that point it begins to get more entertaining, but not as good as it was in the beginning when the show was all about how difficult it would be to care for a Mon and the idea that not everybody would use it for good reasons.

Kazu and kenta are also really boring and get way too much focus and screentime. there was no reason they should have gone to the digital world since they were dead weight. the show should have been all main three+juri+impmon. and ryo kind of makes sense once you find out where he's from and why he was added to the show but for all intents and purposes he just feels like a Gary Stu who comes out of nowhere.

overall i feel that it was the most interesting Digimon series but was still limited by being a show for young children that probably had to fill out a certain quota of episodes instead of being a tightly planned story with no restrictions.

edited 4th Aug '15 9:52:07 PM by wehrmacht

I'd have to list the 1989 Batman movie. It's not a bad film per say, but I don't understand most of the praise for it aside from making Batman dark again. The actors do a good job and the music is cool, but the story just kind of boils down to "The Joker causes trouble and wants to kidnap Vicki Vale, Batman has to rescue her, stop the Joker and then kill him once he finds out that the Joker killed his parents". The story is just really barebones compared to stuff like The Dark Knight Trilogy or Batman The Animated Series. It hasn't aged all that well either, and the movie seems to be more about The Joker then Batman himself most of the time. I actually liked the first half of the film more, when it had a sort of Crime Drama theme going for it before that element was dropped for no reason.

Now I can mention something I actually grew up with. Back in 2007 when I was about 13 years old, I use to think that Sonic Satam was the best TV Show ever and even bought the complete series boxset {Which I still have to this day}. I was such a huge mega fan of it and would even read fanfics that continued the storyline. Years later, I eventually decided to rewatch the show, and now I've noticed many problems with it, like how this version of Sonic is an unlikeable douchebag half of the time who spouts out lame 90's slang {I love Jerk with a Heart of Gold characters when done right, but he can be really obnoxious and almost borders on Designated Hero at times}, especially in the 2nd season. Tails, my favorite Sonic character, being Demoted to Extra was a descision I'm not a fan of. Robotnik, while still being menecing, never really directly fights Sonic himself at all unlike the game counterpart, so he comes off as a lazy Fat Bastard and a Generic Doomsday Villain, even though I do still like the character design and voice. There's also Bunnie Rabbot and Rotor being Demoted to Extra for the sake of shoving in lame comedy with Antoine {Who I don't inheretly hate, but the big focus on him later on is pretty bad} and Dulcy. Ugh, freaking Dulcy. The less said about her, the better.

And aside from Snively {Who I actually really like in Season 2 due to him gaining more personality and some funny quirks}, almost any character outside of the main group is really flat and boring, like Ari or the Wolf Pack. Not to mention that, while this show still dark, compared to stuff like Season 2 of Beast Wars it's really quite tame aside from the And I Must Scream aspect of Roboticization {Which is never really focused on anyway}.

edited 9th Aug '15 5:38:09 PM by marston

If Sonic Satam irritates you then I suggest you stay away from the comics. I really hate Sonic's one liners as well as all the witty dialogue that the later issues do it. Also, you cannot say that your character is witty and sarcastic when every character is witty and sarcastic.

coughjosswhedoncough

Isaac Asimov's Foundation trilogy won a one-time Hugo award for "Best All Time Series" in the science-fiction and fantasy genre, beating out even J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.

I've read it, and I found it to be boring as hell. What little action there is in the whole trio of novels all takes place "off-camera," as it were. So it mainly consists of people sitting around talking. And the characters all seem to be ultra-intellectuals with no passion whatsoever. It's far too dry and cerebral, which might have been all the rage back in 1965, when the award was given, but it would never be published today.

Maybe that's what Asimov intended, to depict a far-flung future society where mankind had evolved into creatures of pure reason who were no longer driven by base instincts. But there's no "everyman" to act as an audience surrogate. The typical reader simply can't relate to such characters; only a die-hard Asimov fanboy would "get it."

I like Asimov's robot stories (for the most part), but I'm going to take his Foundation books to the used book store and get rid of them.

I read some of the Foundation books as a teenager and what bothered me was not the idea they were somehow dry, intellectual and boring; I was actually quite interesting. (They're conceptual books designed to focus on the decline in galactic civilization, pscycohistory and the Seldon Plan based on it. So naturally it wouldn't want to focus too much on "action" or characters or anything like that, so much.)

Rather for me it was the Technology Marches On factor and things like that (for example, despite it being set over 10,000 years in the future, Asimov still thought nuclear fusion was the pinnacle of energy generation, the only alternatives being fossil fuels).

To be fair, at the moment, nuclear energy is one of the more efficient methods we have, as well as one of the safest (the only major issue being that when things go bad, things go bad).

While Halo was iconic and gave the Xbox it's big start, it's no longer fun for me. The first game was fine for a bit, then started to play like an unfunny HalfLife ripoff: flood=headcrabs, elites=alien warriors from HL etc. The games were meh and the fluff started to get very silly and they Jumped the Shark.

The Fan Dumb sealed the deal, Halo is dead to me.

The Medal Of Honor/Battlefield series are all that is wrong with FPS games. Where is the single player campaign that isn't "'Merica! F__k YEAH!" or just plain stupid. Where are the nice safe baddies: aliens, zombies (not Nazi Zombies), robots or other standard FPS baddies?

I just want to blow some things up without a backstory that trying to be LOTR: the FPS.

My Seinfield Is Unfunny Moments are (disclamer, sorry if one or two of these dosn't exactly fit the trope, as seinfield Is Unfunny is a trope I have trouble with):

• Beast Wars: Transformers/ I loved the show back in the 90's, but re-watching it today... man was it corny! I couldn't watch the pilot without cringing when someone shouted "[Name}, Maximize!" Coupled with all the slapstick (which reached loony tunes-esque levels at times), often slow moving plots, Megatron's hammyness, yessss, make the show very hard to watch nowadays. It didn't help that, in my opinion, it reached Seasonal Rot in the third season.

• The Shrek films/ When the first Shrek movie came out, it was pretty unique in tearing down the traditional fairy tale formula. But as more shows and movie came out in later years, creating the "anti-princess" character and deconstruction the fairy tale, the first Shrek has lost some of that uniqueness. And then there's the infamous DreamWorks Face .

• Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends/ Not the show itself, but it's animation. Flash Animation had just arrived on the scene, and Fosters was one of, if not the first, Cartoon Network shows to use it. And at first I didn't mind it, it wasn't as good as hand-drawn/computer hand-drawn, but not terrible. But then more and more Flash shows were made, and I became tired of all the flat, stiff character designs, and soon Fosters was lost (in my mind) in a sea of poor Flash animation.

All of Marth's games.

edited 7th Dec '15 1:48:57 PM by heliosKAISER

I heard that Beast Wars took a while to grow its beard and shed off the early campiness, but it's been years since i watched the show.

Ya it wasn't until the later half of season one that the plot really started to get going, the story also matured somewhat. Gone was the Saturday morning cartoon feel, by this point the show wouldn't have looked out of place amongst the more plot driven cartoons of now.

Never realized anyone actually took Beast Wars seriously.

it was a pretty good show in its time.

Television in general honestly.

But in particular; anything on Spike TV,

To be fair, a lot of alternative bands to come after them owe a lot to Television.

oh wait you meant the entire medium of serials.