Condemned by History cleanup thread

Cutting Hartman is fine by me. We'll almost certainly be cutting a lot more than that when we get around to cleaning Western Animation.

Sears may not be what it once was, but it's still the 5th-largest department store chain in the U.S. by sales. That doesn't say Deader Than Disco to me. Kmart is probably closer to that status than Sears is, they're closing more stores every year, but they're not dead yet. Ditto Radio Shack, which still has over 1500 stores in operation under corporate ownership and another thousand franchised locations. It's not "Still Alive But Not Very Successful Like Disco," it's DEADER Than Disco.

edited 28th Sep '16 6:32:30 PM by HighCrate

1) @496 Perhaps. One of the reasons why Directoire/Empire/Regency/Early 19th century fashions became fashionable because it was a reaction to the stuffy, aristocratic 18th century fashions. And in turn, the early Victorians would poke fun to the Regency fashions.

Come to think of it, it's pretty common for one generation to poke fun at the fashions of the previous generation. Fashion REALLY is an easy victim of this trope...

2) Tightlacing as a whole?

3) Footbinding.

4) Anyone still sees sagging as... trendy, for the lack of a worse word?

5) Can't think of any fashion trends from the 2000s on what used to be fashionable, but now considered to be too tacky to have a comeback by 2020...

I don't think businesses should qualify at all for Deader Than Disco.

If nothing else, they're totally off-mission for the site. Except maybe publishers. If we're going to list companies that are DTD, we should probably restrict ourselves to publishers. If it's something which you can't imagine having its own TVT page, we don't need examples of its traits.

I agree with and , businesses and the like are completely irrelevant to the site, though I believe we can keep examples like the episode of South Park which protrayed a Blockbuster store as a place where no one ever goes to anymore.

Apparently I cannot add the example of Zeppelins (which are not only dead but universally mocked for their Made of Explodium reputation) or the "car friendly" city (which is not only dead, but so dead that many people now want the car free city and which was not only popular, but so popular that several thriving neighborhoods were torn down to "make room" for the car friendly city) without raising it here first. So please, state your objections. I would much rather do that at the talk page of the article, but apparently this is the way to go so...

Edited to add: I have now read the comment about the car friendly thing still being a thing in the US... That may be so, some cities are still "built for the car" if you go by their physical environment, but even there the trend is not towards more arterial freeways and less public transit but precisely in the opposite direction. If anything supporters of "car friendly" design now dog whistle about "congestion relief" and tolls being "regressive taxes", they don't say: Cars are the future, cars are awesome, our cities should be for cars like they did in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact many advocates of car dependent design nowadays actually say stuff like "sadly you cannot go everywhere by public transit" or "let's be real, cars are here to stay". Not exactly what you'd say if you were convinced of the popularity of your idea(s) on their own merit. And while I don't know whether we do geographically limited examples, but in most of Western Europe even those lines of argument are very likely to fall entirely flat and nobody has successfully run for mayor on those lines in quite some time.

edited 29th Sep '16 6:46:53 AM by Jhonny

I think the problem with zeppelins is that we have tropes like Zeppelins from Another World and the fact that we seem to have an odd fascination for them, far outweighing their practicality.

Actually, looking at it they seem to be coming back, considering the iconic Goodyear blimps are being replaced by zeppelins.

Isn't part of the Zeppelins from Another World trope the fact that they signify the otherworldliness by being so weird and out of place by today's eyes?

Part of it, but as the description states, it's partially Rule of Cool. We can't make them commonplace in our world, but we can in fictional worlds.

Another proposal for reinsertion:

"Commuter" flights - while they were universally popular with businesspeople and wealthy urbanites doing a weekend trip from the beginning of the "jet age", they took a dive in reputation with rising oil prices and increasingly cramped airplanes with Overreacting Airport Security just the icing on the cake. When High Speed Rail offered the first credible alternative along many corridors previously dominated by aviation, their reputation plummeted and on some routes you can't fly any more. Many people who used to be avid fliers are now taking HSR along the same routes, mocking their former aviation habits and reacting incredulous how they used to subject themselves to knee-crushing aviation and bland airline food on an almost weekly basis.

edited 29th Sep '16 6:52:59 AM by Jhonny

Re: "the car-friendly city," the trope isn't "Still Very Commonplace But People Don't Really Like Them Like Disco," it's DEADER Than Disco.

Can Deader Than Disco apply to a show when the creator/major actor(s) in that show become the center of controversy many years after the show ends?

The trope page suggests that the show's popularity needs to suffer because of widespread hatred for the show itself, not its creators.

Re: The Cosby Show

edited 29th Sep '16 8:27:46 AM by Eagal

I personally think it can. It's why we considered lostprophets, after all. As long as the end result is "no one can watch this show or say anything fond about it," it's Deader Than Disco.

That's a very good question that I don't think we've dealt with directly.

I'd lean toward "no."

Part of Deader Than Disco is a retroactive hatred or mockery for this thing ever having been popular. It's certainly hard to watch reruns of The Cosby Show now, after the allegations against Bill Cosby have become too widespread to ignore. But that's a different thing than retroactively deciding that his work was always bad, or even deciding that his work is objectively bad at all, as opposed to bringing up unpleasant associations.

During the height of backlash against disco, one might be hesitant to reveal that they had ever been a fan of it for fear of being thought to have poor taste in music. But I don't imagine anyone having that same fear of revealing that they were once a fan of The Cosby Show for fear of being thought to not have the precognitive ability to divine that its lead actor would one day be accused of sexual misconduct.

edited 29th Sep '16 9:02:35 AM by HighCrate

I'm on the fence about The Crosby Show for exactly that reason. Leaning towards keeping it, considering, as while there might not be a fear in admitting it, it's certainly a big regret.

Zeppelins are too often seen as too cool to fit the trope. People still see the benefits they have, as people do recognise that there are options that aren't as flammable as that specific one.

Businesses need to go actually into bankruptcy, as well as being mocked for being all that was wrong with that particular type of business in the first place. If they're just outdone by competitors and lose their profits because of that, it's not enough.

edited 29th Sep '16 9:02:08 AM by AnotherDuck

I think that The Cosby Show, or at least Bill Cosby in general, would qualify as a keep for the same reason that Lostprophets counted as a keep. If someone heavily involved with a work (say, a vocalist or lead actor, in these cases) had committed such horrible crimes that scores of people found it impossible to enjoy their work anymore, then that sounds like the definition of DTD to me.

I completely understand HighCrate's arguments, but I agree with Larkmarn & TheFox.

Car friendly cities are two things at once. First they are an ideology (which obviously predates the actual cities being built) and second they are actual physical cities (which might still hang around while the ideology is already dead because building and tearing down stuff is expensive). The ideology of car friendly cities is deader than disco. I thought I made that clear. Sorry if I did not.

It's a bit like fascism is dead but some fascist buildings are still around (as in, buildings built by and for fascists with fascist ideology in mind)

Keep Cosby.

Honestly, it's Cosby himself that's DTD, not his show. I don't remember a backlash against Phylicia Rashad or Lisa Bonet or Raven Symone ever happening. All of the backlash tied to the show is related to Cosby's own scandal. I mean, I Spy and Little Bill and Fat Albert aren't any less DTD that the Cosby Show is by those standards.

The entry is about the show, not those other actors. I have no idea what those other things are. It's not like absolutely everything related to it have to be equally rejected.

Others shows Cosby's created or worked on.

High Crate, please do not remove large chunks of examples without discussing them. I had to restore a lot of DeaderThanDisco.New Media.

Those changes were discussed here in this thread starting with Post 460. They were first made in a Sandbox page so that everyone could view the proposed changes before I made them, and I gave notice of when I intended to make them so that anyone with objections could bring them up before I did so.

edited 29th Sep '16 11:05:51 PM by HighCrate

May I ask why American Idol, Glee & Hannah Montana aren't included in the sandbox? There was a clear retroactive backlash against all three.

edited 30th Sep '16 4:09:47 AM by Spinosegnosaurus77