Condemned by History cleanup thread

I tend to agree that the conk seems to be more Popularity Polynomial than DTD.

There are a couple of people I can ask about conk who would be aware if there was really a widespread backlash against it, or if it was just a style shift. I'll report back.

Hayate the Combat Butler's YMMV page has its DTD as "At first, the series was fairly popular and was pretty well known, but after the manga kept dragging on for years readership started to fall, to the point where there was hardy a big audience left for the series' conclusion." Is that even a compelling argument?

No. It has to go from universally loved to universally hated, not just from fairly popular to not so popular.

Chainsaw it.

Superman Returns is classified as DTD with this argument: "Critics nowadays agree with the fan sentiment that Returns was way too archaic and reliant on the original Superman film's looks and plot points." Does this count?

I don't think it was universally loved, if that quote was anything to go by.

edited 9th May '17 9:02:25 PM by RAlexa21th

Responses were mixed from the start. Cut it.

Not sure how this one got past our initial cleanup, but I noticed this entry today:

• Identity Crisis was never lacking in detractors, but this was primarily because it was so big and popular; it was The Big Comic of 2004 That Everyone Was Talking About. Everywhere you went on comic sites, there were people debating over what Identity Crisis meant for the industry, whether its tonal shift boded darker stories, and whether the DCU would ever be the same again. But as the years ground on, the general opinion of Identity Crisis slipped from "controversial masterwork of our time" to "half-baked edgy fumble." Maybe it was how few of the story threads set up by Identity Crisis actually went anywhere or weren't promptly ignored or retconned, maybe it was how everyone tried to copy it at DC for a few years with increasingly weaker results, maybe it was that people started examining it and separating it from its hype and found that it was actually a very lacking story in many ways. Whatever it is, Identity Crisis has very few fans today, and whenever someone admits to remembering liking it, they'll usually be greeted by everyone else pointing out its plotholes.

If the arc "never lacked its detractors," I don't see how it can be an example. DTD is "universally popular, then universally despised," not "controversial, and then the detractors won."

Let's take a look at this entry:

• The 2005 adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory was a huge success that summer, bringing Tim Burton and Johnny Depp together for the first time since 1999 and becoming their highest-grossing collaboration up to that point. It was warmly received by critics and set the stage for the enormously successful Alice in Wonderland (2010) five years later.
  
  However, back in 1971, a different adaptation of the Roald Dahl book was released^note This version made far less money, but it also cost far less money to make; on a percentage basis, the profitabilility of the two films was roughly comparable, at $4m on a $3m budget vs. $206m on a $150m budget, titled Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory. While this would normally not be an issue for a re-adaptation of a book, by the time Charlie came out, Willy Wonka had become a near-universally beloved family movie, with now-iconic musical numbers and a classic performance from Gene Wilder; this version eclipsed the source novel in the public consciousness and became the source of numerous pop culture spoofs. Thus, there were many viewers that regarded the 2005 film as an insult to the original rather than a faithful adaptation of Dahl's book. In Willy Wonka's colossal shadow, the newer film's backlash grew immensely, with chief box office rival Wedding Crashers ultimately holding up much better over time (it edged out Charlie's final gross in North America), inspiring music videos a decade after the fact.
  
  Today, while Willy Wonka is still the timeless classic it has been for over 25 years, Charlie is hardly ever acknowledged in pop culture unless it is to be unfavorably compared to its 1971 counterpart (a possible exception being the fact that it was the Star-Making Role of AnnaSophia Robb, whose more sympathetic take on Violet is probably more popular that the literary or '71 versions; the 2005 Mike also generally has a bigger fanbase than the '71 one). The film is today seen as the beginning of Burton's Dork Age, Depp's Wonka is regarded as one of his all-time worst performances, and "Wonka's Welcome Song" has become one of the most hated ear-worms in film history. The consensus seems to be that aside from the modern-day visual effects and its effort to be Truer to the Text, there's nothing that Charlie does better than Willy Wonka; the latter strength is undercut by an Adaptation Expansion Backstory for Mr. Wonka that results in a severe Adaptation Personality Change, a Not His Sled ending^note which happened mainly because Roald Dahl himself left it in his will that the book's sequel can never be made into a film; Burton changed the ending to remove the Sequel Hook and a narrative that didn't flow as well with the focus being taken off Charlie. If Depp's domestic abuse scandal in May 2016 wasn't enough to kill the film's reputation, then it must have been Gene Wilder's death in August that year, which firmly solidified the 1971 film as the definitive adaptation of the book.

First of all, it's a wall of text. Even if it's a valid example, I'm sure it doesn't need a three-paragraph essay to establish it as such.

I don't believe it's a valid example, though. It doesn't properly establish its popularity as universal nor the backlash against it as retroactive. Yes, it was financially successful— so was Suicide Squad. While the critical response was generally positive, it was hardly overwhelmingly so. A Wayback Machine link to Metacritic at around the time shows a critical metascore of 72 out of 100 and a user score of 6.7 out of 10: both generally positive, but mixed, not even close to universal praise.

Meanwhile, the backlash against the movie started almost immediately by people who preferred the Gene Wilder version and/or were put off by Depp's performance.

It's simply not a case of "everyone loved it and then everyone hated it." More like "some people loved it, most people thought it was pretty good and then forgot about it, some people hated it, and as the people in the middle moved on the haters' voices got louder."

I agree with your analysis of both of those. Neither meets the "near-universal popularity, followed by widespread backlash, followed by near-universal derision." template.

I still maintain that Deader Than Disco applies only to categories of works, such as genres and styles, not to individual works or creators.

That would be a good redefinition, IMO.

I agree about individual works, but I think a case could be made for allowing individual creators. If a creator is very prolific and/or influential, their name may almost be synonymous with a genre or sub-genre, and if that genre becomes Deader Than Disco I suppose you could say the creator does, too.

In that case, write the example about the genre or sub-genre, and identify the creator as a major contributor to it.

May, but isn't always, and artists can and have survived the DTD death of the genre they were part of.

Limiting it to genres and types, I think, narrows it to uselessness. There's a reason "Disco" is the go-to example — it's just about the only occurrence of this on a genre level that includes both the near-universal embrace and the near-universal disdain later. Most others only have one, if they have either.

Actually, I meant it the other way round: I was thinking of cases where a creator becomes DTD and their genre suffers the same fate because everybody associates it with the now-hated creator. It's not very common, but there are cases where people know - or think they know - a creator's works to the extent that it defines a genre for them, but would be hard put to come up with a single other creator in that genre.

To use an imperfect (because it's not DTD) example, there's the case of Ingmar Bergman defining a whole genre of angsty art movies (NB I'm talking about the pop-cultural perception of Bergman movies here, not about his actual works - another reason the example is imperfect).

edited 19th Jun '17 10:42:01 AM by GnomeTitan

Yeah, there are honestly several examples that don't fit here either.

-Iggy Azalea despite being overwhelmingly hated now, always had a substantial hatedom from many people. A white female rapper was surely not going to go down well with everybody. -The Jonas Brothers. They were a boy band, so of course many people hated them.

I would have no problem nixing any of those.

The music page as a whole needs a scrubbing, IMO.

I think I can agree with axing Burton's Charlie. It was always contentious, especially Depp's performance.

Speaking of entries we somehow missed during the initial cleanup, there's this one:

• Bubsy was originally hyped as the next Sonic the Hedgehog. Electronic Gaming Monthly even gave him an award for being the most hyped character of 1993. When the first game came out, it received mostly favorable reviews. However, a combination of a failed cartoon and sequels that got less and less positive reaction per installment (ranging from the painfully mediocre Bubsy 2 to the trainwreck that was Bubsy 3D) have put this bobcat into a lengthy coma. History hasn't been kind to the original game either, as it's now held up as an example of everything wrong with mascot-based platformers, citing problems such as slippery controls and Bubsy himself being annoying. Rob Paulsen has completely disowned having voiced Bubsy, at least in the pilot. While The Woolies Strike Back hopes to put the bobcat through rehab, not everyone is holding their breath, and some think he should have never woken up.

A first installment that received "mostly favorable reviews" is hardly "universally popular and everyone loved it." As I recall Bubsy was one of several mascot platformers at the time that just kind of came and went without sparking much reaction one way or the other.

I just noticed that NYPD Blue lists Deader Than Disco as a trope on its YMMV page. I can't find it on the Deader Than Disco pages. I don't know if it was ever there or if it was removed in the cleanup effort.

Anyway, while the show was very popular and hailed as seminal and ground-breaking back in the 90s, and has since been largely forgotten, it's by no means universally hated or even sneered at. My impression is, on the contrary, that it's still respected by those who remember it. The example even says so: "Now it's barely even remembered as just another cop procedural. Interest waned so much that after the fourth season's DVD release in 2006 no further seasons were released for a long time."

This seems like a non-example, doesn't it?

A show that ceased being produced due to declining interest is not even close to what Deader Than Disco means. Either that or we have to list every popular show that ever stopped production, meaning just about all of them.

edited 20th Jun '17 12:45:04 PM by Fighteer

Agreed. I just wanted to mention it here before unilaterally removing the example.