X Killer Cleanup

For full context, a Stillborn Franchise entry would need to establish that it was, in fact, meant to be the first in a larger franchise, which I don't think the entry text as written does. Mentioning that the title implies hopes for at least a second movie would help; the comparison to Rugrats could also point to the fact that that franchise had a movie sequel already on the way (it released later the same year) at the time the first-and-only Doug movie hit theaters.

Edited by HighCrate on Sep 10th 2020 at 3:17:28 AM

Alright, I wrote a rough draft.

• The title of Doug's 1st Movie strongly implies that it was meant to be the first in a series of movies based on the then-popular Doug cartoon. At the time, movie adaptations of popular television cartoons was a common trend in animation, having started with the smash success of The Rugrats Movie and having continued with numerous other TV-to-movie adaptations. However, Doug had already been falling in popularity at the time, having been recently purchased by Disney and having had several controversial changes applied to it. Moreover, Doug's 1st Movie was not even intended to be a feature film, having started its life as a Direct to Video film based on Doug before being abruptly moved to theaters after the aforementioned success of The Rugrats Movie. As such, while the film was a box office success (owing to its low budget,) it received unfavorable reviews and became the only Doug movie ever made.

Should I improve anything before I add it?

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Sep 10th 2020 at 6:48:38 AM

Should I bring these three pages to the Real Life section maintenance thread to make them explicitly No Real Life Examples, Please!? And I suspect that this should actually belong under Long-Term, but it's too soon to tell if this is the case.

Edited by LaundryPizza03 on Sep 11th 2020 at 8:42:37 AM

Just edited an entry without thinking about if it fit on Nevermind:

• Genre-Killer: In the process of bringing grunge to the mainstream and ushering in an era dominated by Alternative Rock, the album ended up dethroning several established styles of pop music from the previous decade.
  • Bubblegum vocal pop— and mainstream pop in general— was pretty much dead for any singer not named Madonna until the Backstreet Boys came along. As this was barely two years after the Milli Vanilli lip-syncing scandal and not even a year after Frank Farian confessed to the band's manufactured nature, the general public had decided that pop music had gotten as synthetic as it could be and welcomed the "authenticity" of a garage band on the Top 40. This also contributed to the simultaneous rise of Gangsta Rap and Hip Hop Soul while many of the vocal pop acts transitioned into easy listening; pop rock acts such as Sting meanwhile survived through retooling their music to fit the emerging "adult alternative" crowd, itself influenced by the concurrent rise of alternative rock. The few non-Madonna pop acts who did survive with their pre-Nevermind popularity intact were those who were already too big to fail, most notably Michael Jackson (with his fall from the public eye in 1993 not being the result of changing trends, but rather being accused of child sexual abuse; given that Jackson had headlined the Super Bowl to gargantuan fanfare earlier that year, it's likely he would've continued to hold a sizable mainstream presence had the scandal not occurred).
  • Nevermind also deep-sixed the popularity of hair- and glam-metal, which was already none too popular with rock fans who perceived it as agonizingly manufactured. A great deal of this is owed to grunge being a Spiritual Antithesis of glam metal, being more dour, experimental, and thematically deconstructive compared to the openly hedonistic glam metal. It didn't help that Kurt Cobain was very vocal about his dislike for Guns N' Roses.
  • Alternatively, while Kurt Cobain is credited with bringing several of his favorite Alternative Rock bands (such as Pixies, Meat Puppets, Butthole Surfers) to the mainstream and setting the stage for future acts (Ben Folds Five), more lighthearted forms of alt. rock like Jangle Pop (10,000 Maniacs, Trip Shakespeare and Midnight Oil) and the short-lived Madchester scene (Happy Mondays, The Stone Roses, The Inspiral Carpets, EMF) were sidelined because they sounded like something other than Nirvana. This is also why Radiohead spent most of their early career having to establish themselves as something other than just "another" alt. rock band (though their early attempts at aping Nirvana on Pablo Honey certainly didn't help their case), with retrospective analysts noting that OK Computer would've been far less widely recognized outside of Britain had it not been for the fact that by the time it released in 1997, grunge was no longer the vanguard of mainstream music. The only outlier to all of this was R.E.M., who had their own worldwide breakthrough that year and were popular enough to survive the paradigm shift; by the time the peak of their popularity ended in 1996, Kurt Cobain was already dead and grunge was in the middle of its public fadeout.
  • The success of Nevermind in general can be said to have made lighthearted music as a whole unfashionable for the first half of the 1990's, but no genre outside of mainstream pop and glam metal was impacted more than New Wave Music. While a handful of acts in the genre like Depeche Mode, The Cure and New Order managed to hang on by adjusting their sounds and shifting towards a considerably Darker and Edgier direction than before, earning them their biggest stateside hits, those who didn't or tried and failed (hi, Men Without Hats!) either quickly dissolved or languished in obscurity (hi to you too, Billy Idol!). Worth noting is that Depeche Mode, the Cure, and New Order were already pretty dark bands prior to 1991 (especially the former two, with New Order also benefiting from their past incarnation as Joy Division being a major influence on grunge), but the sudden explosion of the Seattle sound encouraged a shift in an even darker direction; comparing Violator to Songs of Faith and Devotion is like comparing day to night. Acts in a variety of other genres were more easily able to re-tune themselves to fit the new sensibilities that Nevermind encouraged, in part because they were already no stranger to dark, angsty content, but for new wave the tight links to the kind of music that was popular in the 80's made it particularly hard to adapt for the 90's, and the genre would never return to its former popularity after Nirvana's breakthrough outside of the few acts who succeeded at adapting. Lighthearted music in general wouldn't start to become particularly fashionable again until 1997 and wouldn't fully supplant darker alternative rock until rock itself collapsed under its own weight over the course of the 2000's.

On top of being a wall of text, Nevermind wasn't an example of a work's failure being a Genre-Killer, it was an example of a work's success helping to kill off multiple genres.

The reason I am not saying to cut is because some of this might be salvageable for another trope. Genre Turning Point, perhaps?

• Bubblegum pop: Not killed. Once you start having to add in exceptions like "other than Madonna" and "until Backstreet Boys" (who were formed just two years after Nevermind) it's a pretty good bet you're looking at a shoehorn. Cut
• As currently defined, a Genre-Killer does not have to be an example of that genre that failed badly. I think one could streamline the entry text and make a pretty decent case that Nirvana and, by extension, their breakout album played a major role in killing hair and glam metal. Keep, but rewrite
• "more lighthearted forms of alt. rock" is not a genre. Cut.
• New wave: Not killed. "While a handful of acts in the genre like Depeche Mode, The Cure and New Order managed to hang on by adjusting their sounds and shifting towards a considerably Darker and Edgier direction than before, earning them their biggest stateside hits" argues against itself. Cut

Edited by HighCrate on Sep 13th 2020 at 7:09:45 AM

Alright I cut the non-applicable examples and attempted a rewrite. Thoughts?

EDIT: Also that wasn't originally my entry. I had just added on to it.

Edited by themayorofsimpleton on Sep 13th 2020 at 10:57:07 AM

I also cut the Doug's 1st Movie example in Franchise Killer and added my draft to Stillborn Franchise.

I'm finding lately that Genre-Killer is the one trope of the three "killer" tropes that sees the most misuse. I mentioned earlier that the description does not describe what constitutes a genre. If I recall correctly, in order to change trope definitions, you need to go to TRS.

So, should Genre-Killer go to TRS? Or am I overreacting?

Good luck defining "genre" in a way that is internally consistent but also even roughly fits the way the word is commonly used.

I think that's one of those things where we might benefit from a bottom-up approach where we focus on cleaning up the most egregious misuse first and go from there, rather than a top-down approach where we attempt to formulate a strict definition and apply it to everything at once.

Edited by HighCrate on Sep 14th 2020 at 11:10:56 AM

Ah, OK. I will try and do that then.

Bringing up a few questionable examples of Genre-Killer:

Is work centering on Babies really a genre?:

These don't appear to be describing a specific work killing of a genre:

* Mercedes-Benz killed the GT1 grand touring category through sheer dominance - in the 1998 GT Championship, they won every single race, with six of those being 1-2 finishes. Every other team either switched to the GT2 category for 1999 or pulled out of GT racing entirely, forcing the FIA to scrap the category for that year. Ironically, this came back to bite Mercedes-Benz, who shifted their own focus to the premier LMP category in an attempt to win the 1999 24 Hours of Le Mans. The resulting car, the CLR, was notoriously prone to lifting off the ground at high speeds, and after one backflipped into the air and catapulted itself over the safety fence, Mercedes-Benz pulled out of sports car racing entirely, never to return. The GT1 class did return, in 2005, but disappeared for good in 2011.

No, no, no, no, and no. None of those are applicable examples. Cut cut cut.

Seconded.

The Dada and ballet examples are rather blatant Popularity Polynomials and better fit over there.

Edited by Albert3105 on Sep 17th 2020 at 9:55:48 AM

Bringing up this example from Trivia.Duck Tales The Movie Treasure Of The Lost Lamp:

• Genre-Killer: The relative underperformance of both DuckTales and The Rescuers Down Under led to the idea of making an action adventure Disney Animated Classic crumbling; almost all of the animated movies for the rest of the 90's, including all of the Disney Animated Canon films up to 2000, were musicals. While they aged well, this ALSO led directly to Shrek ripping the idea when the genre started to show fatigue.

And how this example is written on GenreKiller.Film:

• The failure of The Rescuers Down Under and DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp at the box office against Home Alone and Problem Child (coupled with the success of both The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast) led Disney to focus exclusively on animated musicals throughout the 1990s. While this worked out very well for them, it ended up allowing studios like Pixar and DreamWorks Animation to step in and fill the gap of non-musical animated films, just as audiences were beginning to grow tired of the musical formula. Despite Disney abandoning musicals shortly thereafter, this still knocked them down from first to fifth in terms of American animation studios throughout the 2000s, and it wasn't until a decade later that they were finally able to regain the ground they had lost by going back to their old approach of alternating between musical and non-musical animated films (incidentally, the movies that led to the defeat of Rescuers and DuckTales also started the short-lived "kid empowerment" trend of the early '90s - see further down for its fate).

Genre-Killer is for killing an entire genre, not putting a particular company off of a genre for a while. And "non-musical animated film" is not really a genre in any case. Shoehorning, cut.

Edited by HighCrate on Sep 20th 2020 at 4:06:48 AM

More non-genres, non-work killers, and other shoehorning. The first and third also attempt to make exceptions:

• The extreme unpopularity of Johnny Test has seemed to have killed off most mainstream attempts in the "kid uses super-science and gadgets to deal with everyday life" genre of cartoons that started with shows like Dexter's Laboratory and The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius. The only modern cartoon show with a super science theme is Big Hero 6: The Series, and even that plays up the superhero angle more than the "dealing with everyday life using gadgets" angle, as well as the English dub of Doraemon, but the latter was short-lived.
• According to Stan Sakai, the reason the animated series of Space Usagi was never greenlit was because of the flop of Bucky O'Hare and the Toad Wars!, with which it shared a rabbit protagonist and sci-fi setting. Networks were apparently reluctant to touch any animals-in-space properties for years afterward. The saddest part? Bucky's publisher has said that despite the show's rating success, Bucky — and thus the genre — died simply because of a toy shipment screw-up leaving stores with more shelfwarmers than "wanted" figures; Bucky was Merchandise-Driven, therefore it was canceled.
• For that matter, the merch-driven "half-hour toy commercial" style of cartoon that reached its peak in the 80s was itself killed for over a decade by the Children's Television Act of 1990, which placed strong restrictions on the advertising content of shows aimed at children. It was only with the rise of cable television (which isn't covered by the law) in the Turn of the Millennium when shows designed to sell products to children became big again.
• The monster successes of shows like PAW Patrol and Doc McStuffins has mostly ended the use of Fake Interactivity in preschool shows that Blue's Clues made popular. Now, most preschool-aimed content tries to teach kids lessons without faking interactivity.
  • A research study done by Disney in 2010 provides further insight into why this is the case. Before the Disney Junior block was conceived, the company surveyed parents and asked them what they wanted to see in the shows their kids watched. Most parents wanted their kids to watch stories that would make them happy and that they could tell back to their parents, a change most likely resulting from the rise of tablet and smartphone apps teaching preschool concepts. In comparison, when Disney conducted the same survey five years prior, parents wanted their children to learn educational concepts from these shows.
• The theatrical short cartoon was killed, not by television, but instead by the "Paramount case", which forced major studios to get rid of their theater chains. While cartoons were popular, they were unprofitable because of their short length (the only reason short subjects could be produced was the fact distribution costs were extremely small for major studios, which imposed their product on theater owners), and by the late 1960s, the genre was in irreversible decline, if not outright dead by this point.
• According to this episode of The Big Picture, the Band Toon and other animated shows designed to promote certain celebrities (such as Muhammad Ali and Hulk Hogan) was killed off twice, first in The '80s by the rise of Merchandise-Driven cartoons that were more lucrative for marketers, and again at the Turn of the Millennium by the rise of Reality TV offering another way for celebrities to promote themselves on television that was not only less expensive, but also more direct and appealing to a wider audience (adults in particular).

• Total Drama Presents: The Ridonculous Race proved to be the end of the Total Drama franchise's original format of spoofing reality TV. Despite reception for the spinoff being mostly positive, series creator Tom McGillis confirmed that since the format was less marketable than it used to be amid changing tastes and fleeting demographics, TRR would be the last installment to parody reality shows.

• In The Golden Age of Animation, a common plot was one in which everyday items came to life in a store after-hours and had adventures (or it would be an excuse to have one-off gags and musical numbers, as seen with "September in the Rain" from 1937). This was particularly prevalent in the mid-'30s, with Frank Tashlin directing two of the most well-known cartoons of the type in 1937's Speaking of the Weather and 1938's Have You Got Any Castles?^note There's a third short Tashlin did, "You're an Education", but it's not as well-known as the other two Then came the 1946 Bob Clampett short Book Revue, which, while not the first parody of the genre (Tashlin's aforementioned works are sometimes seen as parodies of it as well), was so thorough in mocking its conventions that it was impossible to take that sort of plot seriously anymore, and people stopped making them. However, this can also be interpreted as the genre of cartoons simply looking stale when cartoons with actual developed characters and plots — no matter how thin they may be — started getting made, with Tashlin's and Clampett's shorts essentially being the last hurrah for, or a brashly comedic throwback to, the genre.
• While aggressively politically incorrect animated shows for adults were already starting to wane in popularity by the early 2010s due to the critical and commercial success of less lowbrow animated series like Archer and eventually Bob's Burgers, the notoriously negative reputation of Brickleberry pretty much killed the trend entirely, resulting in the rise of more nuanced adult animation like Bojack Horseman and Rick and Morty.

Edited by LaundryPizza03 on Sep 20th 2020 at 6:26:51 AM

Of the unsure ones:

The first I don't know. I don't think "cartoons where things come to life" constitutes a "genre" per se. I could be wrong though, so don't cut yet.

The second can go. There are still South Park-esque cartoons being made. Just look at Hoops for example.

Everything else can go.

when discussing how permanent Genre-Killer needs to be, I thinks it's worth noting the existence of Genre Relaunch, which is explicitly for genres that have had a Genre-Killer but later came back.

Thanks, that will be kept in mind.

x4:

a common plot was one in which everyday items came to life in a store after-hours and had adventures (or it would be an excuse to have one-off gags and musical numbers

Rule of thumb: if it takes this many words to explain what your "genre" is, it's not a genre.

Blues music is a genre. Western films are a genre. I'm willing to believe that something called "crunkcore" is a genre.

"A common plot was one in which everyday items came to life in a store after-hours and had adventures (or it would be an excuse to have one-off gags and musical numbers" is not a genre.

Edited by HighCrate on Sep 23rd 2020 at 5:17:47 AM

Example has been cut

Found yet another Genre-Killer example from the Live-Action TV section:

• MTV's Boy Band spoof 2ge+her arguably struck one of the first blows in the slow death of MTV itself by exposing a number of cynical tropes about how their flagship music program, Total Request Live, operated in the late '90s/early '00s. YouTube also killed off their original flagship tradition of showing music videos on the channel. After all, why watch MTV in the hopes that some particular music video will play on it when you can go straight to it online?

This is a weird example. The first part might fit better under Creator Killer, assuming 2ge+ther was what killed it, and I don't think it did judging by the fact I've never heard of it. The second part is more accurate, as YouTube is arguably what murdered the idea of a music video channel on TV, but is that really a genre? What does everyone else think?

Yeah, that's pretty muddled. I'm not seeing anything worth saving.

Example has been removed