Discussion Main / CondemnedByHistory

Do you think that it’s too recent and/or contentious to add Green Book to this page? To me, it seems like a similar case to Film/Crash, in that it was an award snubber/tone-deaf portrayal of race relations.

Edited by CanuckMcDuck1 For a guy nicknamed Blondie, he is not the tiniest bit blond! Hide / Show Replies

Do you think that the Western Animation/Aladdin can be included here. Here is my skeleton:

• Aladdin: When it first came out in 1992, the movie was, while not without its controversies (e.g., casting primarily White American and British actors such as Robin Williams and Gilbert Gottfried as supposedly Middle Eastern actors, significant Artistic License with the cultures of various Muslim countries, etc.), well received by critics, to the point of winning two Academy Awards for Best Original Score and Best Original Song. In addition, the film itself was to some extent accepted by some Middle Eastern viewers at the time, as it was one of the few mainstream Western depictions that presented their people in a positive light in spite of its own use of Orientalist stereotypes. Over the years, however, Aladdin has been subject to retroactive criticism from both Middle Eastern and Western viewers for a number of reasons:
  • First, there was the aforementioned Orientalist stereotypes about the Middle East, as a lot of non-Middle Eastern (particularly White American) viewers who grew up watching Aladdin as children came of age and began learning about both the Middle East (and larger Muslim world) as they actually exist and the stereotypes that Western works had long used to characterize such regions. This had not been helped by the War on Terror (which began a decade after Aladdin was released AND was the time period that a lot of the children who grew up with the movie came of age), which prompted a larger conversation about the Western world (particularly the United States)' relationship with Muslim-majority countries.
  • Second, there is the aforementioned casting of non-Middle Eastern actors such as Williams and Gottfried as the Genie and Iago, respectively, and the very Westernized designs of the movie's leads, Aladdin and Jasmine (especially when contrasted with the stereotypically Arab features of the movie's Big Bad, Jafar). The criticisms against such character designs and castings largely took place during a larger debate about Hollywood's history of depicting people of color during the 2010s, which was when a lot of the kids who grew up watching Aladdin attended college and began learning about the Middle East.

Edited by BookReaderUSA Hide / Show Replies

Hi, I got something to add. Hope this is okay.

• Tila Tequila was a model who got famous in the 2000s thank to getting a huge presence on MySpace, becoming the site's most popular user. After coming out as bisexual, she would then gain her own VH1 reality competition A Shot at Love with Tila Tequila which would last for two seasons, as well as a few more television appearances and an independent music career. However, she would slowly become more known for her reckless Attention Whore antics, such as false pregnancies talking about her self-described "multiple personalities", wanting to kill herself and multiple conspiracies about the Illuminati, as well as her bisexuality being a lie. After a mental breakdown and her relevancy waning, she began making multiple posts sympathizing with Hilter and the Nazis (despite allegedly converting to Judaism), even doing a photo shoot of her in front of a concentration camp, which led her to get kicked off of Celebrity Big Brother and banned from Twitter. Nowadays, she is known by most as a relic of the early 2000s and a trainwreck Neo-Nazi at worst.

Edited by Acapal100 Hi my name is Aaron Hide / Show Replies

Noticed that a lot of videos recently have been more critical on the first Sonic the Hedgehog game than they were back in the 1990s to early 2010s. It's not just one person either. Seems criticisms center around the level design.

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Would "The Mists of Avalon", and by extension Marion Zimmer Bradley qualify? They were lauded as feminist groundbreakers at the time, but with the revelations about MZB and her husband making a lot of the books come across as horribly uncomfortable reads, a lot of people have pointed out that the books barely even qualify as feminist by modern standards, as well as the fact that many others have done feminist interpretations of Arthurian myth but better, making Avalon's flaws all the more apparent.

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I think the removal of Oreimo was premature. I've said so in the cleanup thread, which I was not aware of before the deletion happened, but which was up for less than 24 hours before deletion anyway. It definitely fits by virtue of being extremely popular when it came out, and in aging like milk less than two decades later. I'm saying so here so as to signal boost, since, again, I wasn't aware of the thread before it suddenly got erased out of the blue from my perspective.

Random Troper: This trope has been suffering from Flanderization in recent months, so I think it's best that we discuss just what the trope is about.

First off, this trope isn't merely about things that aren't as popular as they once were. This trope is about things that have gone beyond simply being 'not as popular' and have fallen so far from popularity that people are embarassed to admit they were into them. The 'fad' or whatever has become a joke — these things might be revived as 'kitsch' but in many cases they just aren't ever going to be popular on their own merits again. It's like a sort of Hype Backlash or something that continues long after those who liked the stuff have gone into hiding.

Here are a few things that ARE Deader Than Disco, or at least heading in that direction:

• Disco itself, of course, is probably never going to be taken seriously again (was it ever?)
• Many 'manufactured' pop bands like the Spice Girls and such. You used to hear about them ALL the time — you just couldn't escape from them. Now, good luck trying to find people who'll admit to being at their concerts.
• Daytime soap operas - these days considered something you compare really bad writing to. If they're not there already, they will be soon (given cancellations of Long Runners such as Guiding Light).
• The Ultimate Warrior — he's more or less a joke these days, and likely to remain so. His nonsensical, egotistical, and occasionally homophobic rantings have made him an embarassment.
• The whole professional wrestling genre has lately seemed to be declining to the point where people are embarrased to admit they watch wrestling (and those that do do so only to talk about how badly done the angles and such are). But wrestling's one of those cases where this trope isn't necessarily permanent. It's managed to make comebacks before.

Okay, so those things DO fit the trope. Now here are two or three examples that DON'T fit, but were seen on the page anyway. While there's no denying they're nowhere near as popular as they were in their day, they haven't reached the point where people are embarassed to admit they were fans of them.

• Looney Tunes — The 90's and afterward haven't been kind to the Looney Tunes. Tiny Toon Adventures, featuring the classic characters in supporting roles as the faculty of Acme Looniversity, was good. But after that, they entered a Dork Age where Bugs Bunny's commercials with Michael Jordan resulted in the film Space Jam. Then came Loonatics Unleashed, a sci-fi superhero series featuring sci-fi superhero descendants of the classic Looney Tunes characters which was poorly received by fans of the classic characters. Looney Tunes Back In Action was an okay pastiche, though it's clear that the glory days of Looney Tunes are behind them. But the characters still have a lot of fans who believe that the classic cartoons still hold up very well today comedy-wise, so the Looney Tunes are not this trope.

• The Muppets - They've struggled to remain relevant in the years following the death of Jim Henson. But they've had some successes here and there, and while they'll probably never again be as popular as they used to be, there are still plenty of Muppet fans out there who aren't embarrased to admit it.

• Interactive Fiction — I haven't actually seen text-based Interactive Fiction on the Deader Than Disco page, but it wouldn't surprise me since the mainstream computer marketers have considered it to be so since the end of the 80's. Granted, 90 percent of non-Infocom text adventures were, in fact, pretty lousy, but the Infocom text adventures (and the 10 percent of non-Infocom text adventures that were actually pretty good) still have their fans. And since the 90's, there are a lot of people who have written new text adventures in languages such as Inform, TADS, and so forth — meaning that the genre as a whole still has plenty of unashamed fans.

So, in closing, before adding an entry to the Deader Than Disco page, one has to ask 'Has this thing become a joke and/or an embarassment to most people?'. If it has, then it's Deader Than Disco. If not, then it's not this trope.

Really, there should be some other tropes about a thing's popularity, so there can be a Sliding Scale of Popularity or something like that. Deader Than Disco would be when a thing's popularity hits rock bottom.

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Would this count for the Video games section?

Mechanics

• The Safari Zone in Pokémon games was seen as an interesting change of pace during Pokémon Red and Blue, especially with it being a source of rare and decent Pokémon. Its loss in Pokémon Gold, Silver, and Crystal was actually lamented back in the Turn of the Millennium; and its reinclusion in Heart Gold and Soul Silver was seen as an Author's Saving Throw back in The New '10s. These days, it's actually considered to be a Scrappy Mechanic, to the point where nobody holds it against games in which the Safari Zone is absent. Omega Ruby and Alpha Sapphire flat out ditched its "No battle" mechanics altogether to almost universal praise.

Edited by RuebenSandwich Hide / Show Replies

Would this count for Live-Action TV?:

Creators

• Jimmy Savile was, in life, hailed as a bastion of British entertainment. For 20 years, he presented the BBC's Top of the Pops, and over 250,000 letters were sent per year to Jim'll Fix It, where he helped make the wishes of children come true. He was also held in high esteem for the millions he raised for charities and spent on rebuilding hospitals, enough to be granted a knighthood. When he died in October 2011, his funeral was a grandiose spectacle befitting a member of the royal family.

Then one year later, ITV broadcast Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savile, a bombshell report documenting historic child sex offences committed by Savile during his frequent visits to hospitals and group homes, alongside during the taping of his shows. The resulting investigation by the Metropolitan Police ultimately concluded within months that Savile was responsible for at least 450 counts of sexual abuse towards minors. Overnight, Savile's very name became toxic, and the BBC was forced to scramble to erase all evidence of his involvement on their shows, especially once accusations came to light that they knew about Savile's crimes and refused to do anything about them - episodes of Top of the Pops that he presented were pulled from circulation, and others, such as the Doctor Who special "The Two Doctors", were recut to remove his presence. Even references to him, such as an episode of Tweenies in which the character Max impersonated Savile, were removed in response to the controversy. As a final nail in the coffin, his ornate granite gravestone was removed overnight and sent to landfill. Once beloved nation-wide, British television have turned its back on Jimmy Savile and now regard him as a stain on its reputation. The draconian attempts to curb all traces of him in the wake of revelations concerning his sex crimes is more than enough to ensure that Savile and his portfolio will never return to the level of popularity they once had.

Edited by NotGonnaDoALot4 There's so much I wish I could take back. Hide / Show Replies

What about The Karate Kid (2010) reboot with Jackie Chan and Jaden Smith?

When it was released, it became a surprise box office success and critical reception was decent enough (it has the second-highest score of all the Karate Kid films on Rotten Tomatoes, with only the original beating its rating; while on Metacritic, it even outranks the original score-wise).

In recent years, however, it has gotten a bit of a bad rap with accusations of mixing up Asian cultures, thinking kung fu and karate were the same thing, portraying Chinese and Japanese as one and the same.

Outside of the unfortunate cultural implications, nostalgia for the original film and affection for original actors Ralph Macchio and the late Pat Morita colored views on Jaden Smith and Jackie Chan as inferior substitutes, which wasn't helped with the latter two becoming embroiled in controversy recently.

And finally, Cobra Kai premiered later in the decade, bringing back Macchio as well as William Zabka, among others, restoring the original continuity, and becoming a big streaming hit.

Cobra Kai was praised as a revival series that really succeeded in what it set out to do, bringing back the old and spicing it up in unique ways while also making it accessible to new audiences.

It also convinced people who hated the original film's sequels to re-evaluate them and acknowledge that, while they may not have been on the same level as the original, they still had their merits.

Edited by Halestorm5 Hide / Show Replies

Removed:

• Sam Kinison was highly popular in the 1980s, helped by being taken under the wing of Rodney Dangerfield who opened a lot of doors for him in the standup world. His style of insane screaming inspired by his prior career as a Pentecostal preacher was unlike anything else in comedy at the time, and his tragic death in a car accident just increased his legend. Unfortunately, even at the time his act came under fire for its undeniable misogyny, racism, and homophobia, which like the above-mentioned Andrew Dice Clay was very hard to tell if it was part of a staged character or his actual opinions. As society keeps moving on from this kind of material, it becomes harder and harder to admit you were ever a fan.

While a lot of Kinson's material hasn't aged well, I've never seen any backlash against him. In fact, if he's ever brought up, it's always in some sort of tribute.

Would Keiji Inafune be considered acceptable?

During the Turn of the Millennium and The New '10s, Inafune's fallout with Capcom over their money-driven practices made him seen as a visionary who was saddled with a company that didn't view him as a creator. During the Kickstarter campaign for Mighty No. 9, Inafune was one of the poster children for a lauded creator turned independent making a Spiritual Successor that the big-suits wouldn't greenlight.

...but the attitudes towards Kickstarter spiritual successors started to sour a bit when some were hit by Hype Backlash and troubled productions. Not helping was Mighty No. 9's continued Development Hell and Inafune running a kickstarter for Red Ash during said Development Hell, only to reveal it was already funded after it failed. Once Mighty No. 9 released to mixed-negative reception, he established himself as the Scapegoat Creator. And then, in 2022, it was announced he was getting into the very unpopular NFTs...

~ ~ ~

Kickstarter themselves can fall into this category as well - during The New '10s it was seen as a very hopeful way for people to kickstart video game projects that "the suits" and "Corporate" production teams wouldn't touch. Then games started to enter Troubled Production or Development Hell - with horror stories of mismanagement, running out of money, or feature creep not being unheard of. When they came out, some were indeed well-received but others couldn't live up to the hype they made during their kickstarter. This has led to several creators being seen as inept, egotistical, or simply not what everyone thought they were. (ie Tim Schaffer and Keiji Inafune)

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Would the Arrowverse franchise be applicable? They're technically still going on so I don't know if that voids the 'five year' wait, but the early seasons of the franchise are all over five years old and those would definitely be examples. At-the-time, they were praised for kick-starting a renewed superhero TV boom in a similar way the MCU had revitalised the superhero film genre, and for providing a Gateway Series for new fans of the DCU; nowadays though the entire franchise is looked badly upon, early seasons included, for the melodrama, Romantic Plot Tumor, Adaptation Decay, and a variety of issues with their writing, never mind that the early seasons were primarily directed by a showrunner who was outed as a sexual predator. There's still the occasional 'the first season was good though', but even that is becoming rarer, since people who look back on them now tend to notice the Franchise Original Sin nature of the later issues.

Would that be applicable, or is the fact that there's still new seasons coming out voiding the entry?

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I was going to add The Black Tapes here, and wrote out an entry... then I saw the whole "five-year wait" thing and backtracked. Here's the original entry I wrote, I just wanted to be sure.

• The Black Tapes was once as widely beloved as other audio drama darlings such as Welcome to Night Vale and The Penumbra Podcast. It was one of the first fictional audio dramas of The New '10s to present itself as a real-life documentary and imitate True Crime podcasts, presenting itself as nonfiction through the use of heavy Kayfabe. At the time, this was a captivating mixture, helped along by the chemistry between the leads. However, opinion gradually turned against it, along with its siblings, RABBITS and TANIS, as they began to see it as an example of The Chris Carter Effect, growing tired of the podcast raising questions, and introducing mysteries and cliffhangers only to never follow up on them again. Opinion plummeted with the release of the final episode, which saw the main characters eloping to England with little foreshadowing, and few if any plot points being resolved. Nowadays, people rarely discuss it - and never with the fervor it elicited.

I would like to suggest Man on the Moon should be example. The YMMV page has this:

• Vindicated by History: Inverted — the film was critically-acclaimed at the time of its release and Carrey won plaudits for what was seen as an eerie channeling of Kaufman, to the point that many were shocked he didn't receive an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. However, over time (and unlike Carrey's other early dramatic film, The Truman Show), opinions on the film and Carrey's performance in particular have declined considerably. With much more of Kaufman's filmography available on demand to the general public than it was in 1999 - including a very popular side-by-side scene comparison of the scenes Carrey is re-creating to Kaufman's original performances - it's obvious that Carrey is overacting, depicting Kaufman throughout with an anxious, nervous energy (and seeming lack of confidence and self-assurance) the real man never really had in any of his personas. This might not be so terrible in and of itself if not for the making-of documentary in which Carrey applied extreme Method Acting techniques to the point of claiming to be possessed by the spirit of Kaufman (which he has never renounced post facto and even reasserts in the documentary). Whether or not Kaufman would have approved of such antics is an open question (those who had interacted with both men were divided, and Jerry Lawler was particularly vocal in claiming that Carrey wasn't acting anything like the real Kaufman at all off-camera) what we do know is that he created a hostile work environment to underwhelming results, especially as the general backlash against Method Acting mounted starting in The New '10s. His audition tapes - made, of course, before he claims to have been "possessed" by Kaufman - show him giving a very similar performance to what was seen in the finished film, so his Method Acting didn't even improve his performance beyond what he would have given had he not done it at all.

Since the opposite of VBH is this trope, might it count? or is it Overshadowed by Controversy

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Could Home Improvement possibly count? In the 90's, it was among the most watched sitcoms on television, even beating juggernauts like Seinfeld in ratings for a while. Today, the show is rarely (if ever) mentioned, even when specifically discussing popular 90's sitcoms. And the most its 25th anniversary was greeted with was an AV Club analysis on why the show fizzled from pop culture memory after its 1999 cancellation (https://www.avclub.com/why-has-time-forsaken-home-improvement-1798252289).

I know there was never really a full blown backlash against the show, but it seems like even those who remember it now just see it as a run-of-the-mill family sitcom

Edited by MartyD82 Hide / Show Replies

Would Star Wars: The Force Awakens count as an example? Many of the positive reviews at the time were about how they considered it a good jumping-off point and were intrigued by the mysteries presented... fast forward to today and many of those questions were left unanswered or found unsatisfying. In addition most fans I've talked to point to TFA as the route of the Sequel Trilogy's problems

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Does Eden Lake qualify as an example of this trope? Here's what the film's YMMV page says on the subject:

• Condemned by History: Despite being beloved by critics and audiences when it first came out, the film is largely strongly disliked by most modern horror fans, who typically interpret it as a rather disturbing statement that the poor are fundamentally and inherently evil, especially if they partake in cultural signifiers of poverty.

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Considering that the most recent game entry in the series hasn't been updated since 2017, I think it's pretty safe to say that sooner or later, Corpse Party could become a candidate.

For those not in the know, Corpse Party started off as a PC-98 game that just so happened to gain enough interest for an expanded PC remake, then handheld ports of that PC remake with an All-Star Cast. However, the series would eventually begin to falter in the wake of increasingly bitter endings for its spin-offs and sequels (most of which never officially left Japan), and growing concern over the Interplay of Sex and Violence involving canonical minors within the Western audience. Nobody really talks about the series in the mainstream anymore.

There's so much I wish I could take back. Hide / Show Replies

The current state of this page, with its overuse of short sentences with a full stop, sounds extremely clunky, formulaic and robotic. Is this the right tone?

There's so much I wish I could take back. Hide / Show Replies

Should emo and scene fashion and subculture be removed from here? I still see plenty of people who still rock the look, along with having tons of people online have nostalgia for the look, and some even desiring to see it return, so I don't think that it's truly condemned by history yet.

Edited by Rainbowdash55 I GOT BLISTERS ON MY FINGERS Hide / Show Replies

Should it be mentioned how big of an impact the disco/funk has had on R&B, Dance, Pop, and Hip-Hop in the 21st century? I always find that to be one of the biggest ironies of the "Disco Demolition Night" was that Steve Dahl wanted disco songs to be played less on the radio in favor of Rock songs, but a few decades after his event, the tides turned back again and disco has a much wider circle of influence than Rock does.

All-in-all, the article is short and it would be nice to fit in some of the history of disco in there.

Edited by NikkiLee8208 Hide / Show Replies

Previous Trope Repair Shop thread: Misused, started by lalalei2001 on Dec 29th 2015 at 7:47:51 AM

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Previous Trope Repair Shop thread: Needs Help, started by Theatre_Maven_3695 on Jan 13th 2017 at 11:08:38 PM

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Even though it's still too early to tell, I'm holding Terrace House to be a consideration for a future addition to the Condemned by History page. It was initially seen as a fresh take on reality TV without any of the staged drama of other shows of the genre. However, after the fallout of the Hana Kimura suicide, the cancellation of Tokyo 2019-2020, the revelation from former cast members of the producers telling the housemates to fake drama to drum up interest of the show, and the fact that no new series have been announced since 2019-2020's cancellation, I think it's safe to say that even though it's not exactly Condemned by History yet, Terrace House is getting there.

Edited by SCBlue Hide / Show Replies

If it (likely) gets cancelled or (by a miracle) is released, then I'm expecting Yandere Simulator to be this.

You know the drill: starts off with high acclaim due to being made by one guy and getting tons of promotion and fanart, then drowns in Development Hell, a Narm-filled story, and the guy (and by extension the game) getting Overshadowed by Controversy.

There's so much I wish I could take back.

Would John Lasseter count?

A long time ago, he was seen as one of the great animation heroes for helping start up Pixar, introducing Studio Ghibli to the west, and ending the direct-to-video Disney sequels. Then after his sex scandal in 2017, people went from loving him to showing nothing but visceral hate for him whenever he's brought up on sites like Cartoon Brew.

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I don't know if it's mainly because Bill Cosby has been Overshadowed by Controversy, but would The Cosby Show count?

There's so much I wish I could take back. Hide / Show Replies

i wish UCP from wikia was one of these (see the abridged version to see the reason).

Edited by botuczy botuczy8000

Do you guys think The King Of Hate should be added here. He used to be one of the most biggest youtube channels during the late-2000s/early-2010s. Nowadays (and it's been like this since 2013), Phil is a laughingstock and seen as a perfect example of Snark Bait, and most people who watch his content do so for Bile Fascination

Edited by Tehrannotaur

Should Channel Awesome be added to this page? Considering recent events and the mass exodus of producers from the site, it is clear that it will never be as big as it once was. Any thoughts?

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So it seems like someone added Sonic Mania as an example. I don't have a current pulse on the Sonic fanbase or its reactions to Sonic games, but is that really how most of the fanbase feels about Mania or is this a case of fan myopia (of course, the fact that it's been splintered beyond recognition with 20 plus factions doesn't help matters). I thought this game was generally well liked.

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I would like to add the following example, but want to be sure everything doesn't look like whining/ranting/etc. before I add it.

Edited by KingLyger The fantasy RPG videos that play in my head are amazing.

Does Futurama really count? Even if the later seasons are seen as weaker than what came before, the show still seems pretty popular overall on the internet.

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Is Molly Ringwald really that dead of an actress? Apart from the fact her career hasn't done well in the past few years, I know her works aren't as popular as they were then, but she does have some defenders. This trope was removed on her actual YMMV page because of the defender part, and I'd say her feud with John Hughes is more of an Overshadowed By Controversy thing.

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I was wondering for the section under video games, can we add pay-to-win microtransactions and loot boxes models in the future because of recent events?

Edited by Xteme19 Hide / Show Replies

Would politics count for in universe/real life example?

It's pretty common in politics that a candidate or pundit will start off their career as extremely popular only to end up becoming the scrappy, ether because of corruption; scandals; bad policies; circumstances beyond their control or simply because they refuse to follow through on promises (a few famous example off the top of my head being Richard Nixon, Chris Christie & Anthony Wiener)

Also it's the same for celebrities too (I don't see the careers/legacies of Jared Fogel, Jimmy Savile or Bill Cosby making a comeback anytime soon)

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Would Twilight count? The popularity seems to have disolved with fans either moving to other Young Adult Literature fandoms like The Hunger Games or have gotten older and not cared for the Unfortunate Implications lurking in the books. Even mockery of the books seem to have been something disappeared.

However, I feel there might be some Twihards lurking around so the fanbase might just have become silenter...

Edited by JustaUsername Some people say I'm lazy. It's hard to disagree. Hide / Show Replies

Ultimate Marvel has a long entry, but it is a misleading oneas detailed here. As pointed, many aspects of the MCU were borrowed from the Ultimate inprint, there are many paragraphs detailing all those similarities. And the mainstream comics soon adopted themselves the style of the Ultimate line. The project was eventually cancelled because it became redundant: in 2000, there was no MCU and the mainstream comics were something completely different, so the ultimates became a success for its never seen approach. Nowadays, mainstream comics have the ultimate style (which is not simply "everyone is a jerkass", as suggested here), and Marvel does not need to speculate what would an Avengers film look like, as they can make those films and apply the ideas they wanted to apply back then. That doesn't sound at all like "deader than disco", it basically sounds as the complete opposite.

The text also says that the line was closed with just a minimal miniseries. That is a complete lie. The line was closed with a whole Crisis Crossover ending that followed a years long storyline, the highest spectacle comic book industry can provide. That was, after all, the whole purpose of the Secret Wars crossover. If the ultimate line was so reviled as suggested, it wouldn't have got any of this, it would have been silently cancelled and the rest of the comic book line would have been unaffected. Those crossovers are also the highest selling point of the year (to the point that, for the comic book industry, everything else is just filler between a crossover and the next one), and they wouldn't have risked it by giving a prominent role to some reviled content.

Ultimate Secret Wars Hide / Show Replies

While Oreimo does kind of belong there , there's one rather detail many like me would disagree with the fact that it spawned the Little Sister Heroine genre since there are several examples like Sister Princess, Aki Sora, and many others that predate the genre by several years and was more than just "the little sister is one of many options". If it meant to say "made it even more popular" fair enough, but the wording and the linked article implies it's solely Oreimo's fault for incest-themed anime. Not to mention to how the section is somewhat biased since the word "utterly creepy" implies "universally agreed upon". It's starting to sound like a case of the author using the section to rant about the show than to talk about how it's this trope.

Note: I'm half kidding with the last one ,but the point still stands. Kind of doesn't help that the article it was linked to was extremely anti-Moe in general...using rather questionable evidence and how again this trend LONG predates Oreimo

Edited by Sakubara "Life's like a movie, write your own ending. Keep believing, keep pretending."-Jim Henson Hide / Show Replies

(Note I'm not an expert historan) Does former President Richard M Nixon for a real life example?

Started his career as a fairly popular California governor before becoming President Eisenhower's VP, wins the nomination to become the Republican Party candidate in 1960 (loses to JFK), gets his political 2nd wind by winning the presidential election in 1968 (winning this and his 72 reelection by electoral landslides), everything was looking up for tricky dick until watergate

Post watergate scandal, his public image was tarnished being seen as a crook and mad with power

And history hasn't been to kind to him ether, nowadays when anyone brings Nixon up it's usually as a negative comparison or mockery (like in Futurama or the Simpsons)

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Also would spoony count for web videos?

Should the standard for "deader than disco" actually be based on whether or not said series started universally loved? Because a lot of good examples (especially with movies) started as diverse at best but financially gang busters for a short while before becoming universally hated and/or financial poison

I'm just wondering because the twilight series to fit this trope with the only reason stopping it from being added is because it was never universally loved

I changed the rock, disco, and hip-hop redirects to specifically point to the music subpage, at least while it still exists. Those genres are covered there and not on the main DTD page, so people clicking on any links to them that weren't changed after the cleanup are probably looking for the information on that page.

You can't always get what you want.

The description should change. This trope is clearly not a polar oposite of Vindicated By History, since that trope simply means something relatively unpopular becoming more popular later on, not something extremely hated and well-known becoming extremely popular.

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Would Feminist Frequency count? Anita was popular when she first started the series, getting onto Stephen Colbert's show and being invited to talk about her opinions. Then the backlash against her numerous research mistakes, plagiarised YouTube footage and strange opinions in general came. You see thousands of videos from users criticising her and calling her out for her mistakes, and she has announced that she's ending the series. You see more critics than fans of it these days.

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Considering I'm beginning to see DtD as Hype Backlash But More, maybe the concept could work better as a Darth Wiki page?

Something.

Created a cleanup thread here. Please participate.

Now known as Cyber Controller

Do you think that the anti Disney movement is waning?

All started after Walt's death, gain momentum during the 90's (anti corporate sentiment and the now debunked Hollywood's Dark Prince book) and gotten old and stale afterwards (jokes and rants about Walt, the movies,etc). There are still anti-fans (academia, celebrities like Meryl Streep, True Art artists, etc), but Disney isn't going away anytime soon.

Edited by lledsmar Hide / Show Replies

I think the Live Action Television and Film sections really need to be cleaned up. There appear to be too many examples that fall more under "fallen out of the cultural spotlight" (which tends to happen with just about every form of media at some point) than "deader than disco" (where a work not only falls out of the limelight but is looked down on for a reason other than Hype Backlash). Unfortunately, I don't really know much about a lot of the entries on these lists, so could somebody perhaps run through them and trim the examples that violate the basic guidelines for this trope?

Why is K-ON on here? It's certainly no where near Deader than Disco. It's still a popular anime in Japan and the West. In fact just last month Japan voted for the top 20 anime they wanted to see back on TV.

K-ON came at #5, beating Attack on Titan that came at #19.

I can provide a link to the list, if it's required.

Also the entry in question claimed that K-ON college and K-ON Highschool were failed attempts at continuing the series. But they were always just intended to be one-shot mangas.

There's also the fact that K-ON merch is still selling well in its homeland.

Edited by 86.10.10.180

Why was this page cut?

"It's liberating, realizing you never need to be competent." — Ultimatepheer

Hey,Is it all right if Power rangers and Archie comics are going to be part of Seinfeld is unfunny and Deader than disco tropes most never mention about them except some .

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Hey i have a question about the Ben 10 franchise current state with omniverse is it considered deader than disco or Seinfeld is unfunny?

Edited by 111.92.65.118

Are we sure that My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic deserves to be on this list? From what I'm seeing, the show is more popular it has ever been.

I say this because of some things I've seen, most notably 1) The show's ratings are the best it's ever been, considering Hasbro once said Crystal Empire(season 3, episode 1) was the most seen FIM episode at the time, and many episodes in season 4 have since surpassed it in viewership, with the season 4 premiere "Princess Twilight Sparkle" setting a new viewership record and some episodes coming close to surpassing it within season 4 alone. Five episodes in season 4 are the top five most seen FIM episodes of all time, and 2) In terms of business, FIM has only gotten bigger. Hasbro has been saying that in terms of purely much money the series is making, FIM is only having them make more money, with the toys being purchased at a higher rate than before.

I can provide sources if I need to.

I'm just not sure that, with those considered, that FIM is less popular than it used to be. If anything, what I'm reading suggests that it's more popular than ever before.

Edited by 72.213.173.72 Hide / Show Replies

What about the Graduate example then? Should I add a "not despised" qualifier to the DKC example?

By the by, JSR and Parappa are two other "less regarded" rather than outright disliked entries that were left on the page.

Edited by 68.111.78.48 Hide / Show Replies

The Rugrats entry at the bottom of the page is a massive wall of text. I'd trim it myself, but I know absolutely nothing about the series or its history.

Does anybody feel that that disco entry itself under the music subpage could be trimmed? The trope is "Deader than Disco" and describes when something reaches massive popularity followed by a massive public backlash, but the entry for disco itself reads like it was written by a Disco Dan who is more interested in arguing that disco isn't dead and only fell out of the mainstream because of racism and homophobia. It's just a little too editorialized.

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It's been a while, but I have a memory like a steel parrot, and I distinctly remember the quote being "Aunt Didi, what's "discobe?" "Disco is something that happened a long long time ago and it's never ever coming back."

Is the old Doctor Who "pulp"? I'm looking up the term, and it seems to refer to prose fiction. And even if it was, did it remain that way until the initial cancellation?

If a video game gets good reviews when it comes up, but the majority of the retrospective reviews are negative, does this qualify for this trope?

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Removed:

• Traditional Westerns were once a very viable genre, but are now derided for a combination of perceived lack of originality (there really aren't that many plot elements that distinguish the genre, after all), perceived glamorization of Manifest Destiny and the "displacement" of the American Indians, and their association with the king of Values Dissonance, the inimitable Jerkass Stu of John Wayne. There's a reason why some of the most fondly remembered works in the genre are the deconstructions of it. Audience burnout started as early as The '50s *
  ^{in movies of the period, stock footage of Westerns was often used to show that the character was watching something generic on television}
  , and then the cultural shift of The '60s caused more people to question the underlying themes of the genre, leading to the popularity of the aforementioned deconstructions. The finishing blow was the 1980 flop of Heaven's Gate, which caused Hollywood to avoid the genre like the plague to this day — even such successful modern-day efforts as Silverado, Unforgiven and Tombstone haven't resurrected the genre*
  ^{though time will tell if Red Dead Redemption and the remake of True Grit are finally able to pull it off}
  . Oddly enough, Westerns are still popular outside of the very country they're based on, though this adoration is just as likely to be based on kitsch as straight.
  • Not to mention the heaping helpings of Ho Yay. Brokeback Mountain was really just the first openly gay cowboy (or bisexual sheep herder) movie...
  • Notably, John Wayne himself is not Deader Than Disco, despite his literal passing and the aforementioned Values Dissonance — he remains one of the most beloved and iconic stars in Hollywood history, even as many of his most popular contemporaries have fallen into total obscurity.
  • The Western genre in movies always had its ups and downs and was kept being reinvented. As early as the 1930s it was regarded as dying until it was suddenly revived by Stagecoach, which broke many of the genre conventions of the time.
  • The Western may been coming back, albeit in reinvented form, with films like the True Grit remake and Django Unchained.

Westerns are released by major studios every year. The genre was never dead, much less deader than disco.

• B movies in general, regardless of genre. Because most of us can't go to the movies anymore on less than half a paycheck, studios themselves have decided that the only way to attract audience dollars is to spend exorbitant amounts of money on making their films. What isn't widely known that the portion of the budget spent solely to hype and promote the film could actually be used to make several films. Big name stars (many of whom are actors in name only), big production values, armies of CGI SPFX engineers, big name writers and directors means big bucks. In addition, many of the second-run "grindhouse" theaters that were most likely to play such movies have shut down as a result of competition from multiplexes. No more cheap but fun schlockfests from the likes of Menahem Golan, Roger Corman, or Troma, at least not in theaters.
  • The inferior remakes of a lot of classic low budget movies cost over one hundred times the budget of the original. Make of that what you will.
  • B movies may no longer be in theaters, but they're still making them. More than ever, in fact. They just go direct-to-video now or wind up on the Syfy Channel.
  • The Asylum is still pumping out B movies, but only if they're based on movies that already exist.

Uhh, what. Can someone explain this (especially the first paragraph about "big bucks" and "half a paycheck") in proper English?

Am I missing something here? Has there ever been a massive backlash against the Muppets? Why do people keep adding them back in when I remove them?

Yes, the Muppets have kind of fallen into obscurity. But this trope is for stuff that's become a joke. In the past, people laughed WITH this stuff, and now they laugh AT it. I don't think this fits the Muppets at all.

When have the Muppets received the kind of Hatedom that Disco did, or that Twilight does now, or that old boy bands did? I don't recall that.

Just not being as well-known and recognizable as they used to be doesn't qualify for Deader Than Disco. In fact, I'm tempted to say that's a different trope altogether.

Why is the new media entry constantly having people removing my edits?

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Are my eyes tricking me? Or did someone delete the Literature section?

Removed:

• Likewise, the Magical Girl genre is seen as a cyclic trope; the age of Sailor Moon-type storylines was eschewed for more "fighting magical girl" types such as Pretty Cure and Mai Hime where there is Les Yay and more physically oriented action. Shugo Chara feels more like the traditional magical girl than the other brand.

because it's actually an example of Cyclic Trope, and:

• Adventure games never really survived the switch to 3D. While older adventure titles like Monkey Island, Full Throttle, and the Myst games still have cult followings, the genre was largely displaced by more action-oriented titles and by Role-Playing Games. The downfall of Sierra only confirms this. However, there has recently been a revival of the genre on the Nintendo DS (the Ace Attorney games, Hotel Dusk: Room 215, Trace Memory), in the form of Flash games, and most recently through the download-network friendly releases of Telltale Games, who've breathed life into revivals of Sam and Max and Monkey Island, as well as licensed games based on Homestar Runner and Wallace and Gromit. If this trend continues, then they may wind up being moved to Popularity Polynomial.
  • In Europe, especially in Germany, Adventures have seen a revival for quite some time. Examples: The Runaway series, Whispered World, Ankh, Jack Keane, Geheimakte Tunguska, Edna bricht aus, Machinarium, Broken Sword series
    • Many Adventure conventions are likely responsible, while some adventure games were fairly procedural and could be solved by a mixture of common sense and following instructions, others were constructed of perfectly legitimate puzzles and some like Monkey Island operated on making fun of absurd conventions that doesn't change the fact that the genre was ripe with absurd conventions more than anything else. If there's one argument leveled against this dead genre more than any other it's that these games are generally only solvable by using every item you have on everything in the world until something happens, for instance to recharge the wand in King's Quest V you need to fuel the recharger with a slice of cheese. So too many times you had two choices, endure countless hours of brutal trial and error or shill out for a "hint book" (players guide) and finish the expensive game you bought in an hour. In a post Deus Ex world things have thankfully shifted away from forcing the player to find a single sanctioned arbitrary root and more towards letting the player resolve situations the way he wants to and thus the adventure genre bites the dust.

because it seems to be just an example of a genre falling into relative obscurity (and possibly coming back).

Edited by AnonymousCat

EDIT: Nevermind.

Edited by WiseBass

Deleted the entry on hip-hop/rap, for the same reason given by others above me for deleting examples — it simply hasn't been hit with the massive backlash necessary for this trope. If it was really Deader Than Disco, then not only would most of us hate modern rap, but we'd remember the great rappers of The '80s and The '90s — Run-DMC, the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy, Biggie, 2pac, the guys from N.W.A. — the same way that we remember, say, MC Hammer or Vanilla Ice. That, or we'd have forgotten about them like most of the "new jack swing" artists of the early '90s. But we don't, so while "traditional" rap music may be dead in terms of mass appeal, it's still fondly remembered. It's like saying that "traditional" Rock & Roll from the '50s (Elvis, Little Richard) is Deader Than Disco because it doesn't have mass appeal anymore and everybody listens to metal or punk. It seems to me that this was more complaining about changing trends in rap than anything else.

Also thinking about cutting the entries on Ally McBeal and This Life. The former even admits that it never went from all-popular to all-hated, and that it simply faded into obscurity. Should I?

Edited by TheRedRedKroovy

Crazyrabbits: Cut the following:

• Similarly, many manufactured bands and Idol Singers (The Monkees, the Spice Girls, the Backstreet Boys, Britney Spears) go through this. Critics hated them even at their peak, but there were hordes of people willing to appear on TV at their concerts, and now will deny ever being there. This usually extends to their movies as well (anyone willing to admit they liked Spice World? Anyone?). Many people expect Hannah Montana and The Jonas Brothers to suffer this fate rather swiftly.

This is way too generalized. While it is true that there are many bands and one-hit wonders that faded from the limelight, this certainly isn't the case with other artists (see Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears). Just because a band didn't have the same popularity as they did when they released their biggest hit, doesn't mean they've become a joke. Some break up, and some don't bother to replicate their earlier success. If you can rewrite this in a way that acknowledges the most severe instances of this entry, feel free to post it back up. Otherwise, I think it's much too simplified and backhanded to count.

• Anyone in Britain remember mid-2000s stadium retro-rockers The Darkness? In 2004, they were preposterously huge. They won several Brit awards and seemed unstoppable; the video for "Love is Only a Feeling" never seemed to be off the music-based TV channels. Then, in late 2005 their follow-up album arrived in the shops and sold abysmally and the band fell-apart shortly afterwards. Now almost nobody has a good word to say about them and the received wisdom is that the whole period was some kind of collective madness. This troper's theory is that they were widely marketed as, and perceived as, a tongue-in-cheek parody of '80s hair-rock and whilst there was a lot of humour about them and what they did, they took their music perfectly seriously and made the mistake of thinking the irony-loving British public saw things the same way. Turns out they didn't...

Aside from the natter, The Darkness broke up because the lead singer (Justin Hawkins) hit drugs hard. He eventually left the band of his own volition. While their second album didn't sell as well as their first, it was still a massive success (platinum vs. the first album's five-time platinum status). You're suggesting a theory that holds no water, and has no factual basis outside your own words. Hell, even as a parody of glam rock, they were still quite good.

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