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Advertising

  • OnDigital, later ITV Digital, was an early attempt to bring digital TV to British viewers. It was advertised by Johnny Vegas and a cute little Deadpan Snarker sock puppet monkey sidekick as in this advert. It wasn't a resounding success and ITV Digital died a quite public death with a lot of recrimination and lawsuits and all that fun stuff. But the Vegas/Monkey team were so loved that they ended up becoming the mascots of a completely different product, namely PG Tips. And their idea of reintroducing a pair of endearing and loved characters was this, apparently.
  • A literal example: Restoration Hardware, an upscale home furnishing chain, went from white walls, brightly lit stores, and a retro-industrial-Thirties/Forties/Fifties aesthetic to dark gray walls, very dim lights, and items with a modern/rough-edged look at some point after 2008.
  • T-Mobile tried this in Spring of 2012. Their spokeswoman, the T-Mobile Girl, before seen with only white backgrounds and wearing pink sundresses, is now being advertised as bored with the "nice, safe" life she has. She searches for, and finds, a black full-bodied motorcycle jumpsuit (with pink accents) and rides into the night on a Yamaha-looking sport bike.
  • Captain Morgan rum usually portrays their Captain as a playful partygoer. Their new campaign has gone for giving him a more daring and adventurous personality; likely due to the popularity of Pirates of the Caribbean.
  • Life Alert is a serious product - it's meant for older and disabled people if they ever, say, fall down and need help when no one is around — but the old commercials have been the product of giggles for years. "I've fallen and I can't get up!" was subject to Memetic Mutation throughout the 90's and frequently mocked and parodied. In 2014, they decided to darken up their ads into pure Nightmare Fuel. Instead of the old ladies almost comically on the floor, the mood is noticeably darker and you can feel the pain and fear, as if Life Alert is saying "Thought that was funny, did ya? Well, yuk it up now, you little shits." The darker turn wound up backfiring, with complaints and reports of panic attacks pouring in, forcing the company to pull the ad after two short months.
  • Nationwide Insurance (2015 Super Bowl) - Many audiences thought this advertisement was try to pull too hard on heart-strings. A kid talks about life insurance but ends by saying "because I am dead". The commercial ends with the motto Make Safe Happen. This disturbing commercial aimed to up the ante during the crucial advertising season, which ended up backfiring.
  • In what is ostensibly not intended as a parody of this trope, Fairy — who have for decades had a baby as a mascot to symbolise the "baby soft hands" you'll have after washing the dishes with their detergent — introduced a new "Tough Baby" mascot in 2017 to emphasize being tough on dirt. Still a baby, but now he's a tattooed, studded-leather-jacketed Quincy Punk baby with a deep Cockney growl, a motorbike, and the catchphrase "No More Mr. Nice Baby".

Alternate Reality Games

  • Perplex City: The back of Season 2 cards indicated cracks in the veneer of the city's exterior. One of the more thought-provoking ones included the implication that it was essentially a world of autistic people, and those that weren't autistic were ostracized similar to what many autistic people experience in Real Life.

Art

  • Dante and Virgil in Hell is a rapid departure from William-Adolphe Bouguereau's various female nudes, pastoral genre paintings, and his Psyche and Cupid series. The bodies are strained and frozen in violence, there is a demonic beast in the background and the entire thing is done in a harsh series of red, brown, and orange color motifs.
  • Tarsila do Amaral's paintings during the 1920's had vibrant and cheerful colors that evoked childhood, portraying natural landscapes, daily activities and colorful sightings. However, her later works in the 30's focusing on social themes present a much more somber tone, having darker, grayer and less intense colors, like Segunda Classe (Second Class, 1933), as they critically portrayed the reality of many Brazilians in the context of industrialization and rural exodus. That said, she continued to make cheerful paintings afterwards though, with what it is called the "Neo Pau-Brasil" in the 50's.

Radio

  • When Dragnet premiered in 1949, it used subject matter that previous crime dramas wouldn't have touched with a ten-foot pole, like rape and child murder.
  • Many Adventures in Odyssey listeners remember the episode "The Mortal Coil". Whit tries to program a special "Heaven" program into the Imagination Station. Long story short, Whit almost dies, Eugene has a Heroic BSoD from experiencing Hell when he tried the programnote , and other things which made that episode famous among listeners as the most terrifying episode in the show's history.
  • The BBC skewered this idea on April Fools Day 2012 with The Archers - Unchained, a spoof trailer for a Grand Theft Auto style version of the beloved farming soap.

Mythology

  • Contrary to what popular belief holds, this is what modern adaptations do, to an extent, to ancient Greek myths. Some of the grotesque demons and horrid monstrosities, the hellish underworld and evil gods (Hades in particular), that we see in modern movies and video games inspired by Greek mythology are the product of blending the ancient myths with the nightmarish medieval European folklore.
    • Hades and his underworld qualify, as they are often portrayed as horrifying, ghastly, and generally evil. In reality, the Greek underworld, Erebos, is more like a pleasant rural countryside with some wetlands, and Hades was just a little emotionally unstable. The only commonly-found no-no he did in mythology was kidnapping Persephone, and even then, some variations have Zeus selling her to him.
  • This tends to go for the other gods as well. Zeus is often thought of only as the god who went around having sex with women. Never mind he often punished evil doers or helped maintain the world. This is true for the other gods who had their petty moments, but were not evil or went around smiting humans for no reason. They usually had a reason even if only slight. They also had moments where they would help people who were beneficial to civilization.
  • While Norse Mythology was never actually Lighter and Softer, some believe Loki himself became this, as he was associated with the Devil by Christianity and his role as the Omnicidal Maniac during Ragnarok was a product of Christianization.

Pinball

Roleplay

  • Fanfics and forum Role playing Games based on BIONICLE will often make the characters take on more human traits compared to their 85% metal, 15% muscle/lung tissue that is canon. While the primary reason by that it's easier to Write What You Know, the addition of human aspects also means that fanfic characters suddenly have more detailed descriptions of such things as pain, bleeding, etc.
  • Dino Attack RPG, especially near the end, contained exceptional (and at times extremely gruesome) violence, sexual undertones (along with one or two implied scenes), a sub-plot about a lesbian and her homophobic father, a character whose mother is implied (and confirmed by Word of God) to be a prostitute, extreme sexism, implied genocide, drugs (including an overdose), child abuse (and the man responsible gets away with it) characters who explicitly smoked and/or consumned alcohol, post-traumatic stress disorder, philosophical discussions, two characters with sub-plots concerning their religious faith, Body Horror, an unstoppable Eldritch Abomination on an almost Lovecraftian scale capable of destroying the planet and possibly the entire universe if it were to ever get out... and this roleplay is based entirely on a short-lived LEGO theme, which was itself is already a darker and edgier LEGO theme.
  • Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc is already dark, but Doubt Academy takes it even further thanks to a few key differences. Unlike in canon, where convicting the wrong person equals Game Over, here Monobear simply tells them they got it wrong before executing the innocent scapegoat. This creates a Kangaroo Court atmosphere where classmates have already lynched someone they knew was innocent to keep them from taking revenge and others have offered themselves up as Senseless Sacrifices to keep their friends from suffering the same fate.
  • The Insane Cafe RP trilogy has elements of this. The first was a nonsensical, hilarious and downright Narmy. The second was more plot driven and a terrorist attack on a remote laboratory was a key plot point. The 3rd installment features several assassination attempts, a few sex scenes and an impending war. Oh yeah, profanities are uttered the second and third installments.
  • Welcome to Beacon! and its sequel Welcome to Beacon: Ultimate are considerably darker than canon RWBY. The Grimm are a more considerable threat, and the students have to face two major criminal organizations, who have no qualms causing deaths and grevious harm to the student body. Several characters also carry scars, both physical and mental, from prior encounters with the Grimm, and sex between them have been implied several times. There's a reason several players call it "RWBY as written by Gen Urobuchi"
  • Pokémon: Rise of the Rockets started out as a straight-up War Fic of Pokémon, with its very first seen being the execution of Rocket Leader Giovanni, and has only gotten darker from there. Doesn't help that much of the Mind Screw, Despair Event Horizons, Moral Event Horizons, and overall violence has been inspired by such series as Neon Genesis Evangelion.

Theatre

  • Dog Sees God is a play featuring thinly disguised versions of the Peanuts cast in high school. Snoopy was put down after getting rabies and killing Woodstock. Lucy is in an asylum for lighting the little redheaded girl's hair on fire and that's the tip of the iceberg.
  • Cirque du Soleil's Quidam was intentionally conceived by its creators as a show that would be darker, less whimsical, and more realistic than what the company had produced up to that point. They accomplished this by...telling a story about the commonality of loneliness and alienation through the eyes of a jaded preteen girl who learns to reconnect with others via a trip to a sometimes-melancholy Magical Land.
  • Richard Strauss's opera Elektra, based on the Sophocles play but turn the bloodlust and neurotism up to the eleven, and adds a sister-to-sister Les Yay moment.
  • King Lear, believe it or not, wasn't a tragedy until Shakespeare got his hands on the story. In the story his audience knew, the story ends with Lear coming to his senses, forgiving Cordelia, retaking his throne and ruling until he finally dies of old age. Poor audience.
  • The musical Aida is this to other Disney musicals. No surprise, given that it's based on an opera (which ironically, it is a Lighter and Softer version of).
  • The revival of Miss Saigon is this to the original production—which is already quite gritty. But the language and behavior of nearly everyone in the new version is far coarser and rougher than before.
  • Ebenezer is a prequel to A Christmas Carol where murder, destruction, and secrets abound that cast a dark light on the original story. Jacob Marley was was in a one-sided love with Scrooge and Fran's mother despite her having a husband, impregnates and kills Fran as an act of revenge on their family, corrupts Scrooge to love only money and convinces him his fiancee Emily was cheating on him, and convinces him to foreclose Emily's orphanage on Christmas Eve, killing everyone there. When Charles Dickens reveals Marley's crimes to him, Scrooge reveals he'd known about Marley from the start and is fine with all they'd done, including viciously attacking Emily himself and ordering the foreclosure.
  • Wicked, while lighter than the book, is darker than The Wonderful Wizard of Oz book and film it takes inspiration from.
  • The opera by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky based on The Queen of Spades has it in spades in relation to the original story. In the story, Hermann is a manipulative Villain Protagonist who gets his just desserts when he loses at cards and goes mad, while Liza gets over him and more or less happily marries someone else. In the opera, he has Adaptational Heroism, truly loves the girl but can’t let go of his passion for gambling, and kills himself in the end, his last thoughts being of Liza. And before that, Liza realizes her true love is a crazed gambler and she has no future with him, and drowns herself.
  • The Kansas Collection is a loose sequel to the original Oz book. A now-adult Dorothy has stayed in Kansas while Oz is in civil unrest in Oz to the point where a rebellion is trying to take down the new Scarecrow king.
  • David Bösch's 2014 production of L'Orfeo was a modern take on the story with a surreal, nightmarish tone even in the happier parts. The Underworld was full of harsh blue lighting and its spirits all looked like Eurydice but with skulls for faces, and the ending had Orpheus refuse Apollo's offer of paradise, take a knife to himself, and lay down with Eurydice in a shared grave while the chorus and music rejoiced.
  • The 2019 Oklahoma! revival placed much more emphasis on the darkness of the show, achieving this primarily through staging the most uncomfortable scenes completely in the dark, leaving the lights on otherwise so the audience was complicit, giving more sympathy to Jud as an outsider ostracized by the town, and changing the ending into a case of Suicide by Cop while keeping the cheery finale song.

Toys

  • BIONICLE, when compared to other LEGO lines. The first LEGO line to feature brutal, on-screen deaths and carry shades of Cosmic Horror Story.
    • Within Bionicle, the story noticeably turned a shade darker from '04 to '05, and with the advent of the online serials in '07, it also became Bloodier and Gorier. So much, in fact, it made the initial years look like a kindergarten play in comparison. A good deal of this stuff LEGO would never have allowed the writer to publish when the theme first started.
    • Everything with Matoro and the Barraki saga basically slaps you in the face if the Piraka saga hasn't already. Not only do we get a downer ending, in another serial we're showned exactly what would have happened if Matoro never put the mask on. The universe dies, and Matoro is labeled a coward and a pariah. Everyone also is now deprived of a home because the universe is crumbling, and Matoro only redeems himself when he sacrifices his life again to save the village. Seriously, this guy just can't catch a break.
  • LEGO Dino Attack features a group known as the D.I.N.O. Attack team battling against mutated or robotic dinosaurs. It's notable in that it is the only post-apoc LEGO Theme, being set in a empty city ravaged by the dinosaurs. In addition, there is a very heavy emphasis on weaponry and military vehicles.
  • LEGO Exo-Force is implied to take place after the end and is inspired by Anime series such as Mobile Suit Gundam. Like many LEGO themes, it was also cancelled before the story was resolved, adding in a dose of Nothing Is Scarier to the mix - what if the robots won?

Alternative Title(s): Toys, Pinball, Theatre, Roleplay, Radio, Mythology, Advertising, Other

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