Early Installment Weirdness / Other Media

aka: Other

Early-Installment Weirdness in miscellaneous media.

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Alternate Reality Games

• Welcome Home (Clown Illustrations): From Clown Illustrations' official Twitter account, production of the series dates back to 2018, and the initial lineup of characters was drastically different, as Sally Starlet, Howdy Pillar, and Eddie Dear were not created at that time. There is also a second bird character named Sunny/Sonny, meant to serve as a foil to Frank, who was later cut.

Arts

• The Mona Lisa: Contrary to modern depictions of the painting with the greenish sky, the brown clothing, and the ochre skin, the colors used to be brighter and more vibrant, with one critic even describing her skin as "rosy and tender".^note  Compare Leonardo's painting to a copy◊ produced in the early 1500s and currently displayed in the Prado Museum in Madrid; the digital simulation of the original colors looks more like the Prado copy than the original. Centuries of varnish, cleaning, and exposure made it as it is today. True Art Is Ancient indeed.

Asian Animation

• The first season of Balala the Fairies was done in live action and CGI, with all the seasons following it switching to 2D animation.
• Boonie Bears: Typically, a character says the name of the episode during the episode's title card, a feature associated enough with the series that it got carried over into the spin-off Boonie Cubs. However, this wasn't established until Season 3, and before then the title cards had no sound at all.
• Flower Angel features multiple magical girl protagonists as leads, starting with Xia An'an and her friends... for the most part. Season 1 features only An'an as the main magical girl, with the other magical girls slowly being introduced and/or gaining their powers and fairy companions throughout Season 2. The "four magical girls" format would be replicated in Xiaoai's story arc.
• The earliest episodes of GG Bond, specifically Seasons 1 and 2, had 20-minute-long episodes instead of the standard 14-minute episodes it would grow into.
• Happy Heroes:
  • The two-part first episode has quite a few noticeable differences compared to later episodes.
    • Big M. has shoulder pads decorated with Spikes of Villainy that do not appear after the premiere episodes. The Planet Gray insignias on his headband and belt also lack the antennae they have in later episodes.
    • Little M.'s belt also has the antennaeless Planet Gray symbol.
    • Doctor H. has mitten-like Fingerless Hands instead of the standard Four-Fingered Hands.
    • The beginning of part 2 doesn't have a recap of what happened in the previous part, unlike later multi-part episodes.
    • In the Lookus English dub, the name Miss Peach is usually used for one of the recurring characters. The two-part premiere has her referring to herself as Peach I. instead.
    • Also from the Lookus dub, Happy S. calls out the name of his attack as "Happy Knight Punch!" instead of "Happy S. Punch!"
  • It took until the end of Season 1 for Careful S. to be introduced and established as a main character. It wasn't until Season 3 when recurring character Kalo was introduced, as were a number of additions to the show's comedy and lore that would become mainstays afterwards (e.g. Big M.'s face being vomit-inducingly ugly after an incident involving an elevator door, and Doctor H.'s Disappeared Dad).
  • In the early episodes, Planet Gray's surface is mostly barren and it takes on the starry sky of space. Starting in Season 4, the surface of the planet becomes far more interesting, gaining lots of purple-ish rocky terrain and mushroom-shaped houses.
  • The Supermen's mecha, the Car Knights, were animated in 2D until Season 4, when they switched to being CGI animation.
• Pleasant Goat and Big Big Wolf:
  • The earliest known English dub calls the characters Pleasant Goat, Beauty Goat, Big Big Wolf, etc. This is based on the characters' Chinese names. Most later dubs use completely different names (the aforementioned characters are named Weslie, Tibbie, and Wolffy respectively in the later dubs, for example).
  • The first episode doesn't begin with the standard seconds-long Episode Title Card animation like usual, instead giving a backstory for the wolves, introducing Wolffy and Wolnie, and then showing the episode title and continuing normally with the episode.
• All episodes of Pleasant Goat Fun Class end with a separate segment, but it wasn't until the third season, The Earth Carnival, that it would be decided to dedicate that segment to Educational Songs to reinforce the lesson being taught. Before that, the third segments would have stuff like exercises and dances in them.

Religion

• There has actually been a time when most of today's major religions were nothing but small cults centered in one region.
• For thousands of years, Greek and Roman mythology were the dominant religions in Europe.
• Early Greek mythology had several differences, such as Hades not being present and Poseidon having the role of death god instead, and a much darker Dionysus more tied to madness and dismemberment than drunken partying.
• The Bible:
  • The earliest parts of the Old Testament use a variety of Hebrew names for God other than Yahweh, most notably "Elohim". Most scholars conclude that the authors were likely polytheists referring to different deities - only as monotheistic Judaism later developed did Yahweh become the standard, and the earlier names were reinterpreted as merely different names for Yahweh. Others simply assume those were other epithets for God before He revealed His name to Moses, a name that wasn't spoken and so in keeping with that had 'the Lord' used in translations.
  • There are a few verses early in the Old Testament which seem to say or imply that there are multiple gods, mostly in Genesis and Exodus. There is some evidence that the ancient Hebrews may have initially been henotheistic (believing in multiple gods while only worshiping one) rather than strictly monotheistic, so it's possible said verses are "leftovers" from earlier versions of the books in question.
  • The oldest versions of the Gospel of Mark, generally considered the first of the four gospels to be written, did not portray a resurrected Jesus - the narrative ended with his tomb being found empty.
• From the 1st until the third century AC, Christianity was suppressed in the Roman Empire. Christians were seen as insane, cult-like, possibly even cannibalistic (they did say they "ate flesh and drank blood", after all). Then the Christian-sympathizing (and later outright Christian) Constantine the Great and his short-lived co-emperor Licinius issued the Edict of Milan in 313 granting toleration to all religions. Still a minority religion at the time, Constantine greatly favored Christianity and discouraged, but did not ban, non-Christian faiths. After Theodosius I made it state religion in 380 it completely became the other way around. Now everyone who wasn't Christian was forced to give up their beliefs.
• Peter Binsfeld's 1589 Treatise on Confessions by Evildoers and Witches was not the first tract to list Seven Princes of Hell and identify each with a specific sin, although it is the basis for the list you've probably heard (Lucifer as Pride, Mammon as Greed, Asmodeus as Lust, Leviathan as Envy, Beelzebub as Gluttony, Satan (somehow separate from Lucifer) as Wrath, and Belphegor as Sloth). The overall concept predates Binsfeld by over a century, as a Lollard text, The Lanterne of Light from early 15th century had a similar list. In the Lollard version, Lucifer, Satan, Mammon, and Asmodeus are as expected, but Beelzebub is associated with Envy instead of Gluttony, Belhegor with Gluttony instead of Sloth, and there's no Leviathan; instead Abaddon is the lord of Sloth.

Software

• Microsoft Windows: Early versions of the operating system^note Technically, the earliest versions of Windows couldn't be considered true operating systems, since they ran on top of MS-DOS and used it to provide certain functions were quite different from what we know today. Windows 1.0 didn't allow Windows to overlap, because Apple had patented that feature, though Windows 2.0 finally added it. It wasn't until Windows 95 that the Windows interface gained most of the iconic elements we know today, such as the start menu, taskbar^note Windows 1.0 had a more limited version of the taskbar that was used to hold minimized application, an essential feature given the aforementioned inability to overlap windows., and the 3 button combination (minimize, maximize, and close) on the right side of the window title bars^note Prior versions only had the first two; closing window required using the window menu on the left side of the title bar that almost all versions of Windows have had since.

Stand-up Comedy

• Comedian Jeff Foxworthy:
  • He had several albums' worth of material from the 1980s, none of which were released until after his breakthrough in 1994 with You Might Be a Redneck If... on Warner (Bros.) Records. The 1980s albums show him to be far more vulgar (the albums that aren't bowdlerised have "fuck" and "shit" in them; his first two Warner albums have three instances of "shit" as a Precision F-Strike, and his language has been mostly PG ever since), bigoted (non-ironic uses of Black Is Bigger in Bed, Asian Store-Owner, and Camp Gay among other things), and somewhat less reliant on his now-trademark Southern humor. Very early on, he didn't even have his famous "you might be a redneck" one-liners; instead, his original trademark joke was a story that worked in every letter of the alphabet ("A there, dudes! I'm gonna tell you a story you might not B-lieve. 'Cause you C, it's about this friend of mine, he's from D-troit…"). Even You Might Be a Redneck If... has some weirdness, as it's his only album to have the "redneck" jokes as Book Ends (although it seems as this was unintentional; near the end of the album, an audience member shouts out "Redneck!" and he clearly struggles for a few seconds before telling one). All subsequent ones have had the jokes only at the end, except for Have Your Loved Ones Spayed or Neutered, which instead went with an original piece called "I Believe" featuring Larry the Cable Guy.
  • In the late 1990s, Record Producer Scott Rouse made remixes with snippets of Foxworthy's stand-up routines set to music. The first of these, "Redneck Stomp", differs from the others in that it does not have a chorus sung by a contemporary country music artist, instead consisting solely of "you might be a redneck" jokes with a musical backing. All others featured a Country Music artist singing the chorus except "Redneck 12 Days of Christmas", which Jeff performed as a Solo Duet.
• Larry the Cable Guy's affected Southern drawl (he's actually from Nebraska) sounded radically different on his first major-label album, Lord, I Apologize: it was higher and less raspy than it is now. It was also his only major-label album to feature a "Toddler Mail" segment (a carryover from his independent days), and the only one besides his Christmas album to feature a musical track (the title track, which features Larry singing while Mark Tremonti backs him on guitar).
• Billy Connolly's now-famous swearing rarely extends past the word "jobby" in his early albums. One usage of the F-word even gets bleeped out.
• George Carlin started out as one-half of a comedy duo (Jack Burns & George Carlin or Burns & Carlin) then Carlin went solo as a more clean-cut, family-friendly "straight" comedian. He wore a suit and was clean-shaven with short hair & even played a goofy carhop in the Doris Day flick With Six You Get Eggroll. One night, in 1968, he had an epiphany during a performance in Vegas and realized that he no longer fit with the conservative/mainstream/"straight"/"square" crowd, took a hiatus and emerged as the hairy, bearded, anti-establishment, Sir Swears-a-Lot comedian we all know & love.
• Richard Pryor started out as a Bill Cosby-esque middlebrow comic, with material far less controversial than what was to come.
• Roy "Chubby" Brown started his comedy career as a comedy duo with a fellow ex bandmate. The duo named themselves 'Alcock and Brown', as they shared the same surnames of the pilots of the first transatlantic flight, therefore wearing goggles during their performance. The group eventually disbanded, with Vasey continuing as a comedic act by himself, retaining the goggles. Plus, he early sets were clean, until he started including blue material for a dare.
• Jim Davidson's stage persona was very different. He started out as a Motor Mouth joke-teller who used little to no profanity. He was inspired to use swearing after seeing Sam Kinison and it wasn't until the nineties that he abandoned joke-telling in favour of anecdoctal story-telling. Also, while his act consisted of very un-PC material (most infamously the Chalky White character), it wasn't as offensive as it would later become.
• While less prominent than some other examples, Bill Engvall had a slower and more relaxed delivery on his first three albums. His debut album Here's Your Sign is ironically, the only one where his trademark "here's your sign" jokes are not at or near the end. In addition, the skit involving them ends up wandering off-topic into the topic of product warnings about halfway through.

Theatre

• The 1877 version of Swan Lake is very different from the popularized 1895 one. Odette and her friends could voluntarily shapeshift into swans, with her grandfather's magic crown protecting her from her evil stepmother, and von Rothbart and Odile were the witch's minions. Odette also refused to forgive Siegfried for his betrayal, which drove him to cast the crown from her head, and the lake overflowed and killed them both.
• The Vermont Hadestown shows were far more abstract, darker in tone, and much shorter. Early stuff included the song "Everything Written" about fate and the stars, Hermes as a direct minion of Hades who tried to tempt Orpheus away, and Cerberus as the head of security in Hadestown, all of which was changed for the album and later performances.

Visual Novels

• A few rules established in Fate/stay night and maintained for Fate/Zero were quietly swept under the rug or adjusted in later installments such as Fate/EXTRA and Fate/Grand Order, in the interest of creating more varied and interesting Servants. These include the Assassin class being relegated exclusively to different incarnations of a single hero (Hassan-i Sabbah) unless exceptional circumstances are at work (see Kojiro's case);^note A lot of interesting real-life personalities fit into that class, but not necessarily any others, wasting potentially great Servant concepts. The retcon used was that the specific incarnation of a Grail War in Fuyuki required that class be filled by the Hashashin Berserkers being so consumed by their madness they can't talk;^note Increases the difficulty of making such characters interesting the Berserker class in-general being available to heroes of all backgrounds, existing primarily as a means of powering up weaker Servants at the cost of their sanity;^note This is still done on occasion, but most Berserkers nowadays are heroes whose backstory already includes some form of madness or rage, making the class more consistent with the others; and the prohibition on Eastern (ie. Asian) Servants being summoned^note The conceit of the Holy Grail as a Western concept meant that the war was intended for westerners only but it was later reworked into something solely exclusive to Fuyuki..
• Jun Maeda's first visual novel, MOON, is not a dating sim, but a hentai horror. Also, instead of a blank slate male lead who dates one of several girls at a time, the protagonist is Ikumi Amasawa, one of the main girls.