Creator's Oddball

Violent street crime, twisted murders, ruthless outlaws... And a nice, friendly game of ping pong.

Kurt Cobain: It's not going to be about food, is it?
Al: No, it's going to be about how no one understands your lyrics.

— "Weird Al" Yankovic asking for permission to parody Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit"

Creator's Oddball is a work that clashes with the rest of a creator's output. It can be much Lighter and Softer or Darker and Edgier, or even a different genre.

This might be related to Early-Installment Weirdness, where the writer has just started their career and hasn't settled on a genre yet.

If this occurs in an actor's filmography, that actor is Playing Against Type. If this occurs in an actor's filmography when it really shouldn't have, this is Questionable Casting.

In music, this might become a New Sound Album if the change in direction doesn't take and the artist goes back to their signature style. If it's a specific song, and it becomes successful, it's a Black Sheep Hit.

For Franchises instead of writers, this is Oddball in the Series. When it's a show on a TV network, this is Network Red-Headed Stepchild. Sometimes results in Magnum Opus Dissonance in either direction.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Junji Ito is a manga artist who is famous for his horror mangas such as The Enigma of Amigara Fault, Gyo and Uzumaki. He also created Junji Ito's Cat Diary: Yon & Mu, a comedy about his daily life with his fiancee's cats. It still has his signature disturbing art style that makes use of all of his horrific trademarks, but here it's Played for Laughs since they're applied to completely innocent and funny moments.
  • Dissolving Classroom has also several elements that are at odds with his usual output. While it's bleak and has an implied Downer Ending, the bad guys are punished in the end. Also, their powers are clearly depicted as coming from Satan/the devil instead of the usual unexplained supernatural evil force (not to mention that Christianity is largely irrelevant in Japan). And the fourth-wall-breaking ending that shows the evil siblings as Animated Actors is uncommon for Ito as well.
  • The Souichi stories in Junji Ito Kyoufu Manga Collection are also rather unusual, since while it uses Junji Ito's trademark horrifying art style and definitely deals with the supernatural, it's primarily a horror-themed comedy about a boy causing mischief where for the most part, no one suffers any lasting harm. One story in ''Museum of Terror' is genuinely horrific and seems to imply that Souichi will grow up to be a genuine threat, but a later Souichi story has it be All Just a Dream.
• Yoshiyuki Tomino is an odd case. Fans who love his darker and more serious works like Zeta Gundam and Space Runaway Ideon (which earned him the nickname "Kill 'Em All Tomino") are often shocked or put off by his lighter fare like Gundam ZZ and Xabungle. In this case, Tomino tends to let his current mood affect his writing, and his darker works were done during periods of Creator Breakdown while his lighter shows come during periods where he's doing better. Ever since 1999's ∀ Gundam he seems to have gotten completely over his darker side and acknowledges his flaws, culminating in an Alternate Continuity movie version of Zeta with a happier ending.
• Miyabi Fujieda is best known for his Yuri Genre mangas, but his Twinkle Saber Nova is a Shounen Fighting Series with a mainly female cast but no romantic subplots.
• Eiki Eiki and Zaou Taishi are very prolific Yaoi Genre authors but they've also written the hallmark yuri mangas Haru Natsu Aki Fuyu and Love Gene XX.
• Similarly, Swap<->Swap is the only yuri manga by Tomekichi, who mainly writes in the yaoi genre.
• Fujio Akatsuka is known for pioneering in surreal gag manga such as Tensai Bakabon and Osomatsu-kun. He also created Himitsu no Akko-chan, a semi-serious Magical Girl series considered to be the first of its kind. Most of his early work may very well qualify as this, as he used to be an author of shoujo manga before he branched out to shonen and general audiences.
• Starting around The New '10s, Kyoto Animation became famous for their adaptations of in-house Light Novels, Slice of Life works, or stories starring high school students. Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid, while in the Slice of Life genre, has absolutely nothing to do with high school and was adapted from a third-party manga. Their other oddballs, the otaku-centric Lucky Star and screwball Gag Series Nichijou, still has high school students as the leads.
• Makoto Shinkai is best known for serious, melancholy realistic, or Mundane Fantastic dramas, perhaps with sci-fi elements, about the distance - spatial, social, or otherwise - between the youthful romantic leads. Then you have Children Who Chase Lost Voices, which is much more overtly fantastic, and Your Name, which has a lot more comedic elements and a more upbeat narrative and musical pace. Weathering With You breaks new ground for him once more with an extended subplot focused on a middle-aged character.
• Out of the Manga Time Kirara pantheon, Izumo Ito's The Demon Girl Next Door is notable for being a more serialized story (albeit one that still has many of Kirara's trademark tropes all over it) and rather dark, which is shocking given the traditionally laid-back, adorable Slice of Life manga Kirara is best known for.
• Akira Toriyama:
  • He made a one-shot story in 1987 named Lady Red whose humour is much more cynical and mean-spirited than his usual brand of silliness. It features a clueless wannabe heroine who gets raped twice and decides to become a prostitute in the end. Also it mimics Western comics, being written from left to right and featuring typical comic book sound effects.
  • Dragon Ball is very much the outlier among Toriyama's large body of manga work. Toriyama's first big break was Dr. Slump, a zany gag manga series which was seen as his magnum opus until Dragon Ball came along and usurped it. Dragon Ball initially started in much the same vein as Dr. Slump with its silly and raucous humour, but it steadily evolved into the violent, high-stakes, hyper-masculine action-adventure series it's more popularly known as; a direction that Toriyama himself came to regret and attempted to rectify in the final arc. Since Dragon Ball concluded, Toriyama has primarily dabbled in limited manga series and one-shots like Sand Land and Kintoki that instead emphasise comedy and adventure, effectively Revisiting the Roots. His return to the Dragon Ball franchise in 2013 saw him apply more of his gag manga affections to the series, which is reflected in the character design sheets and the overall writing.
• Studio Ghibli has a few:
  • Ocean Waves is the first made-for-TV movie they've done, also it wasn't directed by either Hayao Miyazaki or Isao Takahata, but rather by a younger staff member. It was considered unsuccessful.
  • Only Yesterday had the animators draw the cheek muscles and laugh lines way more realistically than usual, with the result that most adult characters look bizarrely old and wrinkled when they smile. Unsurprisingly they didn't attempt to do this again.
  • My Neighbors the Yamadas is a comedic and episodic slice of life movie with it notably ditching Ghibli's traditional aesthetics in favor of a much more simpler and comedic aesthetic that is very faithful to the 4koma manga strips the film was based on. It's also the only Ghibli film not released in Japan by Toho (their usual partner) or Toei Company (which distributed some of their early output), instead being released by Shochiku.
  • For Hayao Miyazaki, The Wind Rises is noticeably very different from his usual work. While the film isn't without its fantastical elements, the film is much more grounded and realistic than his usual input, which while grounded, are usually very fantastical in nature and unlike previous films, which usually center around entirely fictional characters, the film is instead a fictional biography film about the real-life airplane designer Jiro Horikoshi.
  • The Red Turtle is a co-production between them and the European studio (and Ghibli's worldwide distributor) Wild Bunch and it's extremely different from pretty much every film they've made. Not only is there no Dialogue at all and has a drastically different art style than their usual fare, but it's also the only feature film of theirs to not be directed by the studio's employees, but rather by Dutch-British animator, Michaël Dudok de Wit.
  • Earwig and the Witch is the studio's first CGI movie (directed by Miyazaki's son Goro) and also their second made-for-TV movie. It was not well received, both for the graphics' quality and a story considered flat and unengaging.
  • The prequel short film to Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, Giant God Warrior Appears in Tokyo is the studio’s first (and so far, only) live-action production. It’s also undeniably the bleakest out of the studio’s output and in contrast to the rest of their works, ends on an outright Downer Ending with the events that would set the stage for Nausicaä.
• Bkub, known for his offbeat gag comics and wonky art style, looked to going here with Hoshiiro Girl Drop, an idol-themed romantic comedy with a cutesy orthodox style. Then it was revealed to be an interlude for Pop Team Epic's second season of strips.
• Crimson Spell is the result of prominent BL manga artist Ayano Yamane dabbling in the Heroic Fantasy genre. It's still a yaoi, but her other works (such as the Finder Series and A Foreign Love Affair) and most of her one-shots take place in a relatively "realistic" setting and are more action/crime based.
• Studio TRIGGER:
  • The studio is well known for working on series that are heavy in comedy and action. Their second TV anime, Kiznaiver, is a sci-fi story about seven students forced into an experiment where the pain one feels is shared between them, and while there are still some comedic moments, but it is an intensely dramatic and romantic series, with a lot more focus on character rather than an overarching plotline.
  • Their adaptation of When Supernatural Battles Became Commonplace is an oddball for multiple reasons: it was the studio's first light novel adaptation, is adapted wholesale from its source material rather than having an original plot, has an animation and art style that differs greatly from TRIGGER's usual quirks, and is mainly a Slice of Life comedy.
  • TRIGGER's second web animation was Turning Girls, a Slice of Life sitcom featuring no supernatural elements at all. It's also the first and only series to both have an all-female team and be created by the non-animator side of the studio.
  • Cyberpunk: Edgerunners is far darker, bleaker and serious compared to everything else the studio or director Hiroyuki Imaishi has ever put out, with what little humor and absurdity that is present being more subdued than any work they've created previously. This is especially made clear by the ending, as while Imaishi and TRIGGER's past works usually end on a happy and optimistic notes, Edgerunners ends on a particular dour one, as everyone but Lucy and Falco dies. TRIGGER acknowledged this during their panel at Anime Expo 2022, stating that the anime is a "fresh new style" from them.
• Studio Gainax is well known for their thought-provoking, Aesop-filled stories mixed in with over-the-top action and some Fanservice for good measure. Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt throws away any semblance of lesson-telling and is a full-on Animated Shock Comedy.
• Nippon Animation is known for their World Masterpiece Theater franchise, as well as for other adaptations of Japanese and Western literature and their Cash-Cow Franchise Chibi Maruko-chan. Hunter × Hunter (1999), however, is a Shonen Jump adaptation that's slightly Darker and Edgier than their usual fare, and uses Manga Effects uncommon in most other Nippon works.
• Japanese merchandise company Sanrio (of Hello Kitty fame) is well-known for creating Ridiculously Cute Critters and always focusing on the positive sides of life. During the company's infancy in the 70s, they briefly entered the animation industry by forming their own animation studio called Sanrio Animation/Sanrio Film which lasted from 1977 all the way to 1985. Sanrio Animation was known for focusing on much darker and cynical subject matter, with a dose of frightening imagery and heartbreaking resolutions. Their film adaptation of Takashi Yanase's children's book Ringing Bell (Chirin no Suzu) is considered the studio's darkest work next to their film adaptations of Osamu Tezuka's Unico series (Unico: Black Cloud and White Feather, The Fantastic Adventures of Unico, and Unico in the Island of Magic). The 1977 animated shorts The Rose Flower and Joe and Little Jumbo (both based on Takashi Yanase's works) is considered to be the closest to Sanrio's well-known image as cute and upbeat. While The Rose Flower And Joe isn't as cynical and dark as Ringing Bell, it suddenly becomes very melancholy but manages to have a much happier (and bittersweet) ending with the short's main characters.
  • Sanrio's only non-animated work was co-producing the 1982 American live-action film Don't Cry, It's Only Thunder. To date, this is the furthest the company has gotten from their signature cute and wholesome fare since it's set during The Vietnam War.
• Hiromu Arakawa's works are usually fantasy series with high stakes involved (like Fullmetal Alchemist and her manga adaptation of The Heroic Legend of Arslan), but Silver Spoon is a Slice of Life series that takes place in contemporary Hokkaido and has no fantastic elements at all. According to Arakawa, this was intentional since she wanted to challenge herself by making a more realistic series.
• Ryou Minemani usually has an output of dramatic manga, as seen through her works Himegoto - Juukyuusai no Seifuku and Boy's Abyss. However, the manga in between them, Hatsukoi Zombie, is the awkward stand-out since it's a played straight romantic comedy.
• Syundei is a Boys' Love mangaka who usually approaches darker or gorier topics with their works. Go For It, Nakamura! is very much none of those things, as a gag-based Slice of Life story.
• Almost all of Ashika Sakura's works are of the Boys' Love Genre, or at least heavy on the bishounen. That is, except Sekirei, a fanservicey Seinen harem series.
• Yuu Watase is largely known for works aimed at a female audience, with most of her works being shoujo (though Sakura Gari is a josei Boy's Love series, it's still aimed at a female audience), but Arata: The Legend is her first foray into shonen.
• Norihiro Yagi, whose manga debut was the Genre Savvy and humorous story Angel Densetsu, subsequently wrote the bleak and gory fantasy series Claymore. Oddly, the two do have a bit of a connection, as some characters are visual expies of each other.
• Junko, who is known for her Yaoi Genre doujinshi, is also the creator of Kiss Him, Not Me, a Shoujo Reverse Harem manga somewhat similar to Ouran High School Host Club. However, the main character is a Yaoi Fangirl and there are a lot of references to BL and Otaku culture, so it isn't as much of a departure as one would think.
• Akitaro Daichi, who is famous for lighthearted adventures and wacky comedies, saw some news reports about the genocide in Rwanda and created the bleak dystopian anime Now and Then, Here and There.
• Arina Tanemura usually writes stories with strong Magical Girl elements. The Gentlemen's Alliance is a drama about a former delinquent going to a school for the elite, and it has no fantasy elements at all.
• Mohiro Kitoh is well-known for his cynical and dark manga, most famously Shadow Star and Bokurano. Noririn is a tame, fluffy manga about biking.'
• Mermaid Saga is a dark and serious work about an immortal Death Seeker... by Rumiko Takahashi, the legendary master of romantic comedy. The Diet Goddess is also her only manga to be published in a shoujo anthology, while most of her other works are either shonen or seinen.
• Hiroya Oku is a seinen manga artist best known for his sci-fi horror works such as Gantz and Inuyashiki, but he started his career with Hen, a romantic comedy manga. There's also a manga he created while working on Gantz, Me-teru no Kimochi, which tells the story of a Hikikomori that, after the death of his father, falls in love with his step-mother.

Arts

• During his formative years, Alexandre Cabanel won two important art awards of the time that were indicative of his preference for Biblical Motifs. The Prix of Rome with his "Jesus in the Pretorium" and getting his "Christ in the Garden of Olives" admitted to the Salon of Paris. Some art historians speculate that he was playing it safe, what with making his characters' expressions as neutral as possible. However, a young Cabanel yearned to suffuse more emotion into his artworks, so he switched gears to Mythical Motifs and produced his "Orestes", a nude painting of the son of Agamemnon reaching his hand out. He soon returned to Christian themes with his (still very expressive) "The Fallen Angel" and, after a while, to apathetic, idealized paintings. It wasn't until some years later that he returned to Greek mythology and charmed the aristocrats with his Art Pompier frescos.

Comic Books

• Mark Millar is well known for his Darker and Edgier or Deconstructive versions of superheroes, whether they're alternate versions of existing characters (Superman: Red Son, The Ultimates) or his own graphic novels (Kick-Ass, Nemesis (Mark Millar)). However, he also wrote Superior, which is a Reconstruction of the superhero genre, starring a sickly boy who comes to term with his illness. He also wrote Trouble (Marvel Comics), a Fanservicey romantic drama meant as a prequel to Spider-Man and Reborn serves as his first foray into the fantasy genre.
  • There's also his run on Superman Adventures, an all-ages tie-in to Superman: The Animated Series.
• Jack Kirby and Joe Simon are most well-known for co-creating Captain America. Kirby went on to become one of the greatest superhero comic artists, creating and co-creating many popular superheroes. Simon is also mostly known for his work on superhero comics. But in The '40s Kirby and Simon also co-created... the romance comics genre.
• Frank Miller is known for his grim and gritty comics. He also created a more lighthearted comic called The Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot, which was later adapted into a cartoon on Fox Kids.
• Trina Robbins is mostly known for her feminist underground comix and activism supporting women in comics. She also designed Vampirella's iconic costume.
• Stjepan Sejic is most well-known for working as an artist on Witchblade and also his erotic BDSM webcomic Sunstone. He's now working on a Lighter and Softer all-ages Witchblade spin-off called Switch (2015).
• Artist Christian Zanier's main output is highly erotic adult works and Buffy the Vampire Slayer comics. He also illustrated a couple of LEGO BIONICLE graphic novel stories, featuring bio-mechanical warriors based on children's toys and no women.
• In Emily Carroll's collection of stories in Through the Woods, almost all of the stories share certain tropes and themes; they're set in a vaguely defined past (generally somewhere in the 1700s-1800s judging by the clothes), most of the stories are Nameless Narratives or have the absolute minimum number of named characters, there are supernatural elements present but often the greatest threats are more mundane issues, etc. One story, "The Nesting Place" seems to intentionally go for the opposite on all these points. Judging by the fashions, the story could only be set in the 1920s (possibly the 1930s), every character who appears on screen gets a name and lines to speak, and the only danger to the main character is a fantastical creature... although she uses the threat of mundane dangers that people would pose to the creature, along with a dose of They Would Cut You Up, to get it to back down.

Fan Works

• Eliezer Yudkowsky is most well-known for the blog Less Wrong, as well as having written Three Worlds Collide and the fanfic Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which are more or less Author Tracts about his view of rationality. He also wrote Peggy Susie, which is a parody of The Terminator using Calvin and Hobbes characters, which contains very little philosophical speculation.
• superstarultra is an author well-known in the Haruhi Suzumiya fandom for his Crack Fics. He is also in the process of writing a horror-story collection.
• Two of the official Silent Ponyville stories are pure romance, and a third one is straight-up Slice of Life using the mind-delve spell to show cute scenes from Twilight's childhood.
• Missing Linc has an In-Universe example. Dirk O'Donnell, a director known for directing mature films, is directing the family-friendly Full House Gang movie. He turns out to be trying to make the film more like his typical genre, to the displeasure of Bill Buck.

Films — Animation

• Disney:
  • The Emperor's New Groove feels more like a hybrid between a Warner Bros. cartoon and a Muppet production than anything you'd expect to see out of Disney's theatrical animation department. It's a slapstick comedy with copious Breaking the Fourth Wall gags from beginning to end, with even the few somber moments being played for laughs. In a rare move for a Disney movie at the time, there was no Love Interest or romance for the protagonist. The villains are also lovable nutjobs who don't die in the end, and the standard cute animal sidekick is rejected by almost everyone and becomes a jerk as a result. They even subverted the then-typical Disney "bad guy turns into a giant mindless monstrosity" climax by having main antagonist Yzma turn into a cute little kitten that keeps her intelligence, attitude, and ability to speak.
  • Treasure Planet is remarkably different from the rest of Disney's filmography: no musical numbers, no princesses, no funny animal sidekicks (unless a robot and a mute blob of goo count), no romance outside of some paired supporting characters, an Emo Teen delinquent protagonist, a genuinely sympathetic villain as the Big Bad, and a generally epic tone and sprawling Sci-Fi-based universe not unlike Star Wars. If an unassuming viewer didn't know better, it'd be easy to mistake for a movie from the traditonal animation days of Dreamworks Animation instead.
  • Chicken Little can be considered another example of Disney imitating the output of a competitor, specifically the DreamWorks Animation films of the early 2000s. A CG cartoon with funny animals, a contemporary setting, snarky and sarcastic humor, lots of movie and pop culture references (including a clip of an Indiana Jones movie for no real reason) does sound like something that Dreamworks would've made at the time. Even the promotional materials were a rare example of Disney spoofing other properties, with parodies of their own The Lion King (1994), Men in Black and even The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005) that came out at around the same time.
  • Wreck-It Ralph and Brave came out the same year and they felt like Disney and Pixar swapped places for once. "Ralph" is a film about the secret life of non-sentient things like Pixar often did (as exemplified by the famous meme "What if toys/cars/robots/emotions had feelings?") with lots of jokes linked to a specific demographic (gamers in the 1980s and 90s) that goes over the head of the younger audiences. Whereas "Brave" feels to many like a clichéd Disney character-driven fairy tale featuring a rebellious princess forced in an arranged marriage and having to deal with an overbearing mother.
• Ralph Bakshi is known for street-based dramas and comedies with over the top violence, sex, and nudity (Fritz the Cat, Heavy Traffic, Coonskin, and Hey Good Lookin') and fantasy films (Wizards, The Lord of the Rings, and Fire and Ice (1983)). But he also directed the realistically grounded drama American Pop, which is more down to earth than his street films and fairly realistic in its portrayal of violence and mild in its sexuality.
  • There's also his kid-friendly works in the 1980s, like Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures and the adaptation of The Butter Battle Book, which have a subversive edge to them but are nevertheless apt for family viewing.
  • Then there's Cool World which had a rather bizarre plot (pretty much an older version of Who Framed Roger Rabbit), was made on a big-budget in contrast to Bakshi's previous low-budget films, and was (more or less) aimed towards a younger demographic. However, Bakshi actually has an excuse with Cool World, as the original idea for it (an erotic horror movie) was scrapped due to massive amounts of Executive Meddling from producer Frank Mancuso Jr. and actress Kim Basinger.
• Titan A.E. is a sci-fi film with violence and a soundtrack that contrasts Don Bluth's previous works, all of which swayed more into Disneyesque fantasy (although on the other hand, the film's dark tone isn't completely out of place if you're aware of some of Bluth's earlier movies).
• Noah Baumbach, the director-writer of quirky indie dramas like The Squid and the Whale, Frances Ha, and Marriage Story, also co-wrote Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted. However, he has implied that he took the job to pay off his divorce lawyer's fees.
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem is this for Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s Point Grey Picutres. While Rogen has acted in family friendly films before, the works he produces almost all tend to be raunchy and hard-R, including the production company’s last animated film, Sausage Party. This will be the first project by Rogen and Goldberg geared towards family audiences.
• Argentinian animation pioneer Quirino Cristiani was known mainly for satirical films such as El Apóstol, Sin dejar rastros, and Peludópolis, all of which utilized cutout animation and, in the case of the former, occasional live action miniatures. El Mono relojero, on the other hand, is an adaptation of the children's book of the same name by Contancio C. Vigil, created using traditional cel animation with an art style based the source material's illustrations. Sadly, the latter is also Cristiani's only surviving film, as the remainder of his filmography was lost in a series of studio fires between 1926 and 1961.
• Nelvana is best known for children's franchises such as Care Bears, Little Bear, and Franklin. So it's quite surprising to find out that their early work includes Rock and Rule, an adult animated film.

Films — Live-Action

• Armando Iannucci is best known for his cynical, scathing political satire work on both the big and small screen, but he also directed a whimsical, optimistic, and progressive Dickens adaptation, The Personal History of David Copperfield.
• Charlie Chaplin always directed comedies, starring himself, except for A Woman of Paris, a dramatic film about a tragic romance in which he appears only in a brief Creator Cameo.
• David Lynch is known for surreal and disturbing dramas, often featuring bizarre imagery, weird sex, human deformities, and violence. That is, except for The Straight Story, a G-rated, heartwarming family film distributed by Disney, about an old man who drives a riding lawnmower hundreds of miles to see his dying brother one last time.
• M. Night Shyamalan started off famous for his original drama films with twist endings. In 2010, he directed an adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender. This departure from his standard formula was not well received and was considered his weakest effort. He also did After Earth which many critics felt was fairly standard sci-fi yarn that could've been directed by anybody. Which actually rings true, as that film was the brainchild of its star Will Smith.
• Greta Gerwig, director of auteurist drama films like Lady Bird and Little Women (2019) is also directing Barbie (2023), a tongue-in-cheek and irreverent comedy reminiscent of product placement films like The LEGO Movie.
• George Lucas is famous for sci-fi and fantasy adventure films; Indiana Jones and Star Wars are the most famous examples, while THX 1138 is a classic to sci-fi buffs. He also produced the film Howard the Duck, which is a comedy film based on a comic book. It's technically a sci-fi film, but barely, and it's not fondly remembered. He considers it his Old Shame.
  • His earlier film, American Graffiti, fits even better, being a realistic film inspired by his own teenage years. In fact, he created it because Francis Ford Coppola (who produced it) bet him that he couldn't make a mainstream, realistic movie. It's also considered a classic and basically invented the Nostalgia Filter Coming of Age Story..
  • Strange Magic is an animated kid's movie loosely based on A Midsummer Night's Dream. In this case it was deemed too strange, relegated by Disney to the Touchstone Pictures label and mostly forgotten about. It's become something of a Cult Classic, however.
• Adam Sandler is best known for appearing in rather lowbrow comedies such as Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore. However, some of his films (including Punch-Drunk Love, Reign Over Me and Uncut Gems) are dramas which show that Sandler is capable of more than just screwball shtick.
• Jim Henson, creator of the colorful, cheerful Muppets, also directed The Dark Crystal. Labyrinth could also count as well.
• Titanic (1997): Because of its enormous success and long-lasting cultural impact, it's easy to forget that the film was a huge departure from James Cameron's usual style of films, being a romantic period piece after having directed gritty sci-fi films like The Terminator and Aliens during most of his career.
• Hideaki Anno, the creator of Neon Genesis Evangelion, a dark mecha series with heavy amounts of symbolism and Mindscrew, directed a Live-Action Adaptation of the anime Cutey Honey, a lighthearted magical girl series with plenty of Fanservice.
• Andrew Davis, known for his action films such as Under Siege and The Fugitive as well as lesser-known action films like Arnold's Collateral Damage, directed the family film Holes that was Shia LaBeouf's feature film debut, and was based on a children's book.
• Tim Burton is well-known as a director of movies which cross the horror genre over with another, such as the macabre musicals Corpse Bride and Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (and also one he didn't direct, The Nightmare Before Christmas) or the comedy Beetlejuice. So when compared to his usual body of work, these four films really stand out.
  • His first feature film, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, has many of his stylistic touches, but is much lighter in tone, with a bright color palette and very little of the macabre humor he's better known for. Other than a Nightmare Sequence and Large Marge, there are no horror elements at all.
  • Planet of the Apes is a conventional science fiction action film, a remake no less, with almost none of his Signature Style.
  • Big Fish, which avoids Johnny Depp, takes a Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane approach to the supernatural and is otherwise a generally bright and cheery film.
  • Big Eyes uses uncharacteristically bright colors and does not feature any of Burton's usual actors. Aside from a handful of fantasy scenes, it's a relatively straightforward biographical film.
• Stanley Kramer was a director best known for dramas tackling social issues (Inherit the Wind, Judgment at Nuremberg, On the Beach, etc.). It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World? It's a screwball comedy.
• Wes Craven joked that he went from "violence" to "violins" when he directed Meryl Streep to an Oscar nomination in Music of the Heart.
• John Carpenter is best known for horror and action films, but he had a number of movies that are far from his usual fare.
  • In 1979, right after his Breakthrough Hit Halloween, he directed a straightforward made-for-TV biopic of Elvis Presley that's mainly notable nowadays for being his first of many collaborations with Kurt Russell, who played the King of Rock & Roll.
  • Starman is a science fiction film like much of his work, but it's also a pensive and romantic drama that's been described as "E.T. for adults". Carpenter made it specifically to break out of his horror typecasting after The Thing (1982) flopped at the box office.
  • He intended for Memoirs of an Invisible Man to be this, a sci-fi comedy far removed from his usually serious work. However, its star Chevy Chase, for whom this was a Vanity Project, saw the film as his own attempt to break out of his comedic persona, and the clashes between their visions played a big role in the film's Troubled Production.
• Jay Roach, director of the Austin Powers movies and Meet the Parents, also directed the TV movie Recount, a political drama about the events of the United States presidential election in 2000, and Bombshell (2019), another political drama about the Fox News sexual harassment cases revealed during the 2016 election.
• Zack Snyder, director of violent thrillers such as Watchmen, 300, and Sucker Punch directed the family animated film Legend Of The Guardians The Owls Of Ga Hoole.
  • There is noticeably no slow-motion to be found in Man of Steel, unlike with the aforementioned thrillers, which are heavy on it in their action scenes.
  • Army of the Dead is the first feature film that Snyder has ever shot entirely digitally (the only things he shot digitally before this movie was his short Snow Steam Iron, and parts of the epilogue for Zack Snyder's Justice League after Army of the Dead completed principal photography). It is also perhaps the one in his filmography with the least amount of Color Wash outside of Dawn of the Dead (2004). It's also one for Netflix: the streamer had long been barred from screening any of its films in mainstream cinema chains in the United States and many other countries, notably attempting and failing to work out arrangements for Roma, The Irishman and Marriage Story. In the wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic, however, the #3 U.S. chain Cinemark warmed relations with Netflix, allowing for titles like Mank, The Trial of the Chicago 7, The Midnight Sky and Ma Rainey's Black Bottom to play on their screens. Army of the Dead, however, marks the first time a Netflix film has received a full-on nationwide release in a major cinema chain, despite premiering on the streaming service just one week later. While it only earned about an estimated $1 million, the release was apparently considered enough of a success that Netflix would launch another 14 movies in theaters between September and December 2021.
• George Miller, director of Mad Max, later directed the somber medical drama Lorenzo’s Oil and family movies about cute pigs and penguins. And then, after thirty years, went back to Mad Max with the explosive Fury Road.
• Ed Zwick, best known for historical war epics and the like (including Glory, The Last Samurai, and Blood Diamond) made his directorial debut with the romantic comedy About Last Night..., and took a break from the Oscar bait with his latest film Love & Other Drugs, a sex comedy about a Viagra salesman.
  • And prior to his epic film work, he was well known for producing television dramedies, most notably thirtysomething and My So-Called Life.
• Sergio Leone is probably best known for his spaghetti Westerns, several of which involved actors being cast against type. His last film was Once Upon a Time in America, a story about gangsters.
  • When Sergio Leone finished The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, he originally wanted to direct against type by making Once Upon a Time in America, but gave in to popular demand and made Once Upon a Time in the West, which was the start of a new trilogy that would end with Once Upon a Time in America.
  • Apparently, Sergio Leone — known for having something of a hard-on for America, or at least American history — had also planned to make a film about the siege of Leningrad during World War II. Sadly, he died before it got very far.
• Sam Peckinpah's reputation for making hyperviolent films was established with such movies as The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs (1971). However, he also made The Ballad of Cable Hogue and Junior Bonner, two non-violent character studies about people trying to adjust to life in the changing world of the New Old West.
• Roland Emmerich, best known for large-scale disaster movies such as 2012, Independence Day, and The Day After Tomorrow, tackled Anonymous, a historical mystery-thriller that supports the conspiracy theory of the Oxfordian Theory (i.e., that a member of British aristocracy wrote plays and had Shakespeare presented as an illiterate stooge). After a return to destruction fests in White House Down, his next film, Stonewall (2015), was a historical drama focused on the eponymous riots for gay rights.
• The Coen Brothers did a rewrite of the screenplay for Intolerable Cruelty, and it was originally set to be directed by Ron Howard and Jonathan Demme before the studio offered the Coens the option to direct it. They were initially reluctant because they didn't think it fit their sensibilities, which confused the studio since they wrote it.
• Alfred Hitchcock, known to film history for directing suspense thrillers and crime dramas, often with explicit violence, took some time in 1941 to direct a Screwball Comedy called Mr. & Mrs. Smith (1941) starring Carole Lombard.
• John Landis mainly directed comedies like Animal House, The Blues Brothers, and ¡Three Amigos! but he has also directed the critically acclaimed horror films An American Werewolf in London and a segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie.
• Jerry Zucker is most well known for doing comedies like Airplane! and Top Secret! but he also directed the critically acclaimed drama film Ghost (1990) and the Camelot drama First Knight.
• Not directing, but rather producing: Mel Brooks was a primary producer for both David Lynch's The Elephant Man and David Cronenberg's The Fly (1986). In order to keep anyone from thinking that either of these movies was a comedy, he insisted that he be completely uncredited.
• David Cronenberg is best known for dark and disturbing horror and thriller films. But one of his early B Movies is 1979's Fast Company, an upbeat melodrama about stock car racers (Cronenberg is a huge racing buff). Ironically, art director Carol Spier, cinematographer Mark Irwin, and editor Ronald Sanders all became part of his behind-the-camera Production Posse with that film. After he became a big name, he helmed the film adaptation of M. Butterfly and the historical drama A Dangerous Method, which are akin to artsy Oscar Bait. After the latter came Cosmopolis and Maps to the Stars: satirical dramas about the not-so-beautiful people. However, with the exception of Fast Company, they all fall on the cynical end of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism like his better-known works — the ugliness of human nature just isn't so visceral.
• David R. Ellis the man behind such thrillers as Snakes on a Plane, Final Destination 2, The Final Destination, and Cellular began his career directing the family film Homeward Bound II: Lost in San Francisco.
• David Gordon Green was well known for making critically acclaimed dramatic independent films like George Washington, All the Real Girls, Undertow, and Snow Angels. Then, as his father put it, he went "from the Arthouse to the Outhouse" by making raunchy comedies like Pineapple Express, Your Highness, and The Sitter. Then he did it again, pivoting to a genre horror movie with Halloween (2018).
• Ang Lee, a director best known for dramas and period pieces such as Eat Drink Man Woman, directed the first Hulk film. Unfortunately, his style did not lend itself well to the unfamiliar genre, and The Incredible Hulk (2008) "rebooted" the character for the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Even as Lee made a few more movies heavy on Spectacle in Life of Pi and Gemini Man, Hulk still remains quite the weird spot of his filmography.
• Most of Spike Lee's films have had race, social commentary, or real-world events in American society as a central theme. Inside Man is a departure from this, being mostly a crime thriller that touched only occasionally on race and social issues. However, his biggest oddball to date is Oldboy, a remake of a fantastical South Korean story purely about revenge. Many people were surprised by the choice of Lee to direct it.
  • A common belief about Lee's films is that they are usually centered on Black America, with messages related to the Black struggle, Black social issues, Black history or Black activism, with mostly black casts and white characters generally shown as villains, or at least in need of correction to some degree. Films like Summer of Sam and 25th Hour have casts that are largely white, or at least non-black, as Summer of Sam had a cast of mostly Italian characters, though the actors ranged from Italian, Jewish, Latin, or even just Caucasian. Inside Man had Denzel Washington headlining...along with Jodie Foster and Clive Owen.
• Francis Ford Coppola is known for directing drama films like The Godfather series, Apocalypse Now, and Bram Stoker's Dracula, he also directed the family comedy-drama Jack (1996), about a young boy played by Robin Williams who psychically ages several decades at an accelerated rate.
• Alejandro Jodorowsky, the director responsible for Mind Screw films such as El Topo and The Holy Mountain made a kids' movie called Tusk, which didn't have any of the strange symbolism and violence of his other movies. He disowned the film.
• Francis Lawrence, the director of dark action films such as Constantine (2005), I Am Legend, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, The Hunger Games: Mockingjay, and Red Sparrow also directed Water for Elephants, a romantic drama based on the book of the same name.
• Adult film director Paul Norman directed the horror film Ice Cream Man.
• Tom Schulman, the Academy Award-winning writer of Dead Poets Society, made his directorial debut with the Black Comedy 8 Heads in a Duffel Bag. Carpe diem, indeed.
• Peter Berg, an actor turned director best known for action films such as The Rundown, The Kingdom, Hancock, Battleship, Lone Survivor, Mile 22, and Spenser Confidential as well as drama films such as Friday Night Lights (2004), Deepwater Horizon, and Patriots Day made his directorial debut with the Black Comedy Very Bad Things.
  • He's also gone against type as a producer, being one of the producers of the romantic comedy Lars and the Real Girl.
• Gore Verbinski: He is the director of action/adventure flicks like the first three Pirates of the Caribbean films, The Lone Ranger (2013), and The Mexican, as well as horror films like The Ring and A Cure for Wellness. He also directed the slapstick comedy MouseHunt, the Dramedy The Weather Man, and the animated Spaghetti Western Rango.
• George A. Romero, best known for his Living Dead Series zombie movies, has among his directorial credits the 1971 romantic comedy There's Always Vanilla.
• Michael Bay is best known for his over-the-top, effects-heavy blockbusters like the Transformers Film Series (the first five released between 2007 and 2017) and Armageddon (1998). He deliberately went against type with the small-scale, darkly comedic, true-crime thriller Pain & Gain.
• Ridley Scott usually does grim action films. Twice in the 2000s he made comedies, Matchstick Men (which still had some adventure content as it deals with con men) and A Good Year (a straight-up romantic comedy, mostly to shoot near his French home). He was also one of the executive producers of The A-Team.
• Ridley's brother, Tony Scott, carved out a career directing action films like Top Gun, Man on Fire, True Romance etc. His first feature film? A gloomy vampire story called The Hunger - which he made as a consolation prize for not getting to direct Interview with the Vampire (he was a huge Anne Rice fan). In this case, after The Hunger flopped, he transitioned into directing car commercials - and this lead to his success as an action director.
• John Huston, well known for Film Noir classics such as The Maltese Falcon, Key Largo and The Asphalt Jungle, also did the family musical Annie.
• Kevin Smith went against type in 2004 with the dramedy Jersey Girl, his first non-Askewneverse film, then in 2010 he directed the action-comedy Cop Out and the horror/action/thriller movie Red State. This movie was also atypical for him as a writer.
• Sidney Lumet, known for crime dramas such as 12 Angry Men, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, as well as Network, also did the family musical The Wiz.
• Think Sam Raimi and you think fantasy/horror/adventure movies — The Evil Dead (1981), Darkman, Spider-Man and so on. You probably don't think Westerns (The Quick and the Dead), dramas about found money (A Simple Plan) or romantic dramas (For Love of the Game).
  • A Simple Plan and For Love of the Game in particular stand out for eschewing Raimi’s usual dynamic camerawork and campy tones. Favoring a far more serious and grounded directorial approach.
• James Mangold has made a career out of playing against type - character study (Heavy), crime drama (Cop Land), institutionalised young women (Girl, Interrupted), time-travelling romcom (Kate & Leopold), serial killer thriller (Identity), biopic (Walk the Line), Western (3:10 to Yuma (2007)), action (Knight and Day), comics (The Wolverine, Logan), racing (Ford V Ferrari), co-writing an animated Disney feature (Oliver & Company)...
• Jean-Pierre Jeunet did this with Amélie, a lighthearted romantic comedy completely in contrast to his darker and more violent films. He also went against custom by casting a traditionally attractive actor in the lead role.
• Jon M. Chu had only done music films before getting an action film in G.I. Joe: Retaliation. Even compared to his later work Now You See Me 2 it's weird.
• Rob Marshall is known for his musical films (Chicago, Nine (Musical), Into the Woods), but also directed Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides.
• Marvel Studios has been noted for bringing in some indie or unusual choices for the Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • The Russo Brothers were known for directing television comedy episodes for shows like Community and Arrested Development, when they got the job to direct the big-budget Superhero Conspiracy Thriller blockbuster, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which is now regarded as a contender for the best movie entry of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The result was so positive they would direct the next Captain America and two Avengers films.
  • James Gunn was known for horror or downright weird work before he was hired for Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)... Although the most unexplainable entries of his career might be writing the first two Scooby-Doo films...
  • Scott Derrickson, who already had an oddball compared to his horror films in The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008), was brought in for the trippy Doctor Strange (2016). And amusingly, the sequel that would be horror-oriented had Derrickson eventually drop out due to Creative Differences.
  • Peyton Reed, who had only done primarily comedy films, as well as one romantic dramedy, did Ant-Man (replacing another director who had only delved in that genre, but with a more action-packed approach, Edgar Wright).
  • Jon Watts had only done a horror movie and a thriller, yet Marvel trusted him with their most popular character, and a known jokester in that, with Spider-Man: Homecoming.
  • Taika Waititi, responsible for two acclaimed comedy dramas and a comedy horror flick, made Thor: Ragnarok, which had a more comedic approach as a result. And then there's the matter of him potentially helming a Live-Action Adaptation of AKIRA...
  • Ryan Coogler had a biographical drama and a sports drama before receiving Black Panther. (And him co-writing a sports comedy in the Space Jam sequel is even weirder...)
  • Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck made many dramas on TV and film before being given Captain Marvel (2019).
  • While Cate Shortland had made a thriller in Berlin Syndrome, it's certainly far from the espionage action of Black Widow (2021).
  • Destin Daniel Cretton made quiet low budget dramas. Marvel gave him a martial arts epic in Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings.
  • Chloé Zhao, responsible for two small dramas, was hired to do an epic in Eternals.
  • Nia DaCosta, responsible for the thriller Little Woods and the horror Candyman (2021), ended up with Captain Marvel's sequel The Marvels.
  • Michael Giacchino is well known for being a composer for many films, particularly superhero ones. He also directed the retraux Halloween special, Werewolf by Night (2022) (although he did compose the score for that one too).
• James Wan is one of the biggest names in modern horror, having gotten his start as the creator of the torture porn movie franchise Saw. He also directed Dead Silence, Insidious, and The Conjuring, which all fit his typical line of work. But his most successful movie by far? Furious 7, a high-octane blockbuster action film with an emphasis on vehicles, and Rule of Cool is valued above all else. If one was introduced to Wan through this movie, they'd have a hard time believing he's one of the biggest names in the horror genre. He would later go on to helm Aquaman, which is yet another action-packed romp different from his usual output, this time in the superhero genre.
• Carol Reed was known for his gritty dramatic works (the most famous being The Third Man), but he won his lone Oscar for 1968's Oliver! — a musical. His next film, 1970's Flap, also falls under this since it's a comedy.
• Steven Spielberg has a really varied career, on which action, adventure, science-fiction, and compelling dramas (usually of the historical variety) stand out. The true oddballs are the comedies 1941 (1979) and The Terminal, plus the musical West Side Story (2021).
• Martin Scorsese is famous for directing often violent crime films, including Taxi Driver and Goodfellas. He would eventually end up directing Hugo, a family-friendly fantasy about a young British orphan trying to repair an old automaton brought to him by his father. The Aviator could also count.
• Jordan Peele, best known for being a Mad TV alum and one-half of Key & Peele, both sketch comedy shows, made his directorial debut with Get Out (2017), a horror movie that deals with racism. Granted, it still has a great deal of black comedy and social satire carried over from Key and Peele. Us, which was downright horror with little comedy, was even more clashing to his earlier work.
• Quentin Tarantino: Tarantino's style is very well established across his oeuvre, whether he's doing crime thrillers, war movies, westerns, kung fu revenge flicks, grindhouse pastiches, and much more. His biggest oddball is Jackie Brown, not just simply by the fact that it's his only adaptation, but it's also mostly driven by dialogue and witty banter with sporadic bursts of violence in-between. Therefore, it shares its artistic DNA with Elmore Leonard, the author of the original novel.
• Joe Wright got famous for directing British period dramas like Pride & Prejudice (2005), Atonement and Anna Karenina (usually starring Keira Knightley). Then he went and made Hanna - an action thriller. And then Pan - a PG-fantasy film. His next two films were a a biopic about Winston Churchill and a musical adaptation of Cyrano de Bergerac.
• Kimberley Peirce was fond of the gritty indie dramas with a strong social message - Boys Don't Cry and Stop-Loss. Then she goes and directs the 2013 remake of Stephen King's Carrie.
• Blake Edwards was legendary for directing comedies or light-hearted films like Breakfast at Tiffany's, 10 (1979), S.O.B., Victor/Victoria and of course The Pink Panther series. He had two notable departures. First was Days of Wine and Roses - a drama about an alcoholic trying to get his crush addicted to booze. The second was Darling Lili - a sexy spy musical set during World War I. The latter was notably a victim of Executive Meddling that resulted in a lot of the slapstick he was known for - thus creating jarring tonal shifts. He recut the film in the 90s to make it more serious.
• David Kirschner is well known in Hollywood for his writing and producing credits for family movies like Hocus Pocus and An American Tail; along with his time as president for Hanna-Barbera during the '80s. Yet between these projects he also produced the popular horror franchise Child's Play and later the psychological thriller Frailty; both of which really stand out in a filmography made up of kids material.
• RedLetterMedia made schlock comedy and horror/comedy films such as Gorilla, Interrupted, Oranges: Revenge of the Eggplant, and Feeding Frenzy before finding success as a comedic online review show. However, in 2008 they also made The Recovered, an entirely serious Psychological Horror film without a single joke.
• Michael Moore is famed for political documentaries like Roger & Me, Fahrenheit 9/11, and Capitalism: A Love Story. He has directed a single narrative film, Canadian Bacon, which is a satirical comedy about geopolitics.
• Waking Life is a drastic departure from the rest of 20th Century Fox's adult animated productions, as the film completely lacks the lowbrow humor and Dysfunctional Family writing found in their other works, instead being a philosophical Le Film Artistique drama centering on the themes of freewill, the nature of reality, and the meaning of life. It's likely because of these reasons that Fox decided not to credit their 20th Century Animation branch in the film's production.
• Shawn Levy, best known for sci-fi/fantasy movies such as the Night at the Museum franchise, Real Steel, Free Guy, and The Adam Project, also directed Date Night, a romantic comedy, and This Is Where I Leave You, a comedy-drama about a family reunion that both lack any sort of fantastical elements.
• Eli Roth, a director of Gorn-filled Torture Porn and Splatter Horror films also directed The House With a Clock in Its Walls, a PG-rated Gothic Horror Fantasy film based on a children's book.
• Guillermo del Toro is known for fantasy and science-fiction films that, while scary at times, usually feature sympathetic monsters and heroic outcasts fighting back against an oppressive society, and often have a Bittersweet Ending. By contrast, his film Nightmare Alley (2021) (adapted from the novel of the same name) is a straightforward crime thriller with no fantastical elements whatsoever, featuring a con man Villain Protagonist who lies, cheats and manipulates his way into high society without any regard for others, and ending on a crushingly bleak note.
• David Fincher, best known for gritty, edgy, and R-rated thrillers, directed The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, a whimsical Magical Realism fantasy romance with a PG-13 rating, easily the lightest film he's ever done. He also directed The Social Network, a biopic about the foundig of Facebook, which still contains his trademark cynicism despite not being a gritty thriller.
• Paul Feig is mainly known for his work directing female-led comedy films. However, two notable exceptions exist:
  • Unaccompanied Minors is a holiday comedy focusing on a mix of young boys and girls stuck at an airport together.
  • The School for Good and Evil (2022) is a more dramatic fantasy story.
• A24 is best known for producing dramas and horrors for mature audiences, but they have made one family friendly film, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On (2021).
• Greta Gerwig established her directorial career with the more autorish Lady Bird and Little Women (2019). Her next film will be the more commercial Barbie (2023).
• Disney produced Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers (2022), which is superficially similar to Who Framed Roger Rabbit, in that is set in a world where toons and humans coexist and there's an underlying criminal plot. But, for a Disney movie, it is remarkably meta, self-mocking (for one, the Big Bad is an aged and embittered Peter Pan) and almost sarcastic about the nature of fandoms, movie making and animation production. Not to mention full of Demographically Inappropriate Humour and of cameos from animated shows that are decidedly not for kids, such as Randy Marsh or Butt-Head.
• Neill Blomkamp is known for his VFX-heavy, thematic science fiction films often deal with themes of xenophobia and social segregation. Meanwhile, the upcoming Gran Turismo is a biopic/coming of age film focusing on a player of the titular game series and personal racer.
• The Hercule Poirot of Kenneth Branagh are noteworthy for being the first time he's directed sequels (Death on the Nile) of any kind.
• Busby Berkeley, best known for his lavish musical numbers, directed a crime drama remake called They Made Me a Criminal in 1939. Warner Brothers gave him the oddball project in an attempt to keep him occupied so he wouldn't leave the studio; it didn't work.
• Following bad reviews for The Long Kiss Goodnight, Shane Black attempted this doing a Romantic Comedy imitating his idol and mentor at the time, James L. Brooks. Then when he hit a creative wall, he just returned to his Signature Style and the result was Kiss Kiss Bang Bang.
• Bob Clark directed several notable horror films in the early '70s, including Children Shouldn't Play with Dead Things, Deathdream, and the groundbreaking Black Christmas (1974). Then he abandoned horror, directed the teen sex comedy Porky's, and spent the last twenty years of his career making more family-friendly films such as A Christmas Story and Baby Geniuses.
• Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna, best known for graphic horror movies like Re-Animator, From Beyond, and Society, also wrote the Disney family comedy Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. Gordon was originally slated to direct as well, but had to drop out due to illness.
• Hammer Horror produced many memorable horror films such as The Curse of Frankenstein and Horror of Dracula. Yet they also produced the campy 1969 science fiction film and self-proclaimed Space Western Moon Zero Two, which was as far from Gothic horror as one could get.
• Stanley Kubrick was known for making dark, controversial, and artsy films in his lifetime, but while he didn't live to see its completion, A.I.: Artificial Intelligence was intended to be this, envisioning it as a bittersweet, but whimsical and futuristic Pinocchio-esque story. Kubrick originally wanted to pass on the project to its eventual director Steven Spielberg as it was more like his usual style, but while Spielberg initially convinced Kubrick to hold onto it himself, Kubrick's early death motivated Spielberg to take on the mantle. Because of this rather unique mid-development passing of hands, a lot of people thought that the lighter aspects of the final film were Spielberg defiling a dark Kubrick fable with his signature flim-flam, when in reality they were all Kubrick's ideas to begin with, and made as a conscious tribute to that sentimentality.
• Sexploitation meister Russ Meyer directed a serious courtroom drama called The Seven Minutes. He does manage to squeeze in some instances of his brand of Fanservice, but not nearly to the extent of his other films. The film failed at the box-office and Meyer would later comment that "attaching my name to that film was a bummer. It does a great disservice to everyone concerned."
• The Mighty Peking Man (also known as Goliathon) was a giant monster movie made by the Shaw Brothers, who were known almost entirely for their martial arts movies.
• Ti West, best known for horror films like The House of the Devil, The Innkeepers, The Sacrament, and X (2022) also wrote and directed the Western In a Valley of Violence.
• An In-Universe example in This is Spın̈al Tap, when the eponymous Hard Rock band suddenly changes over to acoustic jazz for the sake of experiment for all of one concert.
• Rob Zombie is best known as both a Heavy Metal musician and the maker of extremely violent, gritty, profane, and darkly comedic horror movies, particularly the "Firefly Trilogy" of House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil's Rejects, and 3 from Hell along with his remake of Halloween.
  • The Lords of Salem, while still an R-rated horror film, strays far from his usual grindhouse-inspired style, instead being a grim Religious Horror film about evil witches that emphasizes mood and Surreal Horror instead of graphic violence and whose villains are not Affably Evil.
  • He also directed a film adaptation of The Munsters. While his involvement is understandable given his lifelong fandom of the show (his Signature Song "Dragula" is named after Grandpa Munster's coffin dragster), what was a surprise was the fact that it was rated PG and specifically recreated the show's sense of humor, without trying to play it Darker and Edgier or as a deconstruction. The trailer even lampshaded this, opening by listing off some of the violent horror movies Rob had made in the past before jumping right into straightforward comedy.
• Robert Rodriguez made his name with violent, sleazy action and horror films like the "Mexico Trilogy" (El Mariachi, Desperado, and Once Upon a Time in Mexico) and From Dusk Till Dawn.
  • So it came as a shock to just about everybody when he made the lighthearted family comedy Spy Kids in 2001... and then made two back-to-back sequels to it over the next two years. He's since mostly gone back to his more R-rated roots with Sin City, Planet Terror, and Machete, though he does this side-by-side with family films like Shorts and The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl that he makes for his kids.
  • The Faculty is something in between. On one hand, it's an R-rated sci-fi horror movie inspired by Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but on the other, it's also a teen horror film with satirical undertones inspired by Scream (1996) and The Breakfast Club.
  • Likewise, Alita: Battle Angel is him going into pure sci-fi action with a PG-13 rating.

Literature

• Last of the Breed is a techno-thriller written by Louis L'Amour, who is generally better known for Westerns and other historical fiction.
• Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke wrote one non-science-fiction novel, Glide Path, a World War II novel giving a fictionalized account of the development of a radar-based ground-controlled landing system to allow aircraft to land at night or in bad weather. (Clarke had in fact worked on the real-life project his fictional system is closely based on.)
• Ken Follett made his name as a writer of thrillers, but is best known (especially outside his native Britain) as the author of the historical epic The Pillars of the Earth.
• Ian Rankin is known for his Police Procedural novels, in particular the Rebus series. Early in his career he also wrote the techno-thriller Westwind, which for many years he considered an old shame though he eventually came around to it.
• The exceptionally British Alistair Maclean is famous for his hard-bitten World War II and Spy Thrillers. He's also written Breakheart Pass, a Spaghetti Western. Amusingly, as the story progresses, you can watch him struggling to keep the narrative from metamorphosing into one of his more typical works... and largely failing, to the point that the abrupt return of Western elements in the ending almost feels like a Ass Pull.
• The first novel V. C. Andrews ever wrote was a sci-fi/fantasy book called Gods of Green Mountain. It being so different from other works her fans are used to seeing is probably the reason why it took almost twenty years after her death to get published, and only in ebook format.
• Mikhail Bulgakov is mostly famous for The Master and Margarita, a largely lighthearted and satiric novel with religious overtones, yet the majority of his works are dark and realistic stories on par with works of Kurt Vonnegut and Charles Bukowski in terms of cynicism and desperation.
• Agatha Christie, famed for her detective stories, wrote (well, assembled) a Hercule Poirot novel named The Big Four that featured Hercule Poirot take on a conspiracy to take over the world by a Chinese Yellow Peril villain, a French Mad Scientist, an American Corrupt Corporate Executive, and a British Master of Disguise. Poirot does such unlikely things as throw gas-bombs and have poison darts hidden in his cigarette case. The finale takes place in a Supervillain Lair in the Italian Alps - which blows up at the end of the novel! It can be most succintly described as Hercule Poirot as James Bond (see Ian Fleming below!)
• Steven Erikson is known for his gritty, serious work, most prominently the sprawling, complex fantasy epic Malazan Book of the Fallen. He also wrote Willful Child, an affectionate, over-the-top Star Trek parody.
• H. P. Lovecraft, famous for his Cosmic Horror Stories about alien beings whose very existence threatens humanity and our fragile minds, also wrote Sweet Ermengarde, a comedic parody of romantic melodramas featuring zero Eldritch Abominations of any sort.
• Ian Fleming, writer of James Bond, also wrote Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, a children's novel about a magical car.
  • His tenth Bond novel, The Spy Who Loved Me, is told from the First Person perspective of the woman in the story, rather than his usual third-person perspective focusing on Bond. (He didn't like the result, though fans of the books generally find it an interesting experiment.)
• Erin Hunter is actually a Pen Name for a series of writers. Warriors and Seekers share writers, however Survivors and Bravelands do not. As a result, the various series can differ in style:
  • Survivors is noticeably different from the other Erin Hunter titles. For starters, the protagonists are not Kid Heroes. Pups do appear but Lucky and the others are mainly adults. The series is also much heavier on Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp" than the others and their Animal Religion is different (instead of just an afterlife, they also anthropomorphise the sun, moon, rivers, and other natural phenomenon).
  • Seekers has a heavier Green Aesop than other Erin series. It also features different Animal Naming Conventions: the animals have names from human languages (such as Tobi and Kallik) and characters keep the same name their entire life.
• Diana Wynne Jones primarily wrote lighthearted fantasy works, that were often at least slightly parodic and usually didn't play everything straight. And then there's The Dalemark Quartet, which, while being most definitely fantasy and young adult literature, is much more serious in tone, and a straight fantasy work without a hint of parody. It has a noticeably different feel than anything else she wrote.
• Robert Munsch often makes kids' books with hilarious, over-the-top situations and cartoony characters and colours. But then along came Love You Forever, the biggest tearjerker of all kid's books...
• Dav Pilkey is best known for his humor books, especially Captain Underpants, or otherwise for his books for little kids like Dragon and The Dumb Bunnies. In 1996, he wrote and illustrated God Bless The Gargoyles.
• David Ritz spends a lot of time writing (and ghostwriting) biographies about musicians, comedians, and athletes. He writes the occasional romance novel, but his one true oddball is the 1981 Speculative Fiction sports/fantasy/romance novel The Man Who Brought the Dodgers Back to Brooklyn.
• A.N. Wilson is known for his non-fiction works, including books about religion and biographies. He's also released two xenofiction books about cats called Stray and its Lighter and Softer Spin-Offspring sequel Tabitha.
• Ursula K. Le Guin is best known for her adult-geared speculative fiction and science fiction. However, one of her best-known series Catwings is a children's series about cats with wings.
• Rebus author Ian Rankin has two, both examples of Early-Installment Weirdness: The Flood, a coming-of-age novel with Gothic overtones, and Westwind, a techno-thriller. The former is just about on the periphery of the same 'Verse as his later novels, but the latter is definitely not.
• The Bad Guys series by Aaron Blabey is a graphic novel chapter book series. While still meant for a younger audience, they are very different than his standard rhyming children's picture books.
• Mikhail Lermontov’s main male characters are not the best guys to have a romance with. They are selfish, or Yandere, or at best Loved I Not Honor More, or some combination thereof (and if they are actually nice, they generally get killed off). However, he also wrote A Wanderer’s Prayer, a beautifully touching short poem where the narrator is of I Want My Beloved to Be Happy mindset, praying to the Blessed Virgin to help and protect an unnamed “innocent maiden”, including giving her "companions full of care”.
• Nanako Tsujimura actually mostly writes science fiction and fantasy. The major outlier is the one series of hers that got turned into an anime and translated into English: the contemporary mystery series The Case Files of Jeweler Richard.
• Harry Martinson was primarily an author of leftist social critiques and travelogues inspired by his years as a merchant seaman. However, the work that catapulted him to international fame and eventually led to his winning the 1974 Nobel Prize for Literature was Aniara, an extremely dark and depressing piece of dystopian science fiction that, for added weirdness, was also a collection of poetry.
• Bruce Coville: Coville is well known for his stories about magic and science fiction, making a handful of stories without those elements into his oddballs.
  • Oddly Enough: Oddest of All contains "What's the Worst That Could Happen?", which is one of Coville's very few stories to not have anything fantastic happening. There's no magical or supernatural elements, no aliens or fantastic technology, just a normal kid trying to confess to a girl that he likes her and get over his stage fright in time to perform in the skit they're supposed to do. Even when said skit goes horribly wrong, it's all due to natural causes.
  • Fortune's Journey, likewise, has no fantastic elements — it's a historical fiction story set in the 1850s about a teenager who's inherited an acting company from her father and is just trying to keep them afloat on their journey to California.
• Elmore Leonard's short novel Touch seems glaringly out of place as a supernatural thriller compared with the rest of his collection of crime novels.
• The Big U, a college campus satire novel by none other than Neal Stephenson, science-fiction writer and author of Snow Crash. He does not like the book and discontinued publishing for a while. Then people started paying hundreds of dollars for old copies of it, and he had it republished, saying that "the only thing worse than people reading the book was paying that much to read it." To be fair, it was his first novel.
• John Grisham usually writes legal fiction. Only five aren't of this genre, and one of them is Skipping Christmas (which was later adapted as Christmas with the Kranks). A Christmas Special, of all things. A Painted House, a coming-of-age story in Depression-era Arkansas, is another. He also wrote An Innocent Man which is legal nonfiction and the only nonfiction book he has written so far.
• While it's in the sci-fi genre like most of his stories, Good Night, Mr. James by Clifford D. Simak has been described by the author himself as unique; it's much darker in tone than most of his work, and has a Shoot the Shaggy Dog ending.
• Comic novelist Kingsley Amis (using the pseudonym "Robert Markham") wrote Colonel Sun, the first James Bond novel published after Ian Fleming's death.
• Roald Dahl, world famous for his children's novels, also wrote My Uncle Oswald, an erotic softcore satire. Exactly why becomes more clear when one learns that he was an inveterate womanizer. One of his jobs in World War II actually required him to seduce well-connected American women into political compliance.
• Jack London is famous for his adventure stories set in the 19th century American West.
  • He also wrote The Iron Heel, which is about the rise of an oligarchic regime in the United States and is often called the earliest of modern dystopias.
  • He also wrote "The Star Rover", about a man who astral travels into several previous lives.
  • Might is Right is a social Darwinist and egoist anarchist tract first published in 1896 that is credited to one "Ragnar Redbeard", a pseudonym for an unknown writer. Most scholars believe that either London or Arthur Desmond wrote it, even though both of them were staunch socialists; if so, it would diverge sharply from both authors' body of work. (London also would've had to be a teenager at the time if he wrote it, though to be fair, large chunks of it do read like the ramblings of an edgy teenage Übermensch wannabe.)
• Roger Zelazny is primarily known for writing science fiction and fantasy, but he also co-wrote (with Gerald Hausman) the novel Wilderness, a straightforward story of frontier survival.
• James Patterson is so well known for writing thrillers that when he wrote Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas, a romance novel, the television commercial even lampshaded the trope by saying "By James Patterson. Yes, James Patterson."
• Robert W. Chambers, the author of the supremely creepy ''The Repairer of Reputations'' and ''The Yellow Sign,'' mostly wrote light, fluffy romantic comedy stories. A reader looking for more weirdness is likely to be very disappointed.
• Orson Scott Card, writer of Ender's Game and other science fiction and fantasy stories, also wrote a series of soap-opera-ish books about women in the Bible. This makes more sense when you remember how much his religion impacts even his better-known stories.
• Stephen Donaldson is famous for writing speculative fiction: The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Mordant's Need, The Gap Cycle. He is not at all famous for his series of detective novels entitled The Man Who [did something]. (Interestingly, he's in the habit of writing a new detective story after completing a series of fantasy novels: it seems to be how he winds down.)
• Suspense novelist Dean R. Koontz surprised his fan base with an uplifting but dark illustrated children's book called "Oddkins" in 1989. He then followed it with the illustrated kids' Christmas books "Santa's Twin," and its sequel "Robot Santa," though those were much more comedic in tone.
• Po Bronson wrote the novels Bombardiers, about Wall Street greed, and then The First 20 Million Is Always the Hardest and The Nudist on the Late Shift, a novel and non-fiction books, respectively, about Silicon Valley. Then he wrote What Should I Do With My Life? and had this to say:
  My last three books were set in the world of business, and suddenly I'm writing about bodyworkers and high lamas? What's my dad going to think? Will the Wall Street Journal ever talk to me again?
• Robin McKinley, who usually writes YA fairy tale retellings, also wrote Sunshine, an urban fantasy book for adults.
• Robert E. Howard is mostly known for Heroic Fantasy tales. But also wrote several Westerns, "spicy tales" (adventures with implied sexual content), and a few comedies.
• Norwegian Wood, a gentle, tragic coming of age tale, is this for Japanese surrealist author Haruki Murakami. His work is usually compared to Philip K. Dick.
• P.D. James, a famous British crime writer, also wrote The Children of Men, a dystopian novel.
• David Gemmell, one of the premier writers of Heroic Fantasy, wrote a Thriller named White Knight, Black Swan under the pseudonym Ross Harding, to avoid leading readers to expect another Heroic Fantasy.
• China Miéville is well-known for his Steampunk, sci-fi, and Urban Fantasy which is why The City & the City leaves such a strong impression on the reader. The Reveal, which does in the wizard, is that the whole plot has nothing do to with magic, but was driven by a Mega Corp that used citizens' Selective Obliviousness for their own ends.
• Val McDermid, well-known for her crime novels in which violence, torture, and murder in often described in disturbing detail, has also written a cutesy children's picture book called My Granny is a Pirate.
• After becoming famous for Harry Potter, J. K. Rowling hasn't returned to fantasy since, writing first general fiction and then mystery thrillers. So her most iconic work is something of a Black Sheep Hit.
• Jane Austen was known for her "light and bright and sparkling" romantic comedies about wealthy girls marrying wealthier men while dealing with pompous, annoying relatives and rivals during their courtship. Mansfield Park is basically a case study in child abuse, depicting how the psychological trauma the heroine has endured courtesy of her wicked aunt for eight years has made her grow up into an Extreme Doormat and Shrinking Violet who believes she has no right to be happy. Unsurprisingly, whether justly or not, it's her least popular novel.
• Science Fiction author Stanisław Lem also wrote Hospital of the Transfiguration, a semi-autobiographical novel about a Polish doctor trying to survive the Nazi occupation of his (and Lem's) homeland. (This will frequently be found in the "Science Fiction" sections of libraries and bookstores, despite containing no sci-fi elements whatsoever.)
• Jim Butcher was quite successful with The Dresden Files when all of sudden, he released Furies of Calderon, a huge departure from his typical hard-boiled, first-person magic detective stories. The idea came from a bet where he would take two bad ideas and write a successful story about them and was given The Lost Roman Legion and Pokemon. With the series The Cinder Spires he has also begun writing Steampunk.
• The Long Earth by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter is reasonably hard Sci-Fi, and while it has humorous moments, it's not a comedy. It might be based on an idea Sir Terry had before he became synonymous with funny fantasy, but it's very different from his usual works. And while his love of Victoriana is visible in later Discworld novels, Dodger is unique in that it contains no fantastic elements at all.
• Martin Amis is mostly known for the flippant social and political criticism in his novels, short stories, and essays. He also wrote Invasion of the Space Invaders: An Addict's Guide to Battle Tactics, Big Scores and the Best Machines, in which he interspersed commentary on the phenomenon of video games with reviews and tips on the latest arcade games from the perspective of a fan. The book is so dissimilar to the rest of his oeuvre that it is often assumed that he later disowned it, though he never did.

Live-Action TV

• Quinn Martin, the mastermind behind such Crime Dramas as The Untouchables and The Fugitive, also served as executive producer for the sci-fi series The Invaders (1967).
• Mark Goodson Productions was known as one of the biggest Game Show producers, but the company also made a dramatic anthology called The Web, along with the westerns Jefferson Drum and Branded, and another anthology called The Richard Boone Show.
• The Orville is a relatively serious science fiction drama series done in the style of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Critics wondered if the dick and fart jokes were added at the insistence of executives so people wouldn't be caught off guard that it was a Seth MacFarlane creation, as he is known for creating raunchy comedies.
• Rick Siggelkow mostly produces shows aimed at preschoolers, mainly based on pre-existing British properties. However, two works of his are aimed at older children: Ace Lightning and Dinosapien.
• When you think of true crime documentaries, do you think Napoleon Dynamite? Because Murder Among the Mormons is definitely a departure for comedy director Jared Hess as it focuses on the case surrounding psychopathic fraudster Mark Hofmann.
• Once Kevin Feige and Marvel Studios branched the Marvel Cinematic Universe onto Disney+, it was right away a departure from the usual action-oriented approach of the preceding superhero movies, with WandaVision being half sitcom homage, half mystery with psychological and supernatural horror elements.
• The 1980 television play Blade on the Feather is an ironic pastiche of John le Carré, lacking the musical breaks and weirdly fantastic elements associated with writer Dennis Potter.
• Before 2019, Craig Mazin was primarily known for writing comedy films such as Scary Movie 3, Superhero Movie and the sequels to The Hangover. Then he helmed the critically acclaimed HBO miniseries Chernobyl, an utterly haunting depiction of arguably the worst man-made disaster in history, that often feels less like a historical drama and more like a Cosmic Horror Story come to life.
• Vin Di Bona is known for family-friendly fare such as America's Funniest Home Videos and its many spinoffs. Then there's the short-lived Showtime mockumentary sitcom Sherman Oaks, which featured offensive humor and gratuitous nudity.
• Chuck Lorre is known for his multi-camera sitcoms shot before a live studio audience, and for being one of the last holdouts in both of these traditions. Young Sheldon is a single-camera series without a laugh track.
• Although they've dipped their hands into live-action content prior to their 2013 reboot, PBS Kids is very well-known for its roster of animated cartoons. However, there is one show post-reboot that is a complete 180 from their previous works: Odd Squad, which is primarily live-action but has some CGI elements. In spite of the 2-8 age demographic, the show is much darker than other PBS Kids shows, showing near-death experiences, trauma and magical violence (among other things) while still maintaining a TV-Y rating. It's also worth noting that it was once mistakenly listed as TV-Y7 on PBS Kids's video app.
• Letterkenny is this for WildBrain, who almost exclusively produce content for pre-school and child audiences. Letterkenny is a live-action series that sounds innocent enough on paper, that is until you realise the show is filled to the brim with tobacco and drug usage which is a major focus of the show, and non-stop excessive swearing that is said every few seconds. The same applies to its spin-off Shoresy, which has as much swearing as the show it spun-off from.
• Castle: An In-Universe example in "The Time of Our Lives", which (maybe) visits an Alternate Timeline where pulp crime novelist Castle never met Beckett and made her his new literary muse, and instead wrote a Slice of Life novel that completely flopped and basically ended his career.
• Takashi Miike, a famously transgressive, countercultural Japanese filmmaker known for his love of ultraviolence and shocking imagery, also created Idol x Warrior Miracle Tunes!, a Magic Idol Singer series aimed at young girls.

Music

• Richard and Karen Carpenter were best known for soft rock ballads, but took the occasional unexpected left turn, like putting a furious fuzztone guitar solo in the otherwise sedate "Goodbye to Love", doing a cover of Klaatu's Progressive Rock hit "Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft", and releasing the bouncy, slightly-bluegrass-flavored "Sweet, Sweet Smile" ... which became a top 10 hit on the Country Music chart in 1978.
• Country legend Buck Owens had already displayed a lot of non-country influences in his music by 1969, but that year he released two singles that were much more rock than country: "Who's Gonna Mow Your Grass", which featured fuzztone guitar and harpsichord (!) as lead instruments, and a live cover of "Johnny B. Goode" that would've put most garage bands to shame. However, he was a big enough star that they still managed to become #1 country hits.
  • Owens received some backlash from longtime fans for those two records, plus a bluegrass/gospel cover of Simon & Garfunkel's "Bridge Over Troubled Water," due to a pledge he signed several years earlier stating he would never record a song he didn't consider a country song. Owens defended his choice of music, noting that he said he would not record in a pop-country vein, not record rockabilly or bluegrass (forms of country music).
  • That stated, from about the mid-1970s to early 1980s, in part due to massive grief over the death of his best friend Don Rich in a tragic accident in 1974, an apathetic Owens began recording pop-country. While the music itself isn't bad, it also did not represent Owens at his best, something he later admitted. It wasn't until the late 1980s, when he had a brief comeback with Dwight Yoakam on "Streets of Bakersfield", that he began to record in his classic styles and made vintage Buck Owens music.
• Composer Kikuo is most known for his dark and often disturbing Vocaloid music, but he's also done some happy and cute moe Denpa songs. Would you believe this is the same guy that did "I'm Sorry I'm Sorry"? Even within his Vocaloid works there's "Curry of Pure Water Song", a happy and upbeat song meant to advertise curry. There's also Infinite Dreamer, which sounds like a very mainstream pop song with none of Kikuo's signature surreal sounds, although the lyrics do have some dark implications.
• WASP had Kill, Fuck, Die, their industrial metal album. The song-writing itself wasn't actually that far removed from the band's previous few albums, just a bit angrier, but the production turned it into something totally unlike anything else the band has recorded before or since.
• Diary of Dreams is normally Dark Wave, but The Anatomy of Silence is entirely acoustic neoclassical songs.
• An unusual case: country star Charley Pride recording the disco-flavored Dallas Cowboys theme song in 1979.
• Happy hardcore act Dune released two albums of orchestral ballads; Forever and Forever and Ever.
• Alt-rockers Eels with Cold Dead Hand. In this instance, they teamed up (as the Clutterbusters) with Jim Carrey (Lonesome Earl) to record a Country Music-style satirical piece on gun politics. For good measure, the band members dressed up as Abraham Lincoln, John Lennon, and Mahatma Gandhi — peace advocates who were all shot dead.
• In a Metal Mood: No More Mr. Nice Guy an album of metal and hard rock covers by family-friendly Pat Boone. This one's more of an oddball in lyrical content than actual sound.
• Joy Electric is Synth-Pop, as the name implies. He dropped the "synth" half on the album Unelectric and recorded acoustic arrangements of prior songs. And he dropped the "pop" half for The Tick Tock Companion, which featured completely improvised, ambient synth jamming.
• "Anniversary" by Dark Cabaret artist Voltaire is a straight love song, with no references to death, goths, evil, or Sci-Fi shows. His later country album may also count. The musical style is different, but the subjects of the songs are his usual fare. There's also his New Wave album, "What are the Oddz?".
• Although it was recorded as a joke, Anal Cunt's Picnic Of Love is a complete inversion of their trademark style: instead of short grindcore songs with Black Comedy lyrics and song titles, it consists of 2-3 minute acoustic ballads sung in falsetto, with titles like "I'd Love To Have Your Daughter's Hand In Marriage".
• Ween's 12 Golden Country Greats was a country album, which used veteran country session musicians as a backing band. Though they'd had the odd country-influenced song before and since, it was still a pretty unexpected turn from their Genre Roulette-influenced sound, especially because the album generally plays it straight (well, aside from "Piss Up A Rope" and "Mr. Richard Smoker" anyway).
• Most Pat Benatar albums are album-oriented rock and roll... except True Love, which is jump blues.
• Alice in Chains' Sap and Jar Of Flies EPs. The albums surrounding them can best be described as grunge metal, but these eps are acoustic alternative rock.
• Country Music singer Alan Jackson did a very blues-pop oriented album, Like Red on a Rose, in 2006. It was also the only album on which he did not work with producer Keith Stegall, instead choosing bluegrass pioneer Alison Krauss. Also, despite having written maybe 75% of his own songs, his only contribution as a writer on Like Red on a Rose was "A Woman's Love", a re-recording of a track from his 1999 album High Mileage.
• Attention Please by Boris is a dance-rock album that sounds nothing like their usual metal/hardcore/noise oriented albums.
• Metallica: The Load records, which completely abandoned their classic thrash style for a bluesy hard rock style. Then, they experimented with Alternative/Nu Metal with St. Anger. They have, since, returned to said thrash style.
• Ronan Harris of the Futurepop group VNV Nation collaborated with the Goth Rock band Mono Inc. for the single "Boatman".
• 99% of Santana's songs are Latin-infused rock of some kind with some glimpses of other popular genres... except the song "America" off of Shaman, which is, of all things, Nu Metal, thanks to being performed with and written by P.O.D.
• Frank Zappa's album Cruisin' With Ruben And The Jets was considered an unusual departure in his oeuvre. The album contains no pointed political Satire, no Bawdy Song material, no sudden musical experimentations, no clashing of different musical genres, but is just an honest, straight-faced Homage/Pastiche to the Doo-wop bands he adored. For his fans, this was a huge Audience-Alienating Premise.
• Rocker Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music, a double-album of proto-noise music consisting entirely of guitar feedback, a very huge departure from his experimental but usually still accessible glam rock and art pop output. It was a long-standing assumption that the album was a Take That! at his record label to get out of his contract. However, Reed later admitted that he'd been completely serious about the album and also on a lot of drugs.
• The Melvins have had several album-length left turns, but possibly the most surprising is The Bootlicker: while their sound usually involves sludgy walls of feedback, this album features absolutely no guitar distortion. The actual content doesn't get any lighter and softer, but the arrangements bring to mind Tom Waits and Krautrock more than they do grunge or stoner metal. Freak Puke by Melvins Lite is probably the closest they've come to returning to this sound - that album did prominently distorted guitars; However, with Trevor Dunn sitting in on standup bass and Dale Crover restricted to playing his drums with brushes, it also emphasized the more jazzy and experimental elements of their sound.
• The Butthole Surfers' Weird Revolution, which is much more electronica-influenced than anything they'd previously done. It may have been an attempt to roll with their popular Black Sheep Hit "Pepper", although it was actually preceded by a couple of electronic-based soundtrack contributions, along with the similar but much more experimental After The Astronaut, which got shelved after promo copies got scathing reviews.
• R.E.M.'s 1994 album Monster was this on purpose, featuring distorted, tremolo-heavy sex-rock songs compared to their usual folky alt-rock (with the exception of "Strange Currencies" and "Tongue"). Though it sold well at the time, many did not like the album (at least not at first), the band's mainstream presence would rapidly drop off with their next album (which actually was well-received upon release and is still well-regarded today), and to this day it can't be mentioned online without it being brought up how common it is in used CD stores. The unreleased demos included on its 25th Anniversary reissue are far more in the traditional R.E.M. mode, and them being finished might have led to it being better received. At the time though, the group was so against being typecast as a band that played ballads such as "Losing My Religion" and "Everybody Hurts" that they deliberately did an about-face.
• Kanye West is normally known for rap music, but 808s & Heartbreak is an electropop album.
• Almost every opera by Giuseppe Verdi is a tragedy or a strong drama. However, he also wrote two comedies, Un giorno di regno and Falstaff.
• George Gershwin co-composed Song of the Flame, a 1925 operetta set in Glorious Mother Russia, writing tunes far removed from his usual jazzy style. This also represents his sole collaboration with Oscar Hammerstein II. (Three years later, George Gershwin was hired to compose another exotic operetta, East is West, this time to Ira's lyrics; this show was canceled in the early stages of production.)
• Teen star Lesley Gore performed catchy pop songs in the Girl Group vein in The '60s, such as her Signature Song "It's My Party", balanced with more sophisticated ballads like "You Don't Own Me". Her sporadic adult recording career, in which she emerged in full as a singer-songwriter, largely consisted of downtempo or mid-tempo, stripped-down, jazzy ballads in the vein of Carole King's Tapestry. In 1975, however, she reunited with her Sixties-era producer Quincy Jones to produce...a very disco/funk/soul-styled album called Love Me By Name.
  • Lesley herself would appear to be one in Quincy Jones' pop production career; even the Allmusic website's biography of Lesley would mention that "retrospectives of Jones' career usually downplay or omit his work with Gore, although it was among his most commercially successful; he's known now for recordings that are, well, funkier. But his success with Gore did a lot to build his already impressive résumé within the industry."
• Filipino comedian, rapper, and singer Michael V is best known for his novelty songs and literal English-to-Tagalog or Tagalog-to-English translations of popular songs. But in 2016, he went completely serious in the upbeat, yet relevant song "Dapat Tama", his parent TV network GMA's official song for the 2016 Philippine presidential elections.
• Neil Young was best known for guitar-heavy folk rock until he released his 1982 album Trans, featuring extensive use of synthesisers, vocoder-distorted vocals, and Science Fiction influenced lyrics and artwork, quite unlike anything he released before or since. It was followed in the same year by Everybody's Rockin' (a rockabilly album). He was ready to release Old Ways (a country album) before Geffen actually filed a lawsuit against him for making music "unrepresentative" of his previous work.
• Nickelback has always been associated with, depending on who you ask, the hard rock community since their debut in 1995. So it was a serious shock for many when their eighth studio album, No Fixed Address, was discovered to heavily feature, of all genres, Disco and Electronica. Their signature sound is not entirely absent from the album, however. On their debut album Curb on the other hand they are virtually unrecognizable, as the music has a much heavier and less commercial Grunge/Alternative Rock sound and Chad's vocal style is quite different.
• Singer and illustrator Toromi is mostly known for Denpa songs, but she also wrote the lyrics to the Gensou Airly song "Welcome to Club Airly!"
• Garth Brooks was the face of Country Music in The '90s. So how did he finish the decade? With an album, In the Life of Chris Gaines, which featured him singing under the guise of a fictitious alternative-rock singer named Chris Gaines. Bizarrely, it also produced his only Top 40 hit on the Hot 100.
• Alan Jackson did this twice in 2006 when, in the span of a few months, he departed from his twangy fiddle-and-steel brand of country to release Precious Memories, an album of gospel standards and hymns with minimalist production. It was followed by Like Red on a Rose, a smooth, slick, adult contemporary-leaning album full of mellow, lush romantic songs. The latter also featured only one song written by him (a redo of his 1998 song "A Woman's Love"), and was his only album to date not produced by Keith Stegall (Alison Krauss produced it instead). He did it again in 2013 when he released a follow-up to Precious Memories composed of similar material to the first, followed months later by his first bluegrass album.
• For most of her career, Kathy Mattea had a very sparse, folksy style of country with hints of bluegrass and Celtic music. But her 1994 album Walking Away a Winner had a heavier country-pop and country-rock influence, with many critics comparing the album to Bonnie Raitt or Mary Chapin Carpenter.
• Avril Lavigne's "Hello Kitty", an electro-dance song with dubstep elements and Gratuitous Japanese quite unlike her usual Pop Punk or rock output. To say nothing of the J-Pop-inspired video.
• Lil Wayne, one of the most popular rappers of the 2000s released Rebirth, a rock album, in the 2010s.
• Thrash Metal group Celtic Frost released the Hair Metal album Cold Lake in 1988 much to the shock of fans.
• HoneyWorks has a lot of songs talking about heterosexual romance, and even their Love Triangle songs are based on this. "Nonfantasy", "Gimme Gimme Call", and "Minikui Ikimono", however, deal with decidedly non-heterosexual romance; the former ends in a MMF threesome marriage while the grooms kiss each other; the second ends with the two boys in the Love Triangle dating each other instead while the girl ends the PV dejected but comforted by her friends; and the last is the only one taken semi-seriously, as it deals with the Gayngst of a girl in love with her straight best friend.
• Bloodhound Gang are generally known for their comedic rap-rock-punk songs full of samples, clever puns, and Toilet Humour. Their 2005 album Hefty Fine includes the slow-paced, serious "Something Diabolical", which features HIM's singer Ville Valo and sounds like HIM's usual goth rock output.
• Another Country Music example: Singer-songwriter Paul Overstreet is a devout Christian, but his faith didn't show up explicitly in his work outside of his generally avoiding singing or writing songs glamorizing alcohol or adultery. However, in 1995 he co-wrote a single praise and worship song titled "God is Good All the Time" alongside veteran worship leader Don Moen, even providing guest vocals on a recording of that song for an album recorded by Moen.
• Chris Cornell's solo career either rocked hard like his band Soundgarden or went for a pared-down, mostly acoustic sound. Aside from the Timbaland-produced Scream, which is reviled exactly for how dance-pop beats and Cornell's rock crooning don't gel at all.
• All of Eminem's albums are Angst-ridden, borderline parodic Hardcore Hip-Hop with silly horror elements, at least traces of a Subverted Kids' Show tone, and confessional, imflammatory lyrics about his personal life — except Infinite, an optimistic, lyrical boom-bap album he made early in his career. In addition to having a totally different production style and flow to his later work, with a level of technical lyricism that he wouldn't approach again until The Marshall Mathers LP 2 nearly two decades later, it contains plenty of Hilarious in Hindsight elements. These include an unironic love song to his wife Kim in which he promises to be a good husband to her (he murders her on one song each of his next three albums), and a song which opens with him doing the signature nose-pinch vocal he later uses on "The Real Slim Shady" as he warns about a crazy Serial Killer escaping a mental hospital... who does not turn out to be Eminem's Ax-Crazy Slim Shady alter-ego, but a rival rapper who Eminem heroically fights. The negative reaction to Infinite led to Eminem creating his Slim Shady character and drastically altering his style into the offensive shock-comedy that has remained his Signature Style for the rest of his career.
• Iggy Pop typically specializes in art punk, with his work with The Stooges being Proto Punk. The Idiot and Blah-Blah-Blah meanwhile diverge from this, respectively being a doomy industrial album and an effect-heavy dance-pop album. Both albums share a common thread in that they were co-produced and co-written by David Bowie, who used the records to explore styles that he would further dive into on Low and Never Let Me Down, respectively; Pop even dismissed Blah-Blah-Blah as a Bowie album that he just happened to sing on. Meanwhile, the other Pop/Bowie collaboration, Lust for Life, would be more in-line with Pop's typical output.
• Mike Patton is an insanely prolific singer whose lyrics for about half of his discography are screaming and he can adapt to any genre, but his most accessible work is, of all things, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987) theme song remix for Shredder's Revenge.
• Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross of Nine Inch Nails became Pop Star Composers with The Social Network, David Fincher brought them back in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo 2011 and Gone Girl, and another mature work followed with Watchmen (2019). Then they did a Pixar movie, of all things, in Soul.
• Hourglass, a Solo Side Project by Dave Gahan, frontman of Depeche Mode, while still following the band's traditional Alternative Dance/New Wave Music approach as per the usual Depeche Mode style, takes what the band is typically known for and takes it to great extremes, making it stand out with its smoother tones, stronger emotions, and the general industrial atmosphere that isn't applied elsewhere on Depeche Mode's discography.
• El-P is an alternative rapper/producer known for bombastic, dystopian records with complex lyrics strongly inspired by Philip K. Dick. Despite this, in 2004, he released an instrumental jazz album.
• The Queen album Hot Space is full of disco songs, a departure from their usual rock music. After Hot Space they went back to rock, albeit updating it for the The '80s, and never touched disco again. Although Freddie Mercury continued to explore the genre in his solo music.
• Fabio Lione is primarily known for singing Power Metal, most notably being the lead singer of Rhapsody of Fire for 21 years. But he's also dabbled in Eurobeat, with one song even being featured in Initial D! He also did a Eurobeat cover of "Ave Maria" for Disney of all things.
• Willie Nelson's roots lie in country music but broke into jazz with his 1978 album Stardust, which consisted entirely of jazz standards.
• Dubstep producer Boregore took an abrupt turn to jazz in his 2018 EP Adventures in Time.
• Blue Amazon's remix of Placebo's "Nancy Boy" is drum n bass rather than the former's usual progressive trance.
• The Osmond Brothers, eager to shake up their white bread/bubblegum image, tried their hand at Hard Rock, of all things. "Crazy Horses" was a top 20 hit in America in 1972 and was their Breakthrough Hit in the UK, where it went all the way to #2. It has also attracted a number of semi-tongue-in-cheek/semi-serious Cover Versions from bands like KMFDM and Electric Six.
• Disturbed is most well known for two things; their long and continuous career in metal, and their one-shot orchestral soft rock cover of The Sound of Silence.
• Paul McCartney is best known for his pop-rock music (exemplified, of course, by The Beatles but also in the 1970s with Wings). However, he's also dabbled in classical music, film scores, and experimental ambient electronica, the last of which is usually credited to "The Fireman".
• Snoop Dogg, famous of course for his Gangsta Rap, raised some eyebrows with 2018's "Bible of Love," a double album of Gospel Music played perfectly straight. Snoop argued that Real Men Love Jesus and audiences seemed to agree, sending it to #1 on the Gospel charts.
• TechN9ne is known for his incredibly fast, infinitely creative brand of Hip-Hop and all of his output reflects that except one: The Therapy EP, which changes his style to loud and abrasive Nu Metal. This is due to it being produced by Ross Robinson.

Theatre

• Alexander Ostrovsky's bread and butter was gritty, realistic social satire, his plots usually taking place in Present Day Russia (meaning the 19th century) and only occasionally in historical settings. Then suddenly he wrote The Snow Maiden, which is Magical Realism laden with symbolism and philosophy and set in (vaguely) pre-Christian Rus (basically, an Unbuilt Trope for the Slavic fantasy subgenre which has flourished in Russia since the 1990s, more than a century after Ostrovsky's time). The audience was more confused than impressed, and it took Rimsky-Korsakov turning the play into an opera to boost its popularity.
• Jean Racine was primarily known as a tragedian. However, he wrote Les Plaideurs, his only comedy.

Video Games

• Berzerk Studios is primarily known for their violent and Gorn-filled games such as Trap Master, The Breach, and Infernax. They also developed Frantic Frigates, a Shoot 'Em Up that lacks any blood and gore, and Just Shapes & Beats, a Rhythm Game / Bullet Hell in which blood and death is little to non-existent.
• Bioware is well known for its Western RPGs. However, three of the works it made are much different: their debut project, Shattered Steel, was a Giant Robot Simulation, MDK2 is a Third-Person Shooter, Sonic Chronicles is an Eastern RPG, and Anthem is an online-only loot shooter filled with microtransactions (and was completely their own idea, not EA's as is commonly thought).
• CAVE is well-known for its line of colorful arcade Bullet Hell shooters. Then they made Shin Megami Tensei IMAGINE in a role-reversal with Atlus, who published the first two DonPachi games.
• British developer The Creative Assembly is primarily known for the Total War Real-Time Strategy games. Naturally, their most successful game was Alien: Isolation, a licensed, First-Person Shooter Survival Horror based on the franchise of the same name.
• Criterion Games is known almost exclusively for their racing games, particularly the Burnout series and the Need for Speed games from 2010 to 2013. Black was a bit of an anomaly for the Guildford-based studio, as it was a boots-on-the-ground first-person shooter with no vehicles the player can pilot. While they have since provided assistance with Battlefield Hardline, Star Wars Battlefront (2015) and Star Wars Battlefront II (2017), Black continues to be the only shooter developed by Criterion.
• Croteam is mainly known for their Serious Sam franchise, shooters featuring a sarcastic One-Man Army anti-hero (or parody thereof) mowing down endless waves of mooks and giant monsters. They also made The Talos Principle, a first-person puzzle game with no violence, a philosophical bent about the nature of self and a plot that gets unfurled by reading logs scattered around and talking with an artificial intelligence. It received a great amount of critical acclaim.
• Eden Games are mainly known for their Racing Games, such as V-Rally, Test Drive Unlimited and Gear.Club. However, much like BioWare, three of the games it made are much different: Kya: Dark Lineage was a 3D Platform Game, Titeuf: Méga compet' was a licensed Party Game released only in their native France, and their 2008 game Alone in the Dark was an In Name Only Actionized Reboot of a Survival Horror game.
• The Farm 51 is best known for Painkiller-inspired shooter games, namely Necro Vision and Painkiller: Hell and Damnation, the HD Video Game Remake of Painkiller. Their previous game, Deadfall Adventures, was somewhat more puzzle and story driven than their previous games but was still very much a first-person shooter. However, their 2017 game Get Even, despite being advertised as an FPS, was really more of an Environmental Narrative Game with stealth elements, and while it is possible to play it as a shooter, the gunplay is deliberately poor and the story heavily penalizes you for playing it as an FPS. The Farm 51 have acknowledged this approach was poorly received, and their next game, Chernobylite, while still story-driven, has much more of an emphasis on gameplay and doesn't heavily punish playing it as an FPS.
• FromSoftware are known for making gritty, violent, Nintendo Hard action games such as the Armored Core series, the Tenchu series, and the Thematic Series of Demon's Souls, the Dark Souls trilogy, and Bloodborne. However, they also released Déraciné, a VR adventure game about fairies with no violence at all, and also the light-hearted, cartoony The Adventures of Cookie & Cream.
• Ganbarion's gaming catalogue consists primarily of licensed action games based on One Piece (such the Unlimited trilogy and One Piece: World Seeker). However, among all those One Piece games are two projects they worked on with Nintendo: the dark fantasy Action RPG Pandora's Tower and fitness game Wii Fit U.
• Insomniac Games is renowned for their light-hearted, colorful, and cartoony platformer franchises, (Spyro the Dragon and Ratchet & Clank) so when the studio's gritty, darker, more realistic first-person shooter series Resistance is juxtaposed against their previous work, it can be pretty jarring at first.
• IO Interactive is known for their Hitman series of stealth action games as well as Kane & Lynch and Freedom Fighters (2003), which made the Lighter and Softer Hack and Slash platformer Mini Ninjas an outlier for them; they stated in interviews that they developed Mini Ninjas out of their desire to come up with a game they could "play with their kids". This reached a logical conclusion with the somewhat obscure animated series spinoff of the same name.
• David Jaffe is mostly known for his brutal and violent games like Twisted Metal and God of War. He was also one of the designers for Mickey Mania for the Sega Genesis.
• Kitten Kaboodle, a hyper-colorful Pengo-like 1988 Arcade Game by Konami starring a Cute Kitten, looks and plays nothing like the Shoot Em Ups and adventure-oriented games the company was well known for at the time.
• Level-5 is known for games with colorful, heavily stylized graphics, but White Knight Chronicles features a more realistic art style.
• Midway Games was well known for arcade-style games, or titles otherwise predicated on intense action. They also published the first two Shadow Hearts RPGs.
• miHoYo's works tend to be mobile action games with an Improbably Female Cast. Tears of Themis, meanwhile, goes in the opposite direction, being an Otome Game visual novel with Ace Attorney-style investigation.
• NDcube is synonymous with the Party Game genre and board games thanks to their work on the Mario Party series and Clubhouse Games, which can make it a shock to learn that the studio's very first game was F-Zero: Maximum Velocity, a high-speed futuristic racing title (as was Tube Slider, the last game they made before going dormant for seven years).
• Yasuhiro Nightow is primarily known for science fiction works with a futuristic or contemporary setting like Trigun, Gungrave and Blood Blockade Battlefront, but he also did the art for Energy Breaker, a fantasy JRPG.
• Nintendo:
  • Metroid serves as this among the company's catalogue of franchises, with the original NES game even being created as the "anti-Mario". The grim and dark nature of the sci-fi franchise contrasts even greater when placed alongside most of the other series that co-creator Yoshio Sakamoto oversees, which are all lighthearted and cartoony series (WarioWare, Rhythm Heaven, and Tomodachi Life).
  • While Nintendo publishing a third-party title internationally isn't at all strange, a peculiar instance of this is them distributing R-Type — as in the original 1987 game — for North American arcades, with it even being the last arcade title Nintendo would ever release.
• Obsidian Entertainment is synonymous with open-ended Western RPGs. Assembled from the remnants of Black Isle (and Troika, itself a Black Isle successor studio), Obsidian has created several acclaimed games in the genre (and the occasional Acclaimed Flop). These include Pillars of Eternity, The Outer Worlds, and their best known title, Fallout: New Vegas. Which is why it was so surprising when they released Pentiment, a Historical Fiction Adventure Game.
• On, the creator of the Grow games and other web games, is mostly known for making games with cute and colorful graphics in Sugar Bowl worlds that are meant to be played by everyone, including and notably children. In 2020, he made his first and currently only R-rated game: Zombie Trapping, which includes zombies and blood and has fewer bright colors than his usual games. It really stands out visually compared to his other games.
• Overdrive is a maker of eroge but Go! Go! Nippon! is completely devoid of any erotic content, even kisses. Justified in that it's an educational (sort of) visual novel and thus needs to be accessed by anyone (mostly otaku, though).
• PlatinumGames is known for fast-paced, Nintendo Hard Stylish Action games like Bayonetta, God Hand (as Clover Studios), and NieR: Automata. They also made Infinite Space, an Animesque Space Opera turn-based RPG.
• Respawn Entertainment are known for being made of former team members of Infinity Ward who left and made Titanfall, Titanfall 2, and Apex Legends, all futuristic sci-fi First Person Shooters set in the same universe, with the single-player entries being linear. They then made Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, which is a third person hack-and-slash metroidvania soulslike platformer with elements of Tomb Raider, set in the Star Wars galaxy. However, their signature wall-running mechanic was implemented as one of the protagonist's force powers.
• Rockstar Games:
  • Rockstar is a developer and publisher famous for its self-conscious cultivation of a cool image, making their name with the Grand Theft Auto series and also releasing noir-inspired crime dramas, slick open-world street racers, ultraviolent slashers, adaptations of cult '70s action films, and gritty Westerns... so imagine everyone's surprise when they made Rockstar Games Presents Table Tennis. It was just that: a straightforward table tennis game, treated with the same seriousness as all of their other titles. Pretty much every retrospective on the game goes out of its way to note just how oddball and unlike the rest of the company's titles it was. Table Tennis was actually far more important to Rockstar than one may guess, as it was a test run for the new Rockstar Advanced Game Engine (RAGE) that powered titles like Grand Theft Auto IV and Red Dead Redemption during the seventh generation of gaming.
  • Bully could also count as pretty oddball by Rockstar's standards, given its Lighter and Softer tone compared to the rest of their games. Its Wide-Open Sandbox gameplay and sense of humor, though, were still very much in the Rockstar tradition.
• Rocksteady Studios is known these days for the Batman: Arkham Series. It might seem strange, then, that their debut title was a rather violent first-person shooter (the sort of game Batman himself would despise) by the name of Urban Chaos: Riot Response.
• Rather than a one-off, developer Syn-Sophia made a complete 180 with what kind of games they make. They were originally known for wrestling and beat-em-up games under the name AKI Corporation, but now exclusively make Virtual Paper Doll games including Style Savvy, the Pretty Series, and Fashion Dreamer.
• Sui Ishida is a mangaka known for creating Tokyo Ghoul, a psychological horror manga about violence between ghouls and humans. By contrast, his other work Jack Jeanne is a relatively light-hearted Romance Game about a theatre academy.
• Tango Gameworks had previously been known exclusively for fairly serious horror-based games with The Evil Within, its sequel, and Ghostwire: Tokyo. Hi-Fi RUSH, by contrast, is an over-the-top action-Rhythm Game hybrid with a very colorful and cartoony art style. The launch trailer even lampshades the genre shift:
  From the makers of The Evil Within (seriously)
• Treasure is mainly known for hyperkinetic, colorful and difficult 2D action games with original, innovative mechanics and an Animesque style, such as Gunstar Heroes, Alien Soldier or Mischief Makers. To the surprise of many they also made Light Crusader: a very standard, slow-paced Western-style action RPG with a Westernized art style and an isometric perspective that they never used before or since.
• Valve created several well known First-Person Shooters, like Half-Life, Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2 but it also has dabbled in other genres.
  • Portal, while a first person shooter of sorts, is a puzzle game that is mostly non-violent.
  • Dota 2 is a Multiplayer Online Battle Arena.
  • Alien Swarm is a FreeWare top down shooter.
• Westwood Studios is known for the Command & Conquer series of Real-Time Strategy games (though the studio wasn't limited to RTS, all their game series were), but also made Command & Conquer: Renegade, a First-Person Shooter. Outside of the series, Westwood was also responsible for quite a few non-RTS games such as a PC version of Monopoly, a Platform Game The Lion King, a fantasy RPG Nox, a point-and-click Adventure Game Blade Runner, and even a Massively Multiplayer Online Game Earth & Beyond.
• Zombie Studios was primarily known for making tactical shooters. In 2014 they made Daylight, a procedurally generated maze horror game primarily notable for being the first game made with Unreal Engine 4.
• Al Lowe, the creator of the very adult Leisure Suit Larry series, initially started out as an in-house developer of many Disney games for Sierra On-Line, The Black Cauldron being his most well-known at the time. Came to a complete circle when he created Torin's Passage, a game that harkened back to his pre-Larry days, which confused many people unfamiliar with Lowe's work prior to Leisure Suit Larry.
• Sierra co-founder Roberta Williams crossed this when she created her magnum opus, the gory and violent Phantasmagoria. Prior to Phantasmagoria, she was known for creating the King's Quest, Laura Bow, and Mixed-Up Mother Goose series, all meant for general audiences.
• Balan Wonderworld was the first 3D platformer published by legendary JRPG makers Square Enix, known for Final Fantasy, Kingdom Hearts, and Dragon Quest. Granted, they did not develop Balan Wonderworld, they were only the publishers, but there have been many reports of Executive Meddling from Square Enix, who were keen to massively expand the game's story and lore (including a tie-in novel) similar to typical JRPGs, culminating in the removal of Yuji Naka as director. General consensus is that they interfered too much in the development of a game in a genre they had no experience with, and it shows in the final product.

Visual Novels

• Last Chance in Xollywood: In-universe, Last Chance studio usually churns out No Budget Z-grade exploitation movies, but they once made a film titled Police on Trial, a documentary dealing with police brutality and social justice. Randy made it after her twin sister on Earth was shot for a speeding ticket.

Web Animation

• Canadian animator Alex Henderson's works include animated music videos for Power Metal bands like Alestorm and Gloryhammer . However, one that stands out is Breathing Space, which features Black Gryph0n's "Getting Stronger", a Pop song. There's also his pilot The Rhino and the Redbill, which is not only episode-lenght, but doesn't feature any songs at all.
• John P. McCann, who is known for writing episodes of family friendly cartoons such as Freakazoid! wrote every episode of Lobo (Webseries), an adult oriented cartoon.
• The Kris Straub behind the Mappy cartoon for ShiftyLook in the early 2010s is, indeed, the same Kris Straub behind such web horror series as Candle Cove and ＬＯＣＡＬ５８.
• Rooster Teeth is an entertainment company that bills itself as a "Comedy Gaming Community", which got its start with the military Work Com based on the Halo series Red vs. Blue, and is still primarily known for material related to gaming. However, their biggest hit is RWBY: a completely original Animesque action/adventure webseries that spawned a multimedia franchise that includes video games, comics/manga, literature, and even an anime adaptation.
• supermarioglitchy4 is best known for his wacky and meme-filled videos like his main self-titled show, Guards N' Retards and Sonic the Derphog. He has also made Meta Runner, an action/adventure series with a darker and more mature tone than his other works, although it still has some comedic moments.

Web Original

• Parodied by Something Awful in their "Great Authors" series, where they imagine classic writers working far outside their regular genres, from Hunter S. Thompson recapping an episode of The Big Bang Theory to Cormac McCarthy writing for a parenting blog.

Western Animation

• Stan Lee is one of the greatest superhero comic writers. He created and co-created a lot of the Silver Age superheroes. He also created the erotic animated series Stripperella which, while still a superhero show, is more adult and male-geared than his usual work, as are all the films and series produced by his production company POW Entertainment.
• The Redwall cartoon was this, not for its studio, but for PBS, who aired it. It was—and remains to this day—one of the only non-educational children's shows ever to air on PBS. The reason it was aired was likely meant to encourage kids to read the books, though.
• For Craig McCracken, the The Powerpuff Girls Movie was almost this, as it was initially being produced as a PG-13 feature due to a desire to Avoid the Dreaded G Rating. A shift in direction at the network concerning how to approach adult animation (which resulted in the formation [adult swim]) led to them changing targets to a PG rating more in line with the show.
• In-universe examples appear in Jem:
  • Most of Jem and the Holograms' songs are about romance, friendship, and love in general. Then there's "The Last Laugh" which is almost hateful and is very mocking towards The Misfits. It's surprisingly mean-spirited and shows that Jerrica is fed up with Pizzazz. "Glitter and Gold" is also less fluffy than their normal fare, being a boastful song where Jem talks about how confident and fashionable she is.
  • The Misfits are all about boosting their own egos. "Misfits in Hawaii" is self-deprecating and portrays them in a negative light. "Love Sick" is a straight-up love song (fitting since Pizzazz does become seriously out of it when she falls for Riot), which is not something The Misfits care for.
• Let's Go Luna!, a preschool cartoon on PBS Kids, was created by Joe Murray, who created two other cartoons beforehand, Rocko's Modern Life and Camp Lazlo, the former of which is considered one of the raunchiest Nicktoons of all time and the latter also having its fair share of Parental Bonus.
• Stop-motion animator Art Clokey made a name for himself creating children's shows like Davey and Goliath and Gumby. He tried his hands in live-action with the mid-'60s short The Plucky Plumber, and later explored the spirituality of human consciousness in his 1977 avant-garde cartoon Mandala.
• Olive, the Other Reindeer is this for Matt Groening. It's his only family-friendly work as opposed to his adult cartoons he's primarily known for. It's also the only one to not use his art style, instead being based on the illustrations of the original book.
• Fresh TV is known for its PG-rated 22-minute animated series like Total Drama, 6teen, and Stōked, all of which star and satirize 16-year-old teenagers and the lives they lead; feature a blend of comedy and drama, heavy focus on relationships, significant amounts of PG-rated humor and content (such as mild swearing and pixellated nudity); and are generally known for having a relatively realistic cast and tone^note Although Total Drama would become increasingly Denser and Wackier over time. And then there's Grojband, a G-rated Two Shorts show that stars a group of 13-year-old middle schoolers making songs for their band; features No Fourth Wall, large amounts of Better than a Bare Bulb jokes and Surreal Humor, extremely out-there plots; and has a very quirky tone that heavily emphasizes its offbeat sense of humor and musical elements.
• Most of Doug Langdale's shows are Gag Series filled to the brim with slapstick and off-the-wall humor (Earthworm Jim, Project G.e.e.K.e.R., and Dave the Barbarian). However, his most successful project was The Weekenders, a fairly grounded Slice of Life show. He would go more against type with his later action-packed works in the form of The Adventures of Puss in Boots and Cleopatra in Space. While still having plenty of humor, they also tell overarching stories rather than being largely episodic.
• Invader Zim is this to Nickelodeon, due to its unusual art-style, heavy amounts of Black Comedy and horror, and attracting an older audience than most of the channel's shows. While Nickelodeon did intend for it to be this — the reason they hired Jhonen Vasquez in the first place was that they wanted edgier material in the vein of The Ren & Stimpy Show — the fact that it contrasted so much with their other programming like SpongeBob SquarePants and The Fairly OddParents!, in addition to the show's budget issues, ultimately led to an early cancellation and being destined to be a Cult Classic.
• The Avatar: The Last Airbender franchise represents another one for Nickelodeon. While most of the network's programming consists of episodic zany comedies, the Avatar series are continuity-driven action cartoons, to say nothing of how both The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra enjoy exploring the themes of war, genocide, imperialism, and familial abuse.
• Muppet Babies (2018) stands from Mr. Warburton's other shows , being made for preschool audiences rather than older kids. ^note  Although The 7D was originally going to be for Disney Junior before being retooled for Disney XD.
• It might be surprising for some to learn that the mafia-themed adult-oriented animated series Fugget About It is produced by Canada's 9 Story Media Group, a company whose animated productions otherwise consist only of children's cartoons, including many PBS Kids series.
• Wild C.A.T.s (1994) was produced by Nelvana, and is one of their few, if not only, straight action series (all of their other shows with action have typically been action-adventure or mystery); furthermore, the visual style is straight out of the comic, standing in stark contrast to the varied visual styles of Nelvana's other productions.
• In contrast with C.H. Greenblatt's wacky comedy shows like Chowder and Jellystone!, Harvey Beaks is an atmospheric Slice of Life. It's also the series he's proudest of the most.
• Wow! Wow! Wubbzy! is this for Frederator Studios, being the only preschool cartoon produced by them. In contrast, it has historically created cartoons aimed at older children and eventually moved into adult animation.
• Castlevania (2017) is also an oddball from Frederator Studios, being a straight drama series. In contrast, all of their other shows are comedies (or, at the very least, Dramedies). Its art-style is also far more detailed and Animesque than the studio's other works, which are generally cartoony.^note Bee And Puppy Cat is somewhat animesque, but still has a fairly simple art-style.
• While Duckman wasn't the first adult animated project from Klasky-Csupo (having done the first three seasons of The Simpsons and the Music Video for the Beastie Boys song "Shadrach"), it was easily their most adult work they've done before or since (the only adult works they've done since being the first season of Stressed Eric, and Immigrants, a compilation movie of the finished episodes of a show that would have been for Spike TV).
• Norman Lear is better known as the creator of famous sitcoms with an intelligent bent to them — All in the Family, Good Times, etc. Perhaps this explains why he co-produced a short-lived Edutainment Show for Kids' WB! in 1997, Channel Umptee-3.
• Ready Jet Go! is a children's animated series is produced by Wind Dancer Films, a company known for producing live-action movies and TV shows aimed at an adult audiences.
• Most of the stuff that Aaron Augenblick has worked on, such as Wonder Showzen and Superjail!, are very much not kid-friendly. City Island (2022) appears to be the first kids' show he has worked on.
• Danny Phantom is this for Butch Hartman, being a superhero action show rather than a wacky comedy like his other shows (although it does have its share of comedic moments).

Other

• Lyrick Studios, the producers of Barney & Friends and the original mass market distributor of VeggieTales, also distributed some other series on VHS in their early days... as well as the Catholic documentary series The Faithful Revolution: Vatican II about the Second Vatican Council, colloquially known as "Vatican II". The Audiovisual Identity Database, in its Lyrick Studios article, calls that video "a surprisingly non-children's release".
• Legendary freestyle skateboarder Rodney Mullen has appeared in many a skateboard video and movie doing what he does best either as a skateboarding extra, a stunt double for another actor e.g. filling in for Ben Stiller in the skateboarding scene in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty or a playable character in Tony Hawk's Pro Skater. His role as Jace Skell in Ghost Recon Breakpoint on the other hand is a surprising outlier, as it marks his only non-skating theatrical role to date; the game does however make a subtle reference to Mullen's occupation in the form of a fingerboard found on Skell's desk, though.
• Eurovision Song Contest:
  • Latvia, best-known for crazy novelty acts, sending the quiet, intimate "That Night" by Carousel in 2019.
  • In one of the most triumphant recent examples, Italy sending glam-rock band Måneskin with "Zitti e buoni" in 2021, which went against their usual grain and earned them their first victory in over thirty years.
    • Thirty years prior, they sent their only entry neither in Italian or English: Peppino di Capri's "Comme è ddoce 'o mare," which is in the Neapolitan language.
    • Earlier still, in 1957, Italy sent the longest song to ever compete in the contest. Nunzio Gallo's "Corde della mia chitarra" was a whopping 5:09, which led to the establishment of the rule that songs could be no longer than three minutes long the following year.
    • Al Bano and Romina Power's "We'll Live It All Again" (1976), Raphael Gualazzi's "Madness of Love" (2011), and Nina Zilli's "L'amore e femmina" (2012) are the only Italian entries to have as much, if not more, English in them as Italian. Francesca Michielin's "No Degree of Separation" (2016) was also partially translated into English for Eurovision, but the majority of it remained in Italian.
  • Most people would agree that the Mediterranean-sounding banger of 2019 was Luca Hänni's "She Got Me." Astonishingly, it came from Switzerland, and its fourth-place finish was their best in over twenty-five years.
    • An earlier example would be their host entry from 1989, Furbaz's "Viver senza tei" - their only entry in the Romansh language.
    • Not necessarily sonically (although it is somewhat unusual for them to send a rock song), but conceptually: their 2005 entry "Cool Vibes" was performed by Estonian girl group Vanilla Ninja. While other singers from outside of Switzerland have represented them in the past, most at least sang in one of their native languages (French, German, or Italian). Vanilla Ninja had no connection whatsoever, but they did score very well and finished eighth.
  • At the time, Gina G's "Ooh, Aah...Just a Little Bit" was considered this for both the United Kingdom and the contest as a whole, as it was much more electronically-driven and contemporary than most of what was sent to the competition in the mid-90s. While it only finished eighth, it was still a huge hit and scored a Grammy nomination.
  • Lithuania managed to zig-zag this: they got their best result to this day with LT United's "We Are the Winners" in 2006, a straightforward sports chant/novelty song. That in and of itself was a break from type for them, but even more so was their sending a low-key acoustic number (4Fun's "Love or Leave") the following year.
  • Starting in the '80s, Denmark's trademark at the contest was sending high-energy pop songs with brassy instrumentation and lots of dancing. 1991's "Lige der hvor hjertet slår" by Anders Frandsen was a simple piano ballad...and their first entry since 1985 to finish outside the top ten.
    • Back-to-back examples in 1995 (Aud Wilken's "Fra Mols til Skagen," a minimalistic, intimate song) and 1997 (Kølig Kaj's "Stemmen i mit liv," the only straight-up novelty song Denmark's ever sent).
  • At the time, Lordi's "Hard Rock Hallelujah" was this for Finland, but seeing as they've sent several rock songs since then, it's much more common nowadays.
  • "Irlande Douze Points" by Dustin the Turkey. Ireland, the country known for classy ballads and folk songs, sent an electro-pop novelty song performed by a puppet turkey. It wasn't an experiment that paid off particularly. The duo of entries by Jedward are also quite different from what Ireland's known for sending, but at least they got decent results.
    • Earlier, we have Sandie Jones' "Ceol an Ghrá" (1972), which remains Ireland's only Irish-language entry. Subverted in regards to Ireland's Junior Eurovision participation, which is organized by Irish-language TV station TG4, thereby ensuring that every entry Ireland sends there is in Irish.
  • Most people probably wouldn't have expected Germany, of all countries, to send a goofy, lighthearted song about brushing off the haters. Nevertheless, that sums up their 2021 entry, "I Don't Feel Hate" by Jendrik, pretty neatly. It comes complete with tap dancing and a woman dressed as a giant "deuces." The televote wasn't too keen.
  • Both Hovi Star's "Made of Stars" (2016) and Kobi Marimi's "Home" (2019) apply for Israel. They're mostly known for sending songs inspired by their diverse local cultures and immigrant populations, with a particular emphasis on sounds inspired by Eastern European and Mediterranean music. These two songs were both classically Eurovision-esque power ballads meant to sound more like what you'd hear from a Western European country. Neither did particularly well.
    • For a more successful example, 1998's "Diva" by Dana International was a hi-NRG dance number performed by an openly transgender singer. It wound up earning Israel their third victory.
  • Sonically, Portugal's 2021 entry "Love is on My Side" by the Black Mamba isn't too far afield from their usual entries. What sets it apart is that it's the only Portuguese entry (so far) to be performed entirely in English, as the majority of their entries are entirely or mostly in Portuguese.
    • Also applies to Spain's 2016 entry "Say Yay!" by Barei (also their only entry entirely in English) and France's 2008 entry "Divine" by Sebastien Tellier (mostly in English, save for a few lines in French to appease the broadcaster). Applicable at the time for two 2015 entries - Israel's "Golden Boy" by Nadav Guedj and Serbia's "Beauty Never Lies" by Bojana Stamenov - but both have since sent other entries in English. On the flip side, there are also several countries for whom the odd one out is a song entirely in their native language, which applies to Sevak Khanagyan's "Qami" (Armenia 2018)^note Inga and Anush's "Jan Jan" (2009) is partially in Armenian but "Qami" is their only entry to date entirely in Armenian., Naviband's "Story of My Life" (Belarus 2017)^note They almost had two other songs in native languages, but VAL's Belarusian-language hopeful "Da vidna" couldn't compete after the 2020 contest was canceled, and Galasy ZMesta's Russian-language "Za nauchu tebya" was disqualified from competing in the 2021 contest for containing political content., Kabat's "Mala dama" (Czech Republic 2007)^note There were a few lines in Czech in their 2021 entry "Omaga" by Benny Cristo, Fomins and Kleins' "Dziesma par laimi" (Latvia 2004), and Go_A's "Shum" (Ukraine 2021)^note A few other Ukrainian entries have been partially in Ukrainian, but "Shum" was the first entry entirely in the language. That distinction would've gone to "Solovey," also by Go_A, but it never competed as the 2020 contest was canceled.
  • The original oddball entry would be Sweden's 1965 contribution, "Absent Friend," performed by opera singer Ingvar Wixell. It was the first Eurovision entry performed entirely in a non-native language, in this case English (although Austria's 1963 entry was also partially in English), leading to the establishment of the native-language rule that would last from 1966-1972 and again from 1977-1998.
    • On that note, it made two entries from 1977 stand out: since both Germany and Belgium selected their entrants before the native-language rule was brought back, they were allowed to perform in English, thereby making their respective entries - "Telegram" by Silver Convention and "A Million in One, Two, Three" by Dream Express - the only two entries between 1977 and 1998 not performed in a country's native language.
  • The first example for France would be 1992's "Monté la rivie" by Kali, which was the first French entry to not be performed entirely in French (a lot of it was in Antillean Creole, as Kali hails from the French overseas territory of Martinique). They would go on to send entries in Corsican (Amaury Vassilly's "Sognu" from 2011, although - unsurprisingly - Patrick Fiori's "Mama Corsica" from 1993 also features a few lines in Corsican) and Breton (Dan Ar Braz et L'Heritage des Celtes' "Diwanit Bugale" from 1996).
  • For both the language and the contest as a whole, Morocco's 1980 entry "Bitaqat Hob" by Samira Said remains not only the sole Eurovision entry entirely in Arabic but also the only entry Morocco ever sent and the only appearance by an African country at the contest to date.
  • Several editions of the contest have unique quirks that never spread to subsequent editions:
    • The 1980 contest featured an ambassador from each competing country (mostly the countries' national final hosts or commentators) introducing their country's song.
    • Several from the 1996 contest, particularly its rebranding as "Eurosong," its unique relegation system (every country interested in competing could submit an entry, which were then judged by jurors from each country to determine which 22 countries would join hosts Norway - an idea that backfired when one of the relegated countries was frequent participant and major EBU financial contributor Germany), having politicians from each country wish their representatives luck, presenting the songs in a "letterboxed" format before the contest switched to widescreen in 2005, presenting the votes from a virtual "blue room," and the only instance to date of a country's spokesperson appearing onstage to deliver her country's votes (fittingly, Norway's). Most of these novelties would disappear the following year, and it's the only contest since the very first in 1956 to not feature a German entry.
    • Partially tested in 2001 and widely used in 2002, the EBU offered countries the choice of either determining their votes entirely through a televote, entirely through a jury (if they had no feasible way of conducting a televote) or through a 50-50 combination of jury and televotes. This backfired when it appeared the 50-50 countries and all-jury countries were trading votes, which led to the all-televote-unless-it's-impossible system being brought back the following year. The 50-50 system wouldn't return until 2009, and now every country was using it.
    • 2006 was the only year where a country voted that wasn't participating: the dubious circumstances surrounding their national final led to Serbia and Montenegro being forced to withdraw, but seeing as it was shortly before the contest and they still intended to broadcast it, the EBU allowed them to vote in both the semi and the final.

---