Dancing Bear

aka: Watch It For The Gimmick

Not pictured: the intentionally Creepy Dolls or unintentionally creepier humans.

"The marvel is not that the bear dances well, but that the bear dances at all."

— Russian proverb

A Dancing Bear is any work of media that attracts viewers not because it's particularly entertaining — many of them, in fact, are dull or otherwise pointless — but because of some gimmick involved in the production. Any work for which the method by which it is created is more interesting than the result.

Featuring noteworthy non-actors in major roles (or celebrity guest stars for television episodes) can qualify something for this trope: we don't go to movies with Paris Hilton in them to see how well she acts, after all. Particularly large casts, shockingly difficult productions, unique production methods... anything that's used to sell a work more than its actual content can qualify it for Bear status. The Oner is usually a Bear as well, and Live Episodes too. A Tech-Demo Game runs a high risk of being a bear, if the developers cannot balance its gimmick with good gameplay. Another type of Bear is The Item Number, especially if it ranks high on the Fanservice scale and/or features a very well-known "item girl" (or guy).

Note that this doesn't include works in which outside events make us more interested in it — The Dark Knight certainly got a considerable amount of attention as a result of Heath Ledger's death, but it wasn't a Dancing Bear. For that, see Reality Subtext.

See also Come for the X, Stay for the Y, when the work has a lot more going on than just a bear that dances, and Just Here for Godzilla, for cases where that happens, but the audience doesn't care. See also Overshadowed by Controversy, where a Dancing Bear is especially well-known for controversial moments regardless of other factors.

---

Examples Subpages:

• Film — Live-Action
• Video Games

Other Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The anime of The Flowers of Evil attracted viewers mainly because it was rotoscoped, and the quality and/or terribleness of this animation style was discussed far more than the show's actual content.
• This Boy Can Fight Aliens! gained attention for being entirely animated from a home computer.
• Voices of a Distant Star is an amazing short film as it is. What largely drew people's attention to it initially, on the other hand, was the fact that it was entirely animated by one man on his home computer.
• Ghost Stories became this when it was localized in the west. Due to the localizers having no set limitations for what they could or couldn't do, they let the voice actors improvise almost the entire performance while still following the basic story, leading to an officially licensed Gag Dub. The dub is the only reason anybody outside of Japan watches the series; the few people who bother to watch the original version tend to say that it's just a mediocre horror anime.
• When the One Piece movie The Desert Princess and the Pirates: Adventures in Alabasta was released in the west, its main appeal wasn't the content of the largely-panned recap movie itself, but rather the fact that it was the USA's first uncut One Piece dub, and featured the new English cast. For a couple of years it also served as a good preview for how Funimation would handle the full-length Alabasta arc from the TV series.
• The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You is a pretty good manga in its own right, but it's quite likely that the writer made such a huge harem just to show off his ability to make 100 distinct and well-rounded characters in the first place. In fact, many readers admit to doing so just to see if the story pulls off having 100 unique girlfriends.
• A Manga World That Gets One Page Once A Year has its gimmick right in the title. While the four pages thus far aren't by any means unfunny, the main interest is in just seeing how long the author will keep up with it.

Arts

• William Wegman's works are known specifically because of his use of Weimaraners in them.
• Abstract paintings have occasionally sold for respectable sums because, and only because, they were painted by apes, elephants, or octopuses.

Automobiles

• The Daihatsu Applause is an otherwise ordinary compact sedan except for having a tailgate instead of a trunk, much like a hatchback. This gives it more rear cargo space compared to a sedan for added practicality.
• The Toyota Sera would have been an plain old hatchback coupe if it weren't for its butterfly doors (which swing up and forward unlike regular doors) and glass roof (which, without the included plastic covers, cook the occupants like hothouse tomatoes during sunny days). It was only sold in Japan from 1990 to 1996.

Comic Books

• The primary reason people read 100 Months is because it is the last work John Hicklenton completed before he died, and indeed completing it was the only thing that delayed him taking his own life.
• The DC Comics series 52 was sold not on its content but on the fact that it was a 52-issue miniseries that would publish an issue a week (for a year) in "real time" (i.e., the events of each issue took place over the course of the week following the week during which the events of the previous issue took place). It also filled in the year of time skipped during DC's "One Year Later" event, during which Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman were missing. It was generally well-received, but led to a brief trend of weekly miniseries for DC, some of which were ... less good.
• In-universe, Astro City has a restaurant and nightclub owned by cartoon-character-come-to-life Loony Leo. It's noted that it doesn't particularly matter how good the food, drink, or entertainment is; the novelty of going to a restaurant owned by a cartoon character is plenty.

Fan Works

• My Inner Life is renowned for its terrible writing and the rather... unusual behavior of its writer (among other things, she claims to completely believe the fanfiction is a record of a second life she lives in an alternate dimension while she sleeps and claimed to copyright the fic to sue any detractors).
• There are several My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfics that are famous almost solely due to the novelty of using copious amounts of Gorn rather than for actually being good stories.
  • Cupcakes (Sergeant Sprinkles) - Pinkie Pie tortures and murders Rainbow Dash. The premise is more horrifying than the execution, and the fic is better remembered for leaving an impact on the Friendship Is Magic fandom than for the actual quality of the writing.
  • Rainbow Factory, partially because it's sometimes described as "Cupcakes, except it's Rainbow Dash torturing/killing Scootaloo" and partially because of WoodenToaster's Creepy Awesome song of the same title (the fanfic was inspired by the song).
  • The nonviolent fan video Double Rainboom is known mainly for the ambitiousness of its premise: a full-length fan-made episode of professional quality. Needless to say, whether or not the video itself is any good in and of itself is up for debate.
• What do The Subspace Emissary's Worlds Conquest, Ambience: A Fleet Symphony, and The Loud House: Revamped all have in common? None of them would be well-known outside of their respective fandoms if it weren't for their sheer lengths — all three have been considered the longest piece of literature in the English language at one point in time, only being outdone by each other.^note As of February 2024, Revamped is the longest of the three (and the only one that never became a Dead Fic, finishing at 2,328 chapters and over 31.5 million words), followed by Ambience and World Conquest.
• Sexy Times with Wangxian was well known not so much for its over 1 million words of written smut, but for its sheer amount of tags before it was removed from Archive of Our Own (it reportedly had over 1,700 tags). The tags took up so much space on people's screens that they made the work an accessibility hazard, and eventually led to Ao3 implementing a 75-tag limit (not including tags for archive warnings and ratings) for newer works.
• I'm Not Okay would be an entirely forgettable low-quality Harry Potter fanfiction, were it not for the fact that it was written by Raven, the supposed beta-reader of the far more infamous My Immortal, and bears a lot of similarities to the later work.
• Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash is an entertainingly nonsensical fanfiction of Harry Potter, written entirely by AI. Language model technology would later improve to the point of being able to write much more comprehensible and logically connected stories— which were also much less entertaining than the early versions.

Film — Animated

• Charlie Kaufman's Anomalisa is a melancholy, downbeat drama for adults, acted out entirely by stop-motion puppets. And it's best known for...being a melancholy, downbeat drama for adults, acted out entirely by stop-motion puppets.
• Bartok the Magnificent. Ignoring the fact that the film does in fact have a dancing bear, in this one's case named Zozi, the film was originally marketed on the fact that it starred a minor comic-relief character from Anastasia, being the main character. It's now highly and mostly remembered for being the only sequel to a Don Bluth film that actually WAS directed by him.
• A Boy and His Atom, a 2013 short animated film made by manipulating individual atoms and photographed entirely with a scanning tunneling microscope.
• The only reason anyone outside Brazil remembers Cassiopeia today is that it was the first CGI film to be entirely digital. All of the film's models were created in software — for Toy Story, Pixar created physical clay models that were digitally scanned, which is still their standard practice. Because Cassiopeia entered production before Toy Story but released afterwards due to delays, there is also debate on whether it can be considered the first CGI feature-length film in general.
• The 1987 anime film The Flying Luna Clipper is known for being animated entirely on 8-bit computers and having an animation style resembling an old video game cutscene.
• Fritz the Cat has three Dancing Bears to call its own: it was the first animated film to receive an X-rating, the highest-grossing independent animated film of all time and, debatably, the first film to be considered "Furry."
• Fred Perry's Gold Digger: Time Raft OVA. Its poor acting, rudimentary animation, and extreme Schedule Slip are forgiven because Mr. Perry did everything (besides the voice acting). He wrote the script, created the music, and drew every single frame of this hour-long animated movie by himself.
• Killer Bean Forever, an All-CGI Cartoon action movie starring talking coffee beans, animated solely by one person. Said person also happens to be a professional visual effects artist, and despite the laughable premise, the film has some genuinely good fight choreography.
• Loving Vincent is mostly known for the fact that its every frame is an oil painting, painted by a total of 125 painters.
• Next Gen has a decidedly mixed critical reception, but it's still praised, at least among independent animators that have seen it, as a glowing example of the quality of animation that Blender is capable of. It's a free and open source all-in-one 3D animation program that can handle essentially every aspect of animated film production, from sculpting, modeling, painting, animation, physics, and even video editing, and it's only gotten more feature-rich over the years.
• Paperman is a really cute short but the main draw is the animation style and potential. It's an All-CGI Cartoon that looks like traditional animation. Disney has since used the same style in other shorts and there is much discussion when a full-length film using this animation technique will come out.
• Romeo & Juliet: Sealed with a Kiss is generally regarded as, at best, an average and unimaginative film. But if nothing else, many folks who've seen it or at least know of it appreciate the fact that it was animated entirely by one man.
• Sausage Party was promoted for being the first ever R-rated CGI feature film. Its quality is debatable, some thinking that it's a funny and thought-provoking parody of Pixar films, others arguing that it's trying too hard to be edgy.
• Sir Billi is notable for two things: first, it is the first CGI animated film to be made entirely in Scotland (it claimed to be the first animated film overall, but was beaten to the punch by The Illusionist (2010)), and second, Sean Connery came out of retirement to voice the main character (reportedly, both because it was Scottish film and So My Kids Can Watch), which ended up being his final acting role. Other than that, it's considered pretty bad.
• Sita Sings the Blues, like Sealed With a Kiss, is notable among animation fans for being animated entirely by one woman - and even more impressively, uses different animation styles.
• The Thief and the Cobbler is mostly remembered for its extremely long and Troubled Production.
• Both Disney and Pixar apparently considered the original Toy Story an example of this. Promotion centered on the fact that it was the first entirely CGI feature-length film. Some of the original trailers featured only the darkest sequences and an "adult" score different from the movie's, and practically forgot to tell the viewer that it was a family film about two toys wanting to return to their owner.
• Trolls World Tour got a pretty mixed reception, but many people showed interest in it just because of its release strategy: to adapt to the coronavirus pandemic, it was one of the first animated features to be released for streaming services on the same day as its theatrical release, setting a precedent for other movies struggling to find an audience with theaters closed around the world.
• The "unholy trinity," Watership Down, The Plague Dogs, and Felidae. Three animated films known almost solely for masquerading as kid's films^note Watership Down actually is supposedly a kid's film before surprising you with copious amounts of death, blood and gore, disturbing imagery, and in the latter, a graphic sex scene with cats.
• While Winnie the Pooh (2011) is considered a good movie in its own right, it is mainly known for being Disney's last hand-drawn film before the company gutted its 2D department in favor of CGI films.
• Wonder Park would be an entirely forgettable children's film, if not for a major Role-Ending Misdemeanor that was exposed in its later development, which led to the director, Dylan Brown, being taken off the project two months before its release and going uncredited as a result. Because no one else in the production was willing to take the chair (presumably not wanting to be known to the public as "the director of that movie directed by a sex pest"), this leaves Wonder Park in the odd position of being one of the few, if not only, wide-release films to have no credited director. Quite a few analysts, such as Folding Ideas, pursued and analyzed the film specifically out of curiosity as to whether Brown's loss had left the film visibly affected.

Literature

• The only reason why anyone would want to read Atlanta Nights is to see what a deliberately awful book would be like.
• Blood Meridian features an actual dancing bear at the climax, who meets an unfortunately violent end at the hands of some drunk gunslingers. However, the bear also stands a metaphor used by Judge Holden, who sees it as exemplifying the way that average people go through the motions of life as opposed to truly "liberated" individuals such as himself, who have set aside ordinary morality to exult in bloodshed and sadism. The Kid/Man calls Holden on this, however, pointing out that Holden is is in his own way also a Dancing Bear.
  Holden: I tell you this. As war becomes dishonored and its nobility called into question those honorable men who recognize the sanctity of blood will become excluded from the dance, which is the warrior's right, and thereby will the dance become a false dance and the dancers false dancers. And yet there will be one there always who is a true dancer and can you guess who that might be?
  The Man: You ain't nothin'.
  Holden: You speak truer than you know. But I will tell you. Only that man who has offered himself up entire to the blood of war, who has been to the floor of the pit and seen horror in the round and learned at last that it speaks to his innermost heart, only that man can dance.
  The Man: Even a dumb animal can dance.
  Holden: Hear me, man, there is room on the stage for one beast and one alone. All others are destined for a night that is eternal and without name. One by one they will step down into the darkness before the footlamps. Bears that dance, bears that don't.
• Clarissa is remembered for being the longest novel in the English language.
• The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby received a lot of attention for the laborious way the novel was written. The author suffered "locked-in syndrome" and blinked his left eyelid to respond to a transcriber repeatedly reciting a French language frequency-ordered alphabet until Bauby blinked to choose the next letter. This took ten months. The book itself was well-received.
• Dracula the Un-Dead (2009) was promoted exclusively based on the fact that it was the first story based on Dracula to be written (if only in part) by a member of Bram Stoker's family. Much of the discussion surrounding the book focused on its claim of being "the authorized sequel" when it was based on a Public Domain novel and written by a man whose father had not yet been born when Stoker died.
• The most widely publicized fact about Eragon was that the author finished the first draft when he was fifteen — he was nineteen by the time it was published (after extensive revision) and also received a lot of critical slack for that reason. Whether or not it has outgrown its beardom is a matter of debate.
• Though Finnegans Wake is made by the same author as the better known, better studied Ulysses, most people know the book for its odd, stream-of-consciousness writing style.
• Look upon this lipogrammatic work Gadsby, in which a story is told without using a particular glyph (past 'd', prior to 'f') commonly found in this script, as is this particular saying. A similar motif occurs within A Void.
• It really didn't matter how good Go Set a Watchman actually was; it was guaranteed to be a smash success purely out of the fact that it was only Harper Lee's second published book a full fifty-five years after she wowed the literary world with To Kill a Mockingbird. You're rather more likely to find someone who knows that part, but not that Watchman was actually written first, and then Lee's agent suggested she do a book with the characters as kids instead. Controversy also played a part: some have claimed that the quite-elderly Lee, who had chosen not to publish the book for decades, was not of sound mind and was being taken advantage of. The book also Ret Cons the much-beloved Atticus Finch into a racist, which left a bad taste in many fans' mouths.
• Handbook for Mortals is well-known for topping the New York Times Bestseller List...for twenty-three hours. It premiered at #1 out of nowhere, from an unknown author, and some investigating quickly determined that said author had gotten people to buy it en masse just to get on the list. People who then read it out of curiosity often compare its quality to My Immortal, to the point where a rumor began that they were written by the same person.
• A lot of promotion for How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life centered around it having been written by a 19 year-old Harvard student and starring an Indian-American protagonist (which was rare - if not unheard of - in YA literature at the time). Several early reviews pointed out that, while not terribly-written, there wasn't much else to make it stand out plot-wise. It then quickly became better known for stealing content from other books; it even turned out that some parts were plagiarized from Born Confused, a 2003 novel about an Indian-American girl torn between these two cultures that was also marketed as one of the first YA American novels with a South Asian protagonist.
• The Jungle by Upton Sinclair is best remembered for its exposure of the unsanitary practices of the meat-packing industry. It is often used as an example of the muckraking genre and helped lead to the creation of the FDA. However, Sinclair intended the book to be an indictment of capitalism and a paean to socialism. He famously said that he "aimed for the nation's heart but accidentally hit it in the stomach."
• Le Train de nulle part, a novel without verbs.
• Henry Darger's The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinnian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion, usually abbreviated as In the Realms of the Unreal, is an enormous 15,000+ page work illustrated with loads of "outsider art" that is better known for its insane length and decades-long composition than for any artistic merits it might have (though really, the length and the large number of important illustrations make a wide release of the story very challenging, so it's not like people can simply pick it up at a library/bookstore/e-book shop to judge said merits on their own).
• To many people, War and Peace is remembered because it's one of the longest classic narratives ever written.
• Fifty Shades of Grey is remembered for two things: being published Twilight fanfiction and featuring BDSM.
• The Cormoran Strike Novels jumped from relative obscurity to bestsellers after it turned out that their author was actually none other than J. K. Rowling.
• Woman's World by Graham Rawle is notable as it was created solely using clippings from old magazines. More here.
• Hun er vred ("She is angry") is a feminist post-colonial novel by Maja Lee Langvald. It's a harsh critique of the international adoption industry. But what gets it the most attention from people is that every single paragraph in the entire novel starts with the words "She is angry."
• The Well of Loneliness is the first high-profile novel with an explicitly lesbian theme, so it is clearly an important novel. Opinions vary on whether or not it is also a good novel.
• Toni Morrison's short story "Recitatif" is mainly known for two things:
  • 1) Being Morrison's only published short story.
  • 2) Its central gimmick, in which the audience is told that one of the two main characters is African-American, while the other is white — but the narration never specifies which of them is which, forcing the audience to confront their assumptions about race.
• Naked Lunch is known for three things: being the most definitive example of Beat literature, being the last book to ever be banned in Boston and for its disgusting content that continues to shock readers even into the present day.
• The first Nancy Drew novel, The Secret of the Old Clock, has been read more than any other book in the series—more than most mystery novels in general, actually. That's mainly because it was the start of the famous Nancy Drew franchise. Judged on its own merit, it's not exactly trash, but it's still pretty corny by today's standards, and quality-wise it's not much better or worse than the other books in the series.
• House of Leaves is probably primarily known as "that book with the weird page formatting and nested stories", and secondarily as a horror novel.
• Vorkosigan Saga directly invokes the trope more than once, appropriate considering Barrayar is Space Russia. In Gentleman Jole and the Red Queen, Cordelia discusses Aral's artistic talent with her grandson.
  Alex: Why didn't he show them to anybody? Or give them away? There's so many. Didn't anybody want them?
  Cordelia: He showed them to a few people. Me, Oliver, Simon sometimes. I'm sure quite a few people would have wanted them, but not... not for the drawings themselves. They'd have wanted them because the Lord Regent or the Admiral or the Count had made them, or worse, to sell for money. (pause) He said it would be like that bicycle-riding bear someone was parading around the district, once. It wasn't that the bear was good at bicycling, it was just the novelty of a bear riding at all.
• Moll Flanders is best known for the extremely long title, with the full title being: The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders, Etc. Who Was Born In Newgate, and During a Life of Continu'd Variety For Threescore Years, Besides Her Childhood, Was Twelve Year a Whore, Five Times a Wife [Whereof Once To Her Own Brother], Twelve Year a Thief, Eight Year a Transported Felon In Virginia, At Last Grew Rich, Liv'd Honest, and Died a Penitent. Written from her own Memorandums.
• Some of the books written by childrens' author Eric Carle have gimmicks of their own. The Very Hungry Caterpillar, for one, has holes in the pages on whatever food the titular caterpillar has eaten through. And The Very Quiet Cricket makes use of an small electronic device that would make cricket sounds when the last page is opened up.
• The The Moomins book A Book About Moomin, Mymble, and Little My has holes in each of its pages, making parts of the next and previous pages' illustrations part of the current page's.
• Wings of Fire is considered a pretty good middle-grade fantasy series on it’s own, but the central draw comes from the fact that the dragons are the POV characters and the dominant sophont species of the world, rather than beasts to be slain or mounts to be ridden.

Live-Action TV

• Let's face it: without the eponymous ALF, the show would have been just another vanilla sitcom about a family. And it wouldn't have worked if ALF were a Rubber-Forehead Alien, either. The sheer novelty of ALF being an incredibly expressive Muppet is what made people tune in.
• The Black Mirror special Bandersnatch was the first successful adult Gamebook film, and it's more well known for its gimmick than anything in its story.
• The Charmed episode "Cat House" was marketed around the fact that it was a unique spin on the Clip Show - Phoebe and Paige would be sent back in time, and be superimposed over clips of previous episodes. There was a lot of buzz over how they would get around showing clips of Prue - as Shannen Doherty had forbidden the producers from ever using archive footage of her. The result was one shot of Prue from behind (which was done by a stunt double) and a clip from when she was turned into a dog. The show did a couple more episodes like this, but the first one is what's remembered.
• Home Movie: The Princess Bride's primary draw is watching an All-Star Cast fool around at home reenacting a classic film like the rest of us with cheap costumes and props and filming on smartphones, without professional stylists or makeup artists, without CGI or Photoshop, away from red carpets and film sets and perfect lighting, all while still bringing their A-game and treating it as seriously as a "real" project. It's drawn comparisons to celebrities discovering Vines several years late, or old-school YouTube content from the mid/late 2000s.
• Kaleidoscope (2023) is a Netflix miniseries known for its unique structure: the episodes can be viewed in any order and it'll affect how you view the story.
• The documentary series Our Great National Parks is primarily known for the fact that it was narrated by former President Barack Obama.

Music

• The 1984 album Neptune by "one man band" Celluloid is notable for being entirely played on the Mellotron.
• Charm City Devils' cover version of "Man of Constant Sorrow," the bluegrass song popularized by O Brother, Where Art Thou?, is known primarily because it's done as a metal song.
• Although a fine album in its own right, DJ Shadow's 1996 album Endtroducing... is well known for the fact that it's an album made entirely using Sampling techniques. Namely every single sound on the album is sampled from something else and and then combined together into several new songs.
• Foo Fighters released Sonic Highways in 2014. Though it was fairly well-reviewed overall, the main grab was that it featured eight songs about major cities recorded in said cities. The accompanying documentary miniseries emphasized this point further.
• Erik Satie's Vexations is a single page of piano music with a suggestion to play it 840 times in a row. The first performance to follow Satie's suggestion to the letter took place in 1963, with a tag team of pianists, and lasted over 18 hours.
• While critics are mixed on the quality of Guns N' Roses's forever-delayed Chinese Democracy, fans are amazed it was released at all. Its actual musical qualities are submerged beneath the fact it notoriously took fifteen years (and a record-breaking alleged $13m) to make.
• Gustav Mahler's eighth symphony for large orchestra and multiple choruses was billed in its premiere as "Symphony of a Thousand" (most modern performances fall a few hundred performers short of that number); Mahler privately mocked this, calling it a "Barnum and Bailey production."
• This video contains perhaps the worst rendition of the James Bond theme you will ever hear. What makes it fascinating is that it is performed by miniature autonomous robotic helicopters.
• John Cage's 1952 'composition', 4'33". It's famous for being "four minutes and 33 seconds of silence", often either regarded as a sublime anti-music or an Emperor's New Clothes of modern art. More technically, it's not silence but ambient white noise: the sound of a pianist sitting there quietly in front of an audience for four minutes and thirty-three seconds and not playing.
• Karlheinz Stockhausen's opera Light contains a piece that is supposed to be played by a string quartet sitting in four different flying helicopters, their music then transmitted to a big hangar for people to listen to.
  • Another Stockhausen opus, Gruppen, calls for three separate orchestras to perform equally distant from the audience. This plan doesn't fit with many concert halls.
• Leif Inge's 9 Beet Stretch is a performance of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (which typically runs 65-70 minutes) digitally stretched to 24 hours without pitch shifting.
• Much of the early press surrounding Little Big Town made note of the fact that all four members alternate as lead singers, then a really novel concept for a country group. Fortunately, they've also been able to prove themselves as more than just a novelty by having put out a string of well-received albums.
• Jazz pianist Joey Alexander gained attention even outside the usual jazz circles for being a child prodigy, who released his first album when he was 11 years old. He has the chops to live up to the hype, and he's played with big names in jazz like Wynton Marsalis and the Jazz At Lincoln Center Orchestra.
• Much of the hype surrounding Billy Gilman when the then-11-year-old country singer from Rhode Island charted "One Voice" in 2000 was about the fact that he was the youngest male artist to score a country hit. That novelty, combined with the song's narm, wore off fast, and Gilman faded from view until a post-pubescent run on The Voice
• If the country band Ricochet is remembered for anything other than their only remembered song "Daddy's Money", it's for the fact that they were not only the first country artist ever to chart a rendition of "The Star-Spangled Banner", but also that said rendition was one of only a very small number of a cappella songs to enter the country charts (a feat they later repeated with a rendition of "Let It Snow, Let It Snow, Let It Snow" that garnered some seasonal airplay).
• The Traveling Wilburys were a highly successful band with a very devoted following, but most of their fame comes from the fact that they're generally considered the most ambitious supergroup collaboration in history. To whit: George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Tom Petty, Roy Orbison and Jeff Lynne (of Electric Light Orchestra) were all members. Even to people who've never heard their music, the simple fact that those five musicians performed in a band together is pretty impressive.
  • Supergroups in general flirt with this, given that much of the hype (initially at least) comes from the identity of the members rather than the songs they record.
• "Hvem Stjal Spenolen?" is a single by obscure Norwegian rapper Mr. Pimp-Lotion, featuring singer Didrik Solli-Tangen and World Chess Champion Magnus Carlsen as guest artists. If you read the YouTube comments — most of which aren't even in Norwegian — it's clear that most of the listeners are only there to hear Carlsen rap.
• Rappers whose main draw are their Motor Mouth style of spitting, known as "chopping", are increasingly being seen as Dancing Bears. Their detractors claim that the technique places style over substance, as it's the speed of the rapping, not the (often lackluster) content, that's meant to impress the listener.
  • This has been a particular point of criticism for Eminem in The New '10s, whose style (which had always been technical) got to the point where it focused heavily on speed, tearing through his own record for fastest rapping in a hit single three times ("Rap God", "Majesty" and "Godzilla"). While he's maintained the depth of lyrics that initially got him regarded as an all-time great, and some of the fast rapping is musically interesting beyond just being fast, it's also hard to argue that it's not just showing off for the sake of it.
• The song "Soulless" by ExileLord just sounds like someone rapidly mashing keys on a synthesizer for 6 minutes. The only reason anyone cares about this song is that it's extremely difficult to play when it's added to Guitar Hero^note or one of its Spiritual Successors/Fan Remakes such as Frets on Fire or Clone Hero via Game Mod, which appeals massively to Challenge Gamers. The song later got sequels that try harder to sound like actual music, but their difficulty is still the sole reason anyone cares about them.
• A few of Chocofan's Touhou arrangements, such as "LUCKY CAT", are primarily known for being released mere days after the theme they're based on.
• Dire Straits' "Money for Nothing" initially gained a surge in popularity due to being the first song to have its music video be animated entirely in 3D. While the song itself still enjoys a dedicated following due to being genuinely good, most people tend to remember it as a hallmark in music video history for pioneering such a gimmick.
• Wesley Willis' music can be described as a schizophrenic man rambling over a synthesizer's pre-programmed beats, while always following a strict formula for each song. This is something that both his fans and detractors acknowledge.

Non-Fiction

• A Survey of Radial Velocities in the Zodiacal Dust Cloud, better known to those who've read it as "Brian May's doctoral thesis".
• Birds of the West Indies is a field guide to Birds found in the Caribbean. Its claim to fame is its author's name, which was later borrowed by one Ian Fleming for his most famous character.
• Two-, Three-, and Four-Atom Exchange Effects in bcc ³He is a scholarly paper best known for being authored by Jack H Hetherington and F D C Willard - Hetherington's cat. Hetherington, upon completing his manuscript and sharing it with a colleague, was alerted that he had used "we" extensively, and that his paper would be rejected without a co-author. Rather than find one or retype the manuscript, he chose to use his cat Chester. Giving him the first names Felis domesticus^note the Latin name for the domestic cat and using Chester's father's name Willard as a last name, Hetherington submitted the paper - later sharing copies with friends bearing Chester's "signature" in the form of pawprints. Chester would later be credited as sole author of another paper before "retiring" from the field.

Pinball

In general, as pinball machines were originally marketed to operators, who would put them out in public for people to play, advertising for them tended to be more about unique gimmicks and other novelties than about the gameplay itself, as operators were not necessarily players and thus were more likely persuaded on gimmicks and novelties than how good the game actually played. Rather than talk about, say, The Addams Family's intricate depth, its challenging yet fair difficulty, or its scoring oriented around Competitive Balance, it was easier to convince operators to buy the game because Thing comes out of a box and grabs the ball! Or hidden magnets swing the ball around in unpredictable directions!

• Black Hole was the first machine to popularize multi-level playfields—in this case, a smaller one beneath the main one, seen through a window. The artwork on the backglass up top also has a large spinning mirrored disk, creating a Droste Image of a rampaging black hole.
• Black Knight had a related concept: The split-level playfield, where the top half is elevated compared to the bottom half. This proved popular enough to inspire Follow the Leader for its competitors, at least for a brief while. Its sequel, Black Knight 2000, had the same gimmick, only now it was advertised to have a full-length song with vocals playing in the background.
• Centigrade 37 integrated a thermometer into the artwork whose mercury would rise as the game is played. The game itself is well-liked up to the present, but the thermometer was such a big part of the artwork that it would've been the first thing most people would see, especially to onlookers watching it rise as someone plays it.
• Firepower proudly proclaimed that it had "Multiball" (a mode in which 2 or more balls are in play at a time) all over it: On its logo, on the artwork, on the sides of the machine, and all over its marketing, enough that Williams Electronics trademarked the word.
• High Roller Casino was shown off in its marketing for its tri-color LED miniature display that could show scrolling messages and slot machine reel animations,^note So excited was the production team about this display that there are at least 64 known messages that scroll during its Attract Mode which itself was placed above a short ramp that would dunk the ball into a model of a slot machine, whose arm would descend whenever it's activated. In addition, there was a spinning roulette wheel that the ball could fall into and a set of drop targets with stand-up targets behind them that would generate poker hands based on the order they're hit.
• Jurassic Park (Data East) was shown off and remembered for two things: The Raptor Kick, in which a ball going up a dead-end path would then be shot back to the flippers by a solenoid at a very fast speed; and a Tyrannosaurus rex head that would bend down and swallow the ball. The former gimmick actually worked, however, in that the phrase "Raptor Kick" would from then on become the fan term for any time this assembly reappeared in a pinball machine. It helped that players genuinely liked the gameplay as a whole. The T. Rex eating the ball, on the other hand, was prone to mechanical problems and thus rarely imitated.
• Orbitor 1's appeal is solely that its playfield is not entirely flat, but is instead warped transparent plastic, causing the ball to travel unusual paths. Sometimes, a point would be made that the machine was designed by a NASA astrophysicist. Aside from that, the playfield itself was pretty empty, making the games incredibly boring.
• The draw of Predator was almost solely in the fact that it was being made and manufactured by a company other than Stern, which at that point was the only manufacturer of pinball machines larger than a garage and the only one big enough to secure licensed properties. This company, Skit-B, was seen among pinball fans largely as a fresh and young competitor for the then-stagnent Stern, and the fans paid relatively little attention to the game itself compared to it being a Stern alternative. Things fell apart for this project later on^note namely that its leader, Kevin Kulek, was discovered to not have the Predator rights at all and that he squandered all of the pre-order money designing more games he didn't have the rights for, but up to this point, this was what the project was known for.
• The main draw of Space Shuttle, whenever it would appear in arcades and other public places, was an accurate scale model of a NASA shuttle placed onto the playfield. Straightforward as it was, this actually worked incredibly well: As such levels of detail could not be replicated in video games at the time, Space Shuttle proved to be very popular (for pinball), getting pinball out of the slump it had in the mid-80's. It worked so well, it became standard for pinball machines released afterwards to have a model of something on the playfield somewhere.
• The pinball machine for Starship Troopers focused on two easily noticeable aspects: A pretty large model of a Brain Bug that would normally stay hidden but would pop up for you to hit with the ball during certain times; and a third flipper, smaller than the other two and colored red, controlled by a third button on the side of the machine.
• TRON: Legacy, prior to its release, was frequently boasted to have original music by Daft Punk in the game, more so than anything about how the game actually played.
• The flyers distributed to operators for Twilight Zone had a large part dedicated to the gumball machine in the corner: This one is filled with pinballs, and when you deposit a ball behind it, the handle on the gumball machine would turn on its own and provide you with a replacement ball.
• TX-Sector proudly advertised its so-called "teleporting balls": Two pinballs were kept in reserve at various spots, ready to be released under certain conditions, creating the illusion that a single ball teleported elsewhere.
• Arguably, the large monitor in The Wizard of Oz is this. Though downplayed in the promotional materials for this machine, it was the first mass-produced pinball machine to have a full-size flat-screen monitor embedded in it, which is a lot more colorful, bigger, brighter, and most importantly, a lot more modern-looking than the single-color dot-matrix displays Jersey Jack Pinball's competitors were using at the time, and thus draws a lot of attention from onlookers and passers-by. Operators with a Wizard of Oz machine and no other monitor-based pinball machines claim that Oz brings in at least several times as many players as their dot-matrix display or older machines. Although The Wizard of Oz is a solid game in its own right, only time will tell if this novelty continues to last as more machines are released with monitors like this one.
• Xenon's gimmick was that it was the first large-scale release of a pinball machine to have pre-recorded voice clips. As it was released in 1980, right when computer technology became small enough to fit in a pinball machine, it took a lot of work to produce the equipment to get the several seconds' worth of those recordings. The designers and engineers sure as heck weren't going to let that go by unnoticed.
  • In turn, the marketing for Gorgar was completely about how the various voice clips for the titular creature could be spliced together to form other phrases.

Puppet Shows

• The Muppets (2011) focused on and was marketed almost entirely on the basis of "Holy shit, the Muppets are back!"
• A Muppet Family Christmas could have been just any old Christmas special starring the cast of The Muppet Show, but the real novelty of it is seeing a three-way crossover with them, the cast of Sesame Street, and the cast of Fraggle Rock, with the principal cast still alive at the time it was made (1987), no less.
• Thunderbolt Fantasy got the attention of the anime fandom due to its association with Gen Urobuchi. Puppet shows are not typical content for anime streaming sites, to say the least, so the medium made up most of the message; any discussion of it centers on the strangeness of watching Taiwanese puppet theatre scripted by a famous anime writer.

Tabletop Games

• The wargame Campaign for North Africa is primarily known for how long it takes to play, being almost impossible to complete as published in anything less than several years, as well as being ridiculously heavy on bookkeeping and simulationism (down to featuring mechanics for how quickly liquid supplies evaporate in the desert). The game designers jokingly told someone that if they thought there was something wrong with the game, they should try to play it again to completion and see if the problem was still happening.
• The third-party D&D adventure The World's Largest Dungeon puts its Dancing Bear right in the title. Not only is it the largest published dungeon, it also features almost every monster in the Open Game License, and is one of the most expensive RPG sourcebooks ever sold. The actual contents of the dungeon are mostly considered to be horribly edited, unbalanced, and severely padded.
• Mythic Fantasy Roleplaying Game, or MYFAROG, is known exclusively for being a game created by Varg Vikernes, a notorious black metal musician, white supremacist, arsonist, and convicted murderer. Unlike most of its contemporaries in the field of tabletop games with racist subject matter, such as Racial Holy War or F.A.T.A.L., it's generally considered fairly middling mechanically rather than entertainingly godawful, meaning the main reason to look into it is to see the kind of game Vikernes would make (unsurprisingly, it features a lot of white supremacy).
• Forbidden Sky got some attention for its use of electronics, which boosted its "toy" appeal and was notable for being the publisher's first stab at that sort of game. Sadly, the game itself was seen as middling and a step down from its predecessors Forbidden Island and Forbidden Desert (in particular because its design encourages you to take a lot of turns that go "move, perform an action or two, then retreat to a safe tile"), so it was discontinued a few years after its release while its older siblings continued to thrive.
• Kriegsspiel is largely forgotten these days, save for the fact that it was the Trope Maker for all tabletop wargames. Initially used by the Prussian army in the 1800's to plan real battles, it nonetheless paved the way for games like Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000 and BattleTech among many, many others.
• Most kids get Mouse Trap for the funny, toy-like Rube Goldberg Machine trap. The actual gameplay is a bog-standard Roll-and-Move affair.
• Taikyoku shogi is known mostly for its absurd complexity and game length: it's a Shōgi variation where the players have to grapple with 207 piece types.

Theatre

• The musical In Transit, about a group of strangers taking the subway in New York City, hyped up the fact it was entirely A Cappella, using the voices of its ten-member ensemble to fill out its score. Its Off-Broadway and Broadway runs were both fairly short, and it isn't remembered much beyond that fact.
• Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark is more famous for its troubled production than anything else. This aside, the technical aspects - including a spectacular aerial battle above the audience - are the main reasons to see the show.
• Starlight Express is one of the least-remembered Andrew Lloyd Webber productions, especially outside of the West End. Most theater fans who know about it just know that it's a show about trains performed entirely on roller skates.
• Tina Howe's 1979 play The Art of Dining is best known for featuring a set with a real working kitchen, with the actors typically cooking and eating real food onstage over the course of the play (since the audience can smell the food as it's being cooked, this is considered a vital part of the experience). But even plenty of avid theatre fans probably couldn't tell you anything about the plot.

Visual Novels

• Doki Doki Literature Club! initially appears as just another cute dating sim, but went viral because of its Disguised Horror Story nature and how the game interacts with its own files and your computer information from Act 2 onwards. It is also for this reason that fans suggest that newcomers play the game on PC, rather than the later console releases.
• Hatoful Boyfriend looks like a standard dating sim, other than the fact that the potential love interests are pigeons, that are represented by photos of pigeons instead of drawings (and the main character is a human girl). There's far more to it than just "pigeon dating sim", much of it arguably more surreal than the basic permise, but it is the premise alone that is the main reason most people know about this game.
• Love at First Sight is a generic Kinetic Visual Novel set in a Japanese school which would pass unnoticed, were it not for the fact that Sachi Usui, the heroine to be romanced, is a Cute Monster Girl, specifically a Cyclops. There's no real explanation for this and it doesn't even factor in the plot, for example the resident bully torments her... for being weak and submissive. ^note It's one of the author's fetishes, who explains in the notes that he made a game because in the US they're easier to make and distribute than paper doujinshi.
• School Days is notable and popular for two things; the fact that it's a rare example of a fully-animated VN (unlike most Visual Novels, which use mostly static images accompanied by text), and the infamously dark and violent bad endings where the characters go insane and/or get brutally murdered. That's all it's known for, however, as without those two qualities it's just your fairly average harem H-game (the non-bad endings, which make up the majority of them, are pretty normal fare). The creators of the anime adaptation were definitely aware of this, as it follows the darkest route of the game and makes it even darker.

Web Animation

• Fantasy Kaleidoscope is largely known for looking like a professional big-budget adaptation of the Touhou Project series, despite being entirely fanmade. The animation in its own right is rather good, but it's the fact that it's not an official installment of the series that tends to draw people to it.
• Kizuna AI would be a relatively typical Let's Player and YouTuber, if not for the fact that she's an unknown person, or group of people, who only appears in the form of a MikuMikuDance CGI model that claims to be a "super AI" rather than a human using motion-capture tools. Not only did Kizuna herself become popular enough to star in a tourism campaign and get an anime voice acting role, but she (and her imitators) came to create the entire Virtual Youtuber genre.
• Lucas the Spider is popular less for the actual content (which mainly involves the titular character in various silly antics), and more because the creator succeeded in averting What Measure Is a Non-Cute? by making a realistic spider cute and appealing; which is probably how it ended up becoming a preschool show a few years later.
• The main point of The Red Ape Family is less the show itself, and more that each episode has NFTs minted for it, so you can (presumably) earn money by buying one NFT and reselling it. Also doubles as Overshadowed by Controversy for people who are anti-NFT.

Webcomics

• Axe Cop is popular in large part because of the sheer novelty of a comic written by a 5-6 year old boy, albeit with art and interpretation by his 30 year old brother, a talented professional cartoonist.
• The intended gimmick for Billy the Heretic was to be the comic of choice for white supremacists. What it got instead was the coveted title of being the worst web comic ever. And that is going against some serious competition.
• The main gimmick of Dinosaur Comics is that almost all strips are identical, with only the occasional minor alteration.
• Homestuck has a gimmick which it grew into — its use of Medium Awareness combined with the Infinite Canvas of a webcomic, as well as Medium Blending in the later chapters (often being full-blown animations or short playable games). As the comic progressed, however, it became less known for the gimmick of its presentation and more known for its absurdly in-depth Kudzu Plot.
• Many xkcd-comic-inspired Defictionalizations are only recognized because of their inspirational source. The "Tetris in hell" game, for example, is interesting entirely because someone actually bothered to make it even though it doesn't really add anything to the original joke.

Web Original

• Social media accounts of murdered and/or missing people, such as the YouTube channel of Zaharie Shah, the captain of the infamous Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, tend to be flooded afterwards - in an eerily Truman Burbank-esque way - by comments completely unrelated to whatever was posted with condolences, or theories about what happened to them if the case is unsolved. Extra creepy points if the person attached was a complete nobody beforehand, and is probably completely unaware of all the attention... or are they?
• The SCP Foundation has a decent number of entries that focus less on the actual creature or object, and more on the way the information itself ends up conveyed.
  • SCP-2521 is a pretty basic "spooky mysterious monster that abducts people"... but due to the SCP stealing all written information about itself, the entire article is told through pictures and diagrams, with no text used at any point. It was inspired by a contest to create an SCP in under 237 words, to which the writer decided to create an SCP in zero.
  • SCP-4975 isn't much more complicated than a hostile creature that kills people, with its only notable trait being the fact that it makes an eerie ticking sound that only its victims can hear to drive them to paranoid madness, a sign that it has begun hunting them down. That's not the gimmick—the gimmick is that the page has a hidden audio file that starts to play after a few minutes if you're wearing headphones, consisting of an eerie ticking sound.
• Springhole: In Why Stories About Dragons SUCK, Syera complains most stories with dragons use them as gimmicks to distract from the bad writing.
• The Bloody Board was a Buffy the Vampire Slayer forum infamous for one thing: its 39,000 posts were posted by a single person, who happened to be the forum's owner themself. It stayed under the radar for 6 years before its very existence was unearthed by Cracked^note And yes, we admit that the forum's kinda creepy.. This prompted /b/, eBaum's' World and Encyclopedia Dramatica to wreak havoc on the site until it was inevitably shut down.

Web Videos

• Blindfolded speedruns. Inevitably, these are slower than un-blindfolded ones, but are still popular for the novelty of watching someone try to beat a video game while unable to see anything, and for bizarre problems that can come up.
• Some Jerk with a Camera has all his videos filmed on-location at the theme parks he covers, which made him stand out of the reviewer crowd when he debuted. It's telling that when Doug Walker ^note Who reportedly rarely, if ever, watched the content the producers on his site made. made a plug video for this show during its time on Channel Awesome, it was the only thing Doug talked about. During his review of Escape from Tomorrow, Tony takes a moment to point out that he's uniquely qualified to talk about it because of his close familiarity with the film's gimmick in both theory and practice.
• Twitch Plays Pokémon had the simple gimmick of a Twitch chat controlling a game of Pokémon Red by typing in various inputs. Anywhere from 50 thousand to 100 thousand people watched and participated in the original Pokémon Red stream, managing to complete the game in a little over 16 days. While the original Twitch channel would drop heavily in popularity after a year or so, streamers still make use of the gimmick. Some (such as DougDoug) have even built their brand on allowing their audience direct control over whatever game is being played that day — be it Pokémon, Mario Party, or Grand Theft Auto — with the added bonus of the host's reactions to whatever failures and successes occur.
  • Fish Plays Pokémon had over 21,000 people watching a fish move about a bowl to play Pokémon Red.
  • RNG Plays Pokémon, which was effectively just the Fish version, but much faster, and without the fish.
• Unus Annus was a YouTube channel that uploaded weird videos each day, with the gimmick that after one year, the channel and all its content would be deleted. Didn't watch it while it was active? Sorry, but you'll never get to see those videos (unless you disobey the creators' wishes and find some archive copies).

Western Animation

• BoJack Horseman's "Free Churro" is considered the most memorable episode of the fifth season, if not the entire show. The episode's entire 25-minute runtime is just a Will Arnett monologue, only consisting of one uninterrupted eulogy told by BoJack (plus the Cold Open flashback, which features Arnett as Bojack's father Butterscotch). The actual content of said monologue is deeply moving in its own right, but the format is what shot it to iconic status for most critics and fans.
  • Similarly the third season's "Fish out of Water", which is Free Churro's polar opposite - apart from the first scene it's a completely dialogue-free episode, dependent solely on visual storytelling. Again it's extremely well-done in its own right, but it's the format that makes it so memorable.
• The reason Clutch Cargo penetrated into pop culture as far as it did is solely because of its Trope Codifier status in using Synchro-Vox, which cut down on animation costs by having footage of the voice actor's lips speaking the dialogue atop static character drawings. The studio would actually go on to make two other cartoons with the technique, but Clutch Cargo is the only one that's remembered. To quote the show The Higgins Boys and Gruber, "If it weren't for the lips, it'd be a filmstrip!"
• An actual dancing bear is used in this format in-universe on The Critic. Jay's show is falling in the ratings and the set is converted to a rustic cabin appearance, complete with stuffed bear. Except the hippies wouldn't accept a stuffed bear, so they just drugged him up. After it attacks Jay, it offers an apology by way of dancing a polka and moonwalk as he plays the concertina.
• Futurama:
  • In-Universe, Pamela Anderson appears As Herself and mentions starring in Baywatch: The Movie, the first film to be shot entirely in slow-motion.
  • Another In-Universe example occurs when Leela becomes the first female professional Blernsball player. Her lack of depth perception means she's utterly hopeless, and the team owner makes no bones about the fact that her inclusion in the team is a publicity stunt. Also deconstructed, as Jackie Anderson - a female Blernsball player who is actually good - points out that Leela's laughable performances are making it harder for other female players to be taken seriously.
  • Though "The Prisoner of Benda" is a well-regarded episode in its own right, it is best-known for featuring an actual, functioning mathematical proof created by the episode's writer for the sole purpose of solving its Body Swap plot.
• ReBoot, while a quality show in its own right, is best known for being the first ever All-CGI Cartoon to be a full-length animated series.
• The South Park episode "Deep Learning" is notable chiefly because its ending was written by ChatGPT, a text-predicting computer program, rather than a human writer.
• SpongeBob SquarePants has several In-Universe examples:
  • In "Patty Hype", Mr. Krabs begins losing customers to a restaurant called "the Shell Shack" that has a talking dog. (Bear in mind that Bikini Bottom is a city full of talking animals, underwater, and some of those customers don't even know what a dog is.) Mr. Krabs tries to think of a dancing bear of his own, and after he cruelly rejects and mocks SpongeBob's suggestion of "Pretty Patties", SpongeBob starts his own restaurant selling them and becomes a massive success, as people love his technicolour patties. Krabs buys the restaurant out, only to be hit with a mass of complaints when it turns out the Pretty Patties have undesirable side effects.
  • In "Chum Caverns", Plankton relocates his restaurant to a beautiful underground cave and becomes a massive success, with long lines of people waiting to get in the door. The gorgeous scenery proves to be the main attraction, as the enthralled customers freely admit that the food is still terrible even as they're marveling at the sights.
  • "The Masterpiece" has a similar premise to "Patty Hype": a new restaurant is attracting customers away from the Krusty Krab, and when SpongeBob realises it's because of a large statue of the restaurant's mascot rather than the food, Mr. Krabs decides to make his own statue to fight back.
• An In-Universe version occurs during the VeggieTales Christmas video, "The Star of Christmas." The protagonists are attempting to open a musical called "The Princess and the Plumber" on Christmas night in order to escape the fate of using their talents to sell dental wax. While some effort is made towards advertising it based on its merits as an actual play, Cavis Appethart repeatedly sells new actors and backers on it with the promise of using fancy, newly-invented electrical lights on the sets and costumes.

---