Disco Dan

aka: Disco Stu

The '80s called, they want their leisure suit back.

"The '80s are never over. You don't just turn off the '80s!"

— Jack Howitzer is Jack Howitzer in: Jack Howitzer, Grand Theft Auto V

We can understand having trouble coping with change. The realities of The Vietnam War, for instance, were a very hard change for the veterans of World War II to accept. In fact, there might even be the urge to revert some of those changes, or at least live as though those changes never happened.

Yet to do that with pop culture?

It's one thing if you have trouble getting over The Beatles breaking up. This trope would be about people who act as though they are still around, plaster posters all over their homes, compare every other rock song in existence unfavorably to Beatles songs, and may only listen to other music as long as it's nothing past 1980 (or by ex-Beatles). These people are basically trying to bend reality back to the way they want it by sheer force of will. And that's with a band who are still relatively popular and influential; those who are besotted by something that is Condemned by History can be even worse.

Usually, this is Played for Laughs. We get a funny character, who is a walking anachronism by simple virtue of denial. Bonus points if this character forces other people to act as though this reality is true. Curiously enough, more than a few of these characters have an affection for disco music, hence the title.

Most likely has a Funny Afro, and would not take it kindly if told that Disco Sucks.

Compare Born in the Wrong Century, Fish out of Temporal Water, Outdated Outfit. Contrast Fan of the Past, New-Age Retro Hippie. See also Awesome Anachronistic Apparel, which is wearing what should be absurdly outdated outfits and making it work.

Not to be confused with "Disco Dan" Ford, the former major league baseball player, Disco Dan, the '80s ZX Spectrum computer game in which the player fixes nuclear reactors by jumping around inside them, or with Cool "Disco" Dan, the Washington, DC graffiti artist.

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Examples:

Advertising

• In a series of Wendy's commercials advertising the return of their taco salad — a huge hit in the '90s — middle-aged adults celebrate by bringing back slang and fashion from the decade while their children watch and cringe. Neon everything, frosted tips, saying "bomb diggity", etc.
• One 2024 Spectrum ad claimed everyone wants to update their phone... except Ryan, a dude in a neon track suit whose cell phone is a chunky 90's relic, because that's just his "life choice."

Anime & Manga

• Played with in Sonic X. The Chaotix still have one of those old-timey video projectors, and they try to play an HD Dolby Digital 2.1 Sonic X DVD on it. Then, Espio is assigned to go "borrow" a DVD player for them. Charmy is in awe.
• In Spider Riders, one episode has Prince Lumis trying to impress a girl he likes. Hunter comes up with a disguise that he actually calls Disco Dan. Hilarity Ensues.
• In Hi sCoool! SeHa Girls, Mega Drive has an undying love for old cellphones. This also results in her despising smartphones.
• Seitokai Yakuindomo parodies this with Sachiko, Shino's predecessor as president of the student council. As such, she can be no more than two years older than Shino, yet her slang and fashion choices come right out of the 1980s (the anime is from 2010), and she's so clueless when it comes to modern tech that she carries a pocket abacus around.

Comic Books

• The DCU:
  • Snowflame, the infamous cocaine-powered supervillain who premiered in The New Guardians series, was revamped as an '80s-themed villain who dresses like Don Johnson in Miami Vice in a 2020 Catwoman storyline after more than 30 years since his initial appearance.
  • Briefly happened to Green Arrow after he was resurrected. His soul (which opted to remain in the afterlife) only allowed Hal to bring back a previous version of himself, one from before his life fell apart. The reborn Arrow doesn't know what year it is, thinks a man is a super-villain simply for owning a modern (for 1999) computer, and mistakes a cellphone for a walkie-talkie. By the end of the story, his soul rejoins his body, bringing him back up to date.
  • The Mad Mod from Teen Titans was, in the original comics, a contemporary 1960s character. Comic-Book Time led to the version in the cartoon and the cartoon-based comic Teen Titans Go!, where he became a Disco Dan type instead, still obsessed with 1960s pop culture even though the 1960s were long gone.
  • In Wonder Woman: Black and Gold, Cathy has reopened the shop she ran with Diana in the 1960s when she was a teenager despite being middle aged now. She dresses the same way and seems to be trying to relive her glory days. This ends up justified since she is dying of cancer, and only staving off death by using a magic talisman that requires her to be in the place she felt most alive. Understandably having adventures with Wonder Woman and saving people is what she went with for that.
• In Image Comics' Deadly Duo, Kid Avenger mixes this with Fan of the Past; He's actually from the very end of time, but for some reason loved the 1970s and only knows about culture and politics and technology from that era.
• The main character of independent comic The Griffin is a slightly Jerkass high school student who, in 1967, is met by aliens who convince him to join their galactic war in exchange for Flying Brick powers (including freezing his aging at 18), since humans are one of the few species the superpower procedure works on. He agrees, leaving behind his best friend, girlfriend and family. Twenty years later he deserts and goes home. Although he'd accepted that society would have probably changed, he had assumed everyone he met would have put their lives on hold and stayed the same. Therefore, he's actually shocked to discover that, in the intervening years he'd been declared dead, his best friend and brother had grown up into mature adults, his parents had another child and his girlfriend (who he'd always assumed would wait for him) got married. He takes It's All About Me to a whole new level.
• Icon features a Luke Cage: Hero for Hire parody named Buck Wild Mercenary Man, who showcases all the most ridiculous aspects of '70s "Blaxploitation" superheroes because the experiment that gave him his powers also literally froze his brain in 1973.
• Indigo from Impact Comics. Because he's been in jail so long, he's unaware of the leaps and bounds made in technological developments in the last three decades.
• Marvel Universe:
  • Thanks to the circumstances of his resurrection, Jimmy Woo from Agents of Atlas still acts like he's in the world of the 1950s.
  • Captain America gets hit with this after he's unfrozen in both the comics and the movies. Subverted in that while Cap does eventually catch up with the times enough to function in society, his values system remains rooted in the 1930s and '40s (which usually serves as a tool for the writer to contrast Cap's idealism with the cynicism of the world around him). The Ultimate Marvel version from The Ultimates plays it straighter, since the writers figured it would be more realistic to play up the Deliberate Values Dissonance between someone yanked from the end of WW2 and dropped straight into the vastly different world of the early 2000s. Reaction was mixed, especially when some authors began adding in more modern negative American values, like anti-French attitudes or anti-intellectualism or playing up '30s attitudes toward the appropriate behavior of racial minorities and women.
  • Star-Lord from Guardians of the Galaxy loves retro stuff and classic '60s to '70s music, even designing his costumes to evoke Buck Rogers-style pulp heroes. This was partly caused by the fact that he was taken from Earth when he was only a kid (which occurred in either the '70s or '80s, depending on the continuity); all he had to remember Earth by was his own memories and the stuff he had on, which included an old Walkman. This used to not be brought up very often, but after the film adaptation made it a major source of characterization, it's since become one of his most well-known character traits.
  • Depending on the Writer and artist, Klara Prast from Runaways sometimes still dresses like a lower-class immigrant from the early 20th century.
  • The (somewhat) serious Spider-Man villain Hammerhead talks and acts like he's a member of Al Capone's mob; he liked to go to the movies as a kid and the gangsters he saw on the big screen left a big impression on him. Hammerhead even has a vintage limo in The Spectacular Spider-Man, which is kind of badass.
  • The ridiculous Spider-Woman villain Turner D. Century acts like he lived in the 1890s, and his entire motivation is making things more like that period.
• Phonogram is about a "phonomancer" who draws power from music comes into conflict with a group of "retromancers" who wish to reshape the cultural memetics of Britain just so that they can clutch on to their Britpop youth.
• Revolutionaries: When Sgt. Savage is brought into 2017 by the Revolutionaries, it transpires that after having been brought forth from 1944 to 1994 thanks to the Talisman, he embraced '90s culture, becoming a Liefeld-style hero who fought ninjas and skateboarders. He at one point yells "Eat my shorts!" at an enemy completely seriously. And he's also incredibly awesome (what with being a Super-Soldier and all).
• In Howard Chaykin's The Shadow miniseries, Lamont Cranston is a little... well, let's just say that well into the 1980s, he still feels that women should speak when spoken to or else risk a good thrashing.
• Vampire: The Masquerade (Vault): Justified with Cecily Bain in Winter's Teeth as she is a vampire and stuck in her decade of Embrace (the late 1970s). Cecily was a hardcore Gothic Punk rebel for the first three decades of her life and is adjusting to the fact her scene has been dead since the 1990s.

Comic Strips

• Jon from Garfield is a fan of disco. In the animated special, Garfield Gets a Life, he's not even aware that it isn't popular anymore. In 1991. ("You learn a dance, then zango! — 14 years later, they change it!") Funnily, this even works as a Continuity Nod — there are early comics where Jon was interested in disco back when it was still popular.

Fan Works

• In White Devil of the Moon, Luna still acts like the Moon Kingdom exists, which causes conflict when she refuses to explain to Fate why she had to speak to Nanoha. Not to mention she's horrified that Nanoha (who in this fanfic is the reincarnated Princess Serenity) defers to Hayate (her commanding officer in the TSAB), sees the Moon Kingdom as nothing more than an old relic, and has no intention of claiming her birthright as the Moon Princess. She literally runs away when Nanoha formally announces the dissolution of the Moon Kingdom, and the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue states that she constantly tries to find a way to convince Nanoha to claim her birthright. Compare that to Artemis, who basically saw the dissolution as a chance to retire and become a normal housecat.
• In The New Man: An Adam Smasher SI, Adam absolutely hates modern fashion and styles, especially for women, griping about how ugly it makes everyone look. His very first words to Rogue Amendiares after she shoved a gun to his face is to insult everything but her pants. This is also why he finds Chiri Tanaka attractive, because she has a classic Japanese Office Lady look.

Films — Animation

• An Extremely Goofy Movie has Goofy's Empty Nest Syndrome cause him to lose his job, forcing him to go back to college. Of course he attends the same school as his son Max, and embarrasses the crap out of him, showing up in a Funny Afro, bell bottoms, wide lapels and platform shoes. Ironically Goofy eventually ends up being perceived as seriously cool by the other students, partly due to the sincerity of his Disco Dan status but mostly because of his hot date and how his moves are considered mindblowingly cool.
• Mother Gothel from Tangled wears clothing that is hundreds of years out of date from when the film takes place, reflecting the time when she started using witchcraft.
• In Despicable Me 3, Gru and Lucy tangle with Balthazar Bratt, a Former Child Star turned super-villain who seems obsessed with The '80s, when he was at the height of his popularity. He wears a purple suit with shoulder pads, he has a mix-tape of "heist music" that includes "Bad" by Michael Jackson, and his arsenal includes trick bubble gum, a bomb disguised as a Rubik's cube, and a keytar that fires blasts of weaponized sound.
• Before being retconned by the sequel, Trolls from the film were categorized in supplementary mobile games by "families". One of these families were the Retro trolls, who true to their name were styled in retro fashions like mod or disco clothing and their hair done up in afros and beehives.

Films — Live-Action

• I'm Gonna Git You Sucka. Fly Guy, a pimp who got out of prison in the 1980s (after being a big shot in the 1970s), decides to hit his old stomping grounds in full pimp regalia: a white tiger-striped suit, a giant hat with a pink feather, six inch platform shoes with goldfish inside, and a jeweled cane. He gets laughed off the street in a second. He ditches his outdated pimp gear by the end of the film.
• The Brady Bunch Movie has The Brady Bunch living in the 1990s but still acting and dressing like their idealized 1970s sitcom selves.
• The themed Disco boys from Mystery Men, who emerge from prison and refuse to believe that Disco is dead: "Disco is Life!" Bonus points for Tony P, the head of the Disco Boys, being played by Eddie Izzard.
• Billy Madison returns to high school fully decked out in 1984's idea of cool, with an acid-washed denim jacket over his REO Speedwagon shirt and Billy Squier blasting out from the speakers in his Trans Am. He immediately becomes a laughingstock and a target for the next O'Doyle bully.
• Uncle Rico from Napoleon Dynamite is a washed-up former high school football player who still films himself throwing his football around and forces people to watch the videos. When Kip buys a "time machine", Uncle Rico sets the year to 1982, his prime year of football playing in high school. Luckily, his whole backwater town has just caught up to the '80s in terms of style and culture as well.
• In The Wrestler, Randy "The Ram" Robinson seems to be stuck in The '80s, the time of his Glory Days. He plays Nintendo games with neighborhood kids and talks about how much he hates modern music, preferring hair metal from the eighties.
• A rather dark example in Kalifornia, as it involves not outdated fashions or fads so much as outdated attitudes. Early Grayce (Brad Pitt) is an "unreconstructed redneck" type who speaks in a slightly animalistic Southern accent. One of his more reactionary beliefs is that women should not only be inferior to men, but should be kept in a state of perpetual childhood. As such, his female companion, Adele, is forced to wear baby-doll dresses at all times and doesn't smoke cigarettes because "Early broke me of it." In addition, she's often seen playing with a yo-yo and speaks in a very whiny voice. When Adele finally starts acting like a grown-up and gives Early a Shut Up, Hannibal! speech, Early kills her; he then abducts the hero's more modern, liberated female companion and turns her into a sex toy, with a halter top and cutoff shorts. (Of course, since Early is also an unapologetic serial killer, his Politically Incorrect Villain tendencies are just the tip of the iceberg.)
• Gary King, the main character in The World's End, still lives, acts and dresses like he's a eighteen-year-old living in 1990 despite him being 41. For instance, he still drives The Alleged Car that his friend sold him for £300 as his first car, even though he's had to replace almost everything of it, and he apparently has never taken the mixtape that his friend made for him out of its cassette player. He also has unflattering dyed black hair despite his obvious blond eyebrows and beard, to an extent that his character development by the end of the movie is signified by him being shown clean-shaven and with his natural blond hair.
• In Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), Peter Quill was abducted from Earth in 1988 and hasn't been back since. Consequently, he acts like he's in the '80s and constantly listens and dances to a mix tape of old music. The mix tape was a gift from his late mother and is his most prized possession. Peter's mother might also be one; all the songs on Awesome Mix 1 are from the '60s and '70s, with the most recent one (Escape) being from 1979. For some reference, that's the same year that Peter's actor was born, so he's nostalgic for music older than he is.
• In Angry Video Game Nerd: The Movie, The Angry Video Game Nerd uses a Commodore 64 to access the internet and play an MMO with Cooper, which is rendered with flashy modern graphics on Cooper's PC but looks like a 16-bit platformer on the Nerd's Commodore. The Nerd also uses a massive bulky microphone for voice chat as opposed to the sleek headset that Cooper uses. Later, the Nerd brings along a huge record player for music to listen to on a road trip.
• Miss Hannigan in Annie (2014), subtly. Her hair and clothing style is more suited for a young woman in the '90s-early 2000s, another way she's living in the past.
• One odd version is Debbie from the 1992 movie Singles. Set in early '90s-era Seattle, the film is absolutely drenched in the early grunge and alt-rock scene (almost painfully so). Debbie, though, still dresses like she takes all her cues from mid-to-late-'80s MTV trends. However, due to how much it clashes with the look of everyone else (plus the fact that, fashion-wise, the '60s and '70s made several small comebacks in the '90s and 2000s, which means ironically that hearkening back to older trends would blend in better), Debbie comes off as bizarrely anachronistic even though her fashion is, at most, seven years out of date.
• Kingsman: The Golden Circle: Poppy is not only nostalgic for the 1950s, she's built a '50s-themed main street. And apparently, her grasp of current affairs is still stuck in The '80s as she complains about being persecuted for peddling marijuana (which, while still illegal, it's not seen as that threatening) while execs of alcohol and tobacco companies get to appear on magazine covers (something that hasn't happened since the mid-1990s).

Literature

• One of H. P. Lovecraft's inspirations, Lord Dunsany, was archaic in his language use and wrote his extensive works with a quill pen. Lovecraft's own distinctive style belonged to an age about 30-40 years before most of his writing was done as more mainstream writers like Fitzgerald and Hemingway were championing minimalist prose.
• The novel Wicked Game features a radio station run by vampires, all of whom are musically stuck in the era that they died in.
• The characters in Toby Litt's Beatniks are determined to live the Beat lifestyle, refusing to acknowledge modern technology or music — even though they were born in the 1970s.
• Anne Rice's vampires are so afflicted by this trope, holding onto the eras in which they were alive, that many commit suicide in a world they no longer recognize. Armand asks for Lestat's and later Louis' help in connecting to the present, so that he doesn't die of culture shock in this way.
• Deconstructed with the title character of Don Quixote who is a borderline example: his obsession with Chivalric Romance leaves him mentally stuck in an era that barely even existed, and in 1610, few people in Spain know, and even less care, what an Knight Errant is. So, Don Quixote has to explain himself time and again throughout the first part of the novel. His Character Filibusters are each time shorter, until chapter XLVII comes and he gives up:
  "Haply, gentlemen, you are versed and learned in matters of errant chivalry? Because if you are I will tell you my misfortunes; if not, there is no good in my giving myself the trouble of relating them;"
• Elbow Room: Butler from short story "The Faithful" simply refuses to cut or trim Afro hair and as a result his clients are abandoning him (this is the 1970s). He's pretty mean about it, too; when a small boy gives him a dollar to get his hair trimmed into an Afro he gives the boy a schoolboy cut anyway.
• Jon L. Breen wrote an Ellery Queen pastiche where a head injury caused him to be mentally stuck in the '50s. When he solved a case requiring knowledge of US presidents, several of whom were elected post-1959, his father made a remark about him being back to normal. He replied that he had no idea what his father was talking about and that "President Winkler" had better do something about the moon colonies before it was too late.
• In Andy Weir's The Martian, the crew of Ares 3 each brought their favorite entertainments on thumb drives (or something similar). Commander Lewis brought disco, and complete runs of shows like Three's Company. During an Earth flyby she gets to chat briefly with her husband, who reports buying an authentic ABBA eight-track.
• In "The End of the Pier Show", Brigadier Sir Giles Gallant and a committee of like-minded townsfolk attempt to restore the town to what they regard as the glory days of World War II. Too late they discover that they cannot bring back the good parts of the war without bringing back the bad parts as well.
• James Donovan Halliday from Ready Player One is an Eccentric Millionaire and game designer that was obsessed with the 1980s (the decade that he lived in as a teenager). He had an encyclopedic knowledge of nearly all movies, tv shows (animated and live-action), anime, books and games (be they video games, tabletop games and so on) and would impulsively fire employees that did not share his obsessions (though his friend and partner Ogden Morrow would discreetly rehire them).
• Mathias Martel, the main protagonist of Magik Online is an understated teenage version. His hatred of Concordia — which conquered Earth — leads to him preferring pre-Conquest pop culture like Marvel comics and the Disney Aladin movie, never mentioning any form of entertainment that was created post-Conquest. The only exception being video games made by Dynamis, where he works.
• Shifted back nearly two centuries, Luc-Esprit Gillenormande (Marius' grandfather) in Les Misérables apparently found his groove in the 1760s (the novel is set in 1832), and never left it, while time transformed him from a rakish "bad boy" and man of the Enlightenment to a hopelessly unfashionable, reactionary old grump.

Live-Action TV

• An episode of 30 Rock featured Andy Richter as Liz's brother who, thanks to a "really bad skiing accident", thought it was still 1985 and that he was still a teenager despite him being a 40-year-old man. At the end of the episode, he found out the truth and held up a cocktail, complaining "I could've been drinking these for years!" What's sad is that it's based on an actual form of amnesia, in which the afflicted victim is unable to remember information for very long i.e. minutes. The only discrepancy is that the brother would only forget everything at the end of the day.
• Episode three of Being Human gave us Gilbert, dead since 1985 and less than willing to move on in more ways than one.
• In Buffy the Vampire Slayer's pilot episode, Buffy recognizes a vampire by his disco-era clothing. Joss Whedon later said he considered having vampires generally dress according to when they died, but regretfully discarded that idea as too cumbersome and silly.
  Buffy: Only someone who's been under the ground for decades would think that's the look.
• In one episode of The Chris Rock Show, there was a fictitious TV movie called "Daddy Still Has a Flattop", about a black man, played by Chris Rock, who still wears an '80s flattop hairdo by the late '90s, embarrassing his wife and son.
• Cobra Kai: Johnny Lawrence is permanently stuck in the bubble that is the '80s. He drives an old Pontiac Firebird, only listens to hair metal music, and constantly watches old movies like Iron Eagle. He's also hopeless with modern technology and social media; he uses a five-year-old LG flip phone, and doesn't even know what Facebook is.
• Community:
  • In the episode "Modern Warfare", Jeff encounters an afro’ed, rollerblading Disco Dan trying to bring disco back, and mocks him. Later in the episode, when it turns into a Paintball Apocalypse, the guy has apparently succeeded in bringing disco back, and now leads an army of rollerblading, disco-dancing paintballers.
  • There's also Abed's fixation on Who's the Boss? despite it dating from before he was born.
• Doctor Who:
  • Some people from "Invasion of the Dinosaurs" plan to literally revert modern-day Earth back to prehistory using Time Travel technology.
  • "Gridlock": The Cassinis are a pair of old women who live over five billion years in the future, yet decorate their Flying Car with stereotypical '30s-'40s décor.
  • Hollywood Midlife Crisis jokes are nothing new for the Doctor, but when the Twelfth Doctor starts going around playing electric guitar, wearing a hoodie and swapping his sonic screwdriver for a pair of sonic sunglasses, it comes across like he's desperately wishing he was still in the late '70s. (Which, considering his personality is Revisiting the Roots to a more distant and moody '70s-style Doctor after the dorky Hipster boys of the previous decade, he is doing on a meta level, too.)
• In the Frontier Circus episode "The Courtship", the T & T Circus arrives in the town of New Atlanta, which is controlled by a pair of sisters who are attempting to live as if they are still in the antebellum south.
• Dan Stark in The Good Guys lives and breathes this trope. To him, the whole world still works like it did in Eighties cop action shows. At times, he seems to make the world around him work this way by sheer force of will.
• In the post-shark seasons of Happy Days, when the show was encroaching into The '60s, Fonzie refused to let go of his Greaser ways. He's scandalized when Chachi and Joanie take an interest in folk music instead of rock n' roll. In an earlier episode, he even lampshades this himself: "If it was up to me, it would stay 1955 forever!"
• Kath from Kath & Kim still perms her hair and dresses as though it's still the '80s. She doesn't even seem to realize that times, and fashions, have changed. Lampshaded in 'Da Kath and Kim Code' where Kath arrives at an '80s-themed party dressed in her everyday clothes...
  Kim: Oh, Mum! What a great costume!
  Sharon: Oh wow, Mrs D. You look hilarious. You're gonna win for sure. Where'd you get that?
  Kath: [wearing an over-the-top '80s-style pink outfit] Oh, from my wardrobe, Sharon. Costume?
  Kim: Yeah, it's an '80s party.
  Kath: Oh, no! Nobody told me! I would have put something funny on!
• Mad Men
  • It's clear that Don's still stuck in the '50s as the series go on. In the final season he still has the classic look going into the '70s.
  • Joan became this as The '60s went on. At the beginning her look was the embodiment of the Pin Up girl and Sexy Sweater Girl look of the Postwar Era and admired, then later her updos, pencil skirts, wiggle dresses, stilettos, and attitude are found passe and garner some ridicule from younger men. While she updates her look slightly after becoming wealthy (she is after all in her mid- to late 30s, so dressing like Twiggy is a no-no) and wears floatier fashions, she still hasn't let go of her stilettos, elaborate hairdos, super-curve hugging clothing, and her '50s era apartment decor.
• The Magician: The villain in "Illusion of the Lost Dragon" is a Chinese warlord who has set up a compound where he lives as if it is the 16th century; the time of his ancestors' greatest power. All of his guards, servants, concubines, etc. dress in appropriate period Chinese garb.
• Catalina's uncle in My Name Is Earl is obsessed with American culture, or at least what he saw of it before his satellite broke...in the late 1980s.
  • Most of the residents of Camden (including Earl) are stuck in the late '80s or early '90s. Most of the men (and some of the women) wear flannel shirts, bands such as Def Leppard and Metallica are still hugely popular, and most are Hopeless with Tech (until Season 4, when everyone has high-speed Internet and computers out of nowhere) Justified in that Camden is on the Wrong Side of the Tracks; most of its residents are uneducated past High School (if even that), and many of them are older (and therefore less likely to develop newer tastes in music or adopt new technology). This leads to Camden being a kind of Retro Universe.
• The Price Is Right looked and sounded almost exactly the same at the end of Bob Barker's tenure in 2007 as it had in 1972. Same sets, same music, same graphic fonts for the credits. Once Drew Carey took over (and much of the old staff left or was were replaced) plenty of stuff got modernized, though not to the point of unrecognizability (ie. the Contestants' Row displays are now run by a computer, but still look like the old eggcrate displays).
  • This meant it fit right in with Gameshow Marathon, a 2006 summer series that saw reproductions of classic game shows; they didn't need to make anything new as they did with the other shows (Beat the Clock, Match Game, Card Sharks, Let's Make a Deal and Press Your Luck)
• Buzz Sherwood from The Red Green Show is still a hippie, despite the '60s being long over.
• Saturday Night Live:
  • A 1997 episode took a look at the "Superfans" after Mike Ditka became head coach in New Orleans. Chris Farley's character Todd O'Conner, having had a nervous breakdown and now believing it was still 1985, fit this trope to a T: he mentioned he had to get home "to see Jimmy Stewart on Carson." (If he was told it wasn't 1985, he'd have a Hollywood Heart Attack.)
  • The Ladies' Man sketches aired in the 1990s, but Leon Phelps, the eponymous Ladies' Man, was a deliberate relic of the 1970s with his afro, wide-collared shirt, and outdated sexual politics. In short, he looked as out-of-touch as he was.
• Tommy Saxondale in Steve Coogan's Saxondale has a bit of this going on; an ex-roadie from The '70s convinced he's still bucking the system, he's a bit stuck in the past and not quite the rebellious spirit he thinks he is.
• One of the recurring jokes about James May on Top Gear is that he is stuck in some point in the past, usually sometime between 1910 and 1960.
• What We Do in the Shadows (2019) plays with vampire stereotypes by having the main cast be an extreme version of this — stuck in the Victorian London time period of classic vampire icons like Dracula — but then, hilariously, has a much more literal version of this trope with a menacing vampire family nearby who are stuck in The '70s (called "the Hustle Dynasty").
• The Windsors has Fergie being unable to get over the '80s, when life was going particuarly well for her, and has her repeatedly try to recreate the era via things like disco.
• Johnny Fever on WKRP in Cincinnati is a borderline example of this trope. Having been a DJ for over a decade, he's settled into a preferred playlist (especially once he was liberated from the "Beautiful Music" straitjacket of WKRP's previous format) and so would much rather play deep cuts of Carl Perkins or Pink Floyd than the top-40 pop and rock hits that Andy Travis, the program director, has to all but order him to play. He later becomes an almost literal example of this trope in the persona of "Rip Tide" when he was hired under false pretenses to do a disco-revival show (the episode aired in 1981, soon after Disco had passed its expiration date), and became the personification of every cheesy '70s disco trope rolled into one stoner DJ, which ends up causing him to lose control and turn into his disco persona while on the air at WKRP.
• Neil of The Young Ones dressed and behaved like a hippie well into the 1980s, and once stubbornly declared that "Flares are coming back in! I read it in my horoscope!"

Music

• SR-71's song "1985", made famous by Bowling for Soup, is about a middle-aged soccer mom who thought she could become a world-famous actress back in the '80s. Instead, her life has been anything but what she imagined — a dull routine suburban life with a family, and even they're sick of her inability to get over it.
• Inverted with James Brown and his ill-advised late-1970s "Original Disco Man" period. With album sales flagging by 1979, Brown sought to put himself back in the limelight by changing his sound from his trademark soul-funk to straight up disco, using the angle that his classic hits were responsible for the genre's existence. However, this trope was subsequently played straight when the album was released literally the same month that the infamous Disco Demolition Night at Comiskey Park made the style unpopular essentially overnight, and Brown found himself yet again on the back foot until 1985's "Living in America."
• There are many popular musicians out there who will do a "throwback" number every once in a while, but then there are also some musicians who make that their entire gimmick. Exhibit "A" would probably have to be Southern California's Big Bad Voodoo Daddy, who not only refused to acknowledge that swing music went out of fashion in the late 1950s, but actually succeeded in hauling it back into the mainstream media for a short while.
  • While there are people who dislike music (or certain genre of music) made after a certain year, there are others who perform in styles that have since long fallen out of favor except by their hardcore fans, not as a gimmick but as a core part of their style because they are uncomfortable with newer styles or dislike the newer, updated sounds. One example toward the end of his career (and, as it turned out, life) was country singer Faron Young. "The Singing Sheriff" (as he was known to his fans) Young — a hardcore honky-tonk singer who occasionally added elements of pop music into his material — enjoyed the peak of his popularity from the mid-1950s through mid-1970s, after which radio began turning toward younger acts. Young, as the story goes, did not take kindly to the changes in the music he loved, and his sound (rooted mostly in the 1960s) was beginning to sound dated with his new material recorded in the 1980s. Young grew increasingly bitter and held closer to his sound by the early 1990s, when a bright young country star named Garth Brooks set new records for sales and concert attendance... and not always with sounds that were even remotely considered country, and certainly what Young perceived to be the true sound of country; Young was outspoken about his criticisms about Brooks and others, but few were listening or even interested in his opinions by now. In December 1996, with health problems and his increasingly bitter attitudes toward country music and life in general setting in, he took his life.
  • While other older country singers have never grown as bitter as Young, singers such as George Jones and Merle Haggard have been or were outspoken about what they regard(ed) as non-traditional country sounds (i.e., adult contemporary and straight-ahead pop) encroaching on their sounds of country music; acts like Taylor Swift and Rascal Flatts, and more recently Lady Antebellum, have taken the brunt of that criticism. While they continued to record new material for the rest of his life that has been critically acclaimed, their sounds remain rooted in traditional sounds.
  • Singer-songwriter/guitarist Leon Redbone's music is primarily covers of early 20th-century jazz, blues, and Tin Pan Alley classics, as well as some self-penned songs in those styles. He is probably best known for his musical appearances on SNL in the '70s and as the singer of the theme song for the TV show Mr. Belvedere in the '80s.
  • The New Vaudeville Band was a '60s retro-jazz group created by British songwriter Geoff Stephens who in 1966 recorded a hit novelty composition "Winchester Cathedral", a song inspired by 1920s Dance Band and with a Rudy Vallee megaphone-style vocal. They would later release the On Tour album, with the hit single Peek-A-Boo, later followed by the hit singles Finchley Central and Green Street Green.
  • Robert Crumb, best know for his underground comics, formed a retro string band in the 1970s called R. Crumb and his Cheap Suit Serenaders. On the three albums they released in the 1970s, they played songs from, and in the style of, the 1920s: old-time music, ragtime, "evergreen" jazz standards, western swing, country blues, hokum, vaudeville and medicine show tunes. They where also know for releasing their albums also on the then long defunct 78RPM record format (in addition to standard 33 1/3 RPM records).
• On his album Life is Good, Nas of all people invokes this on the track "Loco-Motive", intended as a throwback to the '90s gangsta rap/boombap of the start of his career, explicitly both for the enjoyment of and a shot at those Fan Dumb who think he should remain in that style and not evolve as a musician — declaring "this for my trapped in the '90s niggas". To be fair, the whole album, to a degree, is a throwback to '80s and '90s hip-hop, but "Loco-Motive" especially.
• While most Classical Music fans enjoy other forms of music as well, many can be extremely stubborn this way (some to the point of referring to classical music simply as "good music" with the exclusion of all other genres implied). Subverted in that there is still new music made today in the classical style and the genre continues to grow, but even then some fans get very critical and even outright hostile over new additions.
• The schtick for Big Daddy (note: not Big Bad Voodoo Daddy) was that they were a 1950s/early 1960s group that crashed on a desert island during a USO tour. When they were "rescued" many years later, they didn't know the new styles, so when they covered contemporary songs like "Superfreak" it came out sounding a bit like "Crimson and Clover" and their version of "Dancin' in the Dark" owes a lot to "Moody River". They've actually released several albums of this stuff, including one that's a tribute to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band.
• The song "Parents Just Don't Understand" by the rap duo DJ Jazzy Jeff and The Fresh Prince: the first verse — about a mother and son going shopping for clothing for the upcoming school year — has the main protagonist complaining that the clothes he'll be made to wear are, in his opinion, hopelessly outdated... more appropriate for 1963 or The Brady Bunch instead of realizing that grunge and hip-hop fashions he hopes to wear (to make him look "cool" and "popular") to school are inappropriate for any educational setting. On the first day of school, he is disconsolate, claiming that he was scorned and mocked for the clothes he was made to wear.
• In the mid-to-late 1970s, on both sides of the pond, there was a resurgence of 1950s rock-and-roll style music that most people who were young at the time found puzzling and anachronistic. In the UK, acts like Showaddywaddy made appearances on shows such as Top of the Pops in crepe shoes, Teddy-boy suits and ducktail hairstyles, performing songs that felt twenty years (at least) behind the times. In the US, Sha Na Na, who rose to fame with a '50s covers set at the iconic Woodstock festival, became one of the most popular musical acts in America, and even had their own syndicated variety show that showcased both '50s rock 'n roll acts that were still touring as well as more "modern" acts. Viewers of the normally intended demographics were puzzled, but their parents — who'd been young in the 1950s — basked in the warm glow of recognition and nostalgia. Pan forward another twenty years and note there was a surge of popular music that evoked the 1960s. It was even called the "second summer of love" ^note The first Summer of Love having been 1967). It has been speculated that the programme-shapers and opinion-formers of both periods had been going through a collective mid-life crisis pining for their own lost youth, and had generated a revival of the music of their youth which appealed not so much to the young as to those of their own generation.
• In his The Beatles' pastiche "The Long Medley", Mitch Benn calls Britpop "All of my seventies baby friends/Kicking themselves that they missed the sixties/So they did the sixties again".
• The singer of Joe Iconis's "Yesterdays / I Can't Relate" enjoys old records and other fads from decades ago, which prevents him from relating to his more modern peers who find that strange.

Podcasts

• Evelyn from Less is Morgue died in 2004, and pretty much all of her interests originated around that time. She also has an obsession with 1980s cartoon Middle-Aged Tree Men.

Pro Wrestling

• WCW had Disco Inferno, whose gimmick was Exactly What It Says on the Tin. In his later years, in an attempt to be more current, he became Pretty Fly for a White Guy and changed his name to Disqo (a play on Sisqo, a rapper who experienced faddish popularity around the turn of the century). That didn't work out for him, and so he went back to being Disco Inferno until WCW closed.
  • Not nearly as entertaining as Disco Inferno, WCW attempted to cash in on the popularity of That '70s Show by turning Mike Awesome into "That 70s Guy".
  • And then, of course, there was Johnny B. Badd, wherein Marc Mero was done up in an almost perfect clone of Little Richard.
• Joey Ryan had a gimmick as a Casanova Wannabe who acted like it was the '70s.
• The afro warrior of Pro Wrestling NOAH, Mohammad Yone, and The Funky Weapon of New Japan Pro-Wrestling, Ryusuke Taguchi.
• WWE tag team Deuce 'n Domino were a pair of '50s greaser throwbacks complete with pompadours, leather jackets, a valet who dresses in a poodle skirt (albeit much shorter than actual ones of the period) and rollerskates, an entrance that involves them driving out in a classic convertible, and a theme song that wouldn't be out of place on the Grease soundtrack. This got a brief subversion from play-by-play commentator Michael Cole, where he mentioned that they admitted in private with him that they realize it's not the '50s, but they like the look. They may have been prescient when it comes to rollerskates, though. Roller derby is currently making a comeback in large to medium-sized American cities, complete with the "retro" pre-1990s skate style.
• Wrestling Society X had the Old School Express, Jock Samson and Marion Fontaine. This got worse when they were joined by an unfrozen old school wrestler Matt Classic, 'old school' '50s/'60s moves such as a head vice or an abdominal stretch as finishers despite these moves generally no longer being taken seriously. Even the website listed him as having won the championship in 1952.
• In 2010, Jay Lethal of TNA did a gimmick that entailed pretending to be "Macho Man" Randy Savage (including the wraparound shades and the Jive Turkey accent) and literally acting as if it were still The '80s. The gimmick was dubbed "Black Machismo."
• Taken to ridiculous lengths by WWE NXT tag team The Vaudevillains, who style themselves after, as the name implies, Vaudeville.
• In Progress Wrestling there's Flash Morgan Webster who dresses up like a Mod (for those unfamiliar Mod's have their roots in the 1960s, at least 20 years before he was born)
• The Federalists were the very first political party of the United States Of America. In 2018, Marion Fontaine ran for public office as one. Despite his local popularity, he didn't do too well, what with the party no longer existing.
• In 2019 Impact Wrestling redebuted Johnny Swinger, a 25+ year veteran by that point, as a delusional out-of-touch goofball who thinks it’s vaguely sometime between the mid-'80s and 1993 ^note when he was just a teenager, let’s not think about it too hard and speaks only in inside wrestling references and lingo from that period.

Roleplay

• In Survival of the Fittest v4, we have Joshua Krakowski, who has been literally described as "The Living Anachronism" due to his clear '90s influence, right down to using '90s slang and looking like a Surfer Dude. Daniel Vaughan also has tendencies of this, as he clearly is a little too fond of the '80s. Naturally, he and Josh get along quite nicely.

Tabletop Games

• One the villains in Dark Champions: The Animated Series is Beatlemania; a criminal who is obsessed with the Beatles (despite having been born after they split up) and who fashions all of his crimes around Beatles themes.

Theatre

• The Drowsy Chaperone features Man in Chair, a lonely recluse who is obsessed with Broadway musicals of the 1920s-1940s, and who proceeds to narrate a recording of the titular show to the audience (making it a Play Within a Play).

Toys

• Barbie's Childhood Friend Midge expresses an interest in fads from The '60s, the decade in which dolls of herself first entered production.

Video Games

• The titular character of the Leisure Suit Larry series is permanently stuck in the 1970s in terms of style; in his case, it's partially justified. At the start of the series, Larry is a 38-year-old virgin who's been completely out of touch with the modern dating scene for most of his life; when he finally decides to remedy the situation, his idea of "cool" is over a decade out of date, more due to ignorance than willful disbelief. Later games, however, establish that even after coming to his senses, he maintains his "classic" look and tastes simply because he personally likes them.
• Bully has an entire clique of Greaser throwbacks who believe they're still in the 1950s and are opposed to the preps — a reference to the classic Young Adult novel The Outsiders.
• Ensemble Dark Horse Miror B. in Pokémon Colosseum and its sequel is one of the main bosses in the first game (and a minor crook in the second) who has an afro bigger than his head (and colored in a way that makes it look like a Poké Ball, no less) and has his own unique battle music — salsa in Colosseum, real disco in XD.
• Tiger in Tekken 3, a hidden character who is merely a different outfit for Eddy Gordo. As such, he uses the same fighting style (Capoeira).
• Eddie from the SSX games. He has an Afro, come on. Oh, and he's a white guy, so he really has no excuse apart from "I really never let go of my childhood." And yet, while his style is stuck in the '70s, his personality is stuck in Totally Radical '90s mode.
• Charles in Space Colony is described as an officer in the Royal Navy during World War I. He keeps a stiff upper lip, lies back and thinks of England, and won't take any sass from those Indian fellows. But he was actually born sometime in the 22nd century and currently lives in outer space. His official company profile says it's a complete mystery how the Hell he got the way he is and stayed that way.
• The WarioWare series has the identical but seemingly unrelated Jimmy T. and Jimmy P. The former's parents, brother, and sister joined him in later games.
• Paper Mario:
  • A minor character in Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door is a Disco Dan of indeterminate species with a French accent who flirts with Goombella. Even more random than usual for the Mario-verse.
  • Somehow, Paper Mario: The Origami King managed to give this personality to a yellow hole puncher. They love disco, dances non-stop during their boss fight, and their Boss Subtitle is the "Disco Devil". However, don't let their kookiness fool you, their disco obsession makes them a very legitimate threat. After all, they stole the faces of forty Toads to have them dance with them all the time and punched out the Sun to use it as their disco ball while also forcing a Toad DJ to play disco music for them under the threat of removing his face too.
• Disco Kid in Punch-Out!!, although it can be argued that the game actually takes place in the '70s, meaning that Disco Kid grew up during the days of disco.
• Serious Sam: The First Encounter, The Second Encounter and II have Dancing Denzell and Groovy Gregory as characters the player can choose.
• Toni, the Flashback FM DJ in Grand Theft Auto III. People ask her if she remembers anything after the 1970s and the '80s, and she doesn't, but she also thinks there isn't anything worth remembering after those times. You also hear her in Vice City (set in the '80s) as the DJ of Flash FM.
• Konstantin Brayko of Alpha Protocol has an obsession with the '80s and is basically a Russian Tony Montana. Hell, his boss music is even Turn Up The Radio by Autograph.
• Chibi-Robo!'s Funky Phil, who is actually a living dancing flower.
• Milla Vodello from Psychonauts. Her Mental World is a giant technicolor dance studio with disco music blaring. (Unless you stray into her nastier memories, anyway.) Possibly inverted as the game's aesthetic and the timeline shown on the camp log seem to put the game's setting somewhere in the '60s. Apparently, clairvoyance can let you enjoy musical trends a full decade before they hit.
• One of the zombies in Plants vs. Zombies is a disco dancer, dressing in stereotypical white leisure suit and afro hairstyle, as a Visual Pun on how disco is dead. (This was originally a Michael Jackson expy but legal issues forced a change.)
• The Radioman from Spec Ops: The Line. Guy sounds like he just came back from a Vietnam War protest and plays lots of tracks from that period over his speaker systems, including Jimi Hendrix and Deep Purple. Not that anyone's complaining.
• The Justicars of the Mass Effect universe live according to a code that was formulated thousands of years ago when the asari were the only known sentient life in the galaxy and there was little or no law enforcement to contend with. It can create... problems for the Justicars in the 22nd century.
• Project × Zone 2 has Segata Sanshiro, who hasn't gotten the memo that the Sega Saturn has been defunct for years.
• The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker has the unusual example of Tott, an example of this trope in what is otherwise a Medieval European Fantasy setting. He's a dancing-obsessed guy dressed in 1970s disco clothes who is constantly dancing in front of a tombstone trying to remember a song that can let one change the In-Universe Game Clock; his inability to do so references the whole "out of step with the times" element of this trope.
• The Player Character of Disco Elysium is, appropriately enough, a huge disco fan, or at least was, before he lost his memory after a massive drinking binge — although the fact that he must have been a fan of the genre is one of the few things that he quickly discerns, judging from the outfit he finds strewn around his trashed hostel room, which consits of a forest green blazer, a wide collar satin shirt, mustard-yellow bell bottom pants, a pair of high-heeled green snakeskin loafers, and a really horrible necktie, and the fact that the smile that is frozen into his face is a imitation of the one a famous disco-star wore on his face back in disco's hayday. It is later shown that, in Revachol, disco is not seen as merely a music genre, but a state of mind similar to Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll. It also can be used as an adjective (e.g., "That is so Disco")
• Pyramid from Enslaved: Odyssey to the West is a very dark example of this, being a survivor of the old, pre-Robot War world who is so hopelessly trapped in the past and unwilling to let new generations of humanity forget said past that he's built a horrifying slave empire devoted almost entirely to forcibly sharing his idea of the good ol' days with the people of the wasteland.
• Shin Megami Tensei: Recurring zombie enemies Bodyconian^note "bodycon" is short for "body-conscious" and refers to the style of dress she's wearing, which was extremely popular in Japan before the economic bubble burst and Maneater are references to the Japanese disco dance culture of the 1980s^note While disco died in America, it continued to persist in other countries for a little while longer. As the Shin Megami games were released in the late 1980s, it is a joke that the subculture was on its way out at the time.
• Grand Theft Auto: Recurring radio interviewee Jack Howitzer is an '80s action star who has difficulty accepting that the days of The Ahnold are over.

Visual Novels

• Averted with the protagonist of Melody. Although he's much older than Melody, he's not out of touch with the music scene, and he goes out of his way to learn Melody’s taste in music.

Web Animation

• In Happy Tree Friends there is a character literally named Disco Bear, and as he name would suggest he is all about groovy music, big hair, and boogying down.
• Homestar Runner:
  • Technology and music-wise, Strong Bad seems stuck in the 1980s or 1990s. Considering how he's been slowly upgrading his computers, it's possible that he is changing with the times, but he's fifteen years behind the curve. He marvels at his 45-pound laptop's 5-minute battery life and has no idea what a mouse is. Old Timey Strong Bad is worse; he's still using the telegraph in 1936, decades after it had been rendered obsolete by the telephone. Strong Bad's latest computer, the Compé, appears to bringing him a bit closer to the present, but only slightly: while it has a flat-screen monitor, it has what looks like 256 colors and pixels as big as fists. Which means it's, what, 1991? When the Compé was compressed by six years worth of dust into an older-style computer, he considered it a step up. He also seems to be in a state of denial about how outdated the tech he uses really is; when The Paper begins to fail, he cries out "Why do all my 30 year-old electronics keep breaking on me?"
  • Then there's the Videlectrix guys, who release Atari 2600 style games in the present day without realizing that they're ridiculously out of touch until they're tasked with developing the Homestar Runner game and try controlling a Commodore 64 with a Wiimote.

Web Comics

• The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob!:
  • Bob has a collection of vinyl records, an entire basement full of VHS tapes with a working VCR, an Atari 2600, a rotary phone, and of course wears his trademark bellbottom pants. It's probably not so much that he's actively defying change as just that he'd be the last person on Earth to care about fashion trends, including technology fashion.
  • His artificial daughter Molly learned much of what she knows about the world from that VHS collection, causing her to pepper her speech with decades-old cultural references.
  • Then of course there's Cloud Cuckoo Lander Mr. Bystander, who thinks rock and roll will never catch on, thinks Sputnik is still up there, and considers heavy metal punks to be hippies.

Web Original

• The Onion's "Area Man's Pop Culture References Stop at 1988".
  • The Onion's original publisher, T. Herman Zweibel, is stuck in the early years of the 20th century, regularly complaining about the imminent threat posed to the United States by the Spaniards.
• Rolfe from Showbiz Pizza is this quite a bit. He sings Disco during shows and repeatedly says it's his favorite genre. Often made fun of by his hand puppet, Earl, because of it.
• The character of the blogger running Yo, Is This Racist? is a Totally Radical '90s "out-of-work rapper" who refuses to get an iPhone as he prefers his pager, hangs out at the mall and still thinks yelling "DEEEEEEEEZ NUTS" is the cutting-edge of meme-based comedy. Possibly justified as one update implied he was actually a Human Popsicle "unfrozen in the future to spread the message about racism".

Web Videos

• "90s Kid" on Atop the Fourth Wall is out of touch and obsessed with Rob Liefeld-esque 1990s comic books. Note that he met with 80's Dan (see below) to trade soft drinks, so for one crossover you got twice the Disco Dan fun!
• Brad Jones of The Cinema Snob, has created a character called 80's Dan. His videos are parodies of '80s-style sitcoms, with canned laughter and a feel good theme song, and feature the time displaced Dan subjecting his less than enthusiastic roommates and neighbors (including a R.O.B. the Robot) to the joys of '80s pop culture. Bonus points for him actually being named "Dan".
• The Angry Video Game Nerd lives in a basement full of old video game consoles, doesn't own anything made after The '90s and uses a Commodore 64 and a rotary phone. The former can browse the internet and play modern games (they just take about five years to start up), and the latter can play smartphone games despite not having any kind of screen. The Mega Man episode, made in honour of his 10-year anniversary on YouTube, later reveals that he's "kept up with the times" by updating his vinyl collection and getting a cell phone. The vinyls are now on cassette tapes, and the cell phone is a forty-year-old Motorola digital personal communicator.
• Game Grumps' Danny is an example to an extent. He's not stuck in the past; however, he does seem to prefer that age, constantly bringing up songs, references or slang of the time. Also, he sucks at modern games, with hilarious results considering what his show is about. Arin put it best.
  Arin: Game Grumps, starring Arin "Sucks at games" Hanson and Dan "hasn't played a video game since 1987" Avidan.
• Nightmare Time: Miss Holloway is an immortal witch with a love for the '80s, keeping the same teased hair and leather jacket even as the decades pass.

Western Animation

• Even though Archer exists in a bizarre Anachronism Stew of a world, Rip Riley stands out as one of these. Archer even calls him on it during a plane ride, accusing him of trying too hard with his "Sky-captain of yesteryear" look.
• Eddy from Ed, Edd n Eddy keeps a disco ball, polyester suits, and various Tom Jones and Barry White records in his room. While the show takes place in an Ambiguous Time Period (however it's heavily implied to be in the 2000s), it's clear that Eddy is still way behind the times. Eddy is unusual in that he is only 12 and thus is likely too young to have even experienced the '70s.
• Quagmire from Family Guy lives by the swinger lifestyle of the '50s and '60s (or, he used to, before they amped up his sexual perversion and made him Brian the dog's Sitcom Archnemesis). It makes sense when it's revealed that he was actually born in 1948 and stays young by ingesting carrots.
• The Futurama character known only as "That Guy" who lives his life like Gordon Gekko despite his perfect grasp of his temporal location. He even gets Fry to embrace his lifestyle while performing a hostile takeover of Planet Express and nearly pulls off a flawless pump-and-dump to Mom Corp. Only his sudden death from boneitis stops him from succeeding. The DVD commentary for the episode reveals that his name is Steve Castle, an appropriate name for an '80s business guy.
• Finn, one of the Dark Hand enforcers from Jackie Chan Adventures, dresses in a '70s disco suit and displays some Disco Dan tendencies at times. This aspect of his personality really shines through in an episode where he travels back in time to the '70s, where he actually has to be physically dragged out of the time period while he shouts "I wanna stay!"
• Motor Ed from Kim Possible behaves like an '80s rocker, seriously, often goes into air guitar riffs, seriously, and even quits his job because he loves his mullet, seriously.
• Michigan J. Frog in the Looney Tunes short One Froggy Evening is a Disco Dan from The Gay '90s brought up to The '50s and later 20 Minutes into the Future. He dances around in a top hat and sings the popular Tin Pan Alley music of his era.
• One-off character(s) Get Thee Hence from Metalocalypse. Whose Nu Metal gimmick and music was already about 6 years out of date when their episode first aired. Nathan sums it up for them.
  Nathan: Rap rock band with a DJ?
  Lead Singer: That's us, motherfucker.
  Nathan: Somebody tell this band what year it is.
• ¡Mucha Lucha! has Senor Hasbeena, a teacher at the FOREMOST WORLD-RENOWNED INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL OF LUCHA who constantly spouts '70s slang in a rather hammy voice. He even has a signature move called The Funky Disco Ball. According to the episode "Woulda Coulda Hasbeena," he was actually a pretty successful luchador in the 1970s until a mysterious flash (later found out to be his future self performing his signature move) distracted him during a championship match with Kid Up And Coming, resulting in him losing the championship; hence why he's stuck in the '70s.
• In The Powerpuff Girls (1998), the Boogie Man (as in, the Boogie Man, the nocturnal demon who scares children) is like this. In fact, the most vital part of his Evil Plan to plunge Townsville into eternal night involves blocking out the sun with a Disco ball the size of the Death Star, and turning Townsville into an eternal disco night club. Because he is the Boogie Man.
• In The Proud Family, Uncle Bobby still performs to this day as an old-school Funk singer straight out of the Seventies, complete with the characteristic heavy rhythmic "Owwww!" tone in his voice (which even Lionel Richie quit doing by the '80s) and which he uses even when speaking "normally".
• The gang from Scooby-Doo, of course, didn't upgrade their '60s-era clothing or slang for decades, until the latest batch of TV movies and What's New, Scooby-Doo? series gave them a makeover. This is lampshaded in Scooby-Doo and the Cyber Chase, where the gang meets video-game doubles of themselves who still dress like in the original Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! series. Shaggy's wardrobe never did catch up with the times, a fact he comments on himself in Scooby-Doo and the Alien Invaders. The revival Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated has several characters very much rooted in disco-styling and the era, including Shaggy himself. But the whole setting sort of exists in the 1970s and the 2010s at the same time (it's heavy on the Retro Universe aesthetic), so it may be perfectly justified.
• The Simpsons:
  • Disco Stu's a recurring joke character who's eternally stuck in the mid-1970s, but he's a fairly positive portrayal of this trope. In fact, one episode reveals that he is actually fully aware that disco is dead and admits that he doesn't even like disco anymore—however, Stu's worried that he's become "a one-note guy" after letting it define him for so long. Most Springfield-residents seems to like Stu just fine—one episode reveals that he was married to Marge's sister, Selma, at one point (Stu was Selma's fourth husband) and Marge claims that Stu's the only one of Selma's ex-husbands she actually liked.
  • C. Montgomery Burns, whose values and vocabulary are still stuck on October 27, 1929 (just before Black Tuesday and the start of The Great Depression). His antiquated demeanor and ideas are a recurring source of humor in the series, as is his on-again off-again ignorance of history after the 1930s (he still thinks there's a Negro League in baseball...).
  • Otto Mann (the bus driver for Springfield Elementary) has become this in the later seasons of the show—he still talks/dresses like a teenager from the 1980s and even still uses a portable cassette player (which he wears on his hip), even though anything to do with cassette tapes has been obsolete since the early-2000s.
  • Much was made in older episodes (when the passage of time in the real world made the show's sliding timescale less noticeable) of the early '70s as Homer's teenage years, his love of bands long past their sell-by date, most infamously Grand Funk Railroad. Nowhere is this clearer than in "Homerpalooza", where his attempts to sell the kids on his old favorites fall flat and he's left to express confusion because, "Everyone knows that rock achieved perfection in 1974!"
• Teen Titans (2003) has a few of these. The animated series gets around the painful Totally Radical nature of old Titans villains like Mad Mod by making them old men who hide behind illusions to make themselves appear "young" and "hip" again:
  • Mad Mod uses mind control to impose his vision of an Anglicized US (at least one seen through the lens of Yellow Submarine and Monty Python) on Jump City.
  • Ding Dong Daddy rides a hot rod and abuses the living crap out of phrases like "Daddy-O". He's got round sunglasses and a beret.
• Teen Titans Go! gives Cyborg some shades of this, with a love of '80s sitcoms and a preference for cassette tapes and VCR over more modern forms of media.
• Since many of the people behind Teen Titans also created Transformers: Animated, this also applies to some of the lower-scale human villains the Autobots fight. Headmaster is a nerd heavy on late-2000s internet slang, Angry Archer talks in medieval lingo, Prometheus Black/Meltdown looks like he never got over the '70s (same with Porter C. Powell), and Slo-Mo is an evil version of a 1930s Screwball Comedy lead. The difference here is that they're in a futuristic, robot-heavy Detroit, making them contrast even more.

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