Once Original Now Common / Real Life

• Artistic movements. Numerous ones like impressionism, surrealism, dada, and postmodernism. At the time they were controversial for being new and upending tradition on varying levels. Nowadays, the simple fact of them having been around awhile negates half of their original notability, and the internet making it easy for any artist to share whatever vision they want makes it a lot harder to appreciate the other half (not to mention that their age and historical appreciation leads to them sometimes being treated as the tradition to now upend).
  • Greek paintings and sculptures. Most of it looks a bit primitive and even uncharacteristically unrealistic today, but without it literally all of Western art the way we know it wouldn't exist (maybe aside from a period of truly Germanic art during The Low Middle Ages).
  • French painter Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun. During the 18th century, her self-portraits caused outrage among her contemporaries. In her paintings, she smiled with her teeth visible, while dressed in soft clothing and carrying her daughter, clearly showing affection for the child. Before then, a smile was seen as a sign of low intelligence and lack of self-control; only monkeys, drunkards, fools and poor people would smile like that in artworks (in Europe anyways). At most, you could smile as a sign of mockery or irony. A toothy smile especially was out because of bad dental hygiene at the time. Fashion dictated that people would wear big poofy dresses, not form-fitting soft clothes that felt natural to wear, which made her look intimate in the paintings. As for her affection for her daughter, it was against the past view of parenting, where it was customary to let a child be raised not by its parents but by a nurse or a relative instead, and preferably far away, so her showing motherly love made her look even more intimate. The scandal made her more famous and more people wanted their portraits drawn by her. As time went by, more of her colleagues would take after her. Today, she is seen as one of the greatest painters in France, but no one would think of her art as groundbreaking or controversial.
• The infamous "Chicken Joke" would be a brilliant subversion of the concept of a punch line, if only it weren't one of the first jokes most people heard. Some people miss the point so completely that they try to make it a real joke—claiming, for instance, that "the other side" is double entendre for death. (Link NSFW.)
• High-end computer technology in general. What's cutting edge can become mainstream and even low end very quickly by other companies doing it a lot cheaper. Just ask SGI or Cray.
• Robin Williams and his mastery of Rapid-Fire Comedy and physical and verbal humor were once new and exciting, like having Groucho and Harpo Marx in the same person. (Mork & Mindy never would have survived without it.) Thirty years later, this same style of comedy has become a punchline in and of itself, most notably in a SNL Celebrity Jeopardy! sketch where "he" is told, "For the love of God, SHUT YOUR MOUTH!".
• Stand-up comics. Most original and groundbreaking ones seem less so a generation later—or less—when their styles and gimmicks are widely reproduced. It can be difficult to understand what makes, for example, Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor so important when stages are saturated with comedians who do approximately the same thing, many of them at least as well.
  • In Britain, comedians like Dave Allen, Billy Connolly and Jasper Carrott were radically different from the traditional working men's club comedians in the 1970s who stood at a mike with a beer in hand and told jokes. Now their observational comedy and conversational style is the norm. Not that they're unfunny now, but they can seem like very conventional establishment figures when once they were radical.
  • One interesting thing of note about the working men's club comedians is that they themselves were a victim of this trope at the time. Beforehand, British stand-up was very stiff upper lip, with a guy in an evening suit standing motionless on a stage with very little charisma. As controversial as the racist/sexist acts of men like Bernard Manning would eventually become, they really were the benchmarks that every up and coming comedian tried to copy.
  • The work of many of the comedians of the "alternative comedy" set of the 1980s now often looks as quaint as the earlier comics they were reacting against, when viewed in context of later work.
  • Surrealism, non-sequiturs, and a rambling rhetorical style are so widespread among stand-up comics of the late 1990s / early 2000s that it's easy to overlook how influential Eddie Izzard was when she first coined that style. And even she simply imitated what certain American stand-up comedians (particularly Emo Philips) and Monty Python did decades earlier.
  • Jerry Seinfeld's observational stand-up routine was insanely popular in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and it was widely recognized as fresh and original. Johnny Carson famously gave him the "OK" sign, when Seinfeld first appeared on The Tonight Show. Fast forward a few years and Seinfeld had become the go-to impression of a lazy hack comedian, due to being copied to death by lesser comedians. As early as 1985, a recurring sketch on Saturday Night Live featured a group of these, dressed alike and beginning and ending nearly every sentence with "What is the deal with..." and "I wanna know!" Seinfeld was also the first person to joke about airline peanuts, now pretty much synonymous with "lazy comedian" (and a hopelessly out-of-date one at that, peanuts having been replaced by the much cheaper pretzels and cookies sometime in the 2000s).
• UNIX seems to fall victim to this trope. Multitasking and on-line documentation are now standard, and the command-line interface is admittedly difficult. But clunky as it was, a person using a computer interactively was a major breakthrough in the early to mid-'70s when the computer world was still based on batch processing^note Not to be confused with Blast processing, which powered the Sega Genesis. The command line was actually considered user-friendly compared to using punch cards.
  • GNU/Linux was considered revolutionary because it was a free full Unix-like system that could run on a single off-the-shelf PC. Other free Unix-like OSes have since been ported to the platform (particularly NetBSD, which aims to be incredibly portable). Even then, GNU/Linux wasn't the first version of Unix that could run on a PC. (That said, it's still more popular than other free Unix-like operating systems.) People who grew up after the rise of open source OSes running on personal computers may not appreciate how much of a luxury having a Unix system to yourself was before the 1990s. Even workstations were often too expensive to justify dedicating to a single user outside of high-powered tasks like CAD/CAM or CGI animation, so users in labs or offices would typically be connecting to a central machine either through text terminals or graphical "X terminals" that were the forerunner of modern thin clients.
  • Accessing the root account used to be a big deal, as only the admins on minicomputers and mainframes could do so, conferring an air of privilege on Unix admins, when multiuser Unix systems were the norm. The rise of Unix-like systems on single-user PCs makes "going root" mundane. It's still a big deal on servers, though.
• Computer programming languages can be like this. Older languages tend to have fewer built-in tools, forcing one to manually program a lot of things that newer languages take care of automatically. This causes many of today's younger programmers to write off these older languages as needlessly complicated to code in, without realizing how, for instance, C (introduced in 1972) was immensely more user-friendly than the programming tools that had come before (such as machine code and assembly language).
• Usenet. In a world where any schmuck with an Internet connection can start a blog or a message board, this has gone from "groundbreaking innovator" to "place where only spammers frequent" very quickly.
• The Gopher protocol, which organized content on the Internet into a browseable (by a text menu interface) hierarchy of sites, files, and folders, complete with a search engine has been all but lost to current generations of Web users as the direct predecessor of the Web. However, a decent-sized gopher space does still exist on the 'net to this day as a reaction to the complexity of modern web design, and a successor protocol exists in the form of Gemini, which adds modern-day security features.
• People these days, with handheld computing devices such as smartphones, electronic book readers, tablet computers, etc. probably don't remember the Newton MessagePad, the grandfather, so to speak, of many of these, and direct ancestor of the iPad. Quite a few of them very likely would think of them as unwieldy or clunky, but when they were introduced in 1994, they were far ahead of their time.
  • They were too far ahead of the time, which is why they were unwieldy and clunky (even by 1994 standards). When Palm came along and did the same thing, with much less ambition, they were unbelievably successful.
• Technologies in general. Remember how a bunch of gigabytes were supposed to take up an area the size of a floor tile? Yeah... take one look at modern terabyte storage devices and hard drives and try not to laugh at those predictions.
  • Computers were marketed based on their speed. It was the quest for 100, then 200, then 300 megahertz. By late '90s half a gigahertz and then one gigahertz finally arrived to a universal meh. Now only do-it-yourselfers and PC enthusiasts focus on speed or process specs.
  • Computer external storage devices went from floppy disks to using optical drives (mainly CDs and DVDs) to using thumb drives and SD cards. By and large laptops and even desktops no longer have optical device players with users instead using USB devices or online cloud storage. Users wanting to use optical drives often have to purchase an external optical drive that connects via USB ports.
  • Peripheral devices such as mice, keyboards, and printers originally had their own unique connectors with matching ports on the computers they were connected to. Once USB ports arrived on the scene they largely replaced everything except displays, which themselves have gone from using SVGA connectors to HDMI connectors.
• Science. Theories that were once revolutionary are now things that are taught to anyone with a basic education, and many people who were geniuses of their era and had what was the best and strongest theory at the time now seem to believe things that are ridiculous. Even though we remember Galileo, Newton, and Aristotle, it's strange to most people to think how revolutionary their ideas and experiments (thought experiments or otherwise) were and how far ahead of their time they were. There are doubtlessly an even larger number of scientists, mathematicians and philosophers who have been outright forgotten by history because their work is now obsolete or factually wrong, or just became common knowledge and now exists in the work of later people who improved upon their original works.
  • It's telling that these days, a lot of stories of historic scientific geniuses are told more as parables of how stupid the majority of people used to be, as opposed to how brilliant the scientists themselves were. Aristotle is the biggest offender: his theories were some of the first attempts to come up with coherent, secular reasons for how things he observed worked. However, he also made no attempts to test his theories, so pretty much every single one ended up completely abandoned once people started to try them out. What made it particularly problematic was that many great intellectuals were content to just cite Aristotle, even in the face of clear evidence that he was wrong.
  • The above is the rationalization used by some who promote ancient astronaut theories. They express shock and disbelief that such "primitive" cultures could have possibly created complex structures, governmental systems or works of art without the assistance of a higher, alien influence.
  • Consider the Pythagorean Theorem, a basic equation that you probably learned (and subsequently forgot) in middle-school geometry class. But its discovery was among the earliest attempts to codify a natural phenomenon into a mathematical formula. Practically all of modern science and engineering is built on that simple triangle.
• In less than a decade, we went from cell-phone commercials advertising the ability to send photos or text messages as if it was magic, because it really was an innovative thing, to a time where the idea of owning a cell-phone that can't do those things is unthinkable. Cell phones themselves became examples over time, from their size (they used to be the size of a brick and just as heavy) to their service (they used to only work in high-traffic areas, and would be useless in the suburbs, for example) to just how many people had them. There was a time when, even after they got smaller, had wider service areas and lower rates, when well over 50% of the adults in the western world still didn't own one, and the idea of teenagers having their own was about as likely as aliens landing. A majority of households still had a landline home phone line, and wouldn't think of getting rid of it because that was their primary phone while their cells were (supposedly) strictly for emergencies. In the modern era, most households have one cell phone per person, many don't have landline phones at all, and when they do, they barely use them.
  • While being uglier, costing more to own and operate, and being able to do much less, the cell phones of yesteryear had battery power that could last for nearly a week, even when used heavily. Modern smart phones die in mere hours even with light use. The modern battery life is largely due to the 'feature war' between smartphone manufacturers, to have the brightest screen, the fastest Internet, the slimmest battery etc. Although a large part of it is also just planned obsolescence.
• If you're too used to DVD and Blu-ray, watching a movie on a VHS tape seems... weird. The quality might seem grainy, the sound is lower-quality, etc., and there's all sorts of damage that could have been done. Plus, having to fast forward if you wanted to see a certain scene... and knowing they weren't that accurate, as most VCR systems would play about a second of silence and then pick up when you fast-forwarded or rewound.
  • And in this day and age, the fact that theatres or rare TV showings were the only way to see old movies seems kinda silly. In 2011, people scoffed at the idea of The Lion King (1994) being re-released in theatres... whereas just fifteen years previous, the practice wouldn't have been that ludicrous.
    • Pre-VCR, it was common practice to re-release movies to theaters just before a sequel came out. Disney themselves would re-release their more popular animated films every seven years.
  • For those who were around when VHS was the dominant medium, this trope is somewhat mitigated by the fact that VHS was always noticeably poorer quality than broadcast TV; and let's be fair, there was a reason why Laserdisc was the (albeit niche) choice for serious cinephiles in the pre-DVD days....
  • It's also somewhat exaggerated by the larger size of most modern-day TV screens by comparison to what was normal in the '80s and '90s; the actual resolving power of the eye at normal viewing distance means that for smaller screens, higher resolutions are not normally as noticed.
  • Similarly, cassette tapes quite often don't sound great, but for many years, they were the only way to listen to music or audiobooks portably, and the most common way to record audio too. Nowadays, you can do both with phones, in higher sound quality. Although, they have made a moderate comeback amongst indie musicians wishing to provide a low cost physical version of their releases or for the intentional lofi sound.
• Audiobooks are much Older Than They Think, having been a thing since as early as the 1930s. But prior to digital and streaming, they were very, very cumbersome, needing to be recorded on cylinders, records, cassette tapes, and compact discs. This really limited distribution - and prior to services like Bookshare, LibriVox, Listening Books, Audible, Amazon, and other non-profits, your picks for an audiobook were basically whatever the store or library had in stock. If you lost or damaged a single volume, you'd have entire gaps. It's hard to imagine a time without streaming services that can deliver audiobooks right to your phone or computer.
• Whilst now-normal HD pictures looked amazing a few years ago, they now look much less impressive when compared to watching in 4K.
• The grocery store chain Piggly Wiggly is the 'trope maker' of the modern self-serve grocery store, but most people likely have forgotten that. (Even fewer people remember that it was one of the first businesses to use the "just-in-time" model of production, and even one of the first to use the shopping cart, but that's because to most people, a grocery store is simply a place where you can buy food.)
  • A&P was one of the first chains in the USA to popularize private-label "store brand" merchandise (most famously Eight O'Clock Coffee), which is now all but universal among grocery chains. The British Coop (Cooperative) were inter-war pioneers in sourcing and packaging tea - a model still evident in the 1990s when they began the (now widely imitated) Fair Trade own-brand goods.
• McDonald's consistently ranks at or near the bottom in rankings of fast food franchises despite being the one that first codified the business model of a fast food joint, partially because it can't stand out in the status quo it created. That said, they are still #1 in profits by a decent margin, probably out of how utterly ubiquitous they are. People who routinely trash it still eat there at least once a month. (They do have to have something to legitimately complain about, y'know.) To a certain extent, Mickey D's represents a sort of replacement-level restaurant—if you can't make your food as good as McDonald's, your restaurant is unlikely to survive. Averted with their Happy Meals—while McDonald's was the first fast food place to have full meal sets aimed at children, the Happy Meal has never been overtaken by any of the competition's counterparts.
  • Starbucks has been affected by this trope, too. Most younger millenials, who have never known life without the chain, sometimes talk as dismissively about it as Americans in general do about McDonald's, preferring newer chains like Blue Bottle. But in the 1980s and 1990s it became the first nationally successful coffeehouse chain, changing the way all Americans thought of coffee from some utilitarian caffeine-delivery system to a drink with many possibilities to be savored in its own right, and making it perfectly normal and acceptable to drink espresso, cappuccino and lattes, previously seen as exotic drinks preferred only by bohemians, Italian immigrants, and Italophiles. The same can be said about the Tim Hortons coffeehouse and baked goods restaurant chain in Canada, given that it became the largest restaurant chain in the country, having more locations than McDonald's and Starbucks combined there, and Tim Hortons isn't as upscale as Starbucks.
  • Burger King (AKA Hungry Jack in Australia) was able to compete with McDonald's by having an indoor dining area. Prior to this, if you wanted a hamburger, you either went to a sit-down restaurant or a drive-in joint. For most people at the time, Burger King was the first place where they could get the speed, convenience, and price of fast food and eat it on a table and sitting on a chair provided by the establishment.
  • Chipotle, while it may not have been the first fast-casual restaurant to use an industrial aesthetic and assembly line process for customizing your order, was the first time many people experienced those two ideas, which have been duplicated over and over again in different restaurants for different types of food. These days, there are 3-5 different "Chipotle of $FOOD" restaurants in most large strip mall complexes.
  • Big Boy Restaurants is the creator of the double-hamburger, their signature Big Boy Burger. Its contents vary on location but always has two beef patties, two slices of cheese, lettuce, onions, and a "secret sauce" resembling Thousand Island dressing. The Big Boy Burger was created as a response to a very hungry customer wanting something big and ridiculous, and this is what the owner/chef came up with. If this sounds like the most hackneyed cheeseburger design, considering it's also the formula for McDonalds' Big Mac, Checkers and Rally's Big Buford, In-N-Out's Double-Double, and many other burger joints' signature burgers, that's because the Big Boy Burger was such a hit that other hamburger restaurants imitated it. However, Big Boy Restaurants is a sit-down chain, and it struggled against the quick, fast-food chains that would pop up later, with every attempt to enter the fast-food business failing. The chain still exists, but now as isolated clusters in Ohio, southern California, Michigan and Japan.
• Howard Johnson's and Holiday Inn were two of the first chains to really standardize the concept of a hotel chain as we know it today. Things such as on-site swimming pools, meeting rooms, and on-site restaurants that most motel patrons take for granted became the norm with Ho Jo, but Executive Meddling in the 70s and 80s, combined with a saturation of the market, pushed that chain into near-irrelevance. (Holiday Inn, however, managed to revitalize itself in The '90s.) Between the saturation of the market and the rampant rebranding present in the motel industry, many facets of the modern hotel that most people don't think twice about were seen as new, convenient, and groundbreaking when they first came out in the 60's or so. A traveler back in the 50's probably would've been blown away by the concept of a motel offering a continental breakfast, for instance.
• The Toyota Prius, the first commercially successful hybrid car, bolted Toyota into the 21st Century, proved Japanese automakers were a force to be reckoned with, and almost single-handedly launched the Hybrid car revolution... and is now quickly becoming irrelevant and a victim of its own success, as the explosion of hybrid cars it helped launch has given rise to bigger, faster, and even more fuel efficient hybrid cars, with even other cars from Toyota like the Camry and Highlander Hybrids stealing its thunder, and leaving the Prius with less of an edge, and less to recommend it. And Toyota playing up the Prius's advanced technology, cult-like following, and general quirkiness for marketing purposes isn't helping, leaving it pigeonholed as a zeerust-y nerdmobile.
  • To a lesser extent, the BMW Neue Klasse/5-Series. When it first launched in 1962, it was revolutionary, being the first midsize BMW built since World War II and their first car ever to not be powered by a modified motorcycle engine, and a breath of fresh air in a luxury car market dominated by overpriced and oversized limousines and personal luxury coupes with massive, inefficient engines and boat-like handling, being small and light, with compact, high-revving engines and things like four-wheel independent suspension and unibody construction. Thanks to this, it singlehandedly saved the company from bankruptcy, established BMW as a major player in the global car market, and became the Trope Codifier for the modern compact executive car. Now, the 5-series too has become a victim of its own success, losing ground in terms of build quality and driving dynamics to similar models from rivals Audi and Mercedes and also foreign copycats from the Americans (Cadillac CTS), Brits (Jaguar XF), Japanese (Lexus GS-Series), and Koreans (Hyundai Genesis), as well it's own stablemate, the smaller 3-series, making it a shell of its former self with not much to recommend to it while remaining the market leader and still having a devoted fanbase.
  • Automobiles went from having optional 8 track tape players and from there on to cassette tapes. Eventually CDs became a widely available option on vehicles but as storing music on a portable devices such as iPods, phones, and other mp3 players along with streaming services starting to take hold CD players began to lose out in popularity. Most vehicles no longer offer CD players even as an option, with owners instead using phones or their vehicle's built in connectivity to access music and other entertainment options.
• The Boeing Model 247, the first modern commercial airliner that first flew in 1933. Unfortunately, it was promptly joined by competitors using the same technology but were just slightly better—most notably, the Douglas DC-3—that hardly anyone knew about the Boeing plane even in the 1930s.
• The Colt M1911 is the handgun that virtually all modern handguns owe their designs to. While there were other handguns around at the time of its release, they were either also designed by the M1911's designer, John Browning, or based off his designs, or had complicated mechanisms that made them unfavorable to copy from. However, because of the fact that virtually all modern handguns took after it, the M1911 and its limited seven-round capacity magazine and multiple manual safeties may seem antiquated now that we have pistols that have are better built, carry more ammo per magazine, and are more ergonomic. Despite this, the M1911 has a huge following and multiple military servicemen still carry them to this day despite being phased out.
• This is why the Browning Hi-Power was phased out in multiple militaries and discontinued by the Browning Arms Company themselves. Many pistols that came after it such as the CZ-75 and the Glock pistols boasted magazine sizes larger than 13-round magazines the Browning Hi-Power provided and pioneered and even took after its internal design and improved on it. In addition, those same pistols were either more ergonomic, lighter, cheaper, or even all of the above and still provided the same level of quality. And because the Browning Hi-Power didn't share the same cult following as its older brother, the M1911, it eventually fell out of favor with the commercial and military market, overshadowed by the M1911 and the guns that took after it.
• Memes in general. What was considered funny and viral back then can quickly become a Discredited Meme when beaten to the ground. For example, the "I was an adventurer like you, then I took an arrow to the knee" meme from The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim quickly fell out of grace weeks after the meme was born. With enough fervor, memes can become overused, tired, parodied, and hated within days. Whilst many memes became popular ironically, they then get taken on as being seriously appreciated by the media, and dragged into the ground well beyond the point where the original fans have derided it as an old meme. A notable example is "Gangnam Style", which due to being such an oversaturated mainstream meme at the time, will lead to groans from pretty much anyone nowadays rather than appreciation.
  • By the 2020s, “within days” has reached “within the same day”.
• Jean Robert-Houdin was a French magician in the 1850s who invented the cliched Victorian magician idea. At the time magicians were seen as beggars, thieves, or children's entertainers. Seeing one dressed like the finest of gentlemen, on a stage, performing for high society, was revolutionary at the time, so much so it's still most people's go-to image of a magician 150 years later.
  • David Blaine also fits this trope. At the time, Blaine's minimalist presentations of simple tricks with ordinary objects for unsuspecting people on the street was unheard of. A decade later it's a cliche used by almost every average teen magician as a substitute for actual presentation.
• Bureaucracy is controversial nowadays, but when it was first invented it was a revolution in fairness compared to the arbitrary rulings of family-run businesses that it superseded.
• The phrase "An eye for an eye", or 'mirror punishments' in general, and their use in early legal systems (such as the Code of Hammurabi). Nowadays it's thought of as symbolizing the Cycle of Revenge ("eye for an eye makes the whole world blind") and/or bizarre Revenge by Proxy ("So if someone kills my daughter, in return their daughter should die?!") However, it was the first known legal concept to include the idea "punishments should be consistent and proportional to the offense." Before that, you either had:
  • Completely arbitrary punishments doled out by the king/governor's will, where if he liked the criminal or they were upper-class, there might be just a token punishment or none at all. Or
  • Disproportionate Retribution that often creates blood feuds. Alice breaks Bob's leg in a work accident, Bob beats her half to death, Alice's brother kills Bob, Bob's father kills Alice and her siblings, Alice's cousins burn down the Bob Family farm... Even if the overly harsh punishment was declared by a king, it might still spur the criminals' loved ones to anger against the victim.
  • Thus, mirror justice was the first type of retributive justice, but since modern society has more complex methods of determining proportional punishment (and generally favors fines or prison over replicating the exact wrong), people only focus on the theory's shortcomings.
• Gaming magazines that featured partial walkthroughs would seem like a scam today, but at the time that it was popular, that was probably your only way to get help on a game... that didn't involve an 800 number or purchasing an expensive guide.
  • When actual game guides by third party companies (Such as Prima or Brady games) became more commonplace, they were purchased not just for the information they detailed (Whether or not some of it was accurate is up for debate) but also because they contained posters, supplementary lore, and official artwork. Most of which largely didn't make its way into the manual (and when it did, it was compressed or even cropped.) Game guides fell out of favour in The New '10s, part of the reason being the fact that official art and supplementary material (Some of which never left its native country) was released separate or even included in a "directors cut", as a preorder bonus, or just released for free via the game or even artists' websites.
  • And for those who either didn't want to purchase a game guide (Provided you could even find one!), you had GameFAQs - arguably one of the best sources for information on a game period. During The '90s and the Turn of the Millennium, if you couldn't find a game guide for something, your best bet was to look it up on GameFAQs. However, even this has fallen out of favour... and reading some of these FAQs today may come off as clunky due to the only form of visual cues being ASCII, textual descriptions of landmarks rather than screenshots, a single page that requires you to search for something specific when that's all you need (With or without a search key), and a lot of informal speech that comes off as bizarre today. All of which were actually selling points of GameFAQs back in the day. In The New '20s, when one can just look up a video walkthrough/Longplay or even a wiki that contains detailed walkthroughs.... it's hard to truly appreciate how much GameFAQs was.
• The Addams Family pinball machine was absolutely groundbreaking in its day, and nearly every pinball machine released after it would follow in its footsteps. It popularized goal-based gameplay (complete objectives to reach the Wizard Mode; before, pinball machines just had you continue playing until things were unlocked), use of magnets on the playfield, modes that could stack, and easy multiballs (prior, multiballs were made very difficult to reach and was itself an end goal). In other words, The Addams Family was the first pinball machine to have rules that intricate. Compared to the machines with more refined rules, better Competitive Balance, and more complex playfields that would be released later, it would be hard for a modern curious player to understand why The Addams Family sold so well when it looks like any other pinball machine, only rougher around the edges in gameplay and with less impressive music.
  • Anyone getting into pinball nowadays will eventually find access to the older electromechanical machines. In almost all cases, they will find them utterly boring compared to the more modern solid-state driven machines: Those electromechanical machines have no ramps, no pre-recorded audio (and thus no voice clips or music), play rather slowly due to their more primitive machinery, and had absolutely brutal difficulty, to where a standard game had 5 balls instead of today's 3. But back in their own time, these electromechanical machines were incredibly popular (albeit in a legal gray area) because not only were they at the cutting edge of electronic gaming, they were dirt-cheap to play. People could insert in a nickel or a dime and play, and if they were good, they could play for a while.
  • And pinball in general easily falls into Once Original, Now Common. Its nature as a physical device limits the types of gameplay, stories (if any), and artistic diversity that video games can have, so it can be tough to imagine a time when video games were so technologically primitive that Space Shuttle's scale model was so impressive, it yanked the market share of pinball machines back from arcade video games. That being said, the real-life physics of pinball is so complex that only in the mid-2010's has home computer technology become advanced enough to accurately replicate pinball virtually. The end result is Once Original, Now Common becoming a Cyclical Trope for pinball, as the gameplay of pinball is nothing like any modern video games, causing an uptick in non-virtual pinball's popularity due to curious video gamers seeking them out to play.
• The Prince by Machiavelli. While it has a cold-hearted reputation, it is actually a guide on how best to govern with reason and make pragmatic decisions. While shocking in the Renaissance, the modern reader will consider most of it to be sensible advice and not get what all the fuss was about. The prevailing notion among the nobility and clergy back then was the Fisher King: if the ruler conducts himself as a just Christian, then the realm will necessarily be prosperous and at peace. Machiavelli was revolutionary because he analyzed the subject amorally.
• Education and degrees. In the 20th century, just having a high school degree opened up a lot of doors for you. In the mid to late 20th century, having a college degree in the right field was practically a golden ticket to employment and job security. Fast forward to the 21st century, and holders of college, university, and even graduate degrees have become a dime a dozen and are finding it harder to get their foot in the door than their parents and grandparents did with the same qualifications.
  • This tragically applies to all fields, not just soft sciences. At first, one could be the snarky Hard on Soft Science specialist and study STEM fields for a guaranteed job in the field. Nowadays, it varies. While Doctors and Scientists are still always welcome, Engineers and Technologists don't quite have the same luck or at least, not without competition for the few jobs needed in the field within the same area. Turns out that when 1500+ graduates in tech fields go after about 50+ jobs in their local city, there's going to be a bloated market for areas that just don't need as much. Tech majors have to get especially lucky and hope that whatever particular field they studied in (programming, databasing, security, et al.) is going to find a job in their hometowns or else its relocation if they can even afford that!
  • The I.Q. test — what is commonly ignored is that the average must always be "100", and that if the average appears to be going up or going down, it's actually reset back to 100 — meaning that if you tested "average" in the seventies, you might be considered to be below average (or worse) today.
    • Specifically, the average has moved three to five points upwards each decade for the last ninety years. The “average” person of the 1970s would be considered only a few points off of meeting the diagnostic criteria of being mentally disabled by modern standards. The average person of the 1950s would be considered mentally disabled by modern standards.
• The ancient Romans connected their empire through a system of roads. It's been centuries since anybody found that to be new. Though, to be fair roads of any quality approaching Roman ones are actually Newer Than They Think. Even when railroads were becoming common few roads outside of cities were paved let alone as smooth as Roman roads. Most of them were still in use by the time cars came around and made wider roads necessary.
• The establishment of democracy and the republic was not a new thing in the late 18th century, as it had existed in Ancient Greece and Rome, and likewise many Italian City States, the Netherlands, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and Switzerland, but the general belief was that a democracy or a republic could only govern a small area of land. For a large area of land, only a kingdom or The Empire was feasible. It took The American Revolution and The French Revolution to first put the idea that a democracy can conquer, centralize and administer a large nation state in a time of self-centered monarchies. Nowadays most of those monarchies are republics.
  • Although later historians likened The French Revolution as a failed utopian experiment that anticipated The Russian Revolution, all of the ideas of the French Revolution, especially those envisioned by its most radical representatives — universal male suffrage, anti-racism, people's right to protest, abolition of slavery — have become entirely mainstream and written into the UN Charter. It was over a course of 100 years before every other Western nation started catching up to its program (and also going further by extending franchise to women) to the extent that it's become hard to see why the Revolution was so radical to start with.
  • Likewise the concept of nationalism, while regarded as Patriotic Fervor and taken up by conservatives these days, was originally a radical leftist program of France to create a culture separate from its monarchical beginnings. This led to national festivals, national flags, national anthems and national holidays honoring prominent days, as well as institutions honoring intellectuals and cultural treasures, first put together in a single package in this period. Today it's become totally traditional flag-waving and institutionalized so it's hard to appreciate what made this idea new, especially since nationalism while initially inclusive and internationalist gradually became exclusionary and expansionist.
  • In general, democracy as we know it (the average citizen voting on decisions and leadership), while widely cherished internationally as an ideal today, even by conservatives, was once considered a pipe dream argued only by impractical dreamers and regarded as quasi-Utopian. Even the Founding Fathers likened it to "mob rule". The vote was scrupulously restricted to property owners (all white and male naturally) and some nations didn't widen the franchise until well into the 20th Century. It's become such a given that it takes some getting used to accept the fact that it's only in the recent era of history that democracy (full universal suffrage, men and women) was truly practised on what was originally regarded as an utopian scale.
• In the aftermath of the American Revolution, it was decided that the ruler of the United States should be called "president," rather than king. It was intended to be an extremely humble title, and had previously been used mostly to describe someone who temporarily chaired a small meeting. These days, most countries have presidents, and the title is now so closely associated with being the powerful ruler of a country it may be considered ostentatious or presumptuous for a leader of a small organization to title himself president. Even the phrase "Mr. President," initially chosen for being the humblest possible way of referring to the office-holder, is now often used as a way to mock the pretentiousness of a low-ranking president. It's hard to recall that, in the country America liberated itself from, the monarch was currently being addressed with "By the Grace of God, King of Great Britain, France and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, Archtreasurer and Prince-Elector of the Holy Roman Empire, Duke of Brunswick-Luneberg." - And that was the "short form" of the official title.
  • Speaking of the American Revolution, one of the things that initially set the United States apart from other countries, particularly those in the Eastern Hemisphere, was it's active promotion and encouragement of immigration to the country. And being a nation of immigrants was and still is a huge source of national pride for a lot of Americans. However, in the decades and centuries following the USA's creation, other countries in Americas and eventually Europe, would do almost exactly the same thing. In much of the world today (at least in Europe and the Americas), a country allowing immigrants into said country is not only considered normal practice, but for many there; it's a straight-up human right.
• Propeller aircraft — for decades, they were the only air transport there was and even a flight from London to New York often involved refueling stops in Suddenly Significant Cities like Gander, Canada or Shannon, Ireland^note  which coincidentally contains the oldest duty free shop in any airport in the world, but today jet aircraft have replaced them on almost every route save a few "short hops" — even though until well into the 1990s jet engines were actually less fuel efficient than propellers. These airports still serve as diversion airports for things like mechanical issues, unruly passengers or medical emergencies.
• As space technology advances, older books and films about robotic missions from previous decades can seem a bit dull in comparison to more recent missions— it may seem hard to imagine people being excited about grainy black-and white photos taken on a brief flyby of a planet or moon if you've seen high-resolution color photos of the same place from landers and rovers. (Such as the hype about the Viking Mars probes in Cosmos: A Personal Voyage compared to the images from the Pathfinder mission in the 2000 "Cosmos Update" epilogue on the DVDs.) But those older photos were the first close-up glimpse of those worlds at all, and without them, the modern missions could never have been attempted.
  • The same can be said of those images next to those of the pre-Space Age era, that more than often were a blurred blob at best and a point of light and worst even if they were taken with the best telescopes available.
• Action Park in New Jersey helped revolutionize American amusement parks, especially water parks, in The '80s. To this day, many of its attractions are still radically unlike anything ever seen. Few people remember this nowadays, though. Instead, when the park is mentioned, it's remembered for just how dangerous many of those rides were before later parks managed to work out the kinks in them. Ask a New Jerseyan of a certain age about Action Park, and they'll tell you that it was either the most badass amusement park ever made, or a Real Life Amusement Park of Doom that should never have been allowed to stay open as long as it was.
• Fan conventions. In an era where cons (especially gaming and anime cons) pop up for just about every little thing (including My Little Pony and Power Rangers), it's hard to explain just what was so revolutionary and important about Otakon, GenCon, or Comic Con. They're still fun and important, but lack a certain gravitas that they used to.
  • Worldcon suffers from this as well. In the 1940s, it was a big deal and was "the" event of the year within science fiction fandom, often the largest con of the year through the 1970s and 1980s, and generally featured some of the best authors, etc. on panels or giving speeches. Now, though it still occupies a prominent place, it's been far overshadowed by cons such as DragonCon (which can be 10-20x larger and attract "bigger" names).
  • Going back further, it can be hard to understand why the World's Fair would have people so excited they came over from other continents, as it had no focus and looked like just another traveling carnival, only bigger. Events like these were the ancestors of today's conventions and expositions that focus on more specific topics and cater to fans.
• The Crossover. Despite that this concept is way older than people imagine, the idea of different properties being present with one another was quite novel back in the day and often a massive spectacle.
• To contemporary readers, Jim Bouton's 1970 book Ball Four seems like a tame, reasonably interesting sports memoir of a struggling pitcher trying to reinvent himself with an expansion team. When it was published, however, readers were scandalized at Bouton's stories about player conduct, including excessive drinking, philandering, and juvenile behavior like looking up the skirts of female spectators. These are all small asides that probably wouldn't get a second glance from most fans today, but most sportswriters and biographers had self-censored stories like these before Bouton, and his revelations were seismic at the time.
• The Criterion Collection premiered many aspects of home video releases that are now largely just the default - primarily the use of letterboxing to preserve the original aspect ratio, providing the Director's Cut versions of films, and a massive wealth of bonus materials. (It's worth noting that Criterion were the ones that invented the DVD Commentary.) While Criterion still provides the best releases out there, it can make them a bit of a tough sell. This is especially true for films that are already out on home video - it's hard to convince someone to spend extra cash buying, for instance, Criterion's release of The Princess Bride when there's already a cheaper Blu-Ray out there with a great remastering job and respectable set of bonus features. That's why they've shifted mostly to art-house films, with a well-educated audience with deep pockets.
• In an age of High Speed Rail it is almost hard to believe that steam trains that are barely faster than a fit person on a bike used to be big effing deals. They were after all the first feasible method of land transport that didn't tire, ran on "anything that burns" instead of precious animal fodder, and back in those days there were no roads that would allow even moderate speeds on bikes - and there were no bikes either. And last but not least the main use for trains in the early days was for cargo - in an era when hauling boats with horses was considered the least cumbersome method of transportation, a steam locomotive was downright revolutionary.
• Hershey's is the butt of many jokes nowadays due to higher-quality chocolatiers showing up, but Milton Hershey was the one who first sold affordable chocolate in the United States on a large scale, and he sold it for a lower price than Ghirardelli, the rival from across the country. As a result, kids of the time, especially those on the east coast, if they wanted to buy a bar of chocolate, odds are they'd get one from Hershey's. Similar remarks are made in Europe about Nestlé, but, like Hershey's, they were also a first—Nestlé popularized milk chocolate, which made chocolate palatable to the many who couldn't stand the intense bitterness without there being milk in it.
• Commercials with the Trix Rabbit (where the kids deny him the cereal because "Trix are for kids") may have been funny once, but modern viewers are starting to see those kids as rather cruel and selfish in the modern day, certainly not the ideal role models for the target audience.
• Jell-O is considered a cheap dessert, but when it was first introduced in 1881, it was a status symbol because you needed a mechanical refrigerator instead of an ice box to make it, when that was a luxury. Modern refrigerators didn't become commonplace in home kitchens until after World War II.
• Sigmund Freud was one of the first psychologists to actually try and use psychotherapy, i.e. "maybe we can cure mental illness by talking to the patient." This was a huge step forward in a society where the prevailing view was "put 'em in an asylum, give 'em some drugs, if they get better, great, if not, they can stay locked up." Unfortunately, because the vast majority of his actual theories about psychotherapy turned out to be wrong, people often forget what a trailblazer he was.
• Karl Marx is a highly contentious (if not outright discredited) figure in both academia and politics for (and among other things) rather obvious reasons, but he essentially invented sociology, and impressively came up with the idea that society is mainly motivated by economics rather than higher principles. Which was quite a radical and (even today arguably) very controversial idea, even among those who embraced his teachings.
• The Hydrox cookie was introduced by Sunshine Biscuits in 1908, four years before the very similar Oreo. Initially it was the more popular cookie, but steadily the Oreo began to overshadow it. When Keebler bought out Sunshine in 1994 they dropped Hydrox altogether. The "ghost brand" was eventually bought by California-based Leaf Brands LLC.
• Standards for writing and character types many plots and modern day books held up as True Art today would not exist without things that inspired them. Reading them may come off as quite minimalistic with little Character Development and characters with little to no flaws. This is one reason why modern authors, when adapting older mythologies such as Arthurian Legend, will tend to veer towards Adaptation Expansion and portray the characters as more than just what the source material presents them as, trying to shine a more "modern light" on the characters who by today's standards would not be considered to be very deep at all.
  • Among these was the standard for what is a Mary Sue. The original Mary Sue was an Author Avatar who outshined canon characters with established levels of competency because they're just that awesome. The standards then changed as it went outside Star Trek circles (At first to fandom or genre-specific standards), then to common speech as essentially "Character I think is portrayed too positively".
    • Tell me if you heard this before - a hero with divine heritage sets out on the hero's journey. Everyone who opposes them is a villain who you aren't supposed to sympathise with, or a monster for them to defeat. Along the way they defeat monsters that were supposed to be impossible to defeat and barely has to struggle for their victories. They win because they're just that badass. And they save a royal figure who they end up marrying. Sounds like a Mary Sue, right? Except this pretty much describes Perseus. As mentioned by Overly Sarcastic Productions, Perseus more or less has no flaws - but he's forgiven against accusations of being a Mary Sue if only due to this trope and Grandfather Clause.
• Canning and tinned foods. Back in the day, it was one of the best ways for food to be preserved (and still is). It even was one of the things that put Dole on the map as it allowed food grown in Hawai'i such as the pineapple to be sold across the world. These days, canned food is seen as a sign of cheapness due to their low price.
  • This also can go towards canned meats - Spam in particular was celebrated in its early years due to its low price as well as its shelf life. These days, it's seen as somewhat of a Stock "Yuck!" outside of the Pacific, and with the availability of fresher foods, it's harder to appreciate just how much this was in The '40s through The '60s.
• Whenever someone brings up the Lucky Rabbit's Foot trope (or actually has one), someone will quip that the rabbit who lost the foot wasn't very lucky (indeed, the quote on the trope page itself is an example.) While this is a pretty good bit of ironic Black Comedy the first time you hear it, considering everyone and their dog has heard it by now, it's kind of lost its spark.
• In The '90s and the Turn of the Millennium, there was a device that, while not necessarily game changing, was a somewhat common sight in school campuses: The AlphaSmart. The AlphaSmart was a word-processing device (Essentially a more portable typewriter) which could hook up to a computer or a printer to send the data in. This was essentially a budget laptop for students, and it was also quite durable too. It was also used frequently by disabled people who had agraphia or difficulties using a pencil and paper. Its low entry price meant schools could easily rent them out or even distribute them to students. However, with the rise of affordable laptops and tablets with keyboards, the AlphaSmart seems like either an overcomplication (requiring a specific cable to plug into computers or printers) or Crippling Overspecialization. The AlphaSmart could only handle word processing, and even when the later models used PalmOS, they were easily outdone by budget laptops and tablets, to the point where nowadays they're only useful as USB keyboards.
• This was what ultimately did in the video-rental stores of The '80s and The '90s. Many children who were born around the Turn of the Millennium or The New '10s don't exactly see what makes "Blockbuster" and other video-rentals so special, in an era where On Demand and Redbox exist. Rentals were significantly cheaper than simply buying a new video outright. On top of that, some videos became rare for whatever reason, and wouldn't be found in conventional stores meaning you had to find them in a Video Rental store.
• LGBTQ+ rights have had a few of these:
  • Early gay rights movements often excluded trans people, drag queens, and anyone else that was gender nonconforming or outside the bounds of "normal." While this approach had its obvious flaws (especially when "normal" was also conflated with "white" and "able-bodied"), appealing to normalcy served a purpose back then. In the 1960's and earlier, homosexual acts were outright illegal, media representation was unheard of, and the vast majority of the general populace only knew of queer people (back then a pejorative) through hateful propaganda from Heteronormative Crusaders. Showing that queer people weren't all child-molesting bogeymen but human beings with normal lives won many professional allies and laid down a lot of important groundwork that later queer rights were built on. It was in later decades that the movement gradually went from "Gays and lesbians can be normal people just like you who deserve respect" to "LGBTQ+ people deserve respect regardless of whether or not they fit your definition of 'normal'."
  • "Rainbow capitalism." Whenever major corporations promote themselves at Pride Parades or to the LGBT+ community, many within the community will call them out for shamelessly courting the queer dollar while doing little to support queer rights politically. But in the 2000's and earlier, companies really were making a grand statement by announcing their support for queer rights by way of appearing at Pride events, advertising in Queer Media, and enacting protections for their LGBT+ employees. But nowadays this isn't considered groundbreaking anymore.
• Thanks to Impossible and Beyond (Plant-based proteins) being so successful, older-style veggie burgers just do not seem very special at all. They were already seen as somewhat of a Stock "Yuck!" to some people, but these days they aren't.
• Text to Speech. A tool made for accessibility for people with disabilities and communication, as well as a reliable source of comedy. While it's still seen as humorous today, it's amazing how Text to Speech has gone from sounding quite robotic and distorted to somewhat realistic sounding. This video shows the evolution of synthesized speech.
• The De Havilland Comet holds the distinction of being the first commercial airliner to utilize jet propulsion. Despite its initial groundbreaking status, the Comet faced a series of significant setbacks that marred its reputation. Tragically, three Comets were lost in a span of only twelve months following highly publicized accidents characterized by catastrophic in-flight break-ups. These incidents were primarily attributed to structural failures caused by metal fatigue, a phenomenon that was not well comprehended at the time. Another accident resulted from excessive stress on the airframe during flight through severe weather conditions. Consequently, the Comet was promptly withdrawn from service and subjected to extensive testing. Through meticulous examination, experts uncovered various design and construction flaws, including inadequate riveting and perilous stress concentrations around certain square windows. As a consequence of these findings, the Comet underwent extensive redesigning, incorporating oval windows, reinforced structures, and other modifications. The lessons learned from Comet's flaws reverberated throughout the industry, influencing rival aircraft manufacturers in the development of their own planes. Regrettably, the Comet never managed to regain its sales momentum, as airlines turned to the American-built Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8 jets. Ultimately, Comet's legacy in aviation history remains a peculiar footnote, overshadowed by the transformative impact of its competitors.
• The packaging method for, of all things, sauces and condiments such as Ketchup, Mustard, Relish, or Mayonnaise can fall into this. Prior to The '80s they often came in glass containers or jars. Condiments were usually put onto hamburgers, sandwiches, and sausages via two ways: Spread with something such as a butterknife, via a ladle/spoon, or just hitting the ketchup bottle and risking making a mess. The introduction of things such as packets and squeeze bottles was a game changer: Since they contained the portability of jars&bottles, the ease of a packet, and you had more control over the amount you put on your food. Plus, a squeeze bottle was able to control how much was coming out at once meaning there was much less of a chance of making a mess just tapping it. The fact that no extra utensils were needed meant that they were a huge boon for potlucks and cookouts in addition to restaurants. While sometimes you do still see the glass bottle or jar used for sauces&condiments, they are far far less widespread than they once were.
• Even names themselves can fall into this trope, thanks to societal and cultural change(s) that make names go in and out of fashion. Many a person has read a period piece or Unintentional Period Piece and giggled at a name that means an unfortunate slang now (Such as "Gay" or "Karen"), a name that was once masculine/feminine being seen as a Gender-Blender Name now, or commenting how so-and-so is an "old person's name" because it's not as common in the present day.
  • A comedian Bill Burr has a whole routine in which he asks how evil a person someone has to be for their name to be erased from book of baby names. The examples mentioned are normal names like Adolph and Jeffrey and (in his opinion) cool names like Judas.
• When Barbie first hit toy shelves at the tail end of The '50s and the beginning of The '60s, there wasn't really anything like it. At the time, most toys targeted at girls (especially dolls) were based around infancy, motherhood, and other housewife things. Barbie was intended to be an adult, and has had various professional jobs outside of "Mother" or "Housewife". These days, Barbie is frequently criticized as promoting negative stereotypes associated with femininity and is often the subject of mean-spirited parodies and bad faith criticism. All of this is lampshaded in Barbie (2023).
• Throughout The New '10s, Yoga pants were ultimately attractive and glorified as such by the media. Nowadays, attitudes have become more open and dynamic with other clothes that it’s hard to look at yoga pants in the same way. While they still are considered attractive, fashion and media-wise they are tame, everyday clothes.
• This trope has become a problem for software designed to detect documents written by AI. The basic function of such systems is to detect the characteristically derivative prose structure associated with autogenerated text, but this means that they tend to produce false positives when being tested on the original "training texts" that this structure was derived from in the first place, such as the Bible and the US constitution.
  • Speaking of which, anything generated by AI is bound to be outdated because it progressively gets more advanced every two years or so.
• The idea of an MP3 player seems almost cumbersome and limited today, when almost everyone has a computer program or a phone that can do the exact same thing without the need for a different device. Hilariously, the sheer amounts of battery drain and data usage that comes with streaming music from a phone has actually driven some people to "think of" a device that's used specifically for such a purpose in places such as a workplace or the home... which is what MP3 players were for.
• So you like to record your own videos? Maybe want to preserve some memories, capture something awesome on video, or try your hand at making an amateur movie? If you lived in The '80s, you’d need a camcorder, which generally cost $1,000 in eighties money. Indeed, as with the Girlfriend in Canada, there were kids would try to make themselves look cool by bragging that they either had a camcorder or knew someone who did. Nowadays, you can record videos via cell phone, which are available for as little as $10 (although quality may vary), typically run $100, and (in the US) are free for welfare recipients. Even a decent tablet can be had for around $500 which, adjusted for inflation, is about a quarter of the price of 1980s camcorders. Consequently, what used to be a luxury is now something most people are able to do.

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