open/close all folders
From Media
Comic Strips
"A joke is never as funny the second time you hear it."
— Calvin, Calvin and Hobbes
Film
"The world is drunk and we're just the cocktail of the moment, pally. One of these days everybody's gonna wake up with a heck of a hangover, down two aspirin and a glass of tomato juice and wonder what the hell all the fuss was about."
— Dean Martin, The Rat Pack (1998 film)
Live-Action TV
"Coming up next on E4: Friends — The One Where You Realize That It's Not As Funny As It Used To Be."
— Things You Won't Hear When Flicking Through Satellite TV, Mock the Week's Funniest Book of All Time 2011
"The mark of greatness is when everything before you is obsolete, and everything after you bears your mark."
Music
Flawed, maybe so
Sure it sucked a tad
but it's all we had
Sure it sucked a tad
but it's all we had
And there's a million of us just like me
Who cuss like me; who just don't give a fuck like me
Who dress like me; who walk, talk, and act like me
And just might be the next best thing, but not quite me!
Who cuss like me; who just don't give a fuck like me
Who dress like me; who walk, talk, and act like me
And just might be the next best thing, but not quite me!
Web Comics
Rapunzel: Not any more, girl.
Web Video
You took 3D to uncharted territory.
Now you're just in Uncharted's territory.
Now you're just in Uncharted's territory.
Western Animation
My cartoons weren't good. They were just first.
Bart: Lisa, that wasn't scary. Not even for a poem.
Lisa: Well, it was written in 1845. Maybe people were easier to scare back then.
Bart: Oh yeah! Like when you look at Friday the 13th Part 1. It's pretty tame by today's standards.
Lisa: Well, it was written in 1845. Maybe people were easier to scare back then.
Bart: Oh yeah! Like when you look at Friday the 13th Part 1. It's pretty tame by today's standards.
Real Life
On Comic Strips
Back when the comics were printed large enough that they could accommodate detailed, elaborate drawings, "Peanuts" was launched with an insultingly tiny format, designed so the panels could be stacked vertically if an editor wanted to run it in a single column. Schulz somehow turned this oppressive space restriction to his advantage, and developed a brilliant graphic shorthand and stylistic economy, innovations unrecognizable now that all comics are tiny and Schulz's solutions have been universally imitated.
On Comics
Lord knows who needs to hear Spider-Man's origin story at this point but, in almost all tellings of it, Peter Parker initially makes selfish use of his powers before letting a thief escape. This thief then goes on to kill Uncle Ben and, upon apprehending him, Spider-Man realizes with horror that with great power etcetera etcetera.
These stories are now so overdone that it's easy to forget the primal impact that once had for the character, with the death of his beloved uncle proving the driving force for the young Spider-Man's character.
These stories are now so overdone that it's easy to forget the primal impact that once had for the character, with the death of his beloved uncle proving the driving force for the young Spider-Man's character.
On Fan Works
"Team 8's largest problem is that it is Team 8 and the fanfiction zeitgeist has moved on from it. In essence it has spawned a host of imitators, and copy cats who both not only worked with the original idea in place, but generally did it in such a way as to highlight the flaws of the original concept in the first place. The problem with being Seinfeld is that eventually people don't get why you're funny anymore, and start struggling to remember why you're funny in the first place. All the things you've done have been used and played with so many times that it's trite, and even if you do it well... it's kind of meh."
— Sufficient Velocity member gman391, on "Fics You Liked Before You Grew a Taste
"
""Basically, [Cupcakes (Sergeant Sprinkles)] was one long torture scene played for shock value above all else, and its aimless narrative and overreliance on gore has earned it many places on 'Worst Creepypasta Ever' lists. Standards for creepypastas are much higher now, but back then, the idea of a gory My Little Pony fanfic was all very novel and shocking and had people clutching their pearls, so the reception and subsequent popularity was a lot more explosive than it would be today."
On Animated Films
It was definitely a huge thing for its time and it's a great thing to just break some barriers and stuff, but it's not all that good of a movie.
"Toy Story is the worst looking Pixar film from a technical standpoint. I'm sorry, but it just is. The human character models are Uncanny Valley, the textures are outdated, and... just look at that dog. Ew. And yet, despite all of this, I cannot believe that the first feature length CGI film looks this good, it is unbelievable. You can kind of imagine an alternate universe where the first CGI movie comes out, and it looks kinda weird and rough and experimental, like something like Foodfight!, and everyone says: "Oh that movie? It was okay, considering they didn't know what they were doing yet." But no. We live in a world where the first one of these was frickin' Toy Story. That's pretty cool!"
. Ew. And yet, despite all of this, I cannot believe that the first feature length CGI film looks this good, it is unbelievable. You can kind of imagine an alternate universe where the first CGI movie comes out, and it looks kinda weird and rough and experimental, like something like Foodfight!, and everyone says: "Oh that movie? It was okay, considering they didn't know what they were doing yet." But no. We live in a world where the first one of these was frickin' Toy Story. That's pretty cool!""I tried to figure out why everyone else reacted to this movie so vitriolically while I came out of it mostly just bored, and I think it’s because of when it came out. The Emoji Movie was the first major Hollywood film that felt entirely like an advertisement. In 2017, it was an anomaly, a cautionary tale about where the film industry was heading if we didn’t stop studios from doing this sort of thing again, but in a post-Ralph Breaks the Internet and Space Jam 2 world… it’s just kind of more of that. I am completely numb to advertisement films and this movie made me feel nothing as a result."
On Live Action Film
"John Carter has been ripped off so many times by so many important filmmakers that it paradoxically can’t help but feel weirdly derivative of films (inspired by its source material) that hit screens decades before John Carter bombed. In the century-long lag time between the literary introduction of John Carter and this cinematic adaptation, many of Burroughs’ innovations became groan-inducing clichés. Like H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, Burroughs was prescient and visionary, yet today looks more than a little old-fashioned."
"The movie has been borrowed from so often that it's difficult to understand how original it seemed in 1983, when Latino heroes were rare, when cocaine was not a Cliché, when sequences at the pitch of the final gun battle were not commonplace. Just as a generation raised on The Sopranos may never understand how original The Godfather was, so Scarface has been absorbed into its imitators."
"To really appreciate this film, I think you have to remember — or if you weren't around then, imagine — what it was like to be a Star Trek fan in 1979. There was no franchise; it was just the original series. That was it. TNG, DS9, Voyager, Enterprise, and all the movies were yet to be imagined. It was just a short-lived, but enormously popular TV series and its spinoff novels and merchandise, and the torch that the fans had kept alight in loving memory. So to see those beloved characters back, on the big screen, and with a motion picture budget to bring forth the best special effects that the technology of the time was capable of... It was the answer to a prayer. As I indicated, the movie was slowly paced and short on action, and I have no doubt that if it had been a stand-alone film with unknown actors, unconnected with Star Trek, but using the same story, it would have probably flopped and been long since forgotten. But it had just enough of the old magic to satisfy the fans and ensure that Star Trek would continue and grow into something bigger."
If this film had come out 30 years ago, it might have had a point or been at least somewhat original. But now, the subversion of the Damsel in Distress trope has become so ubiquitous that it's actually become the cliche.
On Literature
"Flaubert established for good or ill, what most readers think of as modern realist narration, and his influence is almost too familiar to be visible."
— James Wood, How Fiction Works (on Madame Bovary)
Live-Action TV
"Enterprise was a clone of Voyager, which is bad enough. But Voyager itself was already a clone of The Next Generation. So by the time you get to Enterprise, you're watching a copy of a copy of a copy. And much like any Nth-generation VHS dub of a bootleg movie, when everything is said and done, all you're left with is indistinct static."
"But all of those cracks are only visible because for forty-five years one of the basic mandates of Doctor Who has been "Take The Tenth Planet and do it again with more modern sensibilities." Which is, not that The Tenth Planet is as good as Hamlet, kind of like saying Hamlet is rubbish because The Lion King has better songs."
On Music
"It's not who does it first, it's who does it second."
"Thing is, though, that it was such a defining soundscape of its era that it sounds terribly dated these days, and the John Landis video for the title track is positively painful to watch at this point."
— J. Eric Smith on Thriller
"NIN was a much bigger draw than Bowie, but because Trent Reznor is not a disrespectful prick, he rightly allowed Bowie a slightly more exalted position on the bill. Here's the deal, though. The overwhelming majority of the coliseum was there to see NIN. The audience was awash with 14-year-old girls in torn fishnets and black lipstick. Even though they probably went off to college, broadened their musical horizons, and became Bowie fans (considering what a huge NIN influence he is), on that night, they were not. ...When Trent left the stage, so did half the audience, some of them crying that they didn't get enough Trent. Bowie "ruined the show" for them. (That's an actual quote from some girl I overheard in the parking lot — moments before I strangled her to death.)"
''All the talentless impersonators and appalling black velvet paintings on display can make him seem little more than a perverse and distant memory. But before Elvis was camp, he was its opposite: a genuine cultural force. ... Elvis's breakthroughs are underappreciated because in this rock-and-roll age, his hard-rocking music and sultry style have triumphed so completely."
There’s certainly no arguing the titanic influence of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band... it was the Citizen Kane of music. Like Citizen Kane, though, it changed everything that came after it so fundamentally, that when you go back to the source with modern eyes, you often find yourself wondering “What was the big deal?”... A concept album like The Dark Side of the Moon never could have existed without The Beatles having blazed the trail with Sgt. Pepper. So that means we have to pick Sgt. Pepper here, right? No, not necessarily. Let’s take a more reductive view of origins vs outcomes: The Jazz Singer was the first movie released with sound embedded on its film... the first feature film to use three-strip color was Becky Sharp. Does that make The Jazz Singer the greatest “talkie” ever and Becky Sharp the greatest color film ever? No. Pioneers are important, but they aren’t necessarily the pinnacle of their craft, and more often than not, probably aren’t. And I think that’s the case in this contest: The Dark Side of the Moon owes a great debt to Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, but its scope, its execution, its material and its overall, lasting effect strikes me as greater and more powerful than its precursor.
—J. Eric Smith, Best of the Blockbusters: The Greatest (Popular) Record Ever; Round 4: The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band vs. Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon (2005)
; Round 4: The Beatles, Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band vs. Pink Floyd, The Dark Side of the Moon (2005) The pitfall of being a self-styled innovator is that your breakthroughs usually don’t seem special to subsequent audiences who come to take those accomplishments for granted.
“The water is muddied nowadays because there’s a disconnect between ‘cutting edge’ studio technique and conservative musical form,” he begins. “Producers learn tricks from adventurous bands or develop new techniques for them, but their next ‘gig’ is with some bland pop diva and they simply port over the techniques they’ve learned working with interesting artists. The result over time is that strange and unusual sounds and production processes are now ten a penny, splattered across fairly dull songs."
"I see a lot of discourse about "If The Beatles were overrated" and all that. [...] But I'll add one point to the discourse, and I'll need to compare The Beatles to a little art-house flick, you probably haven't even heard of it... Citizen Kane. Citizen Kane is considered the de facto greatest movie of all time, but if you were born in the past 20 years or so, I'd be willing to bet you'd be disappointed by it. Not because it's aged poorly, but because on the surface, it doesn't do anything that hasn't been done by movies that came after. But consider this, those movies wouldn't have done those things if Citizen Kane hadn't done them first. The way that Citizen Kane took advantage of camera techniques or non-linear structure just wasn't done at the time. [...] What I'm trying to say is, it's your own personal call if you don't vibe with The Beatles. But through a combination of insane talent and once-in-a-millennium luck, they were responsible for creating a lot of conventions in popular music that we now take for granted today."
On Video Games
"So Mad Max, or, as it's called in its native land, 'Med Mex', finally rolls into Video Game Town... only to find that the industry is way ahead of it and we've already played what might as well have been the Mad Max video game about seventeen times already by my count, between Borderlands, Rage, Carmageddon, the entire Fallout franchise and, to a lesser extent, Mario Kart."
'"It’s not bad, certainly — the story of the Super Nintendo is in part the story of the death of the side-scrolling platformer, but it’s one of those deaths via last golden age, and even the b-list is pretty good. But it does not sparkle."
— Dr. El Sandifer on Actraiser
on Actraiser"As someone who didn't play [Resident Evil 4] when it came out, this is where I'll admit that I might just be a cynic. It's hard to rate the game properly when so many others, including Dead Space, have come out since with the sole intention of being 'Resident Evil 4 but better'. It's like going back and watching an old black and white movie; I know Citizen Kane is a technical masterpiece, but it doesn't stop it from being so boring that Orson Welles spliced in a cockatoo squawking to wake the audience up. (That's a true fact by the way, look it up.)"
— Lextorias, Why Do Horror Games Stop Being Scary?
"Tony Hawk's Pro Skater is Crash Bandicoot 1. It's fine for what it is and amazing at the time compared to the competition, but nah. Nowadays it feels like a bathroom trip after Mexican night."
"I wanna go on record here, I think the Zelda CD-i games were... judged unfairly. People didn't know they existed until the mid-2000s, and they were just, like, laughing at how cheesy and bad the cutscenes were, but, man... regardless if the cutscenes were good, they were animated cutscenes in a video game, in 1993! With voice acting! Who is even attempting this back then? On a console, no less. And the hand-drawn backgrounds look really good, too; the music's pretty nice. I'm not going to say that they're good games. I'll say that they're ambitious games, and I think they don't get enough credit for that."
On Web Comics
I have to wonder how many other sprite comics out there have done this comic, nearly verbatim? The Author character shows up, introduces himself, followed by a self-deprecating joke. I've seen it done so many times, I cringe a little when I read it in my own comic. But I leave it the way it is as a prime example of what not to do in a sprite comic.
Though, in my defense, there wasn't a spriting community around yet to tell me not to do these things. Besides, most of the things you're not supposed to do in a sprite comic are there because I did them first and everyone got tired of others doing exactly the same things.
Though, in my defense, there wasn't a spriting community around yet to tell me not to do these things. Besides, most of the things you're not supposed to do in a sprite comic are there because I did them first and everyone got tired of others doing exactly the same things.
On Western Animation
"Some people look at the quality of these early episodes and complain that today's animated upstarts aren't being given enough time to get their groove going before they get the ax. The error in that logic is that it doesn't apply to The Simpsons. I was there, and I remember the show being a massive hit out of the gate. It was Fox's first show to break the Nielsen Top 30. These 13 eps were all there was for months and millions kept tuning into the repeats. People loved these badly-drawn, out-of-character, seldom-side-splitting adventures just as much as they loved later, better seasons."
— Peter Paltridge, "The Lost Art of TV Guide Advertising Vol 10: The Simpsons"
"I started watching a lot of previously lost 1930s rubber hose cartoons: Fleischer Talkartoons, Lantz Oswalds, Ub Iwerks, and Terrytoons. For decades these cartoons have been derided by cartoon historians and even some of the animators themselves. These cartoons have attributes that far surpass their seeming limitations. They were extremely inventive and the animators were encouraged to do what comes naturally to cartoonists and animators. They were allowed to draw and animate in their own individual styles. In the early 1930s, there were no set bible of rules for how to animate. The medium was too young."
— John Kricfalusi defending early 1930's cartoons on John K. Stuff
Important doesn't mean good.
— Greg, Nick Knacks
"ReBoot's the first thing I'd ever seen on television that changed my life. You can go ahead; roll your eyes at that, that's cool, it's totally fine. I'll wait. [...] It's visually dated enough that every time a sweet summer child stares at [the Guardian Icon pin on] my hat, realises it's not a Triforce, and decides to look up the source, there's a handful of remarks that usually follow along the lines of "Wow, why are you obsessed with something that looks so bad?" For what it's worth, contextually, ReBoot was the best-looking 3D animated show at the time. See, if you take a look here, you can compare its closest competitor at the time: nothing, and you'll see that ReBoot's shaders and render engine are quite, actually, a bit more nuanced."
Other
"The radical of one century is the conservative of the next. The radical invents the views. When he has worn them out, the conservative adopts them."
"That's one of the weird parts about what's called originality. It doesn't look original unless you look at the time stamp."
"The world's first personal computer was the MITS Altair 8800. The law of leadership would suggest that the MITS Altair 8800 (an unfortunate choice of names) ought to be the No. 1 personal computer brand. Unfortunately, the product is no longer with us. DuMont invented the first commercial television set. Duryea introduced the first automobile. Hurley introduced the first washing machine. All are gone. Is something wrong with the law of leadership... ? No, but the law of mind modifies it. It's better to be first in the prospect's mind than first in the marketplace. Which, if anything, understates the importance of being first in the mind. Being first in the mind is everything in marketing. Being first in the marketplace is important only to the extent that it allows you to get in the mind first."
— Al Ries and Jack Trout, The 22 Immutable Laws of Marketing (1993), p. 15
"When you look at the [Honda] NSX today, it's almost quaint. But that's because you're looking through the lens of every supercar and sports car that it made possible."
—THE SQUIDD, "How Honda Broke Supercars..."
"