- Ethnic Scrappy: Eradicate Sampson - the, er, "eccentric colored man".
- Memetic Mutation: The "Tom Swifties," mentioned in the main page, are now the most memorable thing from the series. Even if they didn't actually appear like that in the originals.
- Values Dissonance: The race relations in the 1950s books are fairly cringe-worthy now. Thomas Pynchon called this out in his 1964 short story "The Secret Integration".
- Also, in the original pre-WW2 stories, the raygun-powered Improbable Aiming Skills and A-Team Firing of the later stories were averted as both sides regularly racked up an impressive body count with rather nonchalantly employed machine guns and artillery.
- Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle contains some seriously racist depictions of Africans as “wild, savage and ferocious ... like little red apes." That really wouldn't fly today.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/TomSwift
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