Needs Help: Pop Cultural Osmosis

The examples in Pop-Cultural Osmosis seem hard to distinguish from other tropes. The definition is supposed to be "Knowing something from another work instead of where it originated," but it tends to be used as a "work has something to do with people's perception of something". For example:

• Calvin and Hobbes: In the 10th Anniversary Collection, Bill Watterson admits that he's "not at all familiar with Film Noir or detective novels", so the stories featuring Calvin's Hard Boiled Detective alter ego Tracer Bullet are "just spoofs on the clichés of the genre."

This example just applies to the creator of the work, not the work itself or the genre being spoofed.

• Bambi: Thanks to this film, many people refer to a baby deer as a "Bambi". The original story is also far more adult.

This doesn't say anything about how people know of the original novel, or if they know about it to begin with.

• Dumbo: Dumbo's name is a pun on the 19th century circus elephant Jumbo, something that not many people nowadays remember now.

This is Weird Al Effect.

• Any time-lapse footage of city life is likely to be a reference to Koyaanisqatsi, either directly or indirectly.
• You know how the canonical sound of lasers firing is a sort of "pew pew pew" effect? You can thank Ben Burtt, the audio designer for Star Wars, for that. The original sound effect was created by holding a microphone up to a taut wire while hitting the other end.

Neither of those things are works, rather, they're cinematic choices.

• Casablanca: Humphrey Bogart never says "Play it again, Sam." The confusion has risen from all the parodies of that scene, including the film Play It Again, Sam.

This is just a different trope, Beam Me Up, Scotty!.

Also, this trope should be YMMV, since some people will know the work from where it originated, rather than another one.

Opening.

While there are some in-universe examples on the main trope page, plenty of the examples are pretty clearly Audience Reactions, so I agree with making this YMMV. Those allow in-universe examples anyway, so the ones that already exist can stay as-is if this becomes YMMV.

Edited by GastonRabbit on May 17th 2019 at 3:43:35 AM

YMMV, clean up misuse.

Would like to see some analysis of wicks before proceeding. I see pop culture osmosis as primarily being about adaptations or homages that are the Hollywood version of the source (ie the creators did not closely read the source), based on Word of God or obvious deviances from the original in the work. The first example is a good version of this. What is wrong with it, and how is that YMMV?

Everything else in the OP is misuse, which we should get rid of. But how pervasive is it?

Pop-Cultural Osmosis and Weird Al Effect (which is YMMV) read like duplicates of each other.

(I also think Jumbo is at least as famous as Dumbo, or at least his name is.)

Edited by Lymantria on May 26th 2019 at 7:11:33 AM

Not all pop culture knowledge is dispersed through parody, sometimes it's via various adaptations which portray The Theme Park Version of the original work.

One example I'm thinking of is O Brother, Where Art Thou?, which has many obvious parallels to The Odyssey, but the creators admitted they'd never read The Odyssey and instead based their plot on what they'd heard about from pop culture. This definitely isn't The Weird Al Effect- the original work is still better-known, and the derivative work isn't a parody of it either.

I do agree that a lot of the on-page examples are actually just either Adaptation Displacement or The Weird Al Effect.

So Pop-Cultural Osmosis is for situations like the one you describe, with imitations in general being more familiar than the original, and Weird Al Effect is Parody Displacement with one specific parody/imitation. Those sound distinct (although they can overlap), yet they read like the exact same trope. Like how the image for Pop-Cultural Osmosis looks more like Weird Al Effect. And it doesn't seem right to me - surely 500 years of history are more significant than 30 years of history. If you're going by recent terms, yes, but by historical terms, the artists win by an utter landslide.

Edited by Lymantria on Jun 14th 2019 at 10:32:08 AM

I think Weird Al Effect is supposed to be "everyone knows the parody more than the original" and Pop-Cultural Osmosis is "everyone knows the original through other works", including non-parody works. Indeed, Weird Al Effect has redirects in Parodied Up (compare Covered Up) and Parody Displacement.

Yes.

Yes.

Pop Culture Osmosis is where a particular element or elements of a work have been referenced so much everyone can name where those references come from despite only a small segment of those people having actually seen it. Like Rosebud from Citizen Kane.

Weird Al Effect is when a particularly popular parody of a work is better known than the real thing, sometimes to the point people enjoy without even being aware it's a parody of something else. Such as how It's a Wonderful Plot might be more familiar to a lot of people from all the sitcoms that have used it in parody than the original movie the plot structure came from.

Edited by CryptidProductions on Sep 6th 2019 at 6:17:29 AM

Clock expired; closing.