Let's start with the Advertising folder. Is anything there salvageable? The folder for reference:
- Daniel Faraday would like to remind you that Subaru cars are "like punk rock." Do not question his logic!
- An ad for the Nissan Cube features icons such as "Add Friends" when someone other than the driver gets in the car, and "Join Group" when the car parks at an area with other people. The car itself is referred to as the "Cube Mobile Device".
- Parodied and deconstructed in a 1993 Smokey the Bear Public Service Announcement. The PSA starts out with him doing a Piss-Take Rap, but he calls it off midway through because this sort of pandering to the younger demographic just isn't his style.
- In 2012, Chuck E. Cheese's radically redesigned Chuck E. Cheese, giving him a design like something out of Alvin and the Chipmunks and making him play the electric guitar as he sings Bowling for Soup songsnote . This did not get positive reactions. In fairness, though, the previous Tony Hawk-wannabe look he'd been sporting for around 15 years didn't scream this trope any less.
- Between 2013 and 2014, Honey Nut Cheerios has an ad out where they do a Cheerio-themed parody/cover of a song that came out twelve years ago ("Ride Wit' Me" by Nelly), with random dubstep breakdown. Other commercials include Buzz talking to Grumpy Cat and asking Usher for tips on being hip.
- During its late-80s slump, Oldsmobile attempted this with its decidedly unsubtle "Not Your Father's Oldsmobile" campaign with its 1988 Cutlass Supreme, attempting to market the popular Cutlass line to "the New Generation of Olds" in the hopes of expanding its customer base. One advert even had Melanie Shatner behind of the wheel of the Cutlass with her father and Captain Kirk himself, William Shatner in the passenger seat. This campaign backfired spectacularly, failing to entice younger buyers while also alienating Oldsmobile's loyal customer base by undermining its own history of innovation and reliability. Despite its sturdy build, the Cutlass failed to sell in the numbers needed to break even and the botched campaign is often blamed for hastening Oldsmobile's decline until it liquidated in 2004.
- Kmart's "giffing out" commercials during the 2013 holiday season scream of this. Inhabitants of the Internet are quick to point out that real gifs don't have any sound as they're simply 256-color image files with animation support. And they're not limited to a single second of animation, either.
- The Progressive advertisements in which Flo turns herself into an Image Macro smack of some middle-aged marketing executive trying to "get down with" the hip Internet-using early-20s demographic.
- Vanilla Ice appeared in a Kraft macaroni and cheese commercial to advertise the tie-in with the Michael Bay Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2014) movie, where he does the "Ninja Rap" he did in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II way back in 1991. Unlike many of the other examples on here it's a parodic example of this trope, since the ad shows Ice working as a grocery store stockboy, and the kid in the commercial isn't nearly as impressed with the rap as his mom is.
- The Satur-Yay-Aaah!! (no, that's not a typo) commercials from General Mills absolutely reek of this, featuring the Trix Rabbit, Chip the Wolf, Sonny the Cocoa Puffs Bird, a talking orange voiced by Kevin Michael Richardson, a kid voiced by Finn from Adventure Time, and...Honey the Honey Drop, who hasn't been in a commercial since The '80s. The commercials feature, among other things, an extremely sporadic and out-of-place Wreck-It Ralph reference, and animation, sets and language that are clearly trying to emulate Regular Show and Adventure Time, but in the end, resemble Breadwinners more than anything.
- Speaking of cereal commercials trying to emulate animated trends of the 2010s, Lucky Charms redesigned their ads in 2016 to resemble the squishy colorful style of shows like Adventure Time and Uncle Grandpa, where Lucky appears more childlike (without his Gaelic accent) and has parties with the anthropomorphized charms. One commercial had them sing the "hearts, stars, and horseshoes..." theme song as a half-hearted rap. The change went over about as well as the "Satur-Yay-Aaaah" ad, so later ads featured a Lucky more reminiscent of the older design, with his old accent back.
- Restaurant chain Wendy's had this commercial for reactions from eating their Jalapeno Fresco Spicy Chicken sandwich. Where the "Memer" turns into an Image Macro while saying "Like a Boss", the "Selfiers" where one takes a selfie and the other takes the selfie, while the "Behind-The-Timeser" who says "It's the bomb. Raise the roof!" is considered lame.
- Many Nickelodeon TV promos post-2014 or so fall under this with frequent usage and showing off of emojis, texting, memes, and even references to "Damn Daniel". There could probably be an entire page of this trope done for them.
- This promo for SpongeBob SquarePants features the titular character checking up on his Instaclam.
- This 2016 SpongeBob Promo blatantly uses "Deal With It".
- An ad for Nick's Saturday Night premieres is done in the style of Pokémon GO.
- One promo references the "Shooting Stars" meme.
- And of course there's this ident from Nick India featuring characters from Motu Patlu, Gattu Battu, and Ninja Hattori-kun learning how to dab, which has achieved Memetic Mutation.
- And then there's The Loud House GoNoodle dance, in which Lola's dance move is dabbing. This video in particular was reused as idents for Nicktoons in the UK.
- A British SpongeBob magazine used, in a trivia quiz, names of popular celebrities at the time as incorrect answers. For instance, one of the answers to "Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?" was "The entire cast of High School Musical", and another question had "Ashley Tisdale" and "Dylan and Cole Sprouse" as choices.
- The Truth anti-tobacco initiative launched their "It's a Trap" ad in Summer 2015 to prove that they were still relevant to The New '10s after having been active since the Bush Era. The entire video just consists of popular Internet memes springing to life and yelling "It's a trap!" whenever kids consider casually smoking at a party. Note that none of them even say the signature lines that made them funny in the first place; apparently, the producers thought that hearing another (unrelated) meme reference would automatically make the audience laugh.
- And then there's "Left Swipe Dat", featuring many popular YouTubers and Vine makers singing a song about rejecting people who smoke on Tinder. It's almost painful to watch. (Though it's clear the participating YouTubers and Vine makers clearly did it for a quick buck.)
- Another campaign warned the audience that secondhand smoke can cause deathly illness in your pets, which is terrible because...we won't be able to watch funny cat videos anymore.
- Truth in general has been reveling in this as of late 2014, because apparently the way to get younger people to stop smoking is to look hip and modern.
- Golden Treasures Lottery came out with an ad for their lottery that starts with the double rainbow meme, featuring a man noticing a double rainbow that goes all the way across the sky, commenting on its beauty, and asking what it means.
- Pop-Tarts advertising and packaging occasionally ventures into this. For example, boxes from 2016 feature memes such as "This... is... tarta!" (a parody of a meme which was popular in the late 2000's) and image macro parodies.
- A series of anti-texting-while-driving PSAs from Australia, called "Don't Be a Dickhead", fall into this trope. It proclaims that every time you use a mobile phone while driving, gingers (or "gingaz") get laid, redheads get wings, and emos are born.note
- A Twix commercial featured a guy trying to hit on a Soapbox Sadie type, asking if she'd like to go back to his place and blog about their ideals. One gets the strong impression that the guy who wrote the commercial has no idea what blogging is.
- In The '80s, Nestle's reinvented the Milky Bar Kid. While the original Milky Bar Kid adverts had been Western pastiches, with the Kid as The Sheriff protecting a town from black hats with a taste for white chocolate, the new Milky Bar Kid was a Captain Space, Defender of Earth!. The ads more or less worked, but they returned to the classic version later that decade.
- A Goldfish advertisement has the fish take selfies and make fun of "duck facing". And it took place in 2017, rather than 2008-2011, when it was most popular. Unlike The Fairly OddParents! example (which is still a little late because it was in 2016), commercials aren't usually made months in advance, so they really have no excuse.
- Another Goldfish commercial has a reference to Keyboard Cat (a video uploaded to YouTube in 2007) in 2018.
- Domino Pizza's "Food of Squads" advert, first aired around September 2017, features four radically-dressed teenagers going around impressing girls, which at one point, one of them pulls out and spins two fidget spinners. This wouldn't be so much of a problem had it aired earlier (around May-July 2017, when they were at their peak of popularity), but by September, the trend was already dying off.
- This Mentos commercial has a yeti that randomly decides to dab. Another version of the commercial has the yeti flossing instead.
- A Cartoon Network ident from 2018 features various Cartoon Network characters doing dances from the then wildly-popular Fortnite.
- Something similar happened in a Holiday Mashup video that same year that had Beast Boy do Floss, one of the dances from the game. Luckily a nearby tree lands right on top of him almost immediately afterward like it was having none of that.
- Before that, their 25th Anniversary promo at one point has Four Arms dabbing. With all four of his arms.
- Parodied in this 2003 Serta commercial. The counting sheep are fed up with losing work, so they visit an image consultant, who recommends them to become "New! Now! Happening". Gilligan Cut to the sheep in a couple's bedroom rapping.
Gonna put you to sleep
Gonna put you to sleep
We're the sheep with the sleep
And there's no Bo Peep!
Gonna put you to sleep
With a sleep that's deep! - A promotional image for Sherlock Gnomes features Juliet dabbing.
- Veteran Filipino senator Juan Ponce Enrile, in his bid to appeal to Filipino youths for his re-election in 2019, made use of contemporary slang such as "lodi"note and "petmalu"note in his campaign advertisements, though some did find it rather cringy and half-hearted for a man in his nineties.
- The Energizer Bunny:
- A 2019 ad demonstrates how Energizer batteries last longer than their competitors by having two robots do the Floss dance popularized by Fortnite, made worse by the Energizer Bunny joining in at the end.
- A holiday 2019 ad has the Bunny take a selfie with a robot penguin.
- The teaser posters for The Addams Family (2019) are oozing with this, with puns like "Straight Outta Coffin" (a pun on a movie that came out four years ago), "It's Gonna Be Lit," and "You Got Served" for the characters. Also questionable is the use of Engineered Hashtags of the characters' names, which doesn't really work for characters with less specific names, like Thing and Grandma.
- The horror film Countdown (about an app that predicts a person's death) uses the phrase "There's an app for that" as part of its tagline, a meme that was popular during 2009-2010, whilst the film was made in 2019, long after the novelty of all sorts of different things having mobile phone apps faded.
- This ad for Xfinity depicts a family called "The Memesteins," which references outdated memes like "NOOB," the Impact font, and hoverboards in 2018. Other less infamous ads in this campaign included "The Filtertons" who live their lives through Instagram filters, and "The Swapsons" whose faces have all been swapped a la certain photo apps, including the dog.
Ok, finally, so let's start with something light.
- Were Still Relevant Dammit: The aforementioned Facebook was mentioned in a 2013 strip. Facebook is not a dead meme from 2012, so cut
- Were Still Relevant Dammit:
- In Cabin Fever, Greg plays a Webkinz-like game. It's very hard to get the reference if you're unfamiliar with Webkinz, which was at the height of its popularity in the mid-to-late 2000s. This should be kept I guess
- Grandpa is shown to be a Facebook user in Old School (having accidentally CC'ed all the grandparents for what was meant to be a movie night with a friend), although Greg refers to it as the "Internet". Social networks are NOT temporary fads
- The Meltdown has a page where one kid is seen dabbing while pretending to be a statue. Granted, it's only a one-off gag and that would probably happen even today, but still. It also mentions selfies. Dabbing was popular when the book came out, so it doesn't count, same for selfies
- Another criticism about the movie version of The Long Haul is that it has so many mentions and jokes about gaming conventions, memes, YouTube stars and social media. Yet another "Present day youth sucks, everything must be stuck eternally in the year the first installment came out" boomer commentary. Or I'm wrong?
- Subverted with the setup of The Deep End — The Heffleys' living situation at the beginning of the book, being forced to live together in Gramma's basement for the summer while their house is being repaired, is a natural continuation from the end of Wrecking Ball. But it happened to be published during the COVID-19 pandemic, so the gags about everybody going nuts while Frank struggles to work from home are more relatable than they otherwise would have been. Even the idea of the characters going on a road trip in an RV is an unintentional echo of 2020, as sales of those took off as the year progressed so people could take socially distanced vacations. This is a subverting so I don't know what to do
Let me comment...
- Don't know
- Social media reference, cut
- Keep
- Keep
- The song being 12 years old haves nothing to do with this because appreciating music doesn't have an expiring date. The part with Usher and Grumpy Cat may stay in?
- Keep
- Keep
- Keep
- It sounds more like a Mythology Gag than this
- Don't know
- Don't know
- Selfier should be cut since selfies are not part of this trope
- This is being a long one...
- Social medias are not temporary fads
- Don't know
- Was popular back then
- Was popular back then
- Dabbing is still popular I think
- Again
- Cut
- Keep
- Another point where it looks like the average troper is a stodgy elder that hates what modern kids like
- Cat videos aren't going out of trend for a long time
- Too general example
- Keep
- Keep (but why people don't want to resurrect old memes? They way better than the modern ones)
- Don't know
- EWW INTERNET IS BAD SO CRINGE NEVER MENTION IT AGAIN
- This goes to Totally Radical or Younger and Hipper I guess
- Cut the connection to the FOP example since it's on another page
- Keyboard Cat is a timeless classic, cut
- Cut, fidget spinners were still hip
- Cut, it's current trends
- EWW FORTNITE BAD DONT LIKE-cut
- Double cut
- Cut again
- Keep
- What's with this website's inane hatred for dabbing?
- Keep
- Another "Eww Fortnite" example
- Selfies aren't a fad
- "4-years old movie" doesn't mean it's a dead fad
- Keep
- Hoverboards are not a dead fad, people still use them
For the last entry, YMMV can't be played with (subverting is a form of Playing with a Trope), so that one should definitely be cut.
I would say the last example should be cut because 1) it's a COVID shoehorn and 2) Were Still Relevant Dammit is YMMV, and therefore can't be subverted.
Speaking of COVID, how does the following example fit the trope?
- Following a decline in importance and relevance due to competition from other video game expos and game companies able to directly announce their products through presentations such as Nintendo Direct, the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) announced that their 2020 expo would be retooled to be less focused on the gaming press and more open to the public, with an increased focus on social media and influencers sealing the deal. The cancelling of that edition due to the COVID-19 Pandemic seems to have at least delayed those plans, though.
No, also "referring to social media" is not considered this trope anymore
The best character is always the one-shot disguise.Also important to bear in mind for Were Still Relevant Dammit is that the work has to be part of a long-running franchise to count. So, say, The Emoji Movie wouldn't be a valid example. How long the franchise has to be to count, I have no idea.
I think it could help if it were renamed something like We're Still Hip and With It Dammit, to communicate the idea that not every modern reference is an example. It would also curb the misuse I've seen where someone tries to add it as an in-universe trope when a character (like an out-of-work actor) is just trying to get attention, but not by being "hip". For example, I've seen Were Still Relevant Dammit added to Gwenpool doing outrageous things so she doesn't fall into obscurity, or Jim Starling from DuckTales (2017) trying not to be a washed-up actor.
I'm beginning to wonder how common this trope actually is. Probably not very.
Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure PurenessIs dabbing really still popular? I haven't seen anybody dabbing unironically since 2018. Flossing is the dance move that still has a shred of relevance.
I think this item can count when a franchise tries to capitalize off a trend that's already dead, a franchise that's very tied to a specific decade tries to update itself in an unnatural way, or when a franchise that doesn't deal with current events much at all suddenly tries to capitalize off them. The first thing that comes to mind for me with this item is the Mickey Mouse rap album. Nineties as fuck.
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.For the Wimpy Kid example, the fact it was his grandpa using Facebook is actually really on-point .
What about memes referenced by shows with Animation Lead Time? The stuff is relevant when the show is written, but by the time of the airdate it is now irrelevant, not helped by the average meme having the lifespan of a week.
Edited by antenna_ears on Apr 5th 2021 at 1:57:39 AM
(x7) Thanks. I cut most of what you said to cut.
TRS Queue | Works That Require Cleanup of Complaining | Troper WallI think it depends on the show. I think the ''Fairly OddParents duckface example counts because the duckface meme was long outdated by 2017, and that show very rarely references memes (their internet episode was pre-meme-culture). Even with Animation Lead Time in mind, that's long overdue. But I think even memes outdated by, let's say a year, would count as WSRD because jumping onto a recent meme when you know production's going to take a year, and memes very rarely last longer than a few months nowadays, is in itself a misunderstanding of modern meme culture. However, if a show has an identity that's somehow very tied to meme culture, then it's probably not an example if they reference a meme.
Edited by mightymewtron on Apr 5th 2021 at 5:11:01 AM
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.PARTY PEEEEEOPLE
HERES SQUEAKY CLEAN MUSIC WITH FULL EFFECT
Ok bitch it's Weezer and it's WeezyWereStillRelevantDammit.The Simpsons
- Walter White and Jesse Pinkman made a live-action appearance at the end of the couch gag for Season 24's "What Animated Women Want", which aired in April 2013, a few months before Breaking Bad ended.
Technically this isn't that bad, I mean Breaking Bad was still popular, people were making memes of it and it was still a relatively popular show a while after it ended.
- Season 17's "See Homer Run" has its plotline reference the California 2003 recall election in 2005.
This can stay. I mean that episode aired in early 2006.
- "Gorgeous Grampa" parodies Storage Wars, a series that was in its third season and would end six years later, and has Bart wearing shutter shades. The couch cag also features the Harlem Shake, which would eventually decline in popularity not shortly after.
Keep the Harlem Shake, remove Storage Wars as the show was in fact still relevant.
- "Politically Inept, with Homer Simpson", a 2012 episode whose plot is a Take That! at Glenn Beck's Fox News show, when Beck had left the network the previous summer to start The Blaze (not to mention the fact that South Park had done essentially the same thing in fall 2009, when Beck's show was generating far more buzz, and The Daily Show had done so repeatedly since November of 2009).
Keep.
- 2000s/early 2010s-era Treehouse of Horror episodes have become this as the pop culture they parody are already a few years old and spoofed into oblivion. "Treehouse of Horror XXIII" which aired in 2012 and spoofed Paranormal Activity, which was released in 2009 and "Treehouse of Horror XXII", aired in 2011 and spoofing Avatar, which was also released to theatres in 2009 come to mind. The segments parodying Stranger Things (2016-?) and The Shape of Water (late 2017) (along with Kang using the Infinity Gauntlet to wipe out Burns' army) in "Treehouse of Horror XXX" (late 2019) are also apparent.
This is a mixed bag. I could see us keeping the Avengers, Paranormal Activity, and Avatar examples but the others I'm not too sure of. In particular Stranger Things which I believe just ended. They also parodied Coraline in a Treehouse of Horror episode airing in 2019.
- From season 25, Homer sings about "swag", of all things. While it's supposed to be a parody of older people trying to prove they are still relevant, it didn't quite have the result the creators were probably hoping for, as the word was waning in popularity and became all but dead a couple months after the episode aired.
I'd say keep. Very few people talker about Swag in 2013.
- Season 25 also had an episode simply titled "YOLO", which aired in November 2013, after "YOLO" stopped being relevant and everybody associated with the word had considered it an Old Shame.
Oh joy. This is literally the first thing I think of when I think of Simpsons not being relevant. Keep.
- The season 25 episode "You Don't Have to Live Like a Referee" features a parody of Jared Fogle from the Subway commercials. Jared was in his prime in the early-mid 2000s and hadn't been prominently featured in advertising since 2008, six years before the episode aired. This has now crossed the line into "Funny Aneurysm" Moment territory due to Fogle's 2015 arrest for numerous pedophilia-related charges.
I'd say keep. Though Fogle did get pedophilia charges and thus would be relevant again shortly after this aired.
- Artie Ziff going broke in "The Ziff Who Came to Dinner" is a parody of the Enron scandal, down to the crooked Z statue, which had happened two years prior.
Keep.
- Many recent episodes include smartphone jokes. One particular example is "Looking for Mr. Goodbart" focusing on a Pokémon GO parody months after Go was extremely relevant (the height of its relevance was in Summer 2016, this episode aired in Spring 2017). The game is still popular, just not as much as in 2016. It also included a parody of the Pokemon anime's first opening song with what was supposed to be animesque art, but it looks more like a western-produced "How To Draw Manga" book.
Pokemon Go was still relevant back then so I'd say cut. And using Smartphones isn't exactly a bad thing when they are still used today. Better than them using the keyboard cell phones in Lost Verizon.
- The ubiquitous celebrity cameos are commonly viewed as this. At first they were usually confined to older celebrities appearing as themselves, with younger ones usually voicing a one-time character. Since the late 1990s, celebrity cameos have become one of the show's major draws (or drawbacks, depending on your attitude). One particular example is "When You Dish Upon a Star" in which Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger (neither of whom were known at the time for being comic performers) get an episode whose entire plot revolved around them (along with Ron Howard, who did have such credentials).
They were relevant at the time still so cut?
- In the eighth-season finale, "The Secret War of Lisa Simpson", Lisa decides to apply to the military school Bart's been sent to, which had previously not allowed girls. Anyone watching at the time could see it was clearly inspired by Shannon Faulkner's real-life struggle to be admitted to the Citadel military college in South Carolina.
Again, this is misuse. The trope isn't about copying stories that were popular at the time. It's about things that have long since faded into obscurity at the time of the episode. Cut!
- "New Kids on the Blecch", an episode from 2001, in which *NSYNC had a guest appearance. The episode is rather outdated now, seeing that the band quit only a year later and is now mostly remembered for Justin Timberlake.
Outdated now does not equal Outdated then. N Sync is also referenced on the Fairly Odd Parents, and nobody is saying that show wasn't relevant at the time.
- The 302nd episode, Season 14's "Barting Over" contained a fawning cameo by Tony Hawk and a brief one by blink-182, both of whom were really big in 2003. Tony Hawk's dialogue in particular may cross over into Totally Radical. There's also the reason why Homer blew Bart's commercial money: to buy back incriminating photos of him nearly dropping his child over a balcony like Michael Jackson did in late 2002. Originally, Homer was supposed to blow the money on a star in the sky that went supernova, but the writers at the last minute changed it into something more current (which would serve as a pop culture footnote years later).
But this was aired in 2003! I'd say keep the Michael Jackson example, but for 2003 this isn't really that bad.
- "MyPods and Boomsticks" was filled to the brim with jabs at Apple and Steve Jobs (Mapple and Steve Mobs in the show) and it was obvious the writers weren't very familiar with them. This was carried over to the episode where Homer gets a MyPad and thinks Steve Mobs is contacting him from beyond the grave. The aforementioned episode aired in 2008, which was a little while before Apple's products became an absolute necessity for most consumers.
Apple Products became a necessity for many shortly after so I don't see the problem besides the shallow parody of it. Keep the iPod example though as they weren't used much back then.
- The opening to "To Surveil with Love" in which the entire Springfield populace lip syncs to Kesha's "TiK ToK" was an obvious attempt at pandering to a younger demographic (though this was done as part of a gimmicky week-long stunt called "Fox Rocks" where the network's shows (except for dramas) were contractually forced to put in musical segments, which is why the Family Guy episode "Brian & Stewie" had a clip show of musical moments tacked on it). Many older fans weren't happy with the opening scene.
Keep this and burn it with hellfire.
- "The D'oh-cial Network" (January 2012): It had loads of references to Facebook (the episode was even a parody of The Social Network — late 2010), Twitter, Apple products, and stores that had recently gone out of business as of 2011. It also ended with an Anvilicious Aesop about not depending on technology. It doesn't help that the scenes ostensibly parodying The Social Network show little evidence that the writers even saw the movie. That the episode prominently features Creep by Radiohead, which was featured in the trailer but not the actual film, reinforces this impression.
This can stay.
- One episode even lampshaded this with Itchy and Scratchy doing a Black Swan parody, with Krusty commenting on how the parody was considered current at the time it was written.
YMMV can't be played with.
- "Lisa Goes Gaga" focuses on a guest appearance from Lady Gaga, much like the Ke$ha couch gag from "To Surveil With Love". While there have other episodes where the celebrity guest was central to the plot rather than a brief cameo, this was essentially a twenty-minute tribute to Gaga using several common jokes about her.
Even back then Gaga was parodied to death. Keep.
- "Whiskey Business" features references to the Occupy Wall Street pepper spray cop and the Tupac Shakur hologram.
- "Beware My Cheating Bart" had a subplot where Homer, intending to exercise, buys a treadmill that has streaming video built in. He soon becomes wrapped up in watching episodes of Stranded, a blatant Lost parody, keeping notebooks full of clues and plot points from each episode. The episode first aired in 2012, two years after Lost went off the air. However, Marge does point out that Homer is watching a series that is several years old and treating it like a current event.
I don't think it's wrong when the show itself admits it's slow on the uptake.
- Season 27's "Barthood" is a parody of Boyhood a few years after the film came out. Despite this, it's considered by many to be one of the best modern day episodes of the show.
Agreed with this being a fantastic episode, but keep.
- One Halloween episode had a scene where incarnations of the characters appeared referencing popular, contemporary anime and cartoon characters. This included Lisa as Mikasa Ackerman, Bart as Naruto Uzumaki, Maggie as Pikachu, Marge as Rangiku Matsumoto, Homer as Roronoa Zoro, everyone as South Park characters, everyone as the Minions, and everyone as Adventure Time characters. At least the joke has Lisa explaining the characters as spinoff characters created by an "evil marketing entity". Making matters worse is that the "characters as anime/manga characters" thing had already been done in a Couch Gag, in "'Tis the Fifteenth Season", and with more consolidated characters (Homer was portrayed as Ultraman and Bart as Astro Boy, for example; in fact, only Maggie-Pikachu was the same).
Anime and manga are still popular today. Cut.
- The Fox Animation YouTube channel posted a video where Homer plays Pokémon GO. While it recycles animation from an older episode with minor edits and new voice clips, it still applies.
Keep.
- Season 20's "How the Test Was Won" has Principal Skinner make a threat that references the famous "Got any grapes?" line from "The Duck Song". Unlike most examples here, it does fit the time zone of 2009 (the episode's original airdate). However, it seems rather painful after the song became irrelevant in 2012 or so.
Cut. It was relevant at the time.
- A theme song in Season 29 depicts Maggie holding some Szechuan Sauce in a reference to the item's increase in popularity after Rick and Morty brought it back into the public eye. A Season 26 episode had a Couch Gag with a cameo from the titular characters, and that episode aired a year and a half or so after Rick and Morty premiered.
Keep.
- Season 30's "Heartbreak Hotel" (October 2018) not only features a storyline based around Homer and Marge taking place in The Amazing Race, about a decade after it had reached its popularity peak. There is also a sequence where Marge is mocked by the rest of her family as a Noob for messing it up, despite said slang itself having long since started falling out of use since the early 2010s.
- A social media promo for “Baby You Can’t Drive My Car”, showing Mr Burns and Smithers disguised as young adults, referenced the “how do you do fellow kids?” meme from 30 Rock. Unsurprisingly, many found the use of it ironic.
- Season 30's "Bart vs Itchy & Scratchy" attempts to cover the controversy of the 2016 all-female Ghostbusters reboot with a female Itchy & Scratchy, three years after that controversy. Throwing it aside for Bart joining a parody of Pussy Riot. One part of the episode features Lisa mocking Bart with outdated internet slang.
- Season 30's "E My Sports" involves Homer coaching Bart to be an e-sports player. E-sports ended up getting big years before the episode aired, with the World Cyber Games (to name one example of a big e-sports event) being formed as far back as the year 2000.
- Season 30's "I'm Just a Girl Who Can't Say D'oh" has Bart flossing while mocking Lisa, a dance repopularised by Fortnite in early 2018. The episode aired in April the next year. In addition, after a while, Hype Backlash caused a slight decrease in Fortnite's popularity, and flossing is now widely seen as a poor attempt at trying to be "hip". This would be repeated in the Season 31 opener "The Winter of Our Monetized Content", where there's a scene that has Homer and Bart flossing.
- "Homerpalooza" (May 1996) plays around with this trope. The heavy focus on Gen X culture and cameos from various 90's rock bands (complete with a lawyer-friendly version of the Lollapalooza music festival) would normally be a straight example, but a big part of the episode is also on Homer lamenting that the things that were cool back in his day are old-fashioned and lame now (a trend that even happened to his father back in the day) and latching onto current trends to be cool again, only to realize that just being yourself is better than mindlessly chasing trends. In this case, the fact that the trends Homer chased have themselves now become old-fashioned and irrelevant makes the episode oddly relevant.
Abe: I used to be 'with it'. But then they changed what 'it' was. Now what I'm 'with' isn't 'it', and what's 'it' sounds weird and scary to me. It'll happen to you!
- Season 31's "Bobby: It's Cold Outside" has a scene of the family singing "Baby Shark" while stuck in traffic.
- Season 31's "Bart the Bad Guy" (March 2020) involves Bart watching a Simpsons-universe version of Avengers: Endgame (April 2019) early and causing movie studios to be concerned about his spoiler leakage (with the episode itself having guest appearances by Marvel producer Kevin Feige and Endgame directors Joe and Anthony Russo). Particularly notable given the finger snap scene had already been parodied on two occasions over the past year, with the first case featuring the real deal as opposed to a parody. It also leads to another Celebrity Paradox seeing as Marvel Comics has already been established to exist in the Simpsons universe, as shown in the episodes guest-starring the late Stan Lee, plus the real Thanos appeared during a Couch Gag in the previous season's "The Girl on the Bus".
- "Do PizzaBots Dream of Electric Guitars?" (March 2021) references the original design of Sonic in the theatrical film, as an example of how Internet criticism can result in change. Sonic the Hedgehog had its first trailer in April 2019, with the redesign being shown in November of that same year, and the movie releasing in early 2020.
Edited by Klavice on Apr 5th 2021 at 9:16:11 AM
The "celebrity guests who aren't comedians" bit can probably be WTH, Casting Agency?, though Alec Baldwin nowadays is known for some comedic roles like in 30 Rock and Saturday Night Live.
The Itchy & Scratchy example is in-universe, so it can be played with in that context.
As for the rest of the examples (and keep in mind I'm not a hardcore Simpsons fan, I don't know these episodes):
- "Heartbreak Hotel": Keep. Amazing Race isn't super relevant anymore, nor are other shows of its genre, and nobody says "noob" unironically in 2018.
- "Baby You Can't Drive My Car": Unsure. It sounds like it could have been Self-Deprecation.
- "Bart vs Itchy & Scratchy": Keep. While all-female reboots are still controversial, the Ghostbusters controversy specifically has very much died down. And I saw the internet slang clip on the Video Examples page and oh yeah, that definitely counts. (She says "pwned" unironically!)
- "E My Sports": Cut. E-sports are still a popular thing, possibly even more popular than they were a few years before the episode.
- "I'm Just a Girl Who Can't Say D'oh": Cut. Flossing might be Snark Bait but it was still fairly popular with kids in 2019, so it's not unrealistic for Bart to do. Flossing in 2020, however, might be a dead meme, I'm not sure though.
- "Homerpalooza": Cut because it sounds like a deliberate Trend Aesop. Maybe it could be in-universe but I don't think so since this doesn't appear to be an in-universe work.
- "Bobby: It's Cold Outside": Cut. "Baby Shark" was still popular when the episode aired. (I should know...I worked with toddlers during that time.)
- "Bart the Bad Guy": Hmm. Leaning towards keep. This entry's more based in Fridge Logic than anything, but if they're referencing Endgame spoilers long after those spoilers were a concern anymore, especially if the existence of Marvel really contradicts the show's canon that badly, then it's outdated and possibly out-of-place enough to be a keeper.
- "Do PizzaBots Dream of Electric Guitars": Unsure, though I do know this scene this time. I saw people give that clip some flak on Twitter for being late to the punch, but it came out during a time when people still remember the movie and its controversy (only a year after its release), plus it's just a brief throwaway joke and could make sense even if you don't know it's a real controversy.
Edited by mightymewtron on Apr 5th 2021 at 7:06:19 AM
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.I should clarify something. WSRD isn’t just “Making outdated references”, it’s also technically “ A long running or timeless work referencing things that are very new, and haven’t had enough time to pass as timeless themselves or a quick fad.”
Ok bitch it's Weezer and it's WeezyI think "references to current memes" can count if the work in question is a reboot of an older work that didn't reference memes at all. Only example off the top of my head is The Powerpuff Girls (2016), but I'm sure there are others.
Hmm. That's kind of hard to quantify. A lot of works make fun of contemporary trends simply because they're set in the present, and some works make an identity out of that contemporary stuff (like South Park, which has a production schedule that allows it to satirize the most recent events possible). What would make it unnatural or forced?
For that matter, is there a trope for a show that relies on referencing contemporary trends? Ripped from the Headlines is more about news events, not cultural events.
Edited by mightymewtron on Apr 5th 2021 at 9:07:37 AM
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.I'll be honest, is this even really worth having around? At best, it seems pretty rare, it attracts complaining and shoehorning, and I don't think "old work references modern things, but badly", is a trope we need here.
Plus, it just reeks of "Modern References Bad".
Edited by WarJay77 on Apr 5th 2021 at 9:11:46 AM
Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure PurenessYou could do a wick check and take it to TRS under "complaining."
However, I think there's something worth recording here, similar to Setting Update. It is interesting when a long-running work includes references to pop culture that it never referenced before, or that clash with the setting. I don't think this is really that unremarkable.
I do some cleanup and then I enjoy shows you probably think are cringe.I mean, maybe, but if the trope is what you described "but bad", then it's inherently complain-y. I think I will do a wick check on it.
A trope for, say, Modernization Creep or something could be interesting and useful. A lot of the Society Marches On misuse might fit there. But this trope as is doesn't seem worth having.
Currently Working On: Incorruptible Pure PurenessThe "Bart the Bad Guy" example might be a mix of Expy Coexistence and Animation Lead Time.
For the Pokémon Go Simpsons example, as someone who plays the game on a regular basis, it's still popular to this day and still receives plenty of content updates (though just not as popular as during its peak in 2016).
Edited by Nen_desharu on Apr 5th 2021 at 11:46:57 AM
Kirby is awesome.The "Bart the bad guy" example also haves a problem of redundancy, as it mentions the appearance of Thanos in a couch gag twice in two consecutive lines (first to mention that they referenced the snap in an earlier episode when it was kinda more relevant, then for the Celebrity Paradox thing)
For the Pizzabots one... well, do you know a case like the one for the Sonic trailer design that is more recent than that? I don't and so I think that's still the more relevant example you can make about how Internet criticism can cause change.
The best character is always the one-shot disguise.
Were Still Relevant Dammit is a trope that has suffered tons of misuse since it's creation.
It was originally envisioned as, "Obvious, desperate, and frequently misguided attempts at keeping trendy, hip and young using Long Running media, especially if it's outdated." But throughout the years, it has decayed into "Slighty long running Piece of media mentions the internet, phones, selfies, memes, or modern slang."
Sometimes, even mentioning something like a modern movie or TV Show will put this trope on your page, and that's why this cleanup was created.
Edited by DookieIdiotNimrod on Apr 5th 2021 at 8:30:11 AM
Ok bitch it's Weezer and it's Weezy