Once Original, Now Common cleanup (formerly "Seinfeld" is Unfunny)

I do get what you're saying, and I can see how the darker (literally and metaphorically) aesthetic was influential on X-Men (if we're talking Sam Raimi's Spiderman, that seems way too optimistic and bright for this, but I digress). As I said, I'm not really too bothered by the entry, just wanted to throw it out there.

I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me

I was mainly talking about their influence on the popularity of hero movies, rather than specific aesthetic (which would disqualify Spider Man).

TRS Queue | Works That Require Cleanup of Complaining | Troper Wall

Given it's influence, I'd say let's leave Blade in. Speaking of, I have concerns on the MCU entry (my thoughts in bold):

• Marvel Cinematic Universe
  • When The Incredible Hulk came out in 2008, many people were awestruck by Tony Stark's cameo in The Stinger. This was Marvel's intent, as they were attempting to build a shared universe of movies that would lead to, in Stark's words, "a team". After other movies in the MCU, namely Thor, Captain America: The First Avenger, and of course, The Avengers - which was a culmination of the previous movies - This Stinger no longer has the same awe that it once had. (agree with this one)
  • Captain America: The First Avenger had a Breakout Character in Peggy Carter, who is really just in the story as a love interest who demonstrates that she's able to be an Action Girl when required. The movie only came out in 2011 when the female superhero genre was thought to be dead in the water after Catwoman (2004) and Elektra. Peggy happened to be played by an actress who really brought her to life, and elevated her beyond the Satellite Love Interest. Remember, this was before Wonder Woman (2017) and Captain Marvel. Even Black Widow wouldn't achieve her popularity until The Avengers (she had debuted in Iron Man 2 but wasn't received too well there). As of 2020, Peggy Carter is the only movie character to have been given her own spin-off show. (I feel this is natter, while Marvel famously resisted female and POC heroes, Captain America was not the film to break this ground, that would be Wonder Woman, I say cut this whole entry)
  • It's a similar deal with Lady Sif in Thor - who was just a supporting character among Thor's friends, and it was made clear she was the best warrior of them. It also helped that she wasn't Thor's love interest, as The Smurfette Principle was still common in blockbusters at the time. Hell, Thor was refreshing simply for having actual female characters besides Jane - such as Frigga, Darcy and Sif. (natter, cut this one too)
  • The big draw for The Avengers was that it was going to be the first movie where superheroes who were popular enough to carry their own films (Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and the Hulk) would crossover in a single film and interact with each other while fighting a common foe. Nowadays, with each successive MCU film featuring cameos from the other heroes or even having them play supporting roles, the characters are now expected to show up in each other's movies. Captain America: Civil War, which was ostensibly supposed to be the character's third solo film, has nearly every superhero in the franchise play a role in the plot and Thor: Ragnarok has the Hulk and Doctor Strange appear even though it's primarily taking place away from Earth. Meanwhile, the DC Extended Universe launched soon after The Avengers' release and had its three most popular heroes (Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman) crossover in only its second film and before its big superhero team-up film was released. With the abundance of superhero crossovers that will continue for the foreseeable future, it will be difficult for new audiences to understand just how much of a big deal The Avengers was.

(Yes this was successful and groundbreaking, but considering other franchises have famously failed to recreate its success, is it really an example of SIU?)

Edited by laserviking42 on Sep 8th 2021 at 1:32:26 PM

I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me

Agree with your cuts, but you're using the term natter wrong. It's Conversation on the Main Page.

Edited by WarJay77 on Sep 8th 2021 at 2:16:31 PM

Current Project: Incorruptible Pure Pureness

^ apologies on that.

I'm going to batch some of the next ones up:

• Breakfast at Tiffany's, one of the earliest "chick flicks," now appears passé compared to its numerous successors. (obviously this is a good example, I'm just worried if it has enough context to stand as it is)
• Bruce Lee's martial arts movies. Today, his fights against opponents who attack one at a time can look cliche until you remember that at the time, he was pioneering not only the tropes of the genre, but the genre itself. Enter the Dragon was The Matrix of its day.
  • Enter the Dragon stands out especially, as it was the last film Lee completed before his before his tragically untimely death and even today it holds up as one of the greatest martial arts films ever. Countless other works have used the "martial arts hero participates in an exclusive tournament on an exotic faraway island to get revenge on the Big Bad hosting it" in reference to this film's first use of the premise.
  • Not to mention: now that All Asians Know Martial Arts has become a bit of an offensive stereotype in its own right, it's easy to forget that Lee's films were once considered revolutionary for their positive portrayal of Asians. In the 1970s, very few American moviegoers had ever seen films with Asian leads who were dignified, intelligent, articulate, cultured and philosophical all at once. As a result, Lee is often cited as a major trailblazer for Asian actors in all genres, and he's credited with permanently changing Hollywood's portrayal of Asians. (should we just cut the sub-bullets and let Bruce Lee stand on his own?)
• Bullitt was considered the definitive car chase movie in its time, but others have copied it. (I've seen it called the first modern action movie, I'm just worried again that it lacks context)
• It might be lost on newer fans just how different The Craft was when it first came out in 1996. Teen Urban Fantasy was not a mainstream genre - the likes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Charmed wouldn't hit the air for a couple of years - and as producer Andy Wick said "It was before YA. There were very few female heroines like that.", and the notion of a girl-centered teen movie called to mind something like Clueless as opposed to anything dark. The filmmakers didn't even know who they were really marketing the film to - until hundreds of goth and punk girls showed up to the preview. (I'm not sure this is correct, I was under the impression that Buffy was the progenitor of the modern teen vampire/monster craze)

I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me

Glad to see some effort here. A while ago I cut down a very defensive paragraph about how the Star Wars prequels were great back then and today's critics just don't understand- It was obviously added by a hurt fan. I cut it down to the only valid point I could see, that it pioneered motion-capture, but I'm not sure if even that fits. I remember that at the time, both critics and audiences were deeply disappointed by the film, so today's reactions are more "I agree" than "What was the fuss?" Still, the CGI was impressive at the time (if badly used) and less so now.

A lot of fans want their favourite works to have been great in their time. The problem with checking these examples is that we need to know contemporary reactions, and that is difficult for those who were not around at the time and don't have sources available.

I wish this trope had been called "Invented The Cliché". Could we yet rename it to make clearer the definition discussed on the first page?

Stories don't tell us monsters exist; we knew that already. They show us that monsters can be trademarked and milked for years.

I'd argue with keeping The Avengers in, but admittedly its in-story reason for being a big deal is hardly lost.

That would take a TRS thread, after a wick check that would definitively prove not only misuse, but that the name itself is the cause of said misuse.

So what's the argument for keeping it? The trope is for elements or works that innovated something, but have since been copied so often that the original no longer seems fresh. In the wake of Avengers, there were more than a few attempts at such a team-up, but so far, no one has managed to do it. The closest was the spectacularly divisive Justice League, but most of those heroes had yet to carry their own movie (Flash and Cyborg still haven't had their own feature).

I'm open to arguments, but as written, the example (in my opinion) doesn't fit the trope.

I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me

The Avengers kind of movie is nigh-commonplace, which to me obscures how impactful it was when it came out.

But how does it apply to this trope? What "kind of movie" is it that is now commonplace? You're not giving a lot of specifics here.

I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me

Ended up coming across this on YMMV.Radiohead:

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• Seinfeld Is Unfunny: Someone who's already familiar with Coldplay, early Muse, Keane, and Travis might listen to The Bends and not get what all the fuss is about. The band has averted this for most of its other albums by going much darker than their contemporaries on OK Computer and delving into Genre-Busting on Kid A and Amnesiac.

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And its counterpart on SeinfeldIsUnfunny.Music:

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• Radiohead. Their albums The Bends and OK Computer (along with their breakout hit "Creep") were so innovative that the band's combination of introspective darkness and falsetto vocals were promptly ripped off by massive numbers of alternative rock musicians, most of which went on to massive mainstream success greater than Radiohead had ever had at the time. Frustration with this led to the band's Neoclassical Punk Zydeco Rockabilly album, Kid A. The genre switch worked, and they've been quite successful and critically acclaimed since.

---

The two of these generally get at the same point, but I think they both could use a bit of rewriting, especially since YMMV tropes can't be played with (to say nothing of how the latter point seems to be focusing on Radiohead in general). Reading through writeups on The Bends and OK Computer, general consensus seems to be that only the former seems to be noticeably hit by this trope. It's still a well-liked album (I myself like it), it just lost its original novelty in a sea of other artists who drew from it. With all that in mind, my idea for a rewrite would look something like this:

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• When The Bends first released in 1995, its melancholy tone, introspective lyrics, and eclectic influences were a radical deviation from Britpop's generally upbeat and rockist template. Alongside its follow-up, OK Computer, it instigated a shift away from the genre and directly influenced its successor movement, post-Britpop. However, while OK Computer is still regarded as standing apart from the artists it influenced, the initial novelty of The Bends is hard to see decades later, when its style became the new basic standard among British Alternative Rock; Radiohead themselves were aware of this, motivating their shift to more Genre-Busting material in the 2000's.

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Edited by bowserbros on Sep 10th 2021 at 11:35:31 AM

Be kind.

Agree with your proposed entry. The Bends was the start of the whole navel gazing introspective britpop, but even Radiohead ditched that sound as soon as they could.

I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me

Alright; I've incorporated the rewrite on both pages (adjusted as necessary) with a link to this thread in the edit summaries.

Be kind.

I agree with the name Invented The Cliche. It would also eliminate trope namer syndrome, especially given that newer tropes try to avoid pop culture references in their name.

Edited by Nen_desharu on Sep 11th 2021 at 11:34:10 AM

Kirby is awesome.

Considering that Seinfeld Is Unfunny has more than 300,000 inbounds and that the misuse patterns here don't really look like a "misleading name", I don't think you'll get far if you make a TRS thread.

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman

Isn't Invented The Cliche a bit misleading?

Edited by Delibirda on Sep 12th 2021 at 11:22:31 AM

"Listen up, Marina, because this is SUPER important. Whatever you do, don't eat th“ “DON'T EAT WHAT?! Your text box ran out of space!”

Most of the misuse so far is from tropers using the page to praise their favorite works and bash subsequent works. Also, because the nature of the trope is partially historical, it seems that some tropers feel compelled to pontificate endlessly on their favorite media, adding natter and convo on the main page.

It's not a misunderstanding of the definition so much as a misunderstanding of what the wiki is for, IMO.

I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me

I feel like renaming Seinfeld Is Unfunny to Invented The Cliche will get it mixed up with Franchise Original Sin.

Edited by RainbowPumpqueen on Sep 13th 2021 at 6:00:26 PM

Sandbox help wanted.

The trope is more like how people don't like old phones.

"Listen up, Marina, because this is SUPER important. Whatever you do, don't eat th“ “DON'T EAT WHAT?! Your text box ran out of space!”

So closer to Unintentional Period Piece misuse then? I wouldn't say that people hate old phones, more that they're a low-hanging fruit because of how radically and suddenly smartphones changed the cultural landscape.

Back on topic though, I'm not sure how well a comparison like that works out, because whereas UPP's misuse is more along the lines of "any reference to something not part of the zeitgeist anymore— no matter how minor— instantly dates the work," SIF's misuse is more along the lines of either They Copied It, So It Sucks! or finding a backhanded way to voice one's own Hype Backlash. I guess you could say that both tropes' conundrums are based on kneejerk reactions, but the kinds of kneejerk reactions present are substantially different.

Be kind.

Since there was no response to my earlier post, I'll leave it as is. Moving on:

• James Bond. When the movies starring Sean Connery first appeared in the early '60s, they were the sexiest mainstream movies at the time. Coming out of the uptight '50s but before the sexual revolution in the later part of the decade, Bond was incredibly risque. The credits sequences alone were hotter than most movies during that period. The first film, Dr. No, premiered in 1962 and made a big impact with Bond having casual sex and that famous (and much-parodied) scene of Ursula Andress coming out of the surf in the white bikini. From Russia with Love had a catfight between two scantily clad gypsy girls. In Goldfinger, one Bond girl was found dead, naked and covered in gold paint, and another was named "Pussy" Galore! However, while Bond did sleep with many women in each movie, all that's ever shown is the lead-in kiss and then cut to the next morning. As the years have gone by and sex scenes become more graphic, the seduction scenes in even the more recent Bond movies seem almost chaste, while the sexual innuendo and jokes that were part of Bond from the beginning now seems corny.
  • Bond was even receiving this treatment by the late '60s, thanks largely to countless parodies and ripoffs. When reviewing You Only Live Twice in 1967, a critic for Time magazine not-so-ironically compared the Bond franchise to that of Frankenstein, saying that "there have been so many flamboyant imitations that the original looks like a copy".
  • With Daniel Craig's portrayal of Bond, it's difficult to appreciate Timothy Dalton's portrayal in The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill. At the time, Dalton's portrayal was the darkest Bond had ever been. Because Dalton's predecessor, Roger Moore, had been the lightest of all the Bonds and the longest tenured, audiences had grown so accustomed to a light, wise-cracking Bond that they were taken aback by Dalton's performance.

The two sub-bullets are, IMO, unnecessary and main page convo-ish. I suggest cut the two and leave the main entry.

I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me

Agreed; the point about the series' sexual content is the only one that feels applicable.

Be kind.

Done. Next:

• From the Slasher Movie genre:
  • Halloween (1978) seems today a clichéd slasher film. But it created the clichés and established the formulas.
  • Ditto for Friday the 13th (1980), which came out before slashers became predictable. According to the filmmakers, people watching it on the big screen would literally be shouting "don't go in there!" and "don't open that!" in genuine fear for the characters. These days, anyone exposed to slasher films knows that of course they're going to go in there and of course they're going to get killed in a clever and creative way.

It was Halloween that established the slasher genre, which Friday the 13th (1980) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) shamelessly stole from. I'd like to replace it with something like this:

• Halloween (1978): While today it seems like a cliched slasher, when released, this independent film built and codified many of the tropes associated with the slasher genre of horror: A silent killer with opaque motivations, who stalks a group of teenagers, picking them (in gruesome fashion) off one by one, and a plucky Final Girl who is resourceful enough to outwit the killer and survive (also abstaining from sex and drugs). The 80s would see numerous franchises take these basic building blocks and make a new horror genre.

I didn't choose the troping life, the troping life chose me

I know what the trope is, I'm just saying that a rename might get it confused with Franchise Original Sin by other tropers, especially since it's been proven time and time again that people don't read trope descriptions.

Scratch that, I think it already is being confused with Franchise Original Sin, given how they're both used as "Thing in new installment bad, same thing in old installment good".

Sandbox help wanted.

The rewrite looks good for the most part, I'd just change "picking them (in gruesome fashion) off one by one" to "gruesomely picking them off one by one" so it flows better.

Be kind.