Cleanup on aisle Special Effect Failure?

Special Effect Failure

I was just looking at this one, and it seems like the majority of examples ignore the description's instruction:

To be a true Special Effect Failure, it has to have looked bad by the standards of the time it was made — and have been remarked on at the time.

An awful lot of examples fail this in various ways, usually either "This 1953 special effect from a big-budget A-list Hollywood production looks ridiculous! They should've fired their CGI people!" or "When you watch this on DVD on a 60 inch screen with your set's brightness turned all the way up, you can totally see the wires!

I'll jump in this afternoon or evening, if I don't have time right after lunch.

I presume all the "look cloooosely at X for the half second he's shown and it's obvious he's using a prop sword" and "some of the thousands of CGI figures onscreen are not perfectly rendered and pathed" can go?

I have a complaint about this trope, but it's something else: why does this have to have been remarked on? We don't have that requirement for anything else, as far as I'm aware (such as "You Fail X Forever").

I think the "remarked on" requirement is an attempt to avoid what we have (in part) - a long list of subjective nitpicks about special effects. And unless you actually create a giant monster to destroy Tokyo while you film it, all special effects are going to fail for some people.

And that gets back to troper Semi's question above - yeah, those can go, I would think. Unless they're in some way remarkable (if, perhaps, not literally remarked upon and cited per The Other Wiki's rules or something.)

In my mind, the test would be something like "Is this something a mainstream media reviewer might have mentioned in a contemporaneous review?"

edited 27th May '10 11:04:45 AM by suedenim

^ That would be awesome though, for a certain definition of awesome.

It seems to me that Special Effect Failure in a work is something that needs to be judged relative to its contemporaries. My personal favorite is the truly awful stop-motion animation of Sardo Numspa's One-Winged Angel form in The Golden Child.

edited 27th May '10 11:03:40 AM by Fighteer

"Remarked-on" may be gratuitous. I think the idea is to emphasize that the special effects were bad for the time and not to modern eyes looking back, since special effects technology advances. Particularly with CGI: people have a sort of anti-Nostalgia Filter there and tend to forget how impressive they once found the effects when they rewatch a movie just a few years later.

Yeah, evaluation of CGI is particularly bad for that. And the clutter makes the actually good CGI examples get lost in the shuffle. For instance, the CGI in Air Force One, a big-budget Major Motion Picture, was remarked on at the time as being particularly unconvincing.

Incidentally, it occurs to me that "I can totally see the wires" (as something said about movies, usually the first Special Effects Failure a person thinks of to cite a bad movie for, is almost a Dead Horse Trope now.

In modern movies, you should never see the wires, as digitally erasing them is a standard, relatively simple, procedure.

But in older movies (and especially TV), you can very often see the wires with crisp high-resolution DVD/Blu-Ray prints... even if the wires were hidden rather competently by the standards of the time. From a modern perspective, it can be hard to tell when the wires were obvious to contemporary viewers.

maybe sort the examples by year, and then have various boundary points, sort of like in Mohs Scale Of Science Fiction Hardness, but each one would mark some technical advance or groundbreaking work, and would mark the point where a particular kind of special effect (Driving a Desk, Stop Motion, etc) would henceforth be counted as a Special Effect Failure.

^ That would not really work, as some techniques have existed for years (like miniatures and mat paintings) and they are still subject to Special Effect Failure if done badly nowadays as they were in their time.

sure, but the idea was to try to give some context for "looked bad by the standards of the time it was made" to avoid the problems in the OP

The biggest problem is this falls into Done Badly.

Except that a lot of the examples weren't Done Badly when they were made. They look cheap or fake now, but they were excellent for the time.

I meant the trope itself. The examples that don't fit have nothing to do with that.

I'm about to savage the section for Star Trek TV series. Too much stuff that's aged poorly, but was entirely acceptable. TOS was not a cheap show, and it got compliments for its effects at the time. The state of the art has just moved on.

edited 28th May '10 9:51:47 AM by Semiapies

This trope continues to attract new example at about a 3:1 ratio of bad examples to good. Is there anything we could do to the description to help stem the tide?

Also, do we have a trope that corresponds to "anti Nostalgia Filter" as described above? It's a good description of this trope's problem, and would make for an interesting trope in itself.

Entirely possible, Suedenim.

I'll just have to do another scouring. And add Special Effect Failure to my watchlist, I think. (Nobody construe this as a reason not to help clean, please! :) )

edited 5th Aug '10 9:40:21 AM by Semiapies

Um... perhaps we should just cut this. If it's attracting more misuse than good use, then it's being treated as a subjective page, and then becoming complaining about special effects you don't like.

I actually don't know whether it's being misused beyond the examples on the page itself - I haven't looked at wicks.

It's a fairly clear name and description, though we can probably improve the latter. I'm loathe to say "kill an old pop-culture trope because some people aren't paying attention".

I say we give it some greater scrutiny and tidying-up and see how it does.

In my mind, the test would be something like "Is this something a mainstream media reviewer might have mentioned in a contemporaneous review?"

Then I would suggest taking out the "have been remarked on at the time" and replacing it with "could have been remarked on at the time".

This trope is still a huge mess, but I'm not sure what can be done about it. New examples (and it gets a fair number) seem to overwhelmingly fit in the nitpicking/Reverse Nostalgia Filter category.

well... it's basically You Fail Special Effects Forever, so it fits within the "reduce fault-finding on the wiki" mission that Fast Eddie is talking about in the You Fail... thread

Forgive me if this has been mentioned, I was in a hurry and skipped some of this thread.

Do we have pages for the types of special effects? CGI, claymation, models, etc? Do we have a page for Special Effects in general? If we do, then simply noting the ways each can fail and why it can be bad for Willing Suspension of Disbelief on each page, then we cover the ground currently covered by Special Effect Failure without having a page dedicated to fault-finding.

If we don't have those pages, we should. They do seem within our scope as much as camera tricks and the like. They're the same sort of nebulous "tropes" used to tell a story.

EDIT: Bleh. I swore I'd never get dragged back into this forum again and here I am ankle deep and sinking. :P

edited 17th Nov '10 9:15:24 AM by ccoa

^ We have some of them.