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for ongoing cleanup projects.
Those are pretty bad, yeah. They're rarely helpful and not that funny either, so they don't even work as a gag. At the thread we often change those to something more informative.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallI think they're bad, since they're useless to someone who isn't familiar with the work being referenced, so it fails the Clear part of Clear, Concise, Witty (though I don't think they're particularly witty, either).
I feel like this stuff is better suited to X Meets Y instead of Laconics.
Edited by GastonRabbit You can't just say "perchance".I think it would be fine if we limit to references to works that everyone and his mother knows, even if not following the work. Things like Superman, Batman, Star Wars, James Bond, Terminator, etc.
For example, if a laconic of Moon Knight described him as "Batman, but white and in Marvel Comics" I wouldn't have a problem with it, because everybody knows Batman (just an example, the current laconic is not that one). "Zero Hour" and "Airplane" are simply not at that level.
Ultimate Secret Wars^ We can't even assume that people know who Batman is. I mean, most people do, but that's Fan Myopia to say everyone knows.
Working on: Author Appeal | Sandbox | Troper WallI proposed here
that we should just ban this style of laconic page. I got a few people to agree, but not enough to make it an official policy. So yeah, I support any attempt to fix this kind of laconic page.
As for the pages themselves, I would say something like "Disaster Movie (parody) about a Shell-Shocked Veteran who is forced to land a plane after the crew all suffer food poisoning." The two trope pages outright admit that Airplane! copied the plot of Zero Hour! wholesale, so I wonder if it would be appropriate to have similar laconic entries.
Neglected to mention this earlier, but at least one mod (Fighteer) once said that Laconics are primarily for trope pages, and are deprecated (or at least discouraged) for work pages. I completely forgot which thread this was in (except that it was on the Long-Term Projects forum); he did say that cutting them wasn't urgent, but I still feel that it's worth mentioning.
If it matters, this was two or three years ago, so it's possible that work page Laconics are no longer deprecated (I don't frequent Wiki Talk, but that's probably where such discussion would take place).
Edited by GastonRabbit You can't just say "perchance".

I know there's a cleanup thread about laconics, but I'm still waiting for a question I asked there ages ago to be answered and I'm worried that if I ask another question before then, it'd be "spamming".
I'm not talking about the "unabridged version" gags. Those are hilarious IMO and can stay. What I'm talking about is when works that aren't spinoffs have laconics that are basically just "Work X, but with Y".
This, I think, is a bit unclear because what if no one's ever seen the work being referenced?
A particularly blatant example is Laconic.Airplane is "Zero Hour played for laughs." I'd never heard of Zero Hour so I went to look at Laconic.Zero Hour (because I didn't want to spend ages reading about a work I wasn't interested in) and it was "Airplane! without the jokes.", which, to make a joke myself, doesn't fly in my opinion.
Edited by Unicorndance