"Seinfeld" Is Unfunny

"The movie has been borrowed from so often that it's difficult to understand how original it seemed in 1983, when Latino heroes were rare, when cocaine was not a cliché, when sequences at the pitch of the final gun battle were not commonplace. Just as a generation raised on The Sopranos may never understand how original The Godfather was, so Scarface has been absorbed into its imitators."

• Some comic strips from the 19th century and early 1900s and 1910s rely a lot on slow-paced Slapstick and running gags that are quite low-brow for someone in search of anything more meaningful. Not to mention a lot of stereotypes about women and ethnic minorities that nowadays come across as horribly offensive. And yet, they were the first, and thus, opened the path for other newspaper strips many years later to follow.
• Adam@home is usually considered to be a copycat of According to Jim (it doesn't help that Adam and Laura look pretty much like Jim and Cheryl). Ironically, the strip had been exploiting this premise for over a decade by the time the TV show premiered.
• Before Blondie (1930), suburban humor was practically unheard of (in the 1930s however, suburbs themselves were still in their infancy).
• Bloom County: While it's still considered one of the best comic strips ever, the many creator-driven strips done since then (Calvin and Hobbes, Dilbert, Non Sequitur, Zits, Get Fuzzy, Liō, Pearls Before Swine and Red and Rover) have made it look rather passé nowadays.
• B.C.: When it started in the late 1950s, its use of blatant anachronisms was fresh and original. Characters used modern slang and Stone Age equivalents of modern technology, and this was a source of much of the humor. Over the decades, this approach became the fallback for comic strips set in the past, which hurt B.C.'s reputation. The strip's legacy became even more obscured in The '80s, during which the cartoonist became a born-again Christian and began using the strip as a soapbox for his fundamentalist religious beliefs.
• Calvin and Hobbes. When it first appeared in newspapers in 1985, it was rare both in comic strips and in popular fiction generally for parents to be portrayed as anything more than slightly exasperated at the antics of their children. Many readers wrote in to complain that Calvin's parents' attitudes toward their son made them mean, perhaps even abusive. Ten years later, creator Bill Watterson could remark with some satisfaction that TV sitcoms with smart-mouthed kids with many being more mischievous than Calvin and sarcastic parents had become the norm - and Calvin's parents now looked tolerant and even loving.
  • One thing to keep in mind, which puts almost everything on this page in perspective: in his 10th-anniversary collection and its DVD Commentary, Bill Watterson remarks that he was the first newspaper cartoonist ever to get away with using the word "booger".
• Cathy, during its final years in The '90s and the Turn of the Millennium, was criticised as being "generic", running on stereotypes, and being the subject of mean parodies. Never mind that the strip was originally created in The '70s— very few characters who were single and working existed in fiction, and Cathy was a figure many single women could relate to, much like The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The fact that the strip was also actually written by a woman who had work experience, was also something that was practically unheard of at the time. To put it into perspective, at one point, Cathy comic strips were as common a sight on office walls as Dilbert.
• Doonesbury: Many subsequent comic strips have imitated its dry wit. Indirectly if not directly, it had more influence on Webcomics than anything other than manga.
  • Doonesbury was the first newspaper comic to regularly have two punchlines in the last panel: a primary joke, and a secondary one which built off the first. It was special at the time. Now almost every comic does it, making those old strips seem run-of-the-mill instead of groundbreaking.
  • In 1985 (after Garry Trudeau returned from a sabbatical), the strip took a Darker and Edgier turn. One decade later, many strips centering on (or simply made by) "boomers" underwent Cerebus Syndrome, like For Better or for Worse, Bloom County (and its sequels, Outlands and Opus), Funky Winkerbean and even Calvin and Hobbes late in the strip's life. Didn't help that most "boomers"' lives had turned quite sour by then.
• For Better or for Worse might look like just another strip starring an angst-ridden mother who's overwhelmed by seemingly endless housework and cursed with an oaf husband and needy children who seem to live in fear of admitting that she's a person, too. But back in 1979, it was pretty much revolutionary to admit that yes, happy homemakers were anything but content with the rut in which they found themselves. In addition, it averted Comic-Book Time. Most comics even today do not do this. Along with Funky Winkerbean, this made For Better or for Worse really stand out.
  • Additionally, the strip touched upon topics such as divorce, homosexuality, child abuse, growing up, how the First Nations people are treated by Canada (which is something Canada still largely sweeps under the rug), sexual assault, deformity, cancer & chronic illness, strokes, and even death. These issues were largely ignored in most comic strips which mostly kept the "G" rating. Since then, arcs that are A Very Special Episode are commonplace in comics, making For Better or For Worse look somewhat melodramatic or Narmy.
    • To put one other thing into perspective, one early strip (in 1980) depicted a doctor wearing a yarmulke. Johnston mentioned she got a lot of letters of praise for that, as well as a lot of letters of criticism. Most people these days would ask what the issue was, though some might think the fact the person was a doctor might be the issue.
  • Some of the early strips depicted John and Elly fighting over petty things, and neither side being in the right. Sometimes, arguments broke out because of John being insensitive (and not just Innocently Insensitive), or Elly overreacting. These days, a modern audience would prefer for both sides to have some kind of a point, and would view this as World of Jerkass.
• Because geeky webcomics like Penny Arcade are omnipresent on the internet today, it's easy to forget how unique FoxTrot's relatively frequent forays into geek and pop culture in the early 1990s were, especially in comparison to what was in the funnies at the time — even before the strip hit Reverse Cerebus Syndrome and turned the nerdy references up to eleven, it still had a great deal of nerdiness for a "middle-class suburban family" strip.
• The Far Side by Gary Larson. The comic strip's format has been imitated so much and so badly over the years that it's kind of hard to appreciate his originals and just how groundbreaking they were.
  • And controversial as well. The Black Comedy in it that seems extremely tame today? That was extremely uncommon in newspaper comics at the time, and got a lot of bad reactions from the Moral Guardians. Nowadays, even the rejected strips seem mild compared to what you'd see on TV or the internet in later years.
  • The humor doesn't even seem as surreal anymore as it was at the time but only because so many humorists were inspired by it and have taken the weirdness still further.
• Garfield:
  • Yes, believe it or not, some of the style of the strip was considered risky at the time, and the published books of the series were some of the first to utilize the 'mini-sized' formats that many newspaper comic collections use today. Oh yeah, and quite a few of the strips in the early years actually were controversial, and Jim Davis received many complaints for some of his gags ("Shake it, Annette," for instance). A lot of younger people would think you were joking if you told them this fact.
  • Garfield also broke ground by having the titular character be a snarky Jerk with a Heart of Gold, especially since he's a cat; Talking Animals had appeared in comic strips before, but were inevitably cute and cuddly. Garfield's sarcasm and rudeness were quite shocking to readers at the time; nowadays, it's difficult to find a strip that doesn't use sarcastic characters (human and animal alike) as the main draw.
• Peanuts was innovative in two ways: Because of the limited space, Charles Schulz had to rely on an ultra-simplistic art style with exaggerated facial expressions. He even developed an emotional shorthand, most famously the "eye parentheses" representing shock. A few decades later, newspapers would run so many comic strips that pretty much every cartoonist had to make his illustrations understandable in the few square inches he received. The second innovation was that Peanuts was one of the darker portrayals of childhood at the time: All of the children in the series were dysfunctional to some degree and fought frequently among themselves. Comics like The Family Circus were the main competition during the series' early years, making Peanuts something of a South Park of its time.
  • Peanuts was also a pioneer in the trope of children thinking and talking like adults. Without it, no Calvin and Hobbes, Simpsons or South Park, among many others. (Given how old-fashioned Charles Schulz was, one has to wonder whether he would consider anything approaching that a good thing, though, given the Menace Decay with Animated Shock Comedy boy characters.)

• The Muppet Show. When it first started, defining the area of the action with the camera's frame of view instead of the physical set was innovative for a puppet show. During the late 1970s and early 1980s the show was both aimed at adults and children, while nowadays it has become exclusively a children's show. (Do you really think that WWE's Monday Night Raw would have become such a hit in the late '90s if it hadn't picked up The Muppet Show's "ironic, postmodern backstage drama" gimmick and run to the ends of the earth with it? Same with WCW Monday Nitro. The fact that the Muppets themselves repaid the favor by guest-starring on Raw only clenches the argument.)
  • Early media of The Muppets includes, for example, Kermit drinking with a straw, or Muppets bicycling, or other such bits of anthropomorphism. For audience members who think of the Muppets as, basically, human, these moments are pointless, if they're even noticeable, but they were not a little impressive at the time.
  • Even the jokes in the Muppet series from the 1970s and early 1980s can sometimes look very corny and tame. (Of course, since The Muppet Show was a pastiche of a variety show, sometimes they looked corny at the time, and that was the joke.)
• Sesame Street. Every single children's television show today owes a tremendous debt to this program for blazing the trail. Now that everybody does it, it's hard to remember that Sesame Street INVENTED quality, research-based, curriculum-based, entertaining and educational children's TV that has a visibly ethnically diverse cast and doesn't talk down to its audience.
• In a world with multiple podcasts about taking apart bad movies, RiffTrax, midnight showings of The Room (2003), and so forth, there's nothing unique or innovative about Mystery Science Theater 3000.

• Comedy team Bob & Ray are subject to this to an extent: now that the Deadpan Snarker is ubiquitous and subversion an essential part of the American comedy landscape, it's hard to realise just how cutting-edge hip B&R were considered for popularising and refining those elements back in The '50s. Partly because of their unassuming style and partly because, as one commentator put it, they influenced a lot of people who've become a lot more famous building on their innovations, not incidentally including Seinfeld himself.
• Hancock's Half Hour. The humour seems very standard for modern audiences. However, the idea that each episode's story was driven by a core cast of fully formed characters was brand new in British comedy, where the use of broad stock characters swapped in and out as needed was more common.
• The Howard Stern Show. What once was an audacious, subversive breath of fresh air among radio DJ shtick, only Howard Stern himself stands out from his many, MANY imitators because of his reputation, and even that's taken a hit in recent years. Even the move to uncensored satellite radio hasn't stemmed the tide of "So What?"
  • Adam West hosted a radio show for a brief period in the early '50s, under his birth name Billy Anderson. While he didn't blatantly take credit, he described what he was doing as "early, less crude Howard Stern." Funny thing is, Stern is a huge fan of Batman and Adam West's version in particular, so maybe West was onto something...
• I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue. "The antidote to panel games", where The Points Mean Nothing and the idea is just to be funny, now seems just like every other panel game on British TV and radio.
  • Graeme Garden once lampshaded this in an interview, and suggested the subtitle be changed to "the template for panel games".
• Even certain formats of radio end up being so influential that the novelty of it has completely disappeared. Back in the Fifties, the idea of a radio station running like a jukebox was revolutionary, leading to Top 40 stations popping up all over the United States, and pirate stations appearing in Western Europe when official broadcasters refused to run the format. Now, the format is just a tried-and-tested money maker, and pirate radio is nearly forgotten.
• Heart has fallen right into this trap, with showbiz sites like this one regularly hanging a lampshade on it.
• Nowadays, anyone on the internet can listen to a foreign station's audio stream, but in the days of shortwave, it was very rare to be able to listen to international radio stations. Shortwave radio was essential for anyone who wanted to really keep up with world affairs, but the popularization of the internet in the 1990s meant that anyone could get international news at the touch of a button. Consequently, the major international broadcasters like The BBC and DW curtailed shortwave transmissions to the developed world.
• Rush Limbaugh got hit with this trope particularly hard in the latter part of his career. Bringing political commentary to AM radio revolutionized the medium, and Limbaugh was immensely popular (and influential) among the American right wing in the 90s and early 2000s. By The New '10s, however, Limbaugh's popularity went into a steep decline. Not only had the radio market been inundated with hundreds of imitators, but terrestrial radio itself was being eschewed in favor of satellite radio and internet podcasts. Limbaugh was no more than a garden-variety right wing commentator by the end of his career, puzzling many as to why he was considered so groundbreaking at one point.

• Catan - which has only been around since 1995 - introduced many concepts to a wide audience for the first time that are yawnworthy today. Among them is fully embracing a layout that changes for and with every game and a simplified way of teaching the rules to novice players (the German version of the rulebook even won a prize for clarity). None of that is considered particularly new today and neither is the tendency to cash into the hype of a boardgame with expansion packs and second or third editions and the likes.
• Duel Masters. Every card being a resource? A shield system that allows the player to draw a card whenever they get attacked? Shield triggers that help you respond to an attack? Now these seem like pretty standard TCG mechanics, but when Duel Masters was released these were revolutionary.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • Your Five-Man Band of elves, dwarves and such all Meet At An Inn where you run across some troubled soul that you agree to help because you know that your karma is named Monty Haul. Yeah, it would be incredibly cliché if not for the fact that it singlehandedly both invented and completely drove nearly every RPG trope into the ground.
  • Many of the mechanical RPG elements that are tropes/clichés today were also created or popularized by D&D. The Class and Level System, Hit Points (arguably present in the tabletop wargames that preceded D&D, but named and popularized by D&D nonetheless), Character Alignment, the "+ 1 magic sword," and so on.
  • Conversely, more tropes in High Fantasy novels work as codified in D&D, instead of as seen in Tolkien. You're more likely to see "Magic A" Is "Magic A" than Tolkien's deliberately mythical and mystical style, for instance.
• Magic: The Gathering single-handedly invented the Collectible Card Game. Games like Yu-Gi-Oh and Chaotic owe their very existence to a man named Garfield. Yet, because of those games, Magic is sometimes dismissed as a children's card game. This despite the fact that many big-time poker players began honing their skills on Magic, and a small but significant group of people make their livings out of tournament winnings and appearance fees.
  • Just as in Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh! features this as well - many cards that were hot stuff or "I Win" buttons back in the day are now in the modern day practically useless - if not outright banned from tournaments. Yet the modern metagames of both require many strategies that were created amongst the early years of both games.
  • As an extension: the earliest deck with a name in Magic is simply The Deck. The Deck was built with the philosophy of keeping as many cards in your hand as possible, to be able to readily respond to your opponent. Back then, the idea was revolutionary, and The Deck swept tournaments. These days, the philosophy of the deck is called Card Advantage, and it's one of the first things you teach players wanting to get better.
• Pandemic Legacy Season 1 is still very well-regarded, but the novelty of permanently modifying the game and the shock at destroying certain components (in a medium where many gamers value keeping their copies pristine) are lost on many new players since these features are now commonplace in the very genre the game popularized.
• One of the most criticized mechanics of the Pokémon TCG is the Prize Cards, where six cards are set aside and a player draws one each time they knock an opponent's Pokémon out, and winning if they draw all six. Common criticisms of this system are that it can cause an important card to be set aside from the deck and that the person in the lead can have a snowball advantage. However, when the Pokémon TCG first came out, this was an innovative mechanic - before then, most TCGs had you manually have to count out your life, and having a system like Prize Cards that could track themselves was a major development that improved the simplicity of the rules. However, after Duel Masters improved upon the Prize Cards system with the Shields system, and a lot of games that were influenced by Duel Masters were released, Pokémon's system now seems archaic when in fact it was the precursor to all of these.
• TWERPS ^note  Which stands for "The World's Easiest Role-Playing System" is a roleplaying game that was intentionally designed to be simplistic in order to contrast from the overly complicated TTRPGs that dominated the market at the time. At the time, it was breath of fresh air. However, now that simplistic and minimalist RPGs are more common, TWERPS doesn't seem so special and can feel overly simplistic with there being only one stat (Strength) that is used for everything. Not helping is how since Strength is both your Hit Points and your attack, you get worse at attacking more damage you take, which can result in a death spiral. ^note While there are rules to combat this problem, they require the use of supplements that are sold separately from the core rulebook.
• For Warhammer 40,000, their eponymous Space Marines are considered something of an unfunny by some of the fanbase. The Space Marines and their incarnations are arguably the most popular faction, and thus a lot of ire is directed at them from players of other armies. Reasons for Space Marine popularity include: the easy difficulty curve and relative forgiveness of the army book, the regularity with which the main codex is updated, being one of the 'more acceptable' armies for children to play, and in general receiving the bulk of support from Games Workshop. Thus it is that Space Marines can sometimes be considered an 'unfunny', 'scrub', or 'kiddie' army.
  • Don't forget that the small army size and inclusion in every starter set ever also make them among the cheapest.
  • The large metallic surfaces of the power armor that the space marines wear is also a lot easier to paint than the flesh and bone of many of the other armies (imperial guard, orcs, tyranid, dark eldar). They're also rather large in scale compared to most other humanoids, and there are relatively few fine details that need their own work; for instance, you could acceptably paint an Ultramarine blue from head to toe (sans the pauldron trim) without worrying about separate armour pieces.
  • The reason the Marines are comparatively kid-friendly is that no less than four of the other armies consider mass murder (Orks), arson (Sororitas) and rape while torturing people (Dark Eldar) or all three at the same time (Chaos) a fun way to pass the time. ^note Admittedly, there are several Space Marine chapters guilty of similar, but not ''all'' of them are.
  • This also caused some of the lore seem weird by comparison. Most notably the Bolter; it's essentially a rapid-firing grenade launcher that can take off entire armored limbs in one shot. Most people decry it as having nowhere near the amount of power as depicted by the lore. However, originally a 5+ armor save (which a Bolter easily ignores) was considered heavy armor back in the inception of 40k, which was originally based on Warhammer Fantasy, and the baseline for toughness, strength, weapon skill and so on was 3, meaning the Bolter's Strength of 4 was well ahead of the curve. But due to Space Marines being far more popular than any of the other races (especially the Imperial Guard, who were supposed to be a badass army) they instead became the baseline, to which everything else was measured against. Most people nowadays forget that Space Marine Power Armor is supposed to be equivalent to tank armor, which is why they take so little casualties from small-arms fire.

• West Side Story. Today this musical seems like a terrible conglomeration of clichés on top of the material it takes from Romeo and Juliet (which itself was a fresh take on a clichéd story in its day). But West Side Story started a lot of musical conventions which became clichés, including its (for the time) grittiness, its use of street slang and cursing, its (relatively) sympathetic portrayal of minority characters, and its use of ethnic musical conventions.
• William Shakespeare. From the introductory paragraph to chapter 6 of Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture:

  I once overheard someone commenting on Kenneth Branagh's adaptation of Henry V: "I liked it, but William Shakespeare is so full of clichés."

  • Henry V is particularly susceptible to this, as it's been mined, deconstructed, or outright stolen from for basically every war movie ever made.
  • Hamlet has been praised as "the crowning achievement of Elizabethan drama" so many times that it's now easy to forget what a unique play it was in its day, and how revolutionary its approach to drama was compared to other plays of the Elizabethan era. At the time, it was a pretty damn big deal for a play to consciously fall so far on the "Character" end of the Sliding Scale of Plot Versus Characters, spending just as much time examining its title character—his obsession with death, his crushing emotional uncertainty, his relationships with his family, etc.—as it spent on the revenge story at the heart of the plot. Hell, the fact that we even have a Sliding Scale of Plot Versus Characters is arguably thanks to Hamlet's influence. Nowadays, it's a common joke amongst theater folks: a woman (for some reason, it's always a woman) sees Hamlet for the first time and complains, "I don't know why people make such a big deal about it. It's just a bunch of quotes strung together."
• Oklahoma!: Broadway musicals like this one may seem quaint, dated, and silly now, but compared to the typical showgirl fare of the time, their integration of music, dance, and plot, as well as their darker themes, were ground-breaking. Both Show Boat and Oklahoma! were written by the same librettist, Oscar Hammerstein II. Whichever show one chooses to credit, Hammerstein was instrumental in this development of a kind of musical based more on narrative and character than entertaining numbers. And without Hammerstein there would certainly have been no Stephen Sondheim, who took that development even further. Sondheim has pointed this trope out as well:

  People don't understand how experimental Show Boat and Oklahoma! felt at the time they were done. Oscar is not about the 'lark that is learning to pray' — that's easy to make fun of. He's about Allegro^note Another, less well known, Rodgers and Hammerstein show.

• Hair. When it came out over 50 years ago, it was incredibly daring and edgy. There was nudity, sex, drugs, homosexuality, cross-dressing, and interracial dating, and its rock score was never heard before on stage. But with the success of musicals like RENT and Spring Awakening, that shock factor can be lost on modern audiences.
  • Revivals of the play these days take this into account by trying to make you forget it's a play at all, performing it in the open instead of on a stage, making it more like a "happening" and thus preserving the original spirit.
• Bürgerliches Trauerspiel ("Bourgeois Tragedy"). During the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century, this Sub-Genre of drama arose in which virtuous commoners were shown as victims of the machinations and depravities of aristocratic villains. At the time, this was considered daring and subversive, sometimes even seditious and revolutionary. Some of them are still performed today, most notably Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's Emilia Galotti (1772) and Friedrich Schiller's Kabale und Liebe (1784), but are often now seen as dated and quaint. This is not an entirely new trend, as the bourgeois values propounded in "bürgerliche Trauerspiele" became subject to criticism themselves, which in the 19th century led to the writing of Realist dramas with bourgeois villains.
• Satire about succeeding in the corporate world by faking it is trite, but How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying was original enough at the time.
• Could be called "The Problem With Chekhov." In Anton Chekhov's day, naturalistic theater about people's real emotional lives was a strange and radical notion. Now it's what almost every play is about, and it's hard to understand why Chekhov's work was so powerful at the time. In fact, Chekhov plays themselves can sometimes seem as stolid and old-fashioned as the works he was rebelling against at the time.
• Goethe and Schiller, thanks to being the quintessential German writers and often mentioned in one breath, can come of as extremely stuffy now, with their plays a bit formulaic and in the case of Goethe's Faust the same problem as with Hamlet above: just a bunch of quotes strung together. If you hear a famous turn of phrase in German and have to guess where it's from, you have a better than even chance it ultimately comes from Martin Luther's translation of The Bible or Goethe's Faust. However, back in the day when plays like Die Räuber (Schiller) or Götz von Berlichingen (Goethe) were first performed, they were downright revolutionary. Some of this revolutionary zeal could be seen centuries later, when the line "Geben Sie Gedankenfreiheit" (give freedom of thought) from Schiller's Don Carlos was met with roaring applause during a performance in the GDR because most of the audience could not help but notice its appropriateness for their oppressive regime.
• The Snow Maiden is a symbolism-laden fantasy with the worldbuilding based on a Theme Park Version of Proto-Slavic mythology and lore — in short, it's an example of Slavic fantasy which has been a prominent presence in Russian bookstores since the success of The Wolfhound. However, The Snow Maiden was first performed in 1873, predating The Wolfhound by 122 years and before fantasy in its modern form was even a thing. This, coupled with the play coming from a playwright famous for realistic social satire, led to its poor initial reception; it took Rimsky-Korsakov turning it into an opera for it to become a success.
• The "first" plays to break the Aristotelian unity of place, action, and time described in Poetics. ^note Even some classical Greek drama, mostly be Euripides, actually broke this convention, Aristotle was wrong on this if it is interpreted as a descriptive text, whether he was right on it as a prescriptive text is for the audience to judge. Aristotle was regarded as pretty much right about everything for most of the medieval period, and the Renaissance too had a fondness for everything Greco-Roman. Going against that took guts. Today, plays set in different places over several days containing numerous plots and subplots are par for the course on the stages of the world.
  • This was a far bigger deal in Continental Europe, especially in France. In England, during the Elizabethan Age, Aristotle and classical Greek texts were not as dominating an influence as Roman drama by Seneca and Latin texts. So William Shakespeare happily violated the unities, likely because he didn't even know about it to start with. The most learned and informed dramatist, Ben Jonson, gently ribbed his friend in the First Folio for his "little Latin and less Greek", and his comedies and dramas were the most formal and classically structured.
  • Shakespeare was unpopular in France until the Romantic era for his violation of classical unities, with Voltaire dismissing him on these grounds. It took the critic Samuel Johnson to first defend Shakespeare's approach as valid and argue that the unities are more guidelines than actual rules. In Germany, the Sturm-und-Drang avant-garde saw Shakespeare as a modern writer on these grounds and admired his bold original spirit. In France, Victor Hugo, a huge Shakespeare buff, wrote a play called Hernani that was a scandal in its day because it violated the "classical unities", which had underpinned France's golden age of Corneille, Moliere, and Racine.
  • Bertolt Brecht defined his conception of drama as "Non-Aristotleian" at the start of the 20th Century. By the time he arrived, drama had already greatly advanced away from the original Aristotleian schema (Anton Chekhov and Henrik Ibsen were the innovators on this front) but Brecht noted that most people still agreed with ideas of three-act structure and the division of epic form and dramatic form, a large cast and the small cast, and the idea that a tragedy can begin end and achieve catharsis in a small space and time.
• The plot of Lessing's Nathan the Wise can come off as a bit cliched and formulaic and its ring parable has been cited so often few people know where it is actually from. The fact that it is still used as required reading in German language high schools probably doesn't help, either. Also the implication of the Ring Parable — namely that out of Judaism, Islam and Christianity all are equally likely to be true (or false) and it's not entirely clear any of them is actually true was revolutionary at the time but is yawnworthy today — at least in Germany where around a third of the population belongs to no church whatsoever.
• One Touch of Venus looks quite tame these days but it was incredibly raunchy when it came out; the very idea of a scantily-clad Love Goddess running around respectable 1940s America. The protagonist trying to hide Venus from his friends and co-workers seems like standard Cringe Comedy but was scandalously raunchy — Marlene Dietrich even turned the role down because she found the material too risque. The musical satirised the strict prudish attitudes of the day — something which is a little lost on a modern audience. Likewise in the film adaptation Ava Gardner's costume was brimming with sex appeal even if it just looks like a long dress these days (and she even got a scandalous Modesty Bedsheet!).
• To contemporary audiences, the work of Henrik Ibsen is relatively tame—but in his own time, he was considered the most scandalous playwright of the day. Plays like A Doll's House (a woman realizes that she has been mistreated by the men in her life and chooses to leave her husband and children to make her own way in the world), Ghosts (a young man suffers from inherited syphilis) and An Enemy of the People (a scientist finds himself fighting against his whole town when his research indicates that the mineral baths there are toxic) contain themes of feminism, women's liberation, sexually transmitted infections, and criticism of domestic life and the bourgeoisie that can be found in virtually every piece of theatrical realism in the twentieth century. But Ibsen was one of the first major playwrights to do this, and his work was so shocking and controversial when it debuted that he was often forced to defend himself to the public and, in the case of A Doll's House, had to write an alternate ending where the main character does not leave her family to appease theatre owners.
• It's hard for a modern audience to realize just how shocking and innovative The Marriage of Figaro was when it was first written and performed. It was one of the first times a play portrayed servants as not just equals but betters to aristocrats; it was one of the earliest feminist works, with all the women characters having agency and initiative, driving the plot and working to expose sexual harassment; and on top of that, all of the male aristocrats are antagonists and at the end, the Count is put through a Humiliation Conga and needs to apologise to his wife in front of their servants, including the woman he was trying to force into sleeping with him. This is especially daring when one considers that at the time servants and women, for the most part, couldn't speak out against aristocratic men, and nearly all opera goers were male aristocrats. However, now it just seems like a standard wacky romantic comedy.

• With the advent of 3D printing, many toys from even The New '10s look surprisingly dull and limited in terms of what they could do.
• Generation 2 in the mid-90s was the first time Transformers would advertise a figure's articulation (how many moving joints a toy has) as a selling point, with the Cyberjets and the Laser Rods. Articulation in older robot toys, including G1 Transformers, was notoriously low and inconsistent, with the vast majority of toys being "bricks" which could only move the arms up and down, but later G2 Transformers would introduce the idea of lines having at least a minimum amount of movement in the arms, legs and head. Starting from the mid-2000s at least, articulation became one of the most discussed topics among Transformers collectors, and a major factor in thinking if a figure is worth buying or not. Cyberjets' and Laser Rods/Cycles/Optimus Prime's articulation would become unimpressive a decade later, and outright primitive after The New '20s (with joints like ankle tilts becoming very common). They also didn't age well in the sense of becoming more fragile after 30 years of age (especially Cyberjets, who quickly become floppy ball-jointed messes; and Laser Rods, which were prone to breaking already back when they were new).
• Playmobil has undergone a lot of this over its 50 year lifespan. Many would look at the sets made in The '70s and The '80s and wonder what's so special about them - because some of these figures couldn't even rotate their wrists (something that had become common in The '80s) and looked far more "Toy"-ey. Sets made after the Turn of the Millennium featured much more detail - even making very realistic looking volkswagen vehicles. Some might even wonder what was so special about a few sets whose main gimmick(s) were that they were able to make noises - or laugh at some obvious Technology Marches On with sets in the Turn of the Millennium having CRT TVs and computer monitors.
• When Barbie dolls appeared at the tail end of The '50s, it was the first major toy targeted at girls to depict an unmarried adult woman with her own independent careers. Most other girls' toys were based around themes of romance/marriage, housework and child-raising. So Barbie was considered somewhat progressive. These days, it's frequently criticized as promoting negative stereotypes associated with femininity (particularly her highly luxurious lifestyle) and is often the subject of mean-spirited parodies and bad faith criticism.
  • Additionally, the character's Impossible Hourglass Figure has been seen as promoting unhealthy body images. All of this is lampshaded in Barbie (2023).
  • One can also take a look at Barbie's outfit(s), jobs, and clothes through the history and mock them as being rather silly because they were intended to mirror what children would see in the modern day. One might have scoffed at the idea of some of Barbie's careers as being overly feminine (such as Veterinarian), but some of them debuted at a time when women were often not seen in those jobs period - and when it became far more common for women to be in the labour force instead of in domestic housework.
• This happened with Thomas & Friends branded Trackmaster playsets. The entire gimmick of the Trackmaster is that one could assemble railways with them - and make the engine(s) actually move independently of you. This was unlike the Wooden Railway set by BRIO at the time - which was far more limited (requiring a battery powered engine and magnets). But then came the Avalanche Escape set which was a pretty big game changer - because it was significantly steeper than any other set and it boasted a more powerful set. After Serial Escalation set in, this set doesn't particularly seem that impressive nowadays.

• Adobe Flash movies. Browse any website full of them and then point out how many cartoons that were "hot stuff" back when they were made now seem rather generic, loosely drawn, or poorly animated. Especially sites like Newgrounds.
  • Many of Newgrounds' Flash games suffer from this, as well. In a time where the site is full of much more complex games, looking back at a time of arcade-y shooting games can be rough for newer users. Stamper even mentions this in the description of his 2000 game Street Life, which was a top rated game at the time, telling new people that it's not worth playing by today's standards.
  • Not to mention Newgrounds' Series Mascot, Pico. His debut was the pinnacle of Flash 3 programming and was what put Newgrounds on the map. Nowadays, the animation is very low-quality, the gameplay is incredibly basic compared to what modern Actionscript can do, and the gratuitously M-rated content comes off as immature. Luckily, the characters themselves grew with the times, as shown with Pico's Colbert Bump as a result of his stint as a Guest Fighter in Friday Night Funkin'.
  • asdfmovie in particular was seen as fresh and new in its debut, since a Flash Rapid-Fire Comedy with Surreal Humor and a dose of Black Comedy had seldom been seen before, but now it's become very common in Web Originals and Web Animation due to its success. Mix this with a few Discredited Memes and the fact that a majority of fans of this genre have seen it already, and it and similar works are cringeworthy to people it's shown to nowadays.
• Once upon a time, an ambitious user of Garry's Mod made the first Stylistic Suck movie from the program. Suddenly, everyone thought this was the only way to animate in Garry's Mod. However, after some genuinely good uses of the program, most people started to see "Heavy flails his arms around and dies" videos as old-hat, or at least from a bygone era.
• GoAnimate. In the early parts of The New '10s, schools would often have kids make cartoons using the software to teach them about animation... of course people thought it would have been more funny to make "Grounded" videos of their own characters, or of characters like Caillou or Dora the Explorer getting Grounded Grounded Grounded Grounded for misbehaving. Looking at some other Grounded videos that still exist from The New '10s, one can see how "Grounded" videos became more complex over the years, as well as people intentionally looking to them for Stylistic Suck and unintentional comedy.
• The Long Runner Happy Tree Friends had a large following back during the 2000s and early 2010s, due to its premise of a Gorn-filled Subverted Kids' Show web series being very unique during the period when the internet was still gaining public popularity and professional content creators were relatively rare online (enough for it to get a season on TV). Nowadays, that obviously isn't the case anymore, because digital animation had become increasingly accessible, meaning high-quality works with similar themes and appeal are now a dime-a-dozen. There's also the fact that these subsequent works generally understand hooking and keeping an audience requires more than one gimmick, which is believed to be the reason Happy Tree Friends fell into obscurity and faced a halt in production by the mid-2010s, since its creators made no real attempt to diversify the series and kept gory shock value as its sole draw (which eventually wore off).
• SMG4, while not to nearly the extent that Super Mario 64 Machinimists like MarioMario54321 and ACDCGAMER have seen, has been affected by this nonetheless. In 2011, a series like SMG4 was unprecedented in the SM64 machinima scene and became hugely popular because of how much crazier it was comparatively, which only increased more and more as the years went by. It was also responsible for pioneering and normalizing much of what modern Mario machinimas utilize, such YouTube Poop-style editing techniques and the implementation of Medium Blending, like the use of Garry's Mod maps and elements. While SMG4 remains highly regarded for various reasons (having the most consistency in polish and uploads, seniority, the highest sub count, and most importantly, it laid the foundation for the creation of Glitch Productions), the impact of the earliest videos can be hard to fathom nowadays since many machinimists have since either replicated their style or have improved on it, and it doesn't help that many of those videos contain or are based on Discredited Memes.
• Diary of a Camper is a Quake movie, the first Quake demo with an actual plot beyond simple gameplay footage — and the very first Machinima movie ever made, thus a launching point for an entire new form of art. Its success in the Quake community quickly spawned a lot of other movies from other people. Special websites for reviews of Quake movies cropped up soon... and Diary of a Camper received near-universal low scores there, due to how primitive it was compared to what came afterward.
• Not to mention, Red vs. Blue was one of the most original uses of games at the time, helped to make Machinima popular, too. While still going strong, it doesn't look that new.
• YouTube Poop even. Granted, some are still quite as funny today as they were back in mid-2007 when the fad was new (like where Link decides to toast spaghetti for dinner), but some jokes have been used so much people may think "Oh, look at the use of the word 'Come', and Robotnik is saying something that sounds like Penis, again" when they view a few YTPs that came up with it.
  • Some other early YTPs that were simply screwing around with Windows Movie Maker or other such effects also come off as boring today because we've only heard everything in G major by this point.
  • In the early days of YTP, most Poopers only had Windows XP's Windows Movie Maker, which was extremely limited, even lacking things such as layers, so most Poopers could only change the order of video clips, replace their audio, or add some very basic visual effects, and any Poop that did something like adding images or special effects over animated footage was impressive and out of most creators' reach. Nowadays, Windows Movie Maker is thoroughly deprecated and free/open source video editors are widely available, so it's hard to find "Flash Poops" as amazing as they were back in 2007.

• Bob and George. The author admits to wincing at this strip with a self-deprecating joke directed at an Author Avatar, even though he knows it's the first use, because it's been done so often since, usually in exactly the same manner as he did it. The comic also popularized the Sprite Comic genre, which today is now seen as a dated relic of an older era thanks to many copycats largely using it out of laziness rather than as an aesthetic choice.
• DM of the Rings deliberately invokes this trope in relation to The Lord of the Rings and Dungeons & Dragons. Since the latter borrowed liberally from the former, the players (who apparently never experienced Tolkien, possibly because LotR is the invention of the DM in their world) are utterly bored by most of the proceedings, and spend much of the comic complaining about the generic plot devices and worldbuilding while demanding that the DM throw in some enemies that aren't orcs.
  • DM of the Rings itself gets this from later comics in its genre (e.g. Darths & Droids) since most of its successors had 'players' who interacted with the game world more (to the point where the GM is having to 'yes, and' more and more as the comic goes on) and had their own life issues that tended to bleed into the story, and the creators of the comics were more willing to depart from the source material.
• Las Lindas: The comic was originally one of the most liked furry webcomics, but once it became more widely known a majority of readers were completely put off by the excessive fanservice and poorly written story.
• MegaTokyo, back in the beginning, was a parody of the Japan that the Western geeks at the time were only just starting to experience - Largo's arc was about parodying shonen stuff, while Piro's was more about the shoujo. In other words, it was a time where such parodies were very few and far between. But now, where parodies of anime and manga are far more common, the older comics just seem like nothing but one lame joke after another, and its massive popularity at the time seem nigh-unbelievable (especially as the comic is now mostly known for its Schedule Slip, to the point of becoming poster boy for slow webcomics).
• Penny Arcade
  • One of the first major Gaming Webcomics and featured tropes like Two Gamers on a Couch and Snarky Non-Human Sidekick. While still well-liked now, most of the innovation of the comic has been imitated by anyone with a Wacom tablet and an internet connection.
  • In-Universe, Gabe complains that Warhammer Online is a ripoff of Warcraft and unoriginal. Tycho is not happy about this.
• xkcd took some time to establish itself, but once it did, Stick Figure Comics started popping up everywhere as a result. While it's hardly the first (and Randall Munroe rather openly admits Cyanide and Happiness was an inspiration), it was the biggest one to use no faces at all and pure stick figures, instead of more detail, a style many have tried to copy with limited success since, leading many to dismiss it at first glance as just another stick-figure comic.