"Overdrive is a street crime movie set in today's San Francisco, okay? It's one of those throwback movies to the '70s exploitation films. Bombs, car chases, afros, hot chicks, windsurfing, space shuttle, okay?"
— Robert Rodino, Stuntman: Ignition
Remember back in the day, when there was that prevalent, cheaply made form of entertainment that was So Bad, It's Good, or at least good but dated? Wouldn't you like to bring it back?
Well, if you're in Hollywood and you have a high enough profile, you can. And you can do it better with a brand-new franchise, better special effects, better actors, a better budget and, hopefully, better writing. If the old form of entertainment has been deconstructed, then this work will probably feature a lot of reconstructing.
If especially successful, this can result in a game of Follow the Leader as everyone else begins mining the past (or, more frequently, ripping off the successful modern version) in the hope that lightning will strike twice. If these follow-ups are of poor quality, or if there's just too many of them (or both, as is often the case), then it can result in the genre being thrown right back in the trash until someone else decides it's worth reviving. Works like this also risk running afoul of So Bad, It Was Better, where the original genre had certain beloved flaws which are lost in the revival.
If done especially well, it can hide the fact that it is a throwback. It is only upon reviewing its similarity to past incarnations that the connection is made. Compare Older Than They Think.
Note this should not cover instances of a specific franchise being brought back, e.g., the later incarnations of Star Trek or Doctor Who, or the Flash Gordon movie. This trope is much closer to a Spiritual Successor than an actual Continuity Reboot or Revival.
Super-Trope to Two-Fisted Tales. Has nothing to do with Evolutionary Levels, we promise. This trope is also the natural environment of Deliberately Monochrome.
Compare Retraux, Homage, Genre Deconstruction, Decon-Recon Switch and Affectionate Parody.
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Advertising
- The hot dog-based fast food chain Wienerschnitzel
made a series of animated commercials that are this for animated ads of The '60s.
Anime & Manga
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann is this for "old school" Humongous Mecha genres — super and real robot alike.
- Most of the works of Naoki Urasawa (Monster (1994), 20th Century Boys, et al...) hearken back to the suspense-thriller gekiga stories that first appeared in the '60s, particularily Osamu Tezuka's attempts to get in on the act, such as MW and Adolf.
- Cannon God Exaxxion: Early '70s Super Robot anime, only with much more realistic politics between the humans and alien invaders.
- Metropolis (2001): The works of Osamu Tezuka and early anime in general.
- Pretty Cure:
- Futari wa Pretty Cure was this to the Magical Girl Warrior genre, with added Postmodernism and Dragon Ball-styled fighting sequences to have it stand out even then.
- While later seasons were more colorful and brighter, the art style from the first season to the third resembled more of a Retraux '80s or '90s shonen anime, like their big hit in that era, Dragon Ball Z.
- Star★Twinkle Pretty Cure does this in a different direction, combining PreCure's signature style with that of a Space Opera from The '80s; it plays fast and loose with the rules of more "hard" sci-fi. The show's musical themes in particular have a noticeable Synthwave styling to them, and the story itself is implied to take place in the '80s as well.
- Ninja Slayer: Ultraviolent '90s Cyberpunk anime and manga like Genocyber.
- Overlapping with Genre Mashup, The Big O is this to both classic Film Noir and old-school Giant Mecha series.
- Martian Successor Nadesico is both a throwback and an Affectionate Parody of '70s Super Robot shows like Mazinger Z. The Show Within a Show takes the throwback even further into full-on Stylistic Suck territory.
- Vlad Love is essentially a throwback to the screwball Magical Girlfriend comedies of the 2000s, with the added twist that the main couple are two girls.
- Idol Dreams, which began in 2013, is meant to be a throwback to the older Magic Idol Singer anime and manga of the '80s and '90s (and of which Arina Tanemura's previous work, Full Moon, is also an example). However, there are some twists on the setup; the manga is aimed at an older audience than usual, the 31-year-old main character ages herself down to become an idol instead of being a child with an Older Alter Ego, and she does this with an age-altering drug instead of magic.
- Bang Brave Bang Bravern! is, similar to Martian Successor Nadesico, both a love letter and an Affectionate Parody of old Super Robot shows, this time from The '90s, most obviously the Brave Series, with a human teaming up with a Hot-Blooded living Humongous Mecha (only now with much more added Homoerotic Subtext).
- Anime Midstream's English release of Matchless Raijin-Oh was meant to hearken back to earlier "anime bubble" releases from the late-90s/early-2000s, with DVD releases limited to five episodes each, paired up with a cheesy English dub with deliberately hokey voice acting.
Automobiles
- During the late '90s and '00s, there was a boom in vehicle design designed to evoke older periods of such, driven partly as a backlash against the wind-tunnel-carved lines of cars in the late '80s and early-to-mid '90s.
- The Volkswagen New Beetle, which helped kick off the trend, was intended as a modernization of the classic VW Bug of The '50s and The '60s. This car wound up influencing the relaunched Mini Cooper and Fiat 500, both of which did the same with their vintage compact namesakes.
- The Chrysler PT Cruiser and Plymouth Prowler were throwbacks to '30s coupes that, in the '50s, were souped up into hot rods by their secondhand owners.
- The Chevrolet HHR (designed by the same engineer as the PT Cruiser) was a throwback to '40s/'50s trucks and panel vans.
- The Chrysler 300 was inspired by '50s American luxobarge sedans.
- The Rolls-Royce Phantom VII takes several design cues from '50s and '60s era luxury cars, including past Rolls-Royce models.
- The fifth-generation Ford Mustang and the relaunched Chevrolet Camaro and Dodge Challenger were meant to hearken back to '60s muscle cars, most notably their namesakes.
- Ford had several retro vehicles during this period, including the 2005-06 Ford GT (a throwback to the GT40 of the 1960s), the Thunderbird (a throwback to the original 50s model), the Ford Shelby Cobra Concept (a homage to the Ford-powered AC Cobra) and the Bronco concept car.
- Nissan did this in the late eighties and early nineties with their so-called "Pike cars": the Figaro (a fifties-styled small convertible)note , the Pao (a sixties-styled small car), the Be-1 (a seventies-styled small car), and the S-Cargo (a minivan blatantly inspired by the Citroën 2CV van). They later tried this with the Nissan Z (RZ34, which was introduced in August 2021 with a concept that looks very similar to the old Datsun 240Z.
- Mazda did this with the first-generation MX-5 Miata, which featured styling modeled after classic British sports cars, in particular the Lotus Elan.
Board Games
- Flying Frog Productions designs many of its games around throwbacks:
- Fortune And Glory: Two-Fisted Tales.
- Invasion from Outer Space and Conquest of Planet Earth: '50s and '60s Alien Invasion movies.
- Shadows of Brimstone: Weird West.
- A Touch of Evil: Hammer Horror.
Comic Books
- Age of the Sentry: A very Affectionate Parody of Silver Age superhero comics, particularly Superman stories of that period.
- Alan Moore loves these.
- 1963 is a sendup of early Marvel comics, especially those of Stan Lee (Moore was able to replicate Lee's Purple Prose and self-promotion abilities perfectly).
- The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen does this for several genres and periods, albeit with a darker edge.
- The first six issues of Tom Strong each featured a flashback done as a pastiche of an earlier age of comics.
- In Supreme. Moore not only recreates the Silver Age Superman atmosphere, but also brings back all the different decades and styles including '80s grim 'n' gritty, Captain Marvel Family, and EC comics stories just to name a few.
- Watchmen isn't often considered one of these. The in-story Tales of the Black Freighter comic, on the other hand, is, homaging the old EC Comics horror/mystery titles of The '50s. The horror/mystery genre never completely died outnote , but after the rise of The Comics Code they were pushed to the margins while superhero comics like Batman and Superman took over the mainstream of the medium. Tales of the Black Freighter was Moore's take on what the best-selling comic in a world without superhero comics would look like.
- Astro City wears its indebtedness to The Silver Age of Comic Books on its sleeve. In a more specific example, the heroes of the '20s and '30s such as the Cloak of Night and the Five Deadly Fists are homages to old pulp stories, such as The Shadow.
- Atomic Robo: Weird Science stories and Two-Fisted Tales of the '30s and '40s, with occasional forays into Raygun Gothic.
- Aquaman (1994) Annual #3 was part of a "Pulp Heroes" event that took superheroes back to their pulp-inspired roots. Aquaman had three noir-style adventures as he searched for his missing friend Tusky, rescued Nera, a dolphin friend of his, and went undercover to infiltrate a gang.
- Big Bang Comics was designed as a loving homage to the Silver Age of superhero comics to contrast the increasingly darker direction superhero comics were taking, and occasionally also did stories in the style of the Golden Age. However overtime it did move to doing stories set in the Bronze Age and The Graveyard Shift was done in the then modern style.
- The 2013 Captain America series was done in the style of '60s/'70s Jack Kirby comics, with plot points heavily connected to the Vietnam War, outlandish villains, and crazy technology.
- Matt Fraction's Casanova is an unabashed throwback to the psychedelic Spy Fiction of The '60s and The '70s, such as Nick Fury and The Cornelius Chronicles.
- The Immortal Hulk is heavily inspired by Atomic Age horror comics, such as the earliest portrayal of the Hulk by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, but with a contemporary spin. It's Spiritual Successor by the same author, The Immortal Thor, does the same with Heroic Fantasy comics of the same era and after, homaging Thor's earlier appearances under writers like Kirby. Meanwhile, the Hulk run that succeeded Immortal Hulk continued the horror comic throwback by moving on to paying tribute to '70s and '80s era Gothic Horror comics like Man-Thing or The Tomb of Dracula.
- Jawbreakers is one to early-mid '90s Marvel and Image Dark Age anti-hero books, particularly taking after X-Force and WildC.A.T.s. It features highly stylized and exaggerated visuals, an emphasis on Rule of Cool, weapons galore, and starring highly masculine men and very sexualized women. The back of the first book outright proclaims "The '90s are back!".
- Marvel Noir was a small line dedicated to reinterpreting its properties such as Spider-Man in Film Noir and Pulp settings.
- Morning Glories: Genre Savvy Teen Horror from The '90s.
- New X-Men: The character of Fantomex is a throwback to Anti-Hero Gentleman Thief characters such as Diabolik and Fantômas.
- Pink Lemonade is a Lighter and Softer Alt-Comic done In the Style of The Silver Age of Comic Books (as well as referencing The Dark Age of Comic Books via the character of ex-'90s Anti-Hero Ron Radical).
- Planetary throws in pastiches of comic book genres that were popular in the 1950s (sci-fi, pulp adventure, western, horror, etc.) before being almost completely eclipsed by the superhero genre in The Silver Age of Comic Books.
- The Resistance Universe is one for the capepunk superhero stories of the 2000s like Rising Stars (which was written by co-creator J. Michael Straczynski), Heroes and Ultimate Marvel. While spin-off titles are generally more fantastical than The Resistance comics, all the comics have a strong focus on how the government and the public react to the presence of superhumans, how normal people react to the powers they have, and how the majority of heroes of more similar to protestors and activists than costumed superheroes (though some do still exist in the setting) while most supervillains are people being manipulated or with a Dark and Troubled Past that made them into villains.
- Sandman Mystery Theatre: Golden Age pulp detective comics and novels.
- Sin City takes its cues from Film Noir books and films, as well as Exploitation Films, despite being a comic book series. It was eventually made into a movie where the homages were perhaps more apparent.
- Speedball: The Masked Marvel was essentially an early '60s Silver Age comic released in 1988, when the rest of Marvel Comics (and the industry as a whole) was going in a Darker and Edgier direction.
- Wonder Woman: Black and Gold: "Whatever Happened to Cathy Perkins?" is a throwback to the Bronze Age Mod era of Wonder Woman (1968-73) with Diana unexpectedly running into her old supporting character Cathy Perkins after decades, revisiting the bouquet shop they used to run, and fending off the old villain trio of THEM!.
Fashion
Literature
- Kelly Creagh's Nevermore Trilogy is a young adult take on gothic horror romance and homage to the works of Edgar Allan Poe.
- Space Vulture (cheesy 1950s Sci-Fi)
- Karl Schroeder's novels tend to mix this with hard science fiction. For example, both Ventus and Sun Of Suns are throwbacks to planetary romances.
- Michael Moorcock's Kane of Old Mars series is a throwback to the Planetary Romance pulps, specifically Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars novels.
- Lin Carter's Zarkon, Lord of the Unknown series is an attempt to recreate Doc Savage-style pulp adventures.
- The novel Grand Central Arena by Ryk E. Spoor is a deliberate throwback to the E. E. "Doc" Smith-style space operas, including referencing some of Smith's novels directly, and a setting that allows for classic Star Wars-style dogfighting.
- Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day and Inherent Vice. The former mixes popular genres from around the turn of the 20th century, such as Westerns, spy novels, and early science fiction; the latter is based on early pulp Detective Fiction featuring the hard-boiled detective.
- All of John Irving's novels are throwbacks to 19th century literature, particularly Charles Dickens.
- Nathan Long's Jane Carver of Waar to Planetary Romance, especially John Carter of Mars (as you can tell from the name).
- Michael J. Sullivan's The Riyria Revelations is a throwback to classic fantasy.
- Although less clear today, H. P. Lovecraft's works were throwbacks to earlier stories written almost a century before his. His biggest influences were Edgar Allan Poe, Robert W. Chambers (especially The King in Yellow), Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen, and Lord Dunsany.
- His short story "The Doom That Came To Sarnath" is a throwback to the more fire-and-brimstone segments of The Bible.
- Battlefield Earth was written to recapture the spirit of the Golden Age of Science Fiction.
- Atlanta in Calydon by Algernon Charles Swinburne was written in the style of the tragic plays of ancient Greece.
- Sheep's Clothing deliberately hearkens back to the darker, Bram Stoker style vampires as a deliberate rejection of the romantic Twilight-style vampires.
- John Fultz's Seven Princes (the first in the Books of the Shaper series) is written in the Purple Prose style of pulp-era Heroic Fantasy.
- Brown's Pine Ridge Stories: This anthology is written to invoke works of the 1950s and 1960s prior to the The Rural Purge. For bonus points, an episode of Bonanza is discussed in the fourth story.
- Jacek Dukaj's story "Oko potwora" is written in the style of Stanisław Lem's stories from a few decades prior (specifically evoking works such as Eden or Tales of Pirx the Pilot), complete with high-concept intellectualism, Used Future, and space travel in a Zeerust setting without advanced computing.
- His other novel, Ice, is a loose throwback to Russian literary classics: on top of, you know, high-concept sci-fi, it's also intentionally written to be a Doorstopper full of long-winded monologues on philosophy, religion, morality and the like.
- The Diogenes Club series: Started out as one to the British glam detective shows of the seventies, particularly those produced by ITC. Over time it evolved so that different stories would each focus on a different genre: the kid sleuth novels of the early 20th century, literary noir, superhero comics, etc.
- Ian Nathaniel Cohen's The Brotherhood of the Black Flag is a tribute not only to the swashbuckler films of Hollywood's Golden Age, but also the historical adventure novels of classic authors such as Rafael Sabatini and Sir Anthony Hope.
- The Expanse has been described by its authors as a tribute and a renewal of old school Space Opera.
- The 2013 anthology Old Mars and the 2015 follow-up anthology Old Venus, both edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois, homage Planetary Romance stories set on Mars and Venus.
Live-Action TV
- American Horror Story:
- American Horror Story: Asylum's central "Bloody Face" arc is an affectionate throwback to old-school Slasher Movies, which have largely declined in popularity since the 1990s. It opens with a horny twenty-something couple being stalked and butchered by an implacable serial killer in a grotesque leather mask while exploring the ruins of a hellish insane asylum, then spends the rest of the season exploring the twisted chain of events that led to the killer's birth five decades previously. It has all of the gleefully over-the-top gore and insanity of the likes of Friday the 13th and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, but with much higher production values, a genuinely talented cast of character actors, and enough clever plot twists to appeal to more discriminating audiences in The New '10s.
- American Horror Story: 1984 is the show returning to the '80s Slasher Movie well, this time influenced by summer camp films like Friday the 13th and wearing a retraux aesthetic played for the highest camp.
- Human Target: Action shows from the '80s and '90s. The series is ultimately based on comic book stories from the 1970s (usually appearing in either Action Comics or Detective Comics as a back-up feature to the main Superman or Batman story respectively), so there's also that.
- Burn Notice: '80s action shows about gadget-building heroes.
- Lucky Louie: '70s and '80s domestic sitcoms.
- The Good Guys: Buddy cop shows from the '70s and '80s.
- Tales of the Gold Monkey: '30s and '40s aviation adventure films, like Only Angels Have Wings, along with a healthy dose of Two-Fisted Tales.
- Miranda (2009): '70s-style studio audience sitcoms.
- Many of the more self-aware Syfy original movies like to hearken back to the cheesy sci-fi B-movies of the '50s. Sharknado is only one of the more famous examples, though Syfy's gradual adoption of the Threatening Shark as a Characteristic Trope sometimes feels more like a throwback to the many, many shark movies that followed the success of Jaws 1 in the late '70s.
- Stranger Things: The '80s output of Steven Spielberg/Amblin Entertainment (particularly E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial), John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, and Stephen King (particularly It). In fact, the show's creators, brothers Matt and Ross Duffer, originally intended to do a remake of It, but were turned down by Warner Bros., the rights holders.
- Many episodes of Quantum Leap go this route. The series has exploited '50s noir detectives, '70s murder mysteries, Hammer horror, gothic thrillers, westerns, war stories, romanic comedy, courtroom drama, etc. Series creator Donald P. Bellisario described the show as "an anthology series with a regular cast".
- While Riverdale is a Teen Drama based off of Archie Comics, the main point of comparison for many viewers and critics has been to '90s mystery shows like Twin Peaks. Casting Twin Peaks actress Mädchen Amick as Betty's mom was probably a deliberate move.
- Almost every episode of WandaVision is a throwback to a different era of television sitcom, starting with the 50s and progressing onwards from that point. Each episode is also a loose homage to a different specific television show from that era.
- Episode 1 parodies classic 1950s "husband and wife" comedies like I Love Lucy and The Dick Van Dyke Show.
- Episode 2 moves into the 1960s with a focus on Bewitched, with the twist that the husband in this case is also supernatural.
- Episode 3 is similar to The Brady Bunch and The Partridge Family in the 1970s setting and tone.
- Episode 4 isn't a sitcom parody, and instead explains much of what's going on in the series up to that point.
- Episode 5 imitates glurge-tastic sitcoms of the 80s, especially Family Ties and Full House.
- Episode 6 advances to the 1990s and almost directly imitates Malcolm in the Middle note , with Billy and Tommy frequently addressing the audience directly.
- Episode 7 is portrayed as a mockumentary of the kind that became popular in the 2000s and 2010s, particularly The Office (US) and Modern Family.
- Episodes 8 and 9 abandons the sitcom framing approach entirely, since Wanda comes to accept the unreality of her Westview sitcom life. They instead take on the style of a contemporary Marvel movie.
- Pretty Little Liars has been called a modern-day teen version of '70s Italian giallo films, employing many of the stylistic tropes of the genre in a teen drama context that's only somewhat Lighter and Softer.
"A mysterious psycho only seen in silhouette with a penchant for black leather gloves and the almost supernatural ability to see and hear everything you do? Deeply buried family secrets that seem to link you directly to the masked lunatic? Elaborately convoluted motivations that hardly make sense upon first viewing? And dolls — lots and lots of creepy dolls? It must be a '70s Italian giallo picture... or, ya know, the formerly known as ABC Family hit drama series, Pretty Little Liars."
- Henry Danger seems to be one to the campy era of superheroes, with over-the-top themed villains and general camp factor.
- The dueling shows Scream Queens (2015) and Dead of Summer were both heavily inspired by '80s slasher movies. The first season of Scream Queens was specifically an Affectionate Parody of college-set slashers like Black Christmas (1974) and The House on Sorority Row, while the second season drew much of its influence from Halloween II (1981) with its hospital setting. Dead of Summer, meanwhile, drew from various Don't Go in the Woods films like the Friday the 13th series and The Evil Dead (1981).
- Word of God is that, in the face of most other recently-made sci-fi (even shows and films within the same franchise that it emulates) going Darker and Edgier as a standard, The Orville was meant to go in the opposite direction, replicating the "sci-fi pulp" feeling of Star Trek: The Original Series.
- Schitt's Creek updates many of the tropes found in Screwball Comedy, especially in its Love Triangle story and class-based comedy. Screwball comedies of the 1930s often had a queer subtext, but the show makes it text by allowing pansexual and flamboyant David to be a protagonist, while the queer characters of the past were usually supporting characters and their sexuality was never directly addressed.
- I Am the Night is a homage to noir as well as neo noir classics like Chinatown and L.A. Confidential.
- John Mulaney & The Sack Lunch Bunch is a Netflix special that homages '70s kids shows/specials like Sesame Street, The Electric Company (1971), and Free To Be... You and Me.
- Outer Banks: Teen dramas from the '90s and '00s, such as Dawson's Creek and The O.C., complete with an almost ridiculously attractive cast.
- MTV's Siesta Key is this to their teen reality shows from the 2000s like Laguna Beach, complete with that show's producers working on this one.
- Danger 5 was originally conceived as a throwback to the pulpy men's adventure magazines of the 1960s of the "weasels ripped my flesh" variety, where any animal is seconds away from violence, clothes fall apart at a moment's notice, Everybody Smokes, and Those Wacky Nazis are around every corner. This results in a very strange Retro Universe where World War Two is being fought in what seems to be an over-the-top version of The '60s. There's also some influence from old Lost World movies, early toku shows, and Tuxedo and Martini spy fiction.
- The second season updates the setting to The '80s, resulting in a Darker and Edgier Sadist Show with a neon-soaked Cannon aesthetic, the constant threat of commies, ninjas, domestic sitcoms, cocaine everywhere, and every episode ending in a toy commercial.
- Saturday Morning All Star Hits!: Saturday morning cartoon blocks from the '80s, complete with stand-ins of Denver the Last Dinosaur, Care Bears, Bobby's World, The Smurfs (1981), ThunderCats (1985), and Cartoon All-Stars to the Rescue (in the form of a Very Special Episode warning kids about the dangers of saying "shut up!").
- Poker Face:
- To classic Mystery of the Week shows from the The '70s and '80s such as Columbo and Murder, She Wrote, along with a Walking the Earth Fugitive Arc that recalls The Incredible Hulk (1977) and Kung Fu (1972), or even earlier stuff like The Fugitive.
- The episode "The Orpheus Syndrome" mixes its influences even further. The main plot resembles a '60s Alfred Hitchcock thriller, most specifically Vertigo, but the plot revolves around 1980s monster movies, with guest star Nick Nolte as a No Celebrities Were Harmed version of Phil Tippett. His character also points out that the '80s monster movies he worked on were themselves examples of this trope, being throwbacks to '50s creature features.
- Warrior (2019) was developed from a dusted-off series pitch by Bruce Lee, and as such, feels very much like a throwback to the sorts of martial arts movies he was making in the '60s and early '70s. There are also quite a few nods (of varying degrees of subtlety) to Lee's movies, and the hero, Ah Sahm, is essentially an unapologetic Bruce Lee Clone.
- Slow Horses, much like the book it adapts, is a throwback to the more cerebral and less glamourous of Cold War-era Spy Fiction - most overtly, the novels of John le Carré and the Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy TV series adapted from them. One of the series' stars is Gary Oldman, who had previously appeared in a film version of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy as well.
- Like the games it's based on, Fallout (2024) is an homage to '50s B-movie sci-fi flicks and Raygun Gothic, with a good dash of horror, Two-Fisted Tales, and The Western tossed in.
Pinballs
- WhizBang Pinball's Whoa Nellie! Big Juicy Melons was made by cannibalizing parts from a 1957 electro-mechanical pinball, then using the components in an all-new playfield design with original art and modern imaging techniques. The result is a boutique pinball table that plays like it stepped out of The '50s with a modern look.
- Data East's Time Machine invokes this when the player reaches The '50s — the dot-matrix display shows the scoring reels of an electro-mechanical pinball while the game plays analog sounds from a chimebox.
- ScoreGasm Master takes it to an extreme: This is a modern take on Williams' Contact Master from 1934, before pinball flippers and bumpers were invented and very close to its bagatelle roots. The difference is that it is made using materials, manufacturing equipment, and electronic parts available in 2015, with modern-looking artwork and sound.
- The remakes of Medieval Madness and Attack from Mars use LCDs, but for most of the game simulate the dot-matrix displays that the original games used. During parts of the game where the player does not have control of the ball, more high-definition graphics are used.
- Total Nuclear Annihilation, in addition to its retraux aesthetics, was inspired by early-'80s Bally games. It features a relatively sparse playfield that places emphasis on the actual gameplay, which forgoes standard mode progression in favor of simpler goals (that are nonetheless difficult to execute).
Podcasts
Sports
- The current home park of Major League Baseball's Baltimore Orioles, Oriole Park at Camden Yards, was built in 1992 as a throwback to stadiums built early in the 20th century, as opposed to more modernized stadiums of recent decades. The park was an instant hit, and sparked a trend in retro baseball stadiums for the next two decades.
- Baseball jerseys as of the '10s feature buttons and simple color patterns. These originated in the '80s as throwbacks to earlier decades, and a deliberate contrast to baseball jerseys of that time.
- In 2016, Seattle Seahawks quarterback Russell Wilson did a tongue-in-cheek homage to sports posters of The '80s, which featured big-name athletes in ridiculous setups and outfits designed to portray them as manly badasses. (The joke is that Wilson's real-life public image, that of a loving father and husband and devout Christian who embraces just how corny he can often be, is the exact opposite of the Testosterone Poisoning that those posters often featured.)
- NASCAR has designated the Southern 500 at Darlington as a throwback weekend. Teams bring cars dressed in old-fashioned paint schemes from the early decades of NASCAR. And NASCAR on NBC goes a step further in that the standard booth team of Rick Allen, Jeff Burton, Steve Letarte and Dale Earnhardt, Jr. step aside for about an hour of the race and let Ken Squier and father-and-son Ned and Dale Jarrett call the action.
- For Monday Night Football's 50th anniversary, its play-by-play team wore the classic yellow blazers made famous by Keith Jackson, Howard Cosell and Don Meredith. It was also simulcast on ABC, its original home before moving to ESPN in 2006; regular simulcasting wouldn't return until the 2020s.
- For the National Basketball Association's 75th annversary celebration in 2022, ESPN2 had each quarter of the Nets vs. Knicks (also referred to their full name of Knickerbockers throughout the night) pay homage to the '60s, '70s, '80s, and '90s in succession with coresponding broadcast looks. ESPN broke out its original logo for the first half, had the commentators also wearing the iconic yellow ABC Sports blazers and even sponsor State Farm using its pre-2012 logo all throughout. The '60s started out in Deliberate Monochrome before being lightly colored as it ended, the '70s retained the warm color filter with simple orange text, the '80s drew from CBS's sports package, and the '90s paid homage to NBC's coverage of the era, complete with usage of John Tesh's "Roundball Rock".
Tabletop Games
- This is the main export of the company Spectrum Games, their motto is even "Genre emulation. It's what we do." Specifically:
- Cartoon Action Hour: Merchandise-Driven action cartoons of the 1980s, such as He Man And The Masters Of The Universe, The Transformers and the like.
- Urban Manhunt: A Blood Sport centered miniatures wargame inspired by dystopian 1980s action cinema
- The Big Crime: 1940s and '50s Film Noir.
- On The Air: Old time radio dramas.
- Macabre Tales: An Homage to H. P. Lovecraft and his pioneering style of Cosmic Horror Story.
- Retrostar: 1970s scifi television, from Battlestar Galactica (1978) to Ark II to The Six Million Dollar Man.
- Stories from the Grave: EC Comics' horror anthology books like Tales from the Crypt and shows and movies in their vein, as well as other such properties like The Twilight Zone (1959).
- Slasher Flick: Old school slasher movies.
- Lancer: Real Robot anime in the vein of Armored Trooper VOTOMS or Gundam.
- Rocket Age: The Space Opera and Planetary Romance of the era of the Film Serial and Pulp Magazine.
- The Fate Core module Weird World News is designed to emulate the groovy mystery-solving cartoons of the '70s like Scooby-Doo, Where Are You!, Speed Buggy, and Fangface.
- The aptly-named Monster of the Week lets you play a '90s-'00s monster-hunting show like The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, or Supernatural. The Character Class System gives options modeled on specific character archetypes from this kind of show.
- They Came From Beneath The Sea! is based on '50s scifi and B Movies, especially those of the nautical variety. The name, for example, is a clear homage to It Came from Beneath the Sea, and there's also a fair bit of Creature from the Black Lagoon, The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, The Monster That Challenged the World, and other movies along those lines in there too.
- Within the tabletop gaming fandom, there's a specific movement known as the "Old-School Renaissance", or "OSR" for short. While there's a lot of rose-tinted view of gaming history and the movement is, by now, long past its initial singular focus on just one game, on top of a whole rabbit hole of other issues, the original premise behind the movement was to bring back the style of Dungeons & Dragons as it was remembered to have been in early Seventies. It worked: there's now a whole slew of games ranging from simple retro-clones with Serial Numbers Filed Off, through various refinements of the basic concept and transplantations to other settings beyond Sword and Sorcery, to games built from the scratch to evoke a similar play experience through entirely different rulesets.
- The Dark Sun setting for Dungeons & Dragons is a throwback to the weirder pre-Tolkienian pulp fantasy - namely, Clark Ashton Smith's proto-Desert Punk Zothique stories, Planetary Romances like the John Carter of Mars novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and Robert E. Howard at his absolute strangest. There's also a lot of influence from Jack Vance, who came a bit later but was very much in the same tradition.
- 7TV: The game is passionately devoted to the television and movies of The '60s through The '80s, and while references to later works do show up (the Sadistic Slasher model is the It (2017) version of Pennywise, for example), its dedication to the "classics" is unparallelled.
Web Animation
- Antediluvian is an animated homage to pre-classic paleoart, depicting Mesozoic animals not just with appearances that were considered accurate for a good chunk of the 19th century, but also behaving like the nasty, savage beasts living in a world of constant hunger and violence they were frequently imagined as at the time.
- Bee and Puppycat has shades of Sailor Moon and other Magical Girl anime of the 1990s.
- Dimensional Prophecy of Zohar Redux — to gory Anime OVAs of the 1980s and 1990s like Wicked City.
- Failing Upward is modeled after the short-lived, Friends-inspired, Gen-X-focused animated sitcoms of the late '90s, such as Downtown and Mission Hill, right down to being set around the same period.
- The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fan animation "Apple Thief." While it has the same animation style and character design as the series it's based on, is filled with Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry-style gags straight from The Golden Age of Animation.
Webcomics
- El Goonish Shive parodies this with the Detective Block "storyline" in EGS:NP, a sendup of noir detective films where the detective is an unintelligible writer's block.
- My Impossible Soulmate is a throwback to '90s Isekai, eschewing the Power Fantasy or Harem types of isekai more popular at the time of writing.
- Weapon Brown, when it's not being a grimdark parody of every Newspaper Comic ever made, is a throwback to the golden age of dystopian post-apocalyptic Cyberpunk... or, as we call it around here, The Apunkalypse. Its art style is even a pretty good pastiche of Nemesis the Warlock or classic Judge Dredd.
Web Original
- The Chronicles of Taras: Red Dementia is, by Word of God, a throwback to old Prison-Escape films.
- Secrets of Harridge House: the Supernatural Soap Opera, especially Dark Shadows.
- The "Yee" meme of 2014, based on a scene from Dinosaur Adventure by Dingo Pictures, has been characterized as a throwback to early YouTube Poop fads that were popular around 2007 or so.
Web Videos
- The Mirror of Amun-Ra is a short film on YouTube that is this for Adventurer Archaeologist movies like Indiana Jones and The Mummy. It's full of visual/narrative/thematic Easter Eggs for die-hard pulp adventure fans.
- Molly Moon makes TikTok shorts that parody 1990s Interactive Movie games, with the jank and awkwardness being Played for Laughs and a bit of horror.
- Ninja the Mission Force — Godfrey Ho Ninja Movies
- The Cartoon Man — Films and cartoons along the lines of Who Framed Roger Rabbit, in which live action humans interact with 2-D "cartoon" elements.
- Shot on Shitteo — No Budget shot on video horror anthologies.
- Italian Spiderman is a spoof of the many foreign-made knockoffs of American superhero properties that came out in the '60s and '70s.
- Tor's Cabinet of Curiosities was originally a College Radio show from the 2020s, so the YouTube version keeps with this theme by paying homage to public access shows with its minimalistic set design and stock footage intro.
Western Animation
- The Secret Saturdays is one to 1960s and '70s Hanna-Barbera Saturday morning adventure cartoons.
- Batman: The Brave and the Bold is an animated throwback to the Silver Age incarnation of Batman, where instead of being a grim loner, he's a somewhat cheery fellow with a dry, ironic wit, closely resembling the Super Friends incarnation. Notable is the fact that Bruce Wayne almost never appears, and in comparatively serious episode "Chill of the Night!", where we actually see Bruce Wayne, face and all, he looks like his 1990s incarnation. The trope is lampshaded in the Batmite episode where the little imp reads a "prepared statement" in response to some 4th wall breaking humor, explaining that this incarnation of Batman is just as legitimate and true to source material as the "tortured dark avenger crying out for mommy and daddy".
- The Venture Bros. does a bit of this and a bit of parody with 1960s action shows like Jonny Quest and such, plus a hefty dose of more darker and more mature themes.
- Fillmore! takes a lot of inspiration from '70s buddy cop shows, not that any kids noticed. More specifically, those made by Quinn Martin Productions.
- In Animaniacs: The Warner Brothers (and the Warner Sister) can be taken as a throwback to The Golden Age of Animation and other comedies of the time like those of the Marx Brothers, especially considering that their backstory is that they were created in the Thirties. Also, they stole many, many jokes from them.
- Several Looney Tunes series:
- Tiny Toon Adventures paid great tribute to its parent franchise.
- Wabbit: A Looney Tunes Production, debuted in 2015, is this trope to syndicated packages of classic Looney Tunes shorts, i.e. The Bugs Bunny and Tweety Show.
- The Ren & Stimpy Show was like a tortured, horrifying version of Golden Age cartoons, complete with animation style and specific gags copied from Tex Avery MGM Cartoons (and Looney Tunes to a lesser extent).
- Whatever Happened to... Robot Jones?: '70s/'80s vintage cartoons. Its art style is derived from that of Schoolhouse Rock!, even to the point where it actually used cels in a time when most cartoons moved to digital ink-and-paint.
- Black Dynamite is an obvious homage to blaxploitation films from the '70s.
- Rob Zombie described The Haunted World of El Superbeasto as an attempt to make an R rated version of classic Looney Tunes.
- According to Word of God, Harvey Beaks is one of these to older Nicktoons, such as Rugrats and Hey Arnold!.
- Adventure Time hearkens back to '80s action-adventure Saturday morning cartoons such as Dungeons & Dragons (1983).
- Sheep in the Big City plays like a Jay Ward cartoon for millennials, complete with Interactive Narrator, Punny Names and lampshading everything.
- OK K.O.! Let's Be Heroes heavily homages and parodies '90s Saturday morning action cartoons like Captain Planet and the Planeteers, complete with Totally Radical dialogue, Retraux music and art, and (intentionally) flawed moral lessons. One episode was even an outright Crossover with Captain Planet.
- Steven Universe: Science fiction and Urban Fantasy anime from the late '80s to early '90s, with particular inspiration from Magical Girl Warrior series of that era like Sailor Moon. Contrastly, the movie throws back to Animated Musicals from the ‘90s, mainly those by Disney and their imitators. Its villain Spinel also possesses Rubber-Hose Limbs and has a design and body language reminiscent of '20s and '30s animation.
- Korgoth of Barbaria: Sword and Sorcery pulp fiction in the style of Conan the Barbarian.
- The HBO Max and Cartoon Network original The Fungies! seems to be one to '80s cartoons like The Smurfs (1981) and The Snorks
- My Life as a Teenage Robot: Classic science fiction anime from the '60s and '70s, particularly the works of Osamu Tezuka.
- Sym-Bionic Titan: Super Robot anime and Toku shows of the '60s and '70s like the Robot Romance Trilogy and Ultra Series.
- Over the Garden Wall often features animation and designs that are reminiscent of cartoons and art from the 1920s to the '40s.
- Scooby-Doo, Where Are You! can be described as transplanting the main cast of the by-then-recent sitcom The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis into a 1940s Haunted House comedy like Murder in the Blue Room or Spook Busters. It's worth noting that the trope now called the "Scooby-Doo" Hoax was already a well-worn feature of these earlier movies.
- The Cuphead Show!, like its source material, recreates the character designs and animation styles of '20s and '30s cartoons, especially Fleischer Studios.
- Ballmastrz: 9009 is a Western Affectionate Parody of the pulpy, hyper-violent, Cyberpunk, often post-apocalyptic anime Original Video Animations of the late 20th century, such as Genocyber, MD Geist and Apocalypse Zero.
- The Loud House is a modernized take on the Slice of Life sitcoms, cartoons, and especially comic strips of the late 20th century, such as Full House, Doug, and FoxTrot respectively.
- Twelve Forever is modeled after Fantastic Comedy cartoons of the 2000s such as The Fairly OddParents! and ChalkZone, right down to its Thick-Line Animation as well being heavily implied to be set around the same period - albeit Darker and Edgier and more LGBT-themed than those shows could've been at the time.
Other
- The Chinook Centre Scotiabank Theatre in Calgary, Alberta contains an exterior and decor themed to Ancient Egypt and so could be considered one to the lavishly themed theatres of the early 20th century.
- The "Cool Britannia" movement in British pop culture in The '90s, which stretched across music, cinema, fashion, and the visual arts, was in many ways a conscious throwback to the "Swinging Sixties", the previous moment in history when the United Kingdom (especially London) was a global epicenter of popular culture. The March 1997 cover◊ of Vanity Fair, which boasted the headline "London Swings Again!" alongside a glamorous shot of Liam Gallagher and Patsy Kensit, highlighted the '60s nostalgia at the core of the cultural moment.
