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This entry is trivia, which is cool and all, but not a trope. On a work, it goes on the Trivia tab.

Trend Killer
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Every era is defined by trends. They tend to vary in period of popularity and quality, but they don't last forever. Sometimes, it may be because of changes in society or technology marching on, causing it to become a Discredited Trope. There may also be times when any works making use of a particular trend bomb on a regular basis, leading to creators abandoning said trend.

This is one level below Genre Killer, though the reasons why both occur are similar – Genre refers to a category, while a trend refers to an element or trope. For example, Action is a genre. Action Heroine is an element in Action films.

Trends tend to be cyclic, which means that their popularity ebbs and flows. If it returns, it is experiencing a Popularity Polynomial, or else it is Condemned by History.

Genres can be considered a type of trend, as their popularity can be cyclic and they are capable of defining eras. While deciding whether an example falls under this or Genre Killer, consider the following:

  • If your example concerns a Narrative Trope, it falls here.
  • If it is based on Meta Concepts such as technologies and adaptations, it is a trend.
  • If your example concerns a Stylistic Trope, it falls under Genre Killer.
  • If the "Trend" can be described as a Sub-Genre, it probably fits under Genre Killer.
  • If you are still unsure, check this page to see what is considered a genre, and this page to see what is considered a trend.

Contrast Totally Radical, where creators try to implement (often outdated) trends in their works as an attempt to stay hip with the current audience. Compare The Red Stapler for when a work of fiction inspires a trend in real life, and Baby Name Trend Killer for when a work makes a name fall out of favour.

As TV Tropes does not know time, please wait at least five years until after the offending work's release. If the trend got revived, there must be a minimum five-year gap between the "killer" and "reviver".

Examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 
  • Before the success of Attack on Titan, it was common practice for anime that Overtook the Manga, usually anime based on manga published in monthly magazines, to be given a Gecko Ending, only to be either given a Truer to the Text adaptation later down the line or a new season that ignores the Gecko Ending. The most notable instances of this include Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) (though this example was encouraged by the mangaka herself), Soul Eater, Blue Exorcist, and Black Butler. However, when Attack on Titan's anime adaptation became a smash hit, the studio made the bold decision to end it on a cliffhanger instead of giving a new ending, despite the fact that the manga would take years to get new material. This ultimately paid off, since the following seasons were just as successful as the first. While Gecko Endings haven't completely gone away, the practice isn't as common as it used to be, as later adaptations of monthly manga such as Made in Abyss followed Attack on Titan's example.
  • Prior to Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, anime movies were usually Non-Serial Movies that featured side stories unrelated to the main plot, and these were met with mixed reactions by fans, who consider these as Filler that could be skipped. Canon movies were quite rare at the time (with films like The Last: Naruto the Movie usually being the exception rather than the rule), and turning story arcs into feature films was even less common. This all changed dramatically with the release of Mugen Train, which, while not the first anime to do so, opted to adapt a story arc as a movie rather than as a seasonal anime. Mugen Train proved to be incredibly successful — it became the highest-grossing film of 2020 and the highest-grossing Japanese film of all time — and other anime series such as Jujutsu Kaisen, Haikyuu!!, and Chainsaw Man began adapting major story arcs into films hoping to replicate that success, while interest in creating standalone non-canon films gradually declined.
  • The smash success of the anime adaptation of My Hero Academia caused a major shift in how shonen manga were adapted to anime. Prior to it, most anime adaptations of long-running shonen manga like Naruto and Bleach were aired non-stop; while it kept the franchises always visible, the overall quality of their animation was never consistent and the need to avoid overtaking the manga caused frequent filler arcs (with Naruto's particularly long round of seemingly nonstop filler in the lead up to the end of the pre-Shippuden era anime being a particularly notorious offender, having been blamed for causing Toonami's initial shutdown). My Hero Academia, in contrast, took a seasonal approach, adapting a group of arcs once a year and releasing it as a season. In addition to all but eliminating filler and providing much better pacing and animation quality, the format was also better suited for binge-watching, which had become popular by the time the anime came out. Subsequent big shonen titles like Jujutsu Kaisen and Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba all followed this cour format, while the former trend of continuous adaptations was left behind. Even perhaps the best known holdout, One Piece, switched to a semi-seasonal format that almost halved the amount of episodes aired in a year (48 to 26) in 2026.
  • The Viz Media dub of Naruto is often credited for ending the Dub-Induced Plotline Change as a strategy for targeting Shonen (and to a lesser extent Shojo) at a younger demographic. Prior to this, it was common for mainstream anime dubs to completely rewrite scripts, rename characters, edit down plot points, compose new music and sound effects, and do all manner of things to try to localize the series to air on TV channels aimed at kids. Viz Media's dub of Naruto did only the bare minimum of edits, sticking as close to the Japanese script as Cartoon Network's broadcast standards would allow, and became a smash success, proving that such efforts (and the associated production costs) weren't necessary. This was further contrasted by the infamous 4Kids dub of One Piece, which did all of the above and ended up becoming a significant laughingstock that would go on to negatively affect the series' reputation in the west for years. After Naruto, most future dubs followed suit, and 4Kids, the main purveyors of this in the 2000s, quickly faded from the public eye before going bankrupt. Nowadays, the only place this trend still remains is in Long-Runner franchises aimed at children, and even they ended up making their scripts much closer to the source material than before, with any changes having to do with previously already changed material.
  • Neon Genesis Evangelion firmly killed the notion that anime appealing to a wide teenager and adult audience were viable only in OVA form. It also ended the "kodomo" era of the mecha genre (as there was declining interest in mecha from tween and younger teen audiences, who overwhelmingly preferred battle shonen series by the late 1990s) and ushered in a second otaku era, with a noticeably more "anything goes" ethos, a looser definition of what exactly can be mecha and more serious themes being explored once again, to an extent not seen in the genre since the peak of the Real Robot boom in the early 1980s.
  • Space☆Dandy in 2014 is often credited for ending the long-standing history of Late Export for You when it came to anime getting English dubs. Previously, it was not unheard of for anime series to take a long time for any anime-focused distribution company to officially release or have shows available for an English-speaking audience, and dubs would sometimes take months to come out, with very rare situations where a show would come out and quickly be dubbed or available. Space Dandy was one of the first anime to have a release and an English dub almost simultaneously with the original airing in Japan, proving that it was possible to do so. From there, anime dubbing and distribution companies began picking up the pace, and dubs started coming out much more quickly. These days, the few shows that take a long time to be given overseas releases often are ones that require some form of extra work to do so.

    Comic Books 

    Films – Animation 

    Films – Live-Action 
  • Airplane! wasn't only a temporary Genre Killer for the Disaster Movie – it also killed the aerial sub-genre retroactively, as the airliner-in-peril/stewardess-lands-the-plane trope of the previous Airport series was destroyed, and all the drama with it, since no one could take it seriously anymore. The only films made since then in the subgenre were either based on a true story or had snakes and Samuel L. Jackson on said plane.
  • Avatar is widely credited by analysts with ending the dominance of film stock in the motion picture industry. Shooting on film had been commonplace for over a century, mostly due to the lack of viable competition, but even after professional-quality digital cameras rose to prominence in the late '90s and early 2000s, most directors and studios stuck with film. Avatar, meanwhile, used digital video to facilitate its 3D display and copious use of CGI, and its skyscraping success resulted in the rest of the movie industry quickly adopting the technology as well. Over a decade later, usage of film stock for new projects is limited to much smaller niches, with digital cameras overwhelming them in prominence.
  • Batman & Robin (1997) killed the trend of superhero movies with a lighthearted, borderline comical tone. The success of Blade, X-Men 1, and Spider-Man 1 convinced studios that more grounded and realistic takes on comic book characters were the way forward for the genre. It would not be until 2014's Guardians of the Galaxy (and the mixed reception of many Darker and Edgier comic book movies, most notably, the DC films of Zack Snyder) that such a tone would be deemed acceptable again.
  • Catwoman (2004) killed off the idea of the Action Girl as protagonist in Hollywood cinema for quite a long time. Later big-budget Hollywood relegated them to secondary roles as love interests or fanservice characters. The massive success of The Hunger Games franchise brought it back, while the success of Wonder Woman (2017) solidified the viability of female-led action films as major blockbusters.
  • Child's Play helped kill off the fad that started with Cabbage Patch dolls and ended with the "My Buddy" dolls. Since those dolls looked a lot like the film franchise's Big Bad Chucky, the line of dolls were effectively scrapped.
  • Clueless effectively ended the 1980s/early '90s "Blonde Bombshell" era that was typified by actresses like Kim Basinger, Rebecca De Mornay, Melanie Griffith, Daryl Hannah, Michelle Pfeiffer, Sharon Stone, and Kathleen Turner. Before Clueless, the “blonde bombshell” archetype — the mature, glamorous, overtly sexualized Hollywood beauty was a dominant on-screen stereotype. The blonde bombshells of this era thrived in erotic thrillers, neo-noir, adult dramas, and high-gloss studio romances. Clueless with Alicia Silverstone's Cher Horowitz, marked a pivot toward a more youthful, relatable, and comedic version of the blonde lead who was approachable, ironic, non‑sexualized but stylish, and emotionally open instead of mysterious. None of these characters used sexuality as power — they used wit, charm, aspirational femininity, and earnestness. After Clueless became a surprise hit, it spawned imitators, influenced Legally Blonde, Mean Girls, and a wave of “ditzy-but-capable” blonde heroines.
  • Coming to America's merciless parody of the Jheri curl hairstyle (by way of Akeem's romantic rival Darryl whose family owns Soul Glo with its over-the-top commercial jingle) is largely credited for killing off said hairstyle. It was very popular among the African American community in the 1980s, but no one could take it seriously after this movie came out (barring the rare exception like in Pulp Fiction, with Samuel L. Jackson's character Jules sporting the hairstyle note ).
  • Adult-geared sex comedies remained wildly popular for most of the 2000s and early 2010s, but changes in cultural sensitivities and the #MeToo movement in the late 2010s made it even harder to sneak more intense material. For example, 2011's Bad Teacher and the sequels to 2009's The Hangover were subject to greater scrutiny than previous works. While 2012's Ted and 2014's Neighbors (2014) gave adult comedy a shot in the arm, its reputation was affected in 2016 by Dirty Grandpa. It did well at the box office but received such an overwhelmingly negative response that subsequent attempts at adult comedy in the same year either became financial disappointments or outright flops. The slipping box-office numbers (aside from lack of success outside the English-speaking world) largely reduced comedy films to direct-to-video/streaming material with the odd theatrical release, mostly aimed at a female (Bad Moms, I Feel Pretty) or unisex "date night" (Blockers, Good Boys) audience. 2023's No Hard Feelings and Anyone but You aimed to reformulate the sex comedy for a mostly female audience to relative success (the latter being a Sleeper Hit).
  • The box office underperformance of the third Divergent film, Allegiant (2016), and the eventual cancellation of its planned sequel, Ascendant, struck a one-two blow to major trends in film adaptations of literature in the 2000s and early 2010s:
  • Doctor Dolittle proving to be a surprising critical and commercial bomb, despite receiving a massive marketing and merchandising push, put the kibosh on merch tie-ins to movies for a while. There were a lot of unsold animal toys clogging up store shelves in the late sixties, and it caused executives to decide that merch was a high-risk endeavor, scaling it back considerably in future projects. Consequently, a decade later, Fox thought nothing of giving the director of a crappy-looking throwback sci-fi flick full licensing and merchandising rights in exchange for substantially reduced pay.
  • Fantastic Four (2015) and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice killed the trend of superhero movies made to serve as a Darker and Edgier Continuity Reboot, one that began with Batman Begins. Batman v Superman's underperformance at the box office and negative critical reception is especially notable, because several of the DC Extended Universe films that were in various stages of production at the time were retooled to be Lighter and Softer in response, to mixed results. Fantastic Four also killed off the trend of Movie Superheroes Wear Black, as even the X-Men movies that started this trend were moving away from this aesthetic starting with X-Men: First Class.
  • The critical and commercial failure of the film adaptation of George & Mildred in 1980 ended the trend of adapting Britcoms into feature-length films in the 1970s, with it not being until Bean in 1997 that the idea was even revisited.
  • In the 2000s, most romance-themed movies could be split into two camps: (A) pandering rom-coms occupied by the likes of Jennifer Aniston, Katherine Heigl, Cameron Diaz, and Reese Witherspoon playing sassy characters, and (B) weepy, melodramatic movies that copied The Notebook. How Do You Know in 2010 and Bridesmaids in 2011 killed the first type, the former due to going over-budget and bombing, and the latter by featuring a female protagonist thoroughly independent from the romantic male lead, while successfully adapting the Judd Apatow style of raunchy humor and character-focused writing. It did not help matters that a new generation of young actresses had no interest in playing either "ditzy girls" or killjoys and the sexist undertones of rom-coms were emphasized, even by Aniston and particularly Heigl themselves, who had sworn off many of their movies.
  • Though the practice was growing in disdain over the years, The Last Airbender was a huge blow to the practice of minority-to-white Race Lift adaptations. The film saw immediate backlash among the fanbase of Avatar: The Last Airbender when reports revealed that it had cast the main characters with white actors, despite them hailing from Fantasy Counterpart Culture versions of Tibet and the Arctic, while casting all the major villains (hailing from a fantastical Japan) as darker-skinned Indians. It went on to bomb hard with critics and audiences alike, which brought a ton of attention to the idea that the practice, far from giving films greater mass-appeal, could risk them being Overshadowed by Controversy. Notably, the term "racebending" originated from this film, but the backlash was so severe that it started being applied to other films as well. It wasn't the last film to do this, but after its release, far more of them – The Lone Ranger (2013), Exodus: Gods and Kings, Gods of Egypt, Ghost in the Shell (2017), etc. – would start seeing harsh discourse and correspondingly poor box office results, and over the following decade, such films would grow increasingly rare. Another big blow came with the growing popularity of The Fast and the Furious, which repeatedly won big at the box office with a diverse cast and proved that audiences wouldn't necessarily drop a film with a non-white lead. There are still cases of getting away with it (more minor characters, characters of uncertain background, Plays Great Ethnics, occasionally villains) and the Race Lift in general still sees use, but the main protagonists tend to be treated as off-limits. Indeed, when Netflix made a second attempt at a live-action adaptation of the cartoon in the form of a streaming series, they made an effort to cast the main characters exclusively from actors of the same ethnicities which the characters were derived from (a decision that was praised).
  • The 2000s trend of Hollywood remaking Asian horror films that began with The Ring died out due to the poor receptions of One Missed Call, The Eye, and Shutter in 2008. Attempts to relaunch the trend have all failed. It should be noted that, aside from The Ring, these Hollywood remakes consistently received savage reviews from critics, but they did reasonably well in the box office until the 2008 trio.
  • The trend of doing PG-13 remakes of R-rated horror films was killed off by the remakes of Prom Night and The Stepfather. The former did OK at the box office but received almost universally negative reviews from critics and horror fans alike, and the latter, in addition to bad reviews, barely made back its budget. Nowadays, attempts at doing the same are met with raised eyebrows.
  • School of Rock in 2003, being a send-up of inspirational teacher movies, basically killed that trend (alongside scathing parodies from Mad TV and South Park) and created a new trend where the teachers are rather useless (such as Bad Teacher). Attempts at reigniting inspirational teacher movies (such as Freedom Writers and Larry Crowne) have been critical and box office disappointments.
  • After the success of Rain Man and Forrest Gump, a common method for neurotypical actors looking out for an easy award was to play a character with mental disabilities while affecting the mannerisms of the condition, using the mental transformation angle as proof of their skill. Even otherwise panned films such as i am sam would often get nominations if it featured an actor using this method. Then, 2008's Tropic Thunder ruthlessly mocked this in the now-famous "full retard" speech, where the actors explain it to be an obvious mercenary ploy for awards made by actors who don't actually care about the people they portray and show them as Inspirationally Disadvantaged to avoid making audiences uncomfortable. The idea was becoming increasingly controversial by the film's release, but after Tropic Thunder, no such film would ever get an awards nod again, and what few films did feature mental disorders, such as Silver Linings Playbook, would have their actors avoid changing their mannerisms. The only major film since then to fit the old template is Music (2021), which was a critical and commercial bomb.
  • Star Trek Beyond is increasingly being looked back on as the film that killed off the spate of Continuity Reboots of major film franchises that took place during the 2000s and the first half of the 2010s. Beyond's flopping at the box-office and killing the reboot series that had started with Star Trek (2009), despite reviewing well and being seen as one of the better films in its franchise, was seen as proof that fans would simply never develop the same emotional attachment to a full-on reboot of a long-standing franchise with a tightly interconnected continuity like Star Trek. As a result, while continuity reboots remain popular for film franchises that only operate in a Broad Strokes continuity (such as James Bond) or are adaptations of other media (most prominently the DC Comics film adaptations), legacy sequels have become a more popular way of continuing established franchises — it probably didn't go unnoticed that Beyond was outgrossed by a legacy sequel, namely Independence Day: Resurgence — with the Star Trek franchise jumping on-board the train with Star Trek: Picard.
  • Twilight in 2008 and The Hunger Games in 2012 killed the child-led blockbuster franchises that Harry Potter had popularized. Young adult novels featuring child protagonists either aged up their protagonists (eg, The Giver and Seventh Son (2015)) or used teenage/adult protagonists instead.
  • The failure of Watchmen killed any attempts at R-rated graphic novel-based movies for nearly a decade. It wasn't until the success of Deadpool in 2016 that they were considered again.
  • xXx: State of the Union in 2005 killed the early-to-mid-2000s trend of fast, modern, teen-oriented action films centered on extreme sports. While the Fast film series, which pioneered the trend, is still going strong today, later installments have focused more on straightforward action and car chases as opposed to the earlier, more extreme sports-centered installments.

    Literature 
  • The inter-war fashion for Purple Prose-laden novels of rural life would probably be considered a trend, drawing on an existing literary pattern, though it may have become a full-on sub-genre — until Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm killed it by the power of effective parody.
  • The Cold Equations was written as a deconstruction of a Science Hero who could never really fail because he would always Techno Babble up a Deus ex Machina solution to whatever scrape he'd gotten into that week. This fact is much less well known than The Cold Equations itself because the archetype ended up discarded and forgotten, due in part to this very deconstruction.
  • It may have simply showed up at the right time, but the full-length novel format of the Harry Potter books ended the dominance of the 90s "kid pulps" such as Animorphs and Goosebumps, which released a new book every month on average. From the early-to-mid 2000s onwards, it's much more common for Middle Grade Literature to be much longer and have at least a year between releases; it's also increasingly common to see Doorstoppers aimed at the Young Adult demographic.

    Live-Action TV 
  • The advent of digital video in the 2000s singlehandedly ended the prominence of TV shows shot on videotape. While videotape's lower costs and faster turnaround made it more practical than 35mm film, it was also limited to a specific look and resolution. Film, meanwhile, could be remastered for better-quality displays, allowing shows on the latter to fare much better in reruns. With digital video, not only were the practical advantages even greater than videotape, but it could also be processed to closely resemble film, resulting in it becoming the dominant medium for TV production by the 2010s.
  • The cancellation of Doctor Who in 1989 marked the final death knell of traditional television serials, which had already been declining considerably by then. By the time the show returned to regular airing in 2005, serialization was mostly limited to the miniseries and anthology formats, with long-form shows (including Doctor Who itself) shifting towards season-long story arcs rather than multi-episode serials.
  • Star Trek: Picard broke the trend of the Darker and Edgier, heavily Story Arc-based science fiction television that had been popularized by Battlestar Galactica (2003) and was continued with by Star Trek: Discovery, which was the edgiest Star Trek series since Star Trek: Deep Space Nine with an added dose of Ruder and Cruder until Star Trek: Picard, following the success of Star Trek: Discovery, became the grand champion of darker, edgier, ruder and cruder Star Trek. By the late 2010s, the entire science fiction genre as shown on television was seen as increasingly suffering from Continuity Lock-Out, The Chris Carter Effect, and unlikeable characters. Star Trek: Discovery proved there was still an audience for Star Trek on television, but the simultaneously released The Orville (a Serial Numbers Filed Off homage to Star Trek: The Next Generation) proved there was still an audience for episodic science fiction with a lighter tone. Star Trek: Picard was seen as trying too hard to get people to take it seriously, so it softened a bit in its second season before wrapping up in its third, with Star Trek: Discovery concluding in a drastically shortened fifth season a year later and the more episodic and less bleak Star Trek: Strange New Worlds taking their place to wide acclaim.

    Music 
  • An all-too-common occurrence when it comes to audio formats, thanks in part to rapid technological advancement rendering certain options obsolete.
    • The debut of the Sony Walkman in 1979 quickly killed off the 8-track tape as the premier portable music format and served as a Killer App for the cassette. Compact cassettes had already been making a steady climb as a viable alternative to both vinyl records and 8-tracks thanks to advancing hi-fi technology surrounding them, their easy recordability, and their higher storage capacity, among other things being able to store many double albums on one tape each and more closely follow LP track lists than 8-tracks (which often had to Re-Cut albums to fit a four-program format). The 8-track was also falling out of favor due to declining build quality causing cartridges to break. However, the Walkman rapidly solidified the ousting of 8-tracks by introducing an even higher degree of portability, making it possible to listen to music anywhere at any time (whereas 8-tracks could only be played at home and in car stereos). Within a few years of the Walkman's introduction, prerecorded cassettes were outselling even LPs. Vinyl held on as the format for singles until the arrival of cassette and CD singles.
    • The cassette and the Walkman, in turn, were done in by a combined death blow of portable CD players with anti-skip and affordable recordable CD formats in the second half of The '90s. While portable CD players existed before, they were expensive and would skip when even slightly jostled, making them impractical in actual mobile use. Music fans would either have to make a cassette copy or purchase a prerecorded cassette if it was one of the increasingly common longer albums to listen to music outside the home. Anti-skip made it possible to actually listen to CDs on the go (albeit at the expense of battery life) as portable CD player prices came down. CD players also became standard equipment in new cars around the same time, and cassette/cigarette lighter adapters made it easy to retrofit existing car stereo systems with portable players. The advent of recordable CDs also eliminated another niche for the cassette, becoming the recordable digital audio format of choice after the failures of DAT, DCC, and MiniDisc. Later MP3 players would do away with physical media altogether. Cassettes largely disappeared from developed markets by the turn of the millennium, though they would have a minor revival similar to that of vinyl records in the 21st century.
    • Apple's iPod singlehandedly ended the Compact Disc's reign as the dominant format for popular music. With its intuitive design and ability to hold entire libraries of music at one's fingertips, it convinced music fans that they didn't even need physical music anymore. The iTunes music store also served as The Moral Substitute for file sharing by providing a convenient way to buy digital music (as opposed to other efforts backed by major record companies, which fell flat on their face due to severe restrictions on what you could do with purchased music). Even after physical music made a comeback in the form of the vinyl and cassette revivals, the CD never fully returned to its original popularity as a format for music distribution.
  • The relative commercial failure of Fleetwood Mac's Tusk struck a major blow to the popularity of double albums in popular music that would span the next thirty years. The format had long existed on shaky ground due to its high production costs, but Tusk underselling compared to the blockbuster sales of Rumours made labels and artists alike far more reluctant to release double albums except out of necessity. When the rise of CDs made longer albums fashionable again, the LP versions would either pare down the material or pack the grooves closer to avoid using more than one disc, and double-CD releases are still rare outside of live albums, compilations, and reissues of double-LP albums that don't fit on one CD. It's also common for proposed double albums to be Divided for Publication. Double-LP albums would only become popular again with the Vinyl Revival, which made it easier to profit off of a Multi-Disc Work on vinyl (which was often necessary due to many newer albums still featuring CD-centric runtimes).
  • In the late '90s and the oughties, the music industry sold song snippets usable as ringtones for up to $5 apiece. This practice started to fall out of favour in the late 2000s, when the novelty wore off, and consumers who still wanted ringtones discovered that they could just use third-party software and tutorials to make them themselves. Then the rise of smartphones finished off what was left of the ringtone market — why buy an overpriced song snippet when you can just connect to the Internet and get the whole thing for a fraction of the price on iTunes or Amazon? It doesn't help that smartphone users will often either use the default ringtone or set it to silent or vibrate, which defeats the purpose of buying ringtones.
  • The Sony BMG rootkit scandal in 2005 played a major role in the death of copy protection in popular music. The rise of home taping in the late '70s instigated a push to deter consumers from copying songs and albums, which resulted in things such as the "Home Taping is Killing Music" campaign, industry lobbying against Digital Audio Tape, and the inclusion of DRM software on CDs in the early 2000s. The latter was highly criticized by audiences, analysts, and even Philips, one of the Compact Disc's co-inventors, as intrusive and self-sabotaging. However, Sony and BMG's attempts at copy-protecting CDs earned particularly loud condemnation for the fact that it revolved around covertly installing malware on Windows computers. Following this, copy-protected CDs would disappear from the music industry, which instead embraced the rise of digital downloads, streaming, and the Vinyl Revival as piracy deterrents.
  • Spotify popularized music streaming at the expense of digital music sales, convincing music fans that they didn't even need to own their favorite albums anymore. The Vinyl Revival complemented the rise of streaming for people who missed building their own music collections.

    Professional Wrestling 
  • The Authority was the breaking point for the evil authority figure in wrestling. Due to it exposing all the role's potential pitfalls if given to a Villain Sue (the fact that they can never lose or be exposed/humiliated, their infinite power which they abused at will, and the heels under their employ always winning in the most contrived ways), their long bout of Too Bleak, Stopped Caring, and especially after the confusing payoff in the WrestleMania 32 weekend in 2016, the whole angle gave the McMahon family (sans Shane) a lot of X-Pac Heat, forcing them to go into hiding, then the WWE proceeded to remove the General Manager figure after TLC 2019 (they've since brought it back, but purely as a babyface role.) Then all other wrestling companies followed suit. Nowadays, the only authority figures seen are depicted as heroic.
  • Ready to Rumble: Professional Wrestling was at the peak of its mainstream popularity in the late '90s due to the Monday Night Wars between World Championship Wrestling and the World Wrestling Federation (now World Wrestling Entertainment), with many wrestlers guest-starring in dozens of shows and movies. That all changed when WCW helped make Ready To Rumble. The movie flopped hard (not helped by portraying wrestling fans as morons and the unpopular "David Arquette as WCW champion" storyline meant to tie into the film, which was the first Gooker Award winner in WrestleCrap history). Coupled with many problems inside the industry that eventually led to WCW going out of business, no one in Hollywood would show much more interest in aligning themselves with the product.
  • The once quite lucrative wrestling "shoot interview" DVD market was killed off by the trend of basically every notable retired wrestler starting their own podcast in the late 2010s, along with the sharp decline in the sales of physical media in general. Sean Oliver, who produced and hosted many of those interviews for his company Kayfabe Commentaries, finally threw in the towel and began hosting the Kliq This podcast with Kevin Nash in 2022, though the archived interviews are still available on the Kayfabe Commentaries website, and some are on YouTube.

    Radio 
  • The advent of radio news broadcasting in the 1930s was what killed off the newspaper "Extra". You could say that most media appearances of "Extra! Extra! Read All About It!" is an artifact of sorts.

    Sports 
  • Throughout the history of NASCAR, there was the practice of "Buschwhacking", where drivers from the top-tier Cup Series would compete in races in the lower divisions (primarily in the second-tier Xfinity Series, which was formerly known as the Busch Series, hence the term). While it was always a thing, it became really prevalent from the mid-2000s to the early-2010s, with multiple Cup drivers often running the full season in both series. Not only did it ruin the purpose of that series being a developmental program, as most of the Xfinity Series regulars found themselves struggling to keep up with the Cup drivers, but it's also speculated to be the reason why many of the Cup Series rookies during that era turned out to be massive busts. Following a failed attempt to curb the trend by making drivers only eligible to score points in one series, in 2017, NASCAR implemented a hard limit on how many races in lower divisions a Cup driver can compete in, as well as banning them from racing during Xfinity Series playoff races, reducing the practice by a significant degree. Buschwhacking is still a thing, but it's highly unlikely it will ever get as crazy as it was during its peak.
  • The Ultimate Fighting Championship, as well as Mixed Martial Arts in general, basically discredited Supernatural Martial Arts and Artistic License – Martial Arts tropes that had been growing popular with the films of Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme, and later revitalized with the Wire Fu films popularized by The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon outside of anime like Dragon Ball Z. Before MMA became widespread, the wider world had no idea what real martial arts or self-defense looked like, allowing frauds, con men, and glorified cult leaders frequently posing as Old Masters to get away with claiming that their fighting styles could defeat anyone or do anything. Actual MMA competition quickly showed that many popular martial arts styles were just plain old unviable in a real fight against a resisting opponent.

    Theme Parks 
  • Throughout the 90s, theme park operators all across America (and sometimes Europe and Japan) were embroiled in the "Roller Coaster Wars": every park was competing to have the tallest roller coaster, the fastest roller coaster, or both. Ohio's Cedar Point, the "coaster capital of the world", started the trend in 1989 with their 200 foot, 70 mph Magnum XL-200 coaster, and it led to a decade and a half of Serial Escalation: 200 foot hypercoasters turned into 300 foot "gigacoasters" with Cedar Point's own Millennium Force, coaster manufacturers began outfitting their rides with hydraulic, magnetic or pneumatic launch systems to propel the trains at speeds only dreamed of, and it seemed like the sky was the limit for the coaster world. And then, the 2000s saw the two coasters that ended the trend: Cedar Point's Top Thrill Dragster, and Six Flags Great Adventure's Kingda Ka.
    • Top Thrill Dragster, a 420 foot "stratacoaster" that launched riders at 120 mph, was well received by both coaster enthusiasts, the general public, and the media, with a short yet intense ride. But some felt the ride was too much of a one trick pony (it's a very simple ride: you get launched up the hill, you come back down), and thought that it came a bit too soon after Millennium Force (which to this day is often considered to be the best roller coaster ever made and a possible contender for the best coaster made by the Cedar Fair company) Even so, it was widely regarded as a Tough Act to Follow in the roller coaster world...until Six Flags decided that they needed to top it with Kingda Ka. Kingda Ka was made by the same manufacturer that made Dragster, the Liechtenstein-based company Intamin, using the patented "Accelerator" hydraulic cable launch system used on Dragster, and it was...let's be honest, it was just Dragster, but slightly larger, slightly faster, and in green instead of red. Casual park guests liked the new ride, but every enthusiast called it an inferior copy of Dragster, and felt that the only reason why Six Flags built it in the first place was because they could say they had a record breaking coaster. Not helping matters was that the hydraulic cable launch systems were Awesome, but Impractical, with frequent downtimes and breakdowns that got more frequent as the rides began to age.
    • Following the opening of Kingda Ka, the looming Great Recession meant that park operators were more wary of building big, flashy, expensive rides like Dragster or Ka, so roller coasters started being more about providing a good experience for park guests while minimizing costs: it's easier to build a ride that people want to go on over and over again than a big flashy ride that you only ride once for the novelty.note  Intamin's last "Accelerator" coaster was 2010's record breaking 140 mph Formula Rossa at Ferrari World Abu Dhabi: they then switched to using cheaper and more reliable magnetic launch systems. The next coaster to beat the height and speed record was Falcons Flight, a 640 foot Intamin "exacoaster" that opened at the very end of 2025 at Six Flags Qiddiya in Saudi Arabia after years of Development Hell and controversy from coaster enthusiasts and human rights activists who saw it as a vanity project from the oppressive Saudi government. While it's still controversial, it's widely agreed that the mere existence of a 640-foot roller coaster makes it a Tough Act to Follow.
    • As the final kicker, Dragster would later be closed for maintenance after a guest waiting in line for the coaster suffered a concussion after being hit by a loose piece of metal from the track, and while Cedar Point fixed the ride with the Top Thrill 2 renovation it still had some problems (most notably, an almost year long period of downtime that started just a few months after it reopened). Six Flags announced that they would be closing Kingda Ka for good after the 2024 season.
  • During the 2010s, Universal Studios theme parks built a large number of "screen" attractions, motion simulators that emphasized action-packed spectacle and big-name actors reprising their roles from the movies that the rides were based on. While theme park enthusiasts had long derided the trend, feeling that Universal had come to prefer them over more traditional rides for the purpose of saving a buck, the opening of Fast & Furious: Supercharged in the Orlando park in 2018, whose contents were lifted wholesale from the Studio Tour in Hollywood, marked a tipping point where even casual guests disliked the ride. Thierry Coup, the senior vice president and chief creative officer of Universal Creative, considers it the biggest mistake of his career, and afterwards, Universal quickly swung back to using physical props and dynamic ride vehicles in their rides, including opening two new full-on rollercoasters, Hagrid's Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure in 2019 and the VelociCoaster in 2021.
  • The opening of Paris' Walt Disney Studios Park is typically credited with bringing the "studio park" era to an end. Dating back to the 1960's with Universal Studios Hollywood and their Studio Tour, it caught on in the 90s with the duelling openings of Universal Studios Florida and Disney–MGM Studios (today Disney's Hollywood Studios), two parks that embraced the theming of a Hollywood studio backlot and a heavy focus on "riding the movies." Companies loved this for its relative budget-friendliness (given that a studio backlot theme doesn't demand intricate, immersive theming) and potential for corporate synergy. Even Paramount and Warner Brothers would try and get in on the trend, purchasing regional parks to highly variable levels of success. Walt Disney Studios Park in 2002 marked the point where the issues with studio parks became impossible to ignore; its bare-bones theming and lack of attractions drew attention to how cheap and incoherent these parks could be, particularly when contrasted with their lovingly detailed late 90's contemporary parks such as Disney's Animal Kingdom and Universal's Islands of Adventure. Today, only Universal Studios continue to get away with the concept thanks to the Grandfather Clause, and even there the studio theming is becoming more of The Artifact as the company seeks to retrofit more immersive "living lands" such as The Wizarding World of Harry Potter and Super Nintendo World into them.

    Toys 

    Video Games 
  • The Atari Jaguar and Sega 32X's commercial failures and widespread negative reception are often credited by analysts with ending the "bit wars" that had dominated the home console market in the early '90s. Whereas the TurboGrafx-16, Sega Genesis, and Super Nintendo Entertainment System all tried to appeal to consumers by describing themselves as "16 bit" systems and their third-generation predecessors as only "8-bit," the Jaguar and 32X tried to one-up all of them by positioning themselves as 64-bit and 32-bit systems, respectively. However, journalists quickly exposed how empty Atari's claim was, and this plus the Jaguar and 32X's lack of differentiation from the competition sowed increased skepticism towards bit-based marketing. While "X-bit" distinguishers still stuck around in the public consciousness for the fifth generation (especially with the Nintendo 64), they were no longer used as selling points by console makers, and the Nintendo 64 ended up firmly beaten by the 32-bit PlayStation (while it actually was 64-bit, few if any of its games were actually capable of making use of this). Come the sixth generation, "8-bit," "16-bit," and "32-bit" would only stick around as labels used by gamers to describe specific styles of games, with newer systems no longer being described in terms of bit width. The increasing plateauing of technology that followed proved a further nail in the coffin; 128-bit computers are still mostly impractical, and 64-bit has long become the standard for home consoles, making bragging about one's bit size a rather pointless endeavor.
  • A prominent trend in the early days of video gaming was the existence of add-ons which aimed to improve the capabilities of a console. These included increasing the strength of the hardware at its disposal, enabling the use of alternate formats like floppy disks or CDs (which essentially gave the add-on its own library), to even, in the case of the Coleco Adam, turning the console into a reasonably good computer for the time. The trend was killed, however, by the Sega 32X: due to being rushed to market, it came with all manner of compatibility issues, and its position at the tail end of the fourth generation meant that the format it was meant to support (32X cartridges) went obsolete only six months later with the release of the Sega Saturn. Not helping matters was the Atari Jaguar CD at around the same time, which, though more obscure, performed even worse. Only one noteworthy add-on was released in the fifth generation, that being the 64DD, and it put the nail in the coffin, not even being released outside of Japan. What few add-ons have released since then tend to be far more specialized and gimmicky, and aim to work strictly with already-existing hardware and games (for instance, the Game Boy Player enabling the use of Game Boy Advance games on the GameCube).
  • During the 70s and the 80s, Button Mashing was a popular mechanic in single-player arcade games, particularly in Shoot 'em Up titles and similar genres: it was considered part of the fun and a valid challenge by testing player's ability to maintain a steady firing pattern throughout the course of a playthrough. The rise of standardized JAMMA cabinets and the increasing supply of cheap and easily-installable autofire circuits made it easier than ever to circumvent this: not only did autofire negate this aspect of difficulty balancing, but most developers didn't anticipate the use of autofire and thus didn't set an hard attack limit, meaning players could set the firing frequency to the maximum 30hz (or whatever was judged optimal for the game) and blow away enemies and bosses far more quickly than intended by firing at a speed a normal person wouldn't realistically be able to sustain. While there were some attempts to resist this (with games such as Gun Frontier and Battle Garegga including a variable in their Dynamic Difficulty to punish players using too high of a firing frequency), shooter titles started to deemphasize firing speed as a major mechanic by the early 90s, and by the end of the decade, arcade games that required serious mashing to build up firepower became extinct outside of deliberate throwbacks and novelty taikan cabinets that could convey repetitive action in a more involved and tactile way. "Mashing" special moves still live on in fighting games (where external hardware existence is heavily frowned upon by competitive players), but even then more recent entries would typically reduce the amount of presses required for such moves due to concerns about accessibility. Star Gagnant, a 2023 game, attempted to revive the concept of button mashing in a shmup (by giving the player both a normal shot that's activated by holding down the shot button and a special shot that's activated by rapidly tapping the button, the latter becoming more powerful the faster the player taps), but it was very ill-received due to concerns about potential injuries that could arise by rapidly tapping for the duration of a standard-length shmup, and many players who cared to play it competitively simply used an autofire controller instead, rendering the gimmick moot.
  • Initially, 2D Fighting Game series tried adapting to the rise of 3D fighters, and gamers in general thinking 2D graphics were obsolete, by making 3D games that combined 2D and 3D fighting game mechanics, such as Street Fighter (the Street Fighter EX sub-series), Mortal Kombat (Mortal Kombat 4 and its sixth-gen installments), and The King of Fighters (the Maximum Impact sub-series). Once Street Fighter IV was released to critical and commercial acclaim with its 2½D gameplay, these 2D-3D hybrid fighters were gone, with later King of Fighters and Mortal Kombat games also employing 2½D gameplay as well as other 2D fighters that never tried adapting to this trend like Guilty Gear.note 
  • Dedicated controllers for home Rhythm Games were once a staple of the genre. Many BEMANI ports on PS1 and PS2 have associated official controllers for them, most notably the DanceDanceRevolution mat, and Guitar Hero would popularize the dedicated rhythm game controller concept in the West with its guitar controller, with Rock Band further expanding on this concept with a drum controller as well; in the late 2000s, it was quite common for a full Rock Band setup of two guitar controllers, one drum controller, and one microphone for karaoke, to be used at parties. However, this trend went away in the 2010s as the latter two series faded out and Konami stopped producing BEMANI games for consoles (only to return half a decade later to a subscription-based service for PC BEMANI ports, which is much less accessible than traditional console ports for a variety of reasons). Nowadays, most players would rather play rhythm games that use something they already have or which has more utility, such as a keyboard,note  gamepad, or the touchscreen on smartphones and tablets (which are known for offering a wider range of game design than fixed controllers).
  • Donkey Kong 64 dealt a huge blow to the late 90s trend of 3D Collect-a-Thon Platformers with open-ended levels like Super Mario 64, Banjo-Kazooie, and Spyro the Dragon — which became popular as a way of showing off large 3D worlds and 3D movement.note  DK64 received criticism for focusing too much on its excessive amount of collectibles, which was seen as Padding to some. Further releases in the genre would often be shorter, lower budget affairs that usually garnered mixed reviews and became Cult Classics at best, while mainstream platformers like the Super Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Rayman series returned to more linear world design. The trend would experience a resurgence in the late 2010s by games like Super Mario Odyssey and A Hat in Time, as well as remakes of older games like Pac-Man World and the aforementioned Spyro.
  • Grim Fandango, the 14th adventure game released by LucasArts, would be its penultimate. In response to its commercial failure, LucasArts reallocated most of its resources away from the innovative adventure titles that had built its reputation, shifting focus instead to outsourced Star Wars franchise spin-offs.
  • The No Sidepaths, No Exploration, No Freedom trope that first person shooters had been moving towards in The Seventh Generation of Console Video Games was dealt two fatal deathblows in the early-mid-10s.
    • The scathing criticism of the level designs of Homefront, Medal of Honor: Warfighter and Call of Duty: Ghosts. All three games were heavily criticized for leaning so hard onto this trope that it actually made them feel boring; with Warfighter in particular being a Franchise Killer in part because of this, the former two helping kill their respective studios, and Ghosts recieving much flak for discarding the innovative level design features that were present in Call of Duty: Black Ops II. Since then, every First-Person Shooter game post-Ghosts has tried to add more unique features to help distinguish it from the others, while attempts at trying to play this trope straight have been critical and commercial dissapointments.
    • A major reason why this trend was in effect across the 7th generation was due to a constellation of factors, such as the jump to HD exponentially increasing development costs to the point that being PC-only was financially risky. This, combined with the exponential increase in console gaming audiences since the mid-late-90s, meant the only way games can reliably profit was to release on PC and consoles. However, the 7th generation consoles (Xbox 360 and Playstation 3) were severely limited in their capabilities compared to contemporary gaming PC counterparts. Thus developers turned to highly-linear levels that Call of Duty pioneered to make sure the games even ran on the 7th generation consoles. Once the 8th generation consoles (Playstation 4 and Xbox One) came, with their much more powerful hardware allowing for much more varied level design, it was all over as developers no longer had to make such extreme compromises.
  • While the general idea of a Dream Match Game isn't dead, its initial features of non-canonicity and lacking plots were killed when SNK, who pioneered the concept with The King of Fighters '98 and The King of Fighters 2002 and made a few similar titles for other series of theirs (such as Samurai Shodown), ended up with the complete bomb that was The King of Fighters XII, which was near universally lambasted for being massively bare-bones compared to its predecessors and essentially being an open beta for the canon The King of Fighters XIII. While updated re-releases of both '98 and 2002 both performed relatively well, XII ultimately caused too much damage to the initial concept — tellingly, other "dream match" fighting games since then such as Tekken Tag Tournament 2 and BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle have had some degree of plot and character development, with even SNK's own SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy outright being Loose Canon.
  • Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite was considered the nail in the coffin on cinematic story modes in Japanese Fighting Games. This was a trend that caught on thanks to NetherRealm Studios' 2011 reboot of Mortal Kombat, which featured a robust story campaign. Injustice: Gods Among Us, Mortal Kombat X, and their sequels also featured similar campaigns, and were thus seen as a new industry standard. However, when the trend hopped across the Pacific and Japanese game developers tried to emulate this success with games like Soulcalibur V, Street Fighter V, and Tekken 7, the results were considered lackluster at best and detrimental to the games at worst. Then, when MvC: Infinite was released with a cinematic mode that was widely panned and reputedly had a negative effect on the game's sales (along with many other scandals), that feature was quietly downplayed or absent altogether from subsequent Japanese fighters such as Samurai Shodown (2019), Soulcalibur VI, and Guilty Gear -STRIVE-.note  However, 2024's Tekken 8 not only featured a cinematic story mode — one that was much better received than its predecessor's attempt — but also brought back Arcade Mode with character-specific endings, something that the Tekken series had started to phase out with Tekken 6 a decade-and-a-half earlier, suggesting the trend may be on life support for now.
  • For a while, there was a trend for independent developers to take up crowdfunding to support their games, with Broken Age kick-starting it by formerly holding the record for most funded Kickstarter project. However, a series of controversies surrounding them, most notoriously the failure of Mighty No. 9 and the middling reception to Shenmue III, resulted in many independent developers using crowdfunding much less due to the stigma associated with them. While crowdfunded games still exist (Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night released just after Mighty No. 9 to great acclaim), most crowdfunding campaigns for games are extremely low-key compared to the ones for Mighty No. 9note  or Shenmue IIInote  and are conciously trying to avoid the mistakes of past campaigns (most notably, being more communicative with backers and avoiding additional campaigns for things like DLC or spinoffs).
  • The Nintendo DS was released during the mid-2000s, in an era before internet-accessible smartphones became widespread. As such it received a large amount of non-gaming "games", including literature, cookbooks, horoscopes, language tutors, fitness trainers, and even ones that teach players to quit smoking. By the time the late 2000s rolled around, iPhones and Android smartphones became commonplace, and such apps can be downloaded for free while capable of receiving regular updates. Today, such DS apps are seen as curiosities at best, and a time capsule of the DS's heyday. It is very telling that the DS's successor, the Nintendo 3DS, largely lacked such apps.
  • Skylanders and the entire Toys-To-Life Game genre was killed due to market oversaturation, largely in part to Disney attempting to hijack the craze with Disney Infinity, which saw a new version every year that added some new content but wasn't compatible with previous versions. Two series that were both very Merchandise-Driven put a large amount of strain on the idea, which wasn't helped when LEGO jumped on the bandwagon with LEGO Dimensions, now draining even more consumer satisfaction and money. Activision at this point began to try to prioritize new games, in order to not get drowned out by Disney and LEGO. In Q3 of 2015 alone, three different major toys-to-life games were hitting the market. That many different games largely made consumers realize the money spent wasn't worth it for cash-grab games, and thus the market for toys-to-life began to die, and by 2017, all three game franchises had been killed off due to disappointing revenue. The failure of Starlink: Battle for Atlas that same year served as proof the market had been oversaturated, and all four game franchises haven't had a new release again. The only survivor of the genre was Nintendo's amiibo, in large part due to not being tied to any particular game and instead functioning across their systems as a whole.
  • The widespread backlash to Star Wars Battlefront II (2017)'s lootboxes caused enough of a stir that legislators were starting to take notice, considering them a form of gambling. This controversy caused the industry to largely shift away from luck-based microtransactions and toward Battle Passes instead.
  • VOEZ, a Rhythm Game originally released on iOS and Android, was ported to the Nintendo Switch in 2017, as an early title for the platform. The porting team took advantage of the system's capacitive touchscreen to replicate the gameplay of the mobile original on a more traditional game platform.note  Notably, it was also one of the few Switch games to strictly be playable in undocked modes only, which caused a lot of backlash from Switch owners (in part due to a lot of game journalism outlets heavily publicizing it as "that game that can't be played in TV Mode"), especially those who only used their Switches in TV Mode (i.e. like a traditional video game console). The game would later get an update that includes an alternative control style that uses the Joy-Cons or other traditional controller, and then Nintendo implemented a mandate that all other games with touchscreen-based controls must also have traditional controller alternative schemes. Other Switch ports of mobile rhythm games, like Deemo and Arcaea would follow suit. As a non-rhythm game example, the Etrian Odyssey HD trilogy, which consists of ports of the orignal three Nintendo DS Etrian Odyssey games that are known for using the DS's touchscreen for map-making, allows the map to be drawn using buttons as an alternative to the touchscreennote . In short, the VOEZ controversy caused Nintendo to put an end to touchscreen-requiring games after the DS, Nintendo 3DS, and (to a lesser extent) the Wii U had so many of them.

    Western Animation 
  • invoked A Charlie Brown Christmas: Aluminum Christmas trees were a popular trend in the late '50s and the first half of the '60s. Their depiction here as a symbol of soulless holiday commercialism helped kill their popularity. The special even inspired a trope on this site, which defines something that sounds fictional, but actually isn't.
  • Because of the negative reception of the eponymous show it attempted to bring into the U.S., the PBS Kids version of Caillou killed off framing devices to sandwich foreign shows together in order to make them more marketable to Americans, as no show of this sort has been attempted since.
  • The monster successes of shows like PAW Patrol and Doc McStuffins has mostly ended the use of Fake Interactivity in preschool shows that Blue's Clues and Dora the Explorer made popular. Now, most preschool-aimed content tries to teach kids lessons without faking interactivity. A research study done by Disney in 2010 provides further insight into why this is the case. Before the Disney Junior block was conceived, the company surveyed parents and asked them what they wanted to see in the shows their kids watched. Most parents wanted their kids to watch stories that would make them happy and that they could tell back to their parents, a change most likely resulting from the rise of tablet and smartphone apps teaching preschool concepts. In comparison, when Disney conducted the same survey five years prior, parents wanted their children to learn educational concepts from these shows.
  • The fall of animated TV shows made to promote celebrities, the Children's Television Act of 1990 (which killed the Merchandise-Driven cartoons that were prominent in the 80s), and changing tastes would eventually deliver the coup de grâce for the Saturday-Morning Cartoon block. The rise of kid-oriented channels on cable such as Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, which had original, creator-driven cartoons that were shown on every day of the week instead of just on Saturdays only accelerated this trend by the 2000s. After the Nick on CBS block ended in 2006, Saturday morning cartoons on network television became strictly edutainment fodder with the exception of FOX's 4KidsTV and the children's blocks on The CW before dying out entirely in 2016 in favor of cheap-to-produce live-action edutainment shows that exploit loopholes to allow for product placement and more advertising than would otherwise be allowed.
  • The success of Teen Titans Go! prompted Cartoon Network to create more Denser and Wackier reboots of their own action-based shows like The Powerpuff Girls (2016) and Ben 10 (2016), but this trend came to an end following the release of ThunderCats Roar, a reboot of the Thundercats franchise that was met with a negative reception from both Thundercats fans and cartoon fans tired of CN rehashing the same formula popularized by Teen Titans Go! as well being an overall ratings failure among general audiences, lasting only a single season while the other reboots received more than one. Since Roar's failure, Cartoon Network has never given the green light to any other reboot of this caliber, with only Go! holding out due to being Adored by the Network (detailed more in this page).
  • The runaway success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987) gave rise to a whole genre of cartoons starring a team of mutants or Funny Animal heroes and accompanying toylines, resulting in Bucky O'Hare and the Toad Wars! (1991), Toxic Crusaders (1991), Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa (1992), Biker Mice from Mars (1993), Street Sharks (1994), and Extreme Dinosaurs (1997). The original TMNT cartoon was such a successful Long-Runner (lasting till 1996!) that after its cancellation (which was due to more serious and melodramatic superhero cartoons like X-Men: The Animated Series and Batman: The Animated Series making the campy TMNT cartoon seem like an outdated joke in comparison; the series itself tried to adapt to this trend with the "Red Skies" seasons, but ratings continued to go down the toilet until it was cancelled), the concept of a Funny Animal or Uplifted Animal hero team mostly went with it, with only future TMNT adaptations managing to enter the mainstream since then.

    Other 
  • Nova Spektrum in Lillestrøm, Norway used to host Christmas-themed trade fairs like JuleExpo, which was held for the last time in 2014. The next year, newcomer Oslo Christmas Show turned up to replace it, but was poorly received because it had much less to offer than JuleExpo. They responded to the negative feedback by saying they'd try to do better next time, but nothing ever materialized, and no other Christmas-themed trade fair has been held at Nova Spektrum since.
  • Referenced in the The Angry Video Game Nerd review of Star Wars: Masters of Teräs Käsi, where he blames the game for the lack of Star Wars fighting games, remarking it was so bad that nobody else was ever willing to try making another Star Wars game in the genre despite the franchise being, in theory, an excellent fit for it.
  • Like the Nintendo DS example above, the era of the 1990s to the mid-2000s was a time before internet-accessible smartphones became widespread. As such, there was a "multimedia" craze, where CD-ROM titles featuring literature, cookbooks, horoscopes, language tutors, fitness trainers, encyclopedias, and even ones that teach the user to quit smoking could be easily found in disc stores. By the time the late 2000s rolled around, internet access became increasingly commonplace, and such topics can be found for free on the world wide web. Today, such multimedia titles are seen as curiosities at best, encapsulating the golden era of the CD and DVD.
  • The idea of a "World's Fair" isn't dead — ever since the successful Expo 2000 in Hanover, Germany, the Bureau International des Expositions has held a new one every five years (with 2010's Shanghai Expo breaking attendance records). But the idea of a World's Fair in the United States died with the disastrous 1984 Louisiana World Exposition in New Orleans, the first and only time that a World's Fair declared bankruptcy before it closed. Conceived by the state and city governments as a way to regenerate the downtown area, tourist turnout was far below expectations and the state wound up with a $100 million debt. There were a multitude of reasons why: For one, it happened too soon after the 1982 World's Fair in Knoxville, and many Southerners had already attended the Tennessee fair. Two, it was held in the middle of the famously humid South Louisiana summer, and the fair had to compete for tourism with the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. Three, tickets were too expensive for most residents (especially in the area where it was held, which was and still is a low-income black neighborhood). And four, the opening of EPCOT at Disney World, which was promoted as "a permanent World's Fair", took away the glamour of having a temporary World's Fair every few years. Indeed, many visitors felt that the New Orleans Expo felt more like a cheap theme park than the actual theme park! Following the ending of the fair (which was running so much debt that the city had to ask for federal bailout money just to keep paying fairground staff), an attempt at a 1992 World's Fair in Chicago was cancelled, and the U.S. hasn't hosted a World's Fair ever since. (Indeed, the U.S. was actually suspended from the BIE from 2001 to 2017 after Congress stopped paying their dues to the organization, and while they've since rejoined, the Bureau isn't in a hurry to give them another chance.)

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