Seinfeld Is Unfunny/Film


 * Ace Ventura: Pet Detective and Happy Gilmore: It seems hard to believe that movies such as these were actually considered raunchy, filthy films when first released in 1994 and 1995. Today, they seem pretty tame compared to most comedy films being released.
 * Airplane! was originally an intentionally corny, funny comedy, and was a huge hit in its time. However, its corny style of humor has been imitated and parodied so many times (often poorly) since that today it may be more likely to be seen as the bad kind of corny humor than the good kind.
 * On that note, up until 1980 Leslie Nielsen was a respected dramatic actor, and the whole joke with his character was seeing him bring his usual gravitas to this kind of material. And of course, afterward his career took a hard right turn into doing nothing but these kinds of films, until they completely eclipsed his public image.
 * This is the case with so many actors from that film: Robert Stack, Lloyd Bridges, Peter Graves, etc.
 * The film Wrongfully Accused can also suffer from this. At the time, it was actually part of the joke that the film cast such a wide net in the material that it parodied. Nowadays, every parody movie is like that, and the worse for it.
 * Alien and its sequels. It looks like a clichéd movie, but invented or popularized most of the relevant tropes for that genre (though even at the time it was intended to do little more than ride the coattails of Star Wars), as well as propagated its xenomorph alien designs throughout many other films.
 * However, the fact that Alien still looks excellent today (great sets, lighting and practical effects), has great pacing and has seven good actors wearing non-dated clothing reduces its potential to underwhelm younger audiences. Aliens actually feels slightly more dated, despite having been made seven years later.
 * An interesting move on the part of the producers of Alien, that served to heighten the tension at the end, but which cannot work now, was . It is difficult now to realize that John Hurt was probably the biggest box office name in Alien, having just done I, Claudius for the BBC, and the film Midnight Express, and that both Veronica Cartwright, who had been acting since childhood (she was Violet Rutherford on Leave It to Beaver, and the sister of Angela Cartwright of Lost in Space), and Harry Dean Stanton, a well-established character, were both much more bankable than Sigourney Weaver, who, at the time, was unknown. She had a single film credit, other than a brief role in Annie Hall, and a few TV appearances. Alien made her career. So, at the end, when   However, now, in the 21st century, she is Sigourney Weaver, Sigourney Weaver kicks ass, and the film could not end any other way. Knowing that she appears in all of the movies as the main hero also helps kill any sense of fear for her safety.
 * Alfred Hitchcock. This trope could just as easily be called Hitchcock Is Not Suspenseful. Anything of his was the defining work in suspense when originally produced, but looks sad and overdone now that it's been copied to death.
 * Alfred Hitchcock's suspense films have had much of the suspense removed due to the rampant parody. On the other hand, the Rear Window trope has been parodied so many times that some viewers are taken by surprise when the old film plays it straight instead of turning into a case of Stab the Salad.
 * Psycho was groundbreaking for its time by essentially founding the slasher film genre, but now the infamous shower scene has been referenced (and often parodied) by other horror films to the point of saturation. When it was first released, the shower scene was an enormous shock - the idea of killing off the character played by the best-known actress in the film one-third of the way into the running time was quite literally unheard of.
 * American Beauty inspired so many other "dark heart of suburbia" dramas that the film has lost a lot of its initial impact. In particular, the "dancing paper bag" scene has been parodied/taken out of context so many times that the original sequence can come off as Narm.
 * Interestingly enough, American Beauty is quite similar to The Ice Storm, another "dark heart of suburbia" movie, which came out two years before American Beauty. (The similarities between the two might be coincidental, though, as Alan Ball wrote the original version of The American Beauty's script before The Ice Storm – or the novel of the same name it was based on – had been released.) This would make The Ice Storm the original Seinfeld Is Unfunny example, except that The American Beauty is much better known, and therefore the likelier inspiration for the various films that followed.
 * Animal House was the Trope Maker or Trope Codifier of many of the Frat House comedies that followed it. Nowadays, it seems horribly cliched, but it was doing a lot of these jokes for the first time. The falling-ladder scene has little effect for the children of Generations X and Y, who saw it copied in countless cartoons and teen movies.
 * Tim Burton's 1989 take on Batman was considered dark and edgy at its time: perhaps not compared to the Batman comic books of that era, which influenced it, but certainly compared to the campy 1960s live action show or the 1970s animated Superfriends, which was how most of the public was familiar with Batman. Now it seems tame, especially when compared with the Christopher Nolan films.
 * The Birth of a Nation invented or popularized many features that are standard in modern cinema, such as cutting between different locations to increase suspense during action scenes. Someone watching the film nowadays won't think twice about these innovations, while the blatant racism and hero-worship of the Klan are unfortunately a lot more noticeable.
 * Blade. The rebirth of the Superhero movie genre also comes to mind. Most people credit X-Men's smooth cinematography and darker take...and completely forget that X-Men borrows heavily from it. At the time it was a sleeper hit and probably the film that truly revitalized the comic book movie market after Batman and Robin single-handedly killed it.
 * Blade Runner popularised a number of sci-fi conventions, and as a consequence, the impact can be somewhat lost on audiences who have already seen the many imitators and their intellectual androids, ugly dystopias and drunken, future cops.
 * Blazing Saddles is rumored to be one of the first, perhaps the first film ever, to include a fart joke. Take a wild guess.
 * Broadway Melody, the second film to win the Academy Award for Best Picture and the first all-sound musical, was a huge deal when it was released. However, its look at the goings-on on a Broadway musical became clichéd by the mid-'40s, thanks to nearly every movie about Broadway copying its basic set-up. Add the fact that as it was the first movie musical, Hollywood still had a lot to learn about blocking musical numbers to avoid looking 'stagey'.
 * Bullitt was considered the definitive car chase movie in its time, but was soon supplanted by The French Connection and others.
 * The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. A lot of stuff regarding it. Many modern audiences have never even heard of it, but they've certainly felt its presence through imitation.
 * Pretty much any film that regularly appears in "greatest films of all time" lists (Citizen Kane, Battleship Potemkin, The Godfather, 8 1/2, etc.) is an acceptable target for the "Seinfeld is unfunny" treatment, especially since being considered one of the greatest films can really disappoint quite a few people who watch it and expect it to live up to the criteria:
 * More than a few critics and film scholars regard Citizen Kane as bloated, pompous and self-indulgent, although they don't dispute that it pioneered much of the visual vocabulary and storytelling techniques of cinema, or how it was trying quite a few new styles of film-making for the time.
 * This was the prevailing opinion of Casablanca at the time of its release. All involved with the production viewed it as just another picture, albeit one with a slightly better-than-average cast. In a documentary about the making of the film, one of the technicians said something to the effect of "We were responsible to the studio for making fifty movies a year. Casablanca was just number thirty-eight." The talk of it being a great American film didn't really begin until a couple of years after Bogart's death.
 * The ending of Carrie is often ranked up there with some of the greatest scary moments of all time and many people wonder why without knowing that it was the first horror film to have a shock ending. Nowadays it's practically expected to shock the audience one last time and the scene in Carrie doesn't seem so scary anymore. In a subversion, the shock ending of Friday the 13 th which blatantly ripped off Carrie is still considered quite scary to modern audiences.
 * Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. Silent comedians like them were hilarious for a very long time. Chaplin's tramp was subversive and constantly undermined any authority figure he came into contact with, including the police, who arrested him pretty frequently. Nowadays many people don't find Chaplin that funny, but he pioneered many jokes, situations, gags in comedy films and in comparison with many other slapstick comedians of his time his work was groundbreaking.
 * A Clockwork Orange and the fight scene in question. Back then it was violent, nowadays it comes off as a comedic fight scene. If it was done in today's definition, the violence will be a lot more bloody.
 * Cracked.com's list of "5 annoying trends that make every movie look the same" shows us how once clever and innovative cinematography techniques have been copied to death in the past 10 years to the point that they're almost in every movie.
 * Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the first truly successful (in western markets) Chinese Wuxia (periodic Kung-Fu) movie, suffers from this. It's much harder to screen such a movie nowadays because people can't look past the "tacky" kung-fu with its flying about and running on walls - which has been imitated repeatedly in many "Hollywoodian" action films for the past 10 years. Of course, it wasn't original per-se, as Wuxia films were already seen as tacky in their homeland (China), but in the west this was regarded as a new phenomenon and therefore taken with more respect. It won an Academy Award and still lingers around the middle of the IMDB's Top 250 list - and for many good reasons other than the dazzling fights.
 * Daredevil, the 2003 film, despite its shortcomings and disappointing box office performance, it was praised as a superhero movie done right, compared to each of its predecessors which gives out a varying degree of surrealism throughout each scene as if telling the viewers that they should never forget that they're watching a superhero movie. Viewers who enjoyed watching Daredevil in the theaters noted that certain scenes made you almost forget that this is a superhero movie. This apparently became a measuring stick for the superhero movies that followed, which used higher levels of realism, thus overshadowing this movie that, so to speak, took a dare.
 * Debbie Does Dallas. To modern eyes it watches like a porno Cliché Storm. That's because it was more or less the comedic template for the porn industry. Likewise, The Devil In Miss Jones for more artsy-fartsy dramatic fare.
 * Les Diaboliques was widely considered to have one of the most shocking original twist endings of all time when it was first released. But after fifty years of films copying this ending, modern audiences are often able to predict what will happen.
 * Die Hard. Eleven years before The Matrix, this movie revolutionized action movies to a similar degree, with a shift toward grittier and more realistic action, heroes that suffer from human weakness and distinct character faults, and a solid blend of humor, drama, and action. It reached the point when movies could be sold by the phrase "Die Hard on an X"—for example, Speed is "Die Hard on a bus."
 * Dirty Harry and The French Connection are notably responsible for many tropes relating to the Cowboy Cop and the genre in general.
 * La Dolce Vita is a film where the "hero" is an amoral Casanova Wannabe journalist type who hangs around lots of decadent celebrity parties and can't get no satisfaction. Precisely what made it seem so racy and different in 1960 and so long and ordinary now. Indeed, film buffs were complaining about how tame it had become as early as the '70s.
 * Fritz Lang. Ditto the sci-fi tropes in Metropolis. And the criminal mastermind/underworld tropes in the Dr. Mabuse films. And the backwards countdown in Woman in the Moon. In fact, this might as well be called Fritz Lang Is Unoriginal.
 * By the way, the countdown didn't just influence movies. NASA stole it too! (Either from Fritz Lang, or more likely from Irving Pichel's Destination Moon, which was mainstream at the time NASA was being founded.)
 * Godzilla, the original 1954 film. At the time of its release, it was groundbreaking for the Japanese film industry. Many people today ridicule older Godzilla films for the reason of them being "Man-in-suit!!!" made films. What they fail to realize is that had it not been for suitmation, most special effects as we know them today (such as motion capture CG, which utilizes similar techniques to suitmation) would not exist. This is despite the fact that Godzilla actually contained very few suitmation shots. Like other films at the time, it mostly made use of stop-motion and clever editing. (Although later films in the series were almost entirely suitmation.) That said, the original may still shock modern audiences who expect something akin to the Lighter and Softer versions of the creature that were often aimed at children.
 * Even though the film's quantity of violent scenes was actually fairly low even in 1999, Fight Club was very controversial at the time for its brutally realistic depiction of hand-to-hand fighting. More significantly, it was controversial for its morally ambiguous ending, which was virtually unheard of at the time, since most movies ended with the main character saving the world or learning a morally satisfying lesson of some sort. Since then, far more violent and morally-questionable movies and television shows have been released, so Fight Club's general theme actually seems pretty run of the mill today.
 * Great Expectations. Modern viewers watching David Lean's adaptation of the Dickens classic might roll their eyes upon seeing Magwitch pop out of the frame at Pip in the graveyard like a cheap horror movie jack-in-the-box, genuinely startling though it is—because they won't know that this was the first time that ever happened in a movie. The same thing might occur with  in Wait Until Dark. It shocked everyone at the time because they weren't used to , but today most people will likely see it coming.
 * Halloween seems today a clichéd, formulaic slasher film. But it created the clichés and established the formulas.
 * See also: Scream. It Lampshaded every horror movie cliche while still paying loving tribute, creating a tongue-in-cheek slasher/comedy genre that has been aped multiple times over nearly two decades.
 * When House Of Games came out in 1987, the idea that was still relatively fresh. (Though similar plots had been used in earlier movies, such as .) Since then it has become such an established cliche of con artist movies that the viewers pretty much expect it, which is why   is much easier to guess now than it was in 1987.
 * The Italian Job. If you were to see it today, you'd think it was a fairly standard heist movie with a very literal Cliff Hanger. In 1969, however, it was positively groundbreaking. The chase scene with the Mini Coopers in Turin was the first of its kind on film. The focus on the crime, while not original, was highly unusual. The cliffhanger at the end was due to the film codes of the era, where criminals couldn't be shown succeeding.
 * Jackie Chan. Through the 1970s, Chinese martial arts films were a deadly serious business, with grim plots and frequent Downer Endings probably best known today from the films of Bruce Lee. Then Chan came along with the idea that you could make a martial arts film that was supposed to be fun, or even a straight-out comedy. Chan's autobiography gives a fascinating view of just how powerful a mindset he was up against when making his early comedy films like Half A Loaf Of Kung Fu, with the public at large pretty much calling him a heretic. Today, these films can be pretty disappointing to people used to his later works where he felt much more comfortable throwing in jokes and wild stunts.
 * James Bond. Many, many of the things from this series. Some Bond tropes became so pervasive that most people accept them as natural parts of life without thinking about it. "The Name Is Bond, James Bond" is a good example. It had become so overdone that in the Continuity Reboot, they made sure to save it until the very end and to make it a Crowning Moment of Awesome instead of just tossing it in every time James met someone new.
 * When the movies starring Sean Connery first appeared in the early '60s they were the sexiest mainstream movies at the time. Coming out of the uptight Fifties and years before the sexual revolution in the later part of the decade Bond was incredibly risque. The credits sequences alone were hotter than most movies during that period. The first, Dr. No premiered in 1962 and made a big impact with Bond having casual sex and that famous -- and much-parodied -- scene of Ursula Andress coming out of the surf in the white bikini. From Russia with Love had a Cat Fight between two scantily clad gypsy girls. Goldfinger one Bond girl was found dead naked and covered in gold paint, and another was named "Pussy" Galore! Now while Bond still does sleep with many women in each movie, all that's ever shown is the lead-in kiss and then cut to the next morning. As the years have gone by and sex scenes become more graphic, the seduction scenes in even the more recent Bond movies seem almost chaste. Also all the sexual innuendo and jokes that were part of Bond from the beginning now seems corny.
 * Bond was even receiving this treatment by the late '60s, thanks largely to countless parodies and ripoffs. When reviewing You Only Live Twice in 1967, a critic for Time magazine not-so-ironically compared the Bond franchise to that of Frankenstein, saying that "there have been so many flamboyant imitations that the original looks like a copy".
 * With Daniel Craig's portrayal of Bond, it's difficult to appreciate Timothy Dalton's portrayal in The Living Daylights and Licence to Kill.
 * Jaws: The so awesome, but now sadly so clichéd use of the movie's theme.
 * The manner in which the suspense is handled also seems rather dated these days - rather than the explosive shocks that the modern genre favours (compare the manner in which the shark appears in Jaws to how it does in Deep Blue Sea or Shark Night), the shark rises out of the water more sedately and realistically. Coupled with a model that has not aged well, it can be jarring to modern in audiences.
 * John Hughes. When he was making teen films, it was rather rare for there to be films based purely on teenagers and their inner angst. It was actually unique to take the usual school archetypes and see what makes them tick. Nowadays, with at least three generations of teen dramas that have replicated or even advanced from the analysis of such films as Sixteen Candles or The Breakfast Club, Hughes's bite doesn't seem as sharp. Ferris Bueller doesn't seem much like a suave troublemaker when compared to recent characters such as Tony Stonem.
 * John Carter has been smacked with this badly. The original book series was the Ur Example, Trope Maker or Trope Codifier for a truly staggering number of fantasy and science-fiction tropes, and in fact established the Planetary Romance genre. The new film gets accused (even by film critics, who really should know better) of being a ripoff of Avatar, among other films that the original books directly or indirectly inspired.
 * John Woo. In similar vein to Jackie Chan, back in the 80s some guy from China created an entirely new genre labeled 'Gun Fu/gun ballet' and similar. He pioneered the idea of choreographed two-gun action scenes, popularized slow motion gun fight sequences in the west, and generally brought Guns Akimbo style into the mainstream. Nowadays films like Face Off and |Mission Impossible II are criticized as copying The Matrix style of gun fights (even though Face/Off is older). Hang on, who was that guy who the Wachowskis were hugely influenced by when making The Matrix?
 * Jurassic Park. First, this is often considered the movie that introduced CGI creature effects to it's audiences on such a large scale. Before this time, CGI in movies tended to be one or two scenes out of a whole two-hour movie due to it's expensive nature, with the rest being taken up by puppetry, stop motion animation and miniature work. JP was one of the first movies to use CGI in the majority of it's creature special effects. Now-days, with films like Avatar and Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow being more CGI than real, the effects look dated and jarring (though it still holds up better than in even earlier films, such as The Abyss). Second, this was one of the very first feature films with a wide audience to do away with a lot of old dinosaur tropes, having bipedal dinosaurs stand horizontally and having them act more like birds and less like lizards. However, the film gets hit by a bad case of Science Marches On. A dinosaur fan might go back to watching that movie and laugh (or cry) at the errors.
 * King Kong (the 1933 original). At the time of its release, people thought it had the greatest effects in film. Now, with almost 80 years of technology advancement, two remakes of which used it, the power is somewhat lost on most people.
 * On the other hand, the trope is reversed if you try to view Kong as a typical 1930s film. Most aficionados of Thirties cinema are more familiar with the mid-'30s and late '30s classics, made after the Hays Code against portrayals of sex and violence in American movies began to be officially enforced. As such, it can be shocking for modern-day viewers to see things like Fay Wray being stripped nearly nude by Kong and blood gushing from the bodies of the dinosaurs after Kong kills them. Indeed, quite a few viewers of pre-Code (1930-1934) Hollywood films have felt their jaws hit the floor at what they are seeing.
 * Koyaanisqatsi. Slow Motion/Time Lapse footage of things like factories and traffic and clouds, put to music, was a new thing in the early '80s.
 * The Longest Yard (1974) or Slap Shot (1977). Anyone who sat down and watched these today would immediately groan. "Oh no, not another scrappy underdog team struggling to overcome their personal issues as emphasized by their chosen sport and antagonized by a wealthier, better-equipped team of entitled (but excessively-pressured) jerks. I can't wait for the second act, when the team falls apart due to the captain's arrogance/the coach's inadequacy/the stars' rivalry and, in order to fix everything and win the Big Game, the team needs to call in a ringer/go on a vacation/listen to a Rousing Speech/use the Power of Friendship."
 * The Lost Boys, when it first came out, was the first of its kind: An often very scary horror film that was also willing to make light of its roots. In a time when vampires were still commonly seen as Hammer Horror Christopher Lee types, Joel Schumacher showed them as grotesque, sadistic monsters. Since then shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and True Blood have gone much further with the concepts—even adopting phrases like "vamp out"—leaving the film remembered for its retro cast, funky soundtrack, and Jack Bauer as a vampire.
 * In addition, Schumacher helped to birth another oft-imitated vampire trope: the "teen" vampire.
 * M. It's gotten to the point where a criminal saying "It's not my fault: I'm crazy!" is a tired and annoying cliché.
 * Mad Max 2 aka The Road Warrior. Pretty much every post-nuke movie since has featured crazed marauders on motorcycles and dune buggies fighting it out in the desert.
 * The Magician, a silent film from 1926 featuring a Mad Scientist Hypnotist. At the end of the movie, when the Big Bad's castle blew up, you may think to yourself, "Hey, they stole that scene from Bride of Frankenstein", but then you realize that Bride wouldn't be made for another nine years. While The Magician may seem like a hopeless Cliché Storm now, (borrowing liberally as it does from Mary Shelley, Svengali, and Victorian Melodrama,) it did go on to influence many horror films that were to follow in the coming years.
 * The Matrix, heavily influenced by anime, religion and the western, caused such a major shift in culture—and Special Effects, with the proliferation of Wire Fu and Bullet Time in action sequences—that it was imitated constantly. The "bullet dodge" scene in which Neo bends over backwards to avoid being hit by the Agent's shots has been parodied to death, such that we don't realise (or remember) that it actually was cool for the time. Interestingly enough, it also suffered from Older Than You Think when it premiered to a young audience who were not aware of the multitude of Eastern and literary influences in the movie.
 * Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead and Day of the Dead George Romero's original "Dead" trilogy is credited with pretty much inventing, or at least solidifying, the modern Zombie Apocalypse story: the Dead rising to feast on the flesh of the living, the total breakdown of society as a result, a small group of humans forced to work together to survive but generally failing due to Humans Are the Real Monsters, and fairly bleak endings stressing the Inferred Holocaust, etc. Many of these elements have been imitated so closely by imitators that they have gone on to become clichés of the genre, meaning that later viewers will often view these movies as being derivative themselves.
 * Porky's once had a reputation for being a definitive sex-comedy, with its "shower scene" having a memetic level of hotness ascribed to it. In retrospect though, the film isn't really that funny or that sexy. This is strange as some of its contemporaries (eg Animal House) have held up very well.
 * The Poseidon Adventure. Just try to watch a Disaster Movie and not spot any scene, plot, or subplot that hasn't either been spoofed, homaged, recreated, or otherwise by even any action movie. It can be quite hard to believe that this movie was so novel back in the 70s (even today, it's an unlikely premise), or that several scenes in The Towering Inferno had people on the edge of their seats. Heck, nowadays, people can probably point out how the elevator scene in The Towering Inferno is actually quite silly.
 * Pulp Fiction: It's heavy use of Lampshade Hanging and non-sequential storytelling were considered revolutionary at the time it was released in The Nineties.
 * Rashomon. Rashomon Style is always exactly the same trope they used in that other damn movie.
 * Revenge of the Nerds. Being a nerd used to mean something. Originally seen as the first movie that was made specifically with the intention to empower nerds. Now the movie is seen as a weak analogy of nerdy social ostracism to the genuine prejudice faced by racial minorities. One could understand questioning how the films most memorable characters (the openly gay Lamar and the pothead pervert Booger) actually qualify as nerds. With passing time, it's been realized that "true nerds" (as opposed to the caricatures in this film) are still not considered any cooler. All of the so-called cool nerds were never true nerds to begin with.
 * In almost a bizarre case of Life Imitates Art and thanks to computers and the internet becoming not only mainstream but a way of life, it's this caricature of "nerds" that 'has' become cool. Unfortunately for "true nerds", this caricature is closer to being Hollywood Nerd (Type 1) than an accurate depiction. The entire image of a shy, skinny pale guy with glasses doing cool things has started to get a bit of romanticism attached to it; however, even in those cases, those with that view fail to realize that the reason why a nerd can do all these cool things, is because of the sheer amount of time spent on learning and working on those things.
 * Saturday Night Fever. There was a time when this movie's dance with the diagonal pointing was actually a new idea.
 * Sin City, at least in regards to its coloring techniques, quite possibly might be the fastest film to ever gain this status. At the time it was released, it was hailed for the unique way it isolated certain colors while the rest remained in black and white. With how fast technology has moved, with every new film trying to color itself in an eye-catching way to draw the audience in, it seems almost bland not even a decade after first being shown in theaters.
 * It was also one of the first movies to ever be shot with fully-rendered CGI backdrops alongside Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow and The Immortal. These days, the effect is no longer as exciting as it once was.
 * Sleeping Beauty was a rather dark film at the time of its release. So was The Black Cauldron. Of course, it probably doesn't help that people tended to think adults would have no business watching that stuff and still do.
 * Not to mention the witch Maleficent screaming "HELL!" (albeit not in a profane context, and with the word mostly drowned out by a fiery explosion). In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, released 37 years later, there is an entire song entitled "Hellfire," and in it the h-word is sung several times.
 * John Ford's Stagecoach, to paraphrase the Halloween review above, "seems today a clichéd, formulaic Western film. But it created the clichés and established the formulas."
 * Star Wars both exhibits and inverts this:
 * After having seen Luke, I Am Your Father parodied a million times, experienced the Expanded Universe, and gotten to see villains like Exar Kun or Darth Revan, and particularly after the two-plus decades of pulp sci-fi blockbusters that the film (directly or indirectly) inspired, coupled with the largely underwhelming response to the prequel trilogy, how many younger people are still able to watch the original movies completely seriously and see Darth Vader as an awesome villain?
 * In the other direction, the original trilogy in particular had this effect on many of the older Space Opera tales that inspired them, such as Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers. It didn't help that both of those series were revived (the former as a movie, the latter as a TV series) to cash in on the post-Star Wars sci-fi craze.
 * Superman: The Movie was the first superhero blockbuster and its sequel, Superman II set the template for a superhero sequel. And yet, not only is it likely that younger audiences might find them boring, but many fans of the modern comics and animations blame the films—which create "the Donnerverse"—for the entirety of Superman's hatedom.
 * Documentary The Thin Blue Line was one of the first documentaries to actually dare to produce reenactments in order to provide greater information about events, not to include narration, and not to identify people speaking on camera. While revolutionary in its time (and, more importantly, its effect of having the case reviewed and eventually overturned) even the most basic of television non-fiction programs have since adopted many of its techniques making it seem trifling to some modern audiences. An acknowledged groundbreaking classic of the genre is now made to seem almost amateurish.
 * The twist in Orson Welles' The Third Man has been done so many times that it's impossible for a remotely film-savvy person to watch it today and not see it coming from very early on, which is a shame because it's nonetheless a well conceived and sharply written film. In these days when writers feel the need to constantly pull the rug out from under the viewers, such a twist is usually just one part of a Gambit Pile-Up.
 * Tron introduced the concept of cyberspace (a virtual world) to most audience members for the first time, something that subsequently became entirely routine, such that by the time of The Matrix (1999), it only needed to be explained THAT Neo was inside a virtual world, not what a virtual world was. Tron's use of computer-generated graphics was revolutionary, and served as midwife to the modern visual effects industry. The film even helped popularize the word "user" for a computer operator. (There was no consensus of terminology at the time; the word "computerist" was another popular term.)
 * 3-D Films. For many early ones the plot was poor or non-existent, and many scenes were shoehorned in just to show off the 3D. They wouldn't be at all worth watching in 2D, and those flaws are jarring now that 3D is becoming popular again after Avatar. Thankfully, a lot of modern 3D movies tend to be quality on their own rights, since 2D versions are often released alongside. Even Avatar, the trend-setter for modern 3D Films, is perfectly enjoyable without 3D.
 * 2001: A Space Odyssey: Similar to Jaws the so awesome, but now sadly so clichéd uses of Also Sprach Zarathustra.
 * One would be hard-pressed to find a scene from any Stanley Kubrick film that hasn't been parodied/homaged to death.
 * The famous "Star Gate" sequence, in which brilliant colors flash past the screen as the main character travels deep into space, required some extremely tricky cinematography and caused jaws to drop when the film was released in 1968. Thanks to the incredible advances in special effects since then, modern audiences often find the scene rather boring (not helped by the fact that sequence goes on for something like ten minutes).
 * WarGames. More than half the world's hacker films are sons of this one. Yet, some of those who see it now thinks "another hacker-boy-saving-the-world movie". No, he was the hacker boy who saved the world. (After nearly precipitating its destruction. Way to save on major characters.) It doesn't help that much of what gave WarGames its punch is fading from collective memory. Having a plucky young hacker almost precipitate World War III was an allegory on how nonsensical the Cold War was to the average person.
 * The Rambo movies seem almost cliched by this point, having seen all the action movies inspired by them.
 * The second film did copy an arealdy common cliche. Gene Hackman had made Uncommon Valor, which saw release in 1983, two years before Rambo First Blood Part II. (This film in turn resembles J.C. Pollock's novel Mission: MIA and a point in The Shadow Unmasks). Tom Laughlin introduced Vietnam Veteran Billy Jack in the late 1960's. Don Pendleton introduced Mack Bolan in 1969.
 * The irony of the sequels is that they were made in response to the shift in the way that action movies were made in the 80's. First Blood was nothing like them, and in fact is more of a thriller than an out-and-out action movie. The creators of Rambo First Blood Part II and Rambo III found themselves competing with films like Commando and Predator and tailored their movies according to audience expectations. It can be odd to see Rambo as a trauma-wracked veteran on the run from an unjust pursuit, rather than the We Do the Impossible One-Man Army he became in later movies.
 * Disney and Dreamworks Animation have an... odd history.
 * When the first Shrek movie came out, it was considered a witty and refreshing break from the then-formulaic Disney Animated Canon fare, despite the fact that, at that point, Disney was going through a different and experimental period. The freshness still hadn't eroded by the time of Shrek 2, which was considered an Even Better Sequel by many. However, by the time of Shrek the Third, Dreamworks Animation - and their competitors - had ran the formula into the ground harder than Disney's "Disneyfied musical adaptations of mythology/classic literature with spunky heroines and goofy sidekicks" did in the 90's. To add insult to injury, most of the Disney |films criticized for following their formula have been Vindicated by History by 90's kids, and the experimental films often became Cult Classics. Shrek, on the other hand, is now often blamed for killing traditional animated films and starting a trend of CGI films that overdo Anachronism Stew and Parental Bonus to painful levels, such as Hoodwinked, Happily N'Ever After and Disney's disastrous Chicken Little.