Totally Radical



""Fellows, that note's a phony! No teen-ager would use the word 'music' in a hip language message... they'd use 'jive!'""

- Robin, using his with-it knowledge of teen lingo to analyze a clue in the very first Teen Titans story.

Make a tubular description of Totally Radical on this gnarly page, dude.

Most television shows for audiences younger than 25 are written by people significantly older than the target demographic. On its own, this is all right. It is when these writers attempt to co-opt the culture of the younger generation that the trouble starts.

The biggest problem is slang. Either it's out of date (usually from the writers' own childhood), or it's awkwardly misused. Either way, there will be gnarly, bitchin' amounts of it, slathered over the dialogue like sauce over a particularly inept casserole.

Also problematic is what kids do in their leisure time. This can be particularly painful if they're attempting An Aesop about something that's recently become popular. Usually, that involves many stereotypical "bad boy" or "cool" activities, such as videogames, surfing, motorcycling, or fixing cars; a recent example would be grossly stereotypical "Sk8r Boiz". However, even your standard episode won't probably show video games (for instance) as anything but the back of a TV with some Pac-Man-esque beeps and boops played over the soundtrack.

This also applies to commercials focused on kids, although they'll at least be knowledgeable about the product they're selling.

Totally.

Of course, this can be done well. Most producers figure, though, that kids can't tell good writing from bad (Viewers are Morons, after all), and throw whatever out there. Most of the time, these producers are simply playing into loose cultural stereotypes, probably not realizing that many real life teens have no involvement or interest in what's perceived as "hip" anyway, so such imagery (even if it's perfectly up-to-date) is of little value to them. Because TV Never Lies, some impressionable viewers even believe it, resulting in Pretty Fly for a White Guy. Buffy-Speak is a common way of avoiding this for those who do care. Another way to avoid the problem is to do it intentionally badly.

Don't forget, you copacetic hepcats, that if a show is trying to be set in a period older than the 80s, the same rules apply.

Shows on the Disney Channel, Nickelodeon (especially the "New" Nick), and Cartoon Network are known for doing this, despite most of them centering around tweens and teenagers. This is usually entwined with the overuse of far-past-neutered euphemisms, like "crud". Badbutt characters often speak this way.

A rich, deep well of Narm, especially when it's a Long Runner's obvious ploy to stay Relevant, Dammit. See also Younger and Hipper, Jive Turkey, Buffy-Speak, Surfer Dude, Valley Girl, Leet Lingo, Xtreme Kool Letterz; this is also a common trait of the Mascot with Attitude and the Hippie Teacher. Get a Load of That Square is a common mockery of this. Contrast with Spock Speak; Little Professor Dialog and Grokking the Horrorshow. A character like this may also be The Nicknamer.

Advertising
"Marge: Yeah, I'll bet there'll be old people talking like young people, like those cell phone commercials everybody hates."
 * The Nineties, in particular, were infamous for using this trope with children's advertising. Around the start of the decade, television advertisers were moving away from the cutesy/sentimental advertisements that dominated children's television for so long and, instead, began using Totally Radical lingo and "EXTREME!!!!!" kids. Your Mileage May Vary with regards to how successful this shift in style was.
 * There's this commercial for the Hardee's Little Thickburger. Presumably it was pulled fairly quickly.
 * An advertisement for the "Slim and Lite" revision of the PSP suggests that players can "put it where they like", which typically means "shove it up their ass". Sony seems to be getting annoyed at their customers.
 * Sony's been particularly bad about this with their PSP advertising. At one point, an incredibly poorly-disguised viral marketing campaign attempting to masquerade as a fan website noted of the PSP, "I'd hit that." Does it even have the right ports for that?
 * Despite trying to win over -- presumably -- the kid demographic, consider how anachronistic the Chuck E. Cheese mascot is with his depiction as a "Sk8r" boy, over a decade after that fad has run its course with young kids. The mascot originally started as a suspendered, straw-hatted barbershop-type performer, appeared in the 1980s as a skateboarding mouse, went out of style, then swerved right back into relevancy when the Sk8r boy image appeared, and is now fading back out of style -- all without any changes ever being made to the character itself. If the owners just wait long enough, maybe it'll come back into style yet again.
 * Their current add campaign has a child badly rapping over the beat to The Cupid Shuffle (which is only ever heard now at weddings alongside The Macarena and The Electric Slide), and then exclaiming that a thousand tickets is "like, a gazillion!"
 * Amp'd Mobile briefly retained a commercial gimmick which involved elderly people talking like teenagers. (One features an old black woman who uses street vernacular and says stuff like "Where you at?"; in another, an old white lady makes frequent usage of "like", "Whatever" and "totally"; apparently, this commercial presumes that old Generation Gap stereotypes will die out, but racial ones never will.) Later referenced on the The Simpsons:

"Bart: Man are you illin'. Lisa: Rappers stopped saying "illin'" twelve years ago. Bart: I'm keeping it real! Lisa: They stopped saying "keeping it real" three years ago. Bart: Mooom! Lisa's dissin' me! Marge: "Dissin'"? Do rappers still say that?"
 * Also parodied in The Simpsons episode "Pranksta Rap", when Bart uses slang words that Lisa (and even Marge) knows aren't used anymore.

"German Guy: Yo, Mike, you vant us to un-pimp zis ting, let me hear you say 'vhat'? Mike: What? Car is launched from trebuchet"
 * Not that Marge can't be guilty of it herself. One episode has her trying to get Maggie to eat her baby food with the help of a sock puppet in Cool Shades who says "Yo-Yo-Yo!" constantly.
 * This Hubba Bubba commercial; note the Alpha Bitch-sounding voice at the closer.
 * This commercial for Cingular. It's been argued that it's intentional irony; this does not prevent it from being very annoying. A later commercial combined it with the "hip grandma". It was parodied with this comic.
 * This commercial for Schick Quattro parodies this and mixes it with Sophisticated As Hell.
 * What happens when a cell-phone advertisement becomes a big hit, but ad execs don't fully get the joke? Apparently, teenage girls talking to one another in textspeak... face-to-face.
 * Parodied in a series of Volkswagen commercials which would end with a grey-haired, thickly accented Peter Stormare "un-pimping" someone's ride...which is a fancy way of saying "trashing it in spectacularly hilarious fashion."

"Click above to find out more about our sponsors and the various hip sites that make WB Online the jammin' place that it is."
 * The Cliff's Notes banner ads, some of which were, at the time of writing, visible on this very site. Among their misinterpretations of textspeak are spelling "who" as "hoo", a Zero Wing reference, and the mystifying term "xcore" (which is possibly "score" spelled with Xtreme Kool Letterz). Xcore sometimes means "hardcore."
 * Gas stations advertising "We got the hooch" after the popular '90s song.
 * EA's initial teaser for Skate 2 announced "We're dropping the deuce." While this can be read as "releasing #2", its slang meaning is "taking a shit". This was possibly intentional, which makes one wonder how they felt about the product.
 * Parodied in an Aim Trimark ad, where some executives, upon being told that their new shoe design is "sick", take most of the commercial to puzzle over whether or not that's a compliment. Then the Aim Trimark guy comes and says that he's not going to invest your money in a company run by these idiots.
 * "It's The Legend of Zelda and it's really rad! Those monsters from Gannon Banned are pretty bad! Octoroks, Tektites and Leevers too, but with your help our hero pulls through!"
 * For the Nintendo Entertainment System: Your parents help you hook it up.
 * While on the topic of Nintendo, their "Play It Loud" campaign was the epitome of this trope. Give The World A Wedgie? Seriously?
 * Most Hot Wheels commercials.
 * A billboard ad for forest fire safety: "Get Your Smokey On". Hmm, should the anti-drug ad on the other side of the sign be nervous?
 * A sign for youth sports that says "Be a Playa". While it obviously was meant to say "Be a player of sports!", what it actually said was "Have promiscuous sex!"
 * Is that the same one with the TV commercial with that cartoon referee? Completely agree. That word does not mean what they think it means.
 * Repeated by an online ad for a US government health campaign here
 * In 1968, Columbia Records ran a notorious ad in Rolling Stone showing a bunch of picket sign-toting young radicals in a jail cell with the caption "But The Man can't bust our music." For extra hilarity, the albums shown in the ad are all Classical Music. (Wendy Carlos' early electronica Switched-On Bach was a bit more far out then.)
 * In a commercial for Lunchables' newest product, "Wrapz", three kids lousily rap about the wrap. Possibly intentional, but still full of fail, and with slang like "A'ight" pronounced "Ah-Ite.".
 * An Australian example for a rather mediocre car combines this with Buffy-Speak, explaining that the Holden Astra "has extra features to an exclamation mark". Um...what?
 * A poster advertising the Slush Puppies sold there. The right side of the poster is a generic image of some Slush Puppie cups, but the left side is in a league of its own. It consists of three open cell phones with text messages on them. They read, in order, "LuVN DA CHiLLLLLLLLLLLL TASTe and FLAVZZZzzzzzzz" "REal FRUIT JUICE ITS GOT VITA C!!!!!!!!" and "GOTTA GET A SLUSH PUPPIE PLUS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
 * Though it might bear mentioning that this one isn't quite as far off the mark as some others (at least in regards to the excessive consonants). No word on whether this speaks worse of the advertisers or "txt literacy" though.
 * The similar Icee cold drink at some point replaced its old bear logo with a snowboarding one, and its current slogan (at least at Burger King franchises that sell it) is "CHILL WITH UR FAV FLAV."
 * Similarly, Big Daddy Pizza posters saying Narmful things like "Every other slice is a sliver", "Wanna Piece of Me?", and "Show Your Hunger Who's Boss".
 * An ad for Progressive seems to be an inversion. Flo, the company's mascot and resident Genki Girl tries helping out an elderly customer who uses outdated slang from the mid 20th Century. Needless to say, she has no idea what he's talking about.
 * There is a German PSA about hepatitis that features a hip-hoppin' syringe (filled with a hepatitis vaccine), singing about using it to protect yourself. Yes, it's as bad as it sounds.
 * Monster energy drinks. JUST LOOK AT THE CAN'S DESCRIPTION.
 * Special mention must be made of K-Mart's Back to School 2009 ads, which went Beyond the Impossible in creating not one, but two horrendous pseudo-slang words that no decent human being will ever utter without monetary compensation: "Blingitude" and "Rockstare".
 * Parodied in this Tim Horton's Steeped Tea commercial.
 * One Disney Channel ad encouraged people to stay for the upcoming shows, because after whatever was coming next, "Then it's off the heezy with The Proud Family."
 * A promo for a Saturday night rerun block stated that the only thing better than shaking it up on live TV is "sharing it with your biffle". Your guess is as good as ours (it may be a failed attempt to phonetically pronounce "BFFL").
 * A short lived McDonald's banner ad, apparently intended to appeal to the "urban demographic" (read: black people) had the brilliant dialogue: "Quarter pounder for $1...I'd hit it". That does not mean what they think it does.
 * Wendy's jumped on the bandwagon with their ad telling customers to "Do a spicy chicken sandwich."
 * A TV ad for the Game Genie in the late '80s featured a pair of Bill-and-Ted-soundalikes and opened with the phrase "Yo video game dudes, talk to me!"
 * The description for this Atari ad explains everything.
 * An ad for an electronic diary for girls has one girl saying "And you can plug in your MP 3 for major tuneage!
 * In Italy they started adding in the buses ads reminding people to leave your seat to elder people. One of them just says "Be polite-leave your seat", while the other one says "leaving your seat is TOO MUCH AWESOME!"
 * Not only is this 1983 comic book ad from Parker Brothers a nearly-perfect example of the trope, it was a trend-setter! To this day, the ginchiest teens totally dig board game adaptations of arcade classics!
 * The phrase "Mickey D's" as a nickname for McDonald's.
 * A UK Pizza Hut billboard gives customers the instruction "Max Your Chat", leaving most people over the age of 0 utterly baffled.
 * As if Ovaltine's advertising were not bad enough, there were a series of ads featuring Radio Ovaltine, which was basically run entirely by kids using "radical" lingo and playing nothing but the Ovaltine jingle sung by different kids, each one in a different style. Each performance was followed with the kid DJ saying something along the lines of "Totally radical!"
 * Old Israeli toy and game advertisements frequently used the word madlik (מַדְלִיק), a ‘90s word for ‘cool’, entirely obsolete in modern Hebrew.
 * The official website for Space Jam has this gem:


 * The ads for the new Hot Pastrami melt from Subway claim it has power chords of tasteocity. If you were to say "Power chords of tasteocity" in conversation, people would probably assume you're having a stroke.
 * There was a hilarious(ly awful) Duncan Yo-Yo commercial made in 1995 that showed two different kids: One was a stereotypical Hollywood Nerd sitting on a chair in his living room playing a Sega Genesis (with Atari 2600 sound effects, of course) and a stereotypical cool kid with a backwards baseball cap "enthusiastically" playing with a Duncan Yo-Yo. The commercial ends with the kid saying, "You want speed, action and excitement? Get a Yo-Yo!" ... Really?
 * This ad for the boardgame Crossfire is an interesting variation. How do corporate advertising geniuses imagine a future that would appeal to the target audience (pre-teens and teens) while also promoting their new product? Why, of course by showing kids in leatherjackets playing the game like a Rollerball/Thunderdome-style deathmatch of gladitorial combat (The loser spins into oblivion), surounded by their cheering fans, while a cool hard rock song is playing in the background. The Angry Video Game Nerd even made a video about it (as his alternate persona Board James)
 * This credit union website aimed at teens. Pretty much everything about it.

Anime & Manga
""Serena:" This contest is going to be major boss, Luna! Victim of the Week: "Hey, Serena! What's up dog?""
 * The TokyoPop translation of the Tokyo Mew Mew manga, which gave characters terrible catchphrases that clashed with their personalities (such as Ojou Minto's "Bust a move, girl") or just sounded awful (Ichigo's "Shocker!").
 * And then there was the 4Kids Mew Mew Power Cut and Paste Translation, which gave Ichigo such "immortal" lines as "Mew Mew Style/Mew Mew Grace/Mew Mew Power/In Your Face!" Oy vey...
 * Likewise, to appeal to less traditional manga readers, the Viz Media translation of Hot Gimmick gives everyone vaguely Valley Girl speech patterns. While this sounds reasonable coming from the mouth of the teenage protagonist, coming from traditionalist middle-aged Japanese housewives? Not so much.
 * Speaking of Tokyopop, the OEL manga Bombos vs. Everything uses this trope liberally.
 * Viz Media's translation of Love.com. Japanese teenagers do not talk like that.
 * They might have been going for Accent Adaptation (the series is set in Osaka), but still.
 * If an anime is subjected to a Macekre dubbing companies will often shove painfully bad slang into the scripts. The company that the voice actors worked for, Optimum, was responsible for most of the slang, as part of their marketing was based on the fact that they would add correct slang and cultural references. (DiC could arguably have sued them for false advertising.) It's also why the practice continued with Cloverway, as they used the same studio, though most of the bad episodes during Cloverway's reign were due to their writers trying to keep in line with DiC's version.Take for example this line from DiC's Sailor Moon dub:

""Serena:" Oh Luna, don't be such a stoigemeister!"
 * This leads to wrong, wrong characterization. Michiru, Haruka, and Setsuna are characters who would never use slang in the Japanese version, but here they are saying "Hey girlfriend!" and "You look like the bomb in those kimonos!"
 * Several other examples, like "Wicked cool," "the bomb", etc. "Hunkasaur" was used to describe a cute guy several times.
 * Lampooned in The Abridged Series where Sailor Venus' debut is filled with hackneyed Valley Girl speech. "Okie dokie pokie!"
 * Sailor Moon Abridged often lampshades this by having the characters say the lines exactly as they are in the dub.

"Ash: Do you know anyone who even says "radical" anymore? Misty: Mm-mm."
 * Let's not forget the infamous "KRILLIN'S IN DA HOUSE!" monstrosity from Dragon Ball Z.
 * Also from the Garlic Jr. arc: "Totally crampin' my style!" or "What a bummer!"
 * Z has other examples as well, even in the superior re-dubbing of the first 60-some episodes - though they usually aren't quite as bad as the above. Krillin is the usual culprit, having actually said "totally radical" at least once, and describing Goku as "one bad dude".
 * Yes. That's right, boys. Mondo cool.
 * Yamcha: Vegeta was crying? THAT'S WACK!
 * Goku would use the word bummer a lot.
 * Demashita! Powerpuff Girls Z. Not too much in the way of speaking, but most of their motions seem ripped from '90s "thug4lyfe" gangsta rap videos.
 * Excel Saga had an episode where Excel and Hyatt had to be the teacher of a bunch of Delinquents who spoke in incredibly anachronistic slang. However, this was both in the original and intentional, as Hyatt actually questioned why they were talking like that.
 * Parodied in the dub of an early episode of Pokémon, when Jessie and James disguise themselves as teenage girls who talk exclusively in over-the-top Totally Radical speak.
 * The original Japanese version is making fun of the ganguro fashion fad, wherein Japanese girls bleach their hair, tan their skin, and wear lots and lots of Day Glo eyeliner and lip gloss - all of which makes them look like a cross between the stereotypical California Surfer/Valley Girl and some sort of monstrous crone. Not surprisingly, this is also parodied with Jynx, which is also modeled off of the Yama Uba (Mountain Hag).
 * It even gets Lampshaded

"Kallen: "You fellas know full well what this badass mother can do!""
 * And even that lampshading was a pretty straight translation of the lampshading the original did.
 * Brock: Blastoise is da bomb!
 * Chrono Crusade (the E Nglish dub at least) uses slang from the 1920's such as "Jake" instead of "cool" or "fine". Justified, though, because the setting is New York City in 1928.
 * In the otherwise fairly good English dub of Code Geass, Kallen gives this priceless line:

"Elemental Hero Neos: If you go into this duel doubting yourself, Yubel will own you!"
 * There was also Nunally in one of the dubbed Picture Dramas: when trying to talk like a boy (it was the Crossdressing Festival), she comes up with "Radical, dudes!". Between her attempt at a masculine voice and the picture accompanying it, it came off as adorable rather than annoying.
 * This gem from the dub version of Yu-Gi-Oh! GX:

"Balmung: This shindig looks like the bomb-diggity. Kite: What did you say? Balmung: What I mean is, it's not bad at all."
 * "Get your game on!"
 * Intentionally invoked with Bakura in a few episodes of Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series.
 * Taken to the logical extreme in the BBT Abridged Movie, Jaden uses slang so often that Yusei has to translate for Yugi to be able to understand.
 * Rad, of Transformers Armada is infamous for his catchphrase "Wicked sweet!", as well as the meme "I want to tell you about the Transformers!"... and, well, just look at his name.
 * The infamous 4kids dub of One Piece changed the original Japanese opening (which they even had translated) into a rap song. A very bad rap song.
 * The Mahou Sensei Negima manga has this problem in a few volumes, depending on who's doing the translation. The first volume practically borders on a Gag Dub. Volume 5 is a little better, but having characters actually say "OMG" and "WTF" does not work well.
 * In the .hack//Sign DVD exclusive episode "Unison," there is a lovely conversation between Balmung,, and Kite.


 * Interestingly the Japanese script had Balmung speaking normally: Kite's reaction is because Balmung praised Helba and her party, who previously only had his contempt
 * Balmung's English dub VA Crispin Freeman changed the line intentionally. It's a subversion since that was the effect he was going for.
 * In the Wind Waker manga, the Deku Tree's attempt to play up the annual Kokiri ceremony comes off as hilarious.
 * Psychic Academy gives us such gems as, "Good Golly".
 * Lampshaded/discussed in Bleach when Ganju, Ichigo, and Hanataro argue about whether certain slang is still current. This raises interesting questions, since Ganju and Hanataro live in a world resembling Feudal Japan. That said, Ganju is the leader of the local equivalent to a motorcycle gang, so whatever.
 * Common in Viz's translation of Katekyo Hitman Reborn! A collection of these lovely lines is up on one of the KHR forums.:
 * Tsuna: Holy ham with rye on kraut!
 * Air Gear mixes this and Cluster F-Bomb.

Comic Books
""Don't jive Hulk with fancy lingo, bug-man! Hulk doesn't dig it!""
 * In the early Silver Age, Snapper Carr was essentially the Justice League of America's collective Sidekick. He spoke in constant slang and was always fixing hot rods, going to baseball games, and so on.
 * Acknowledged in the JLA-Avengers Crossover when Marvel's Rick Jones says that Carr is an okay guy "no matter how he talks". And when Rick Jones thinks your slang is outdated, brother, you got problems.
 * It goes meta when Snapper says "daddio" instead of "Daddy-O", meaning the writer got the '50s slang wrong!
 * Speaking of Rick Jones, there's a What If? issue where Rick Jones becomes the Hulk instead of Bruce Banner. This youthful Hulk mixes Hulk Speak with the early 60s version of this trope to hilarious effect:

"Loki: The humans of the Internet are uncouth! Loki: I've primarily discovered that mortals like to rut and chronicle the experience pictorially."
 * Bob Haney's work on the original Teen Titans comics of the mid-to-late 1960s could be the archetype of this trope. The least subtle display taking place within one such issue which featured Robin deducing that a message from an adolescent was a forgery based on its "vernacular". Daddy-O.
 * In fact, most slang in comics of that era sounds really stupid; Marvel Universe tended to be ahead of the pack, but not by much.
 * A number of other comic book examples are scrutinized here.
 * Teen Titans gets mocked in a 1990s story in The Flash 80-Page Giant, which exactly duplicates the ludicrous slang from the original stories. It turns out to be a tale the former Kid Flash is spinning to Impulse. Bart points out that nobody ever really talked like that - and even if they did, it wasn't when the twentysomething Wally was a teenager.
 * Although it appears to be taken for granted, Silver Age Spider-Man comics deserve special mention. While the original Ditko comics were pretty good as far as slang went, when Peter entered college and gained a social life, the characters' slang got crazy out of hand. Mary Jane is particularly impossible to understand.
 * Lampshaded by Aunt May and Aunt Anna also speaking in this manner, on a splash page.
 * An issue of Deadpool spoofed this when the title character time travels back to the 1960s and encounters the then-current versions of Spider-Man's cast. Their constant overuse of inexplicable 60s slang is a running gag throughout the issue, with Mary Jane being the worst offender. And upon hearing Harry Osbourn speak, Deadpool actually asks if he is having a stroke.
 * An issue of Superboy addresses this when the titular character seeks to reinvent himself after being given the cold shoulder by a girl for his over-use of early-90's cliches and expressions. However, all this accomplishes is trading sunglasses for bug-eyes (which were never seen again), a leather jacket for a PVC one, losing the piercings for a scruffy goatee, ditching his belts all together, and saying "Word. Reprezent." instead of "Don't Mess with the S!"
 * In Nextwave, Boom Boom uses phrases like "Oh noes!" and "ZOMG!" in both everyday conversation and periods of extreme stress. However, this is due to her actually being completely brainless, in the most literal sense of the word. Warren Ellis, the comic's writer, practically lives on the Internet and was taking the opportunity to lambast some of its stupider members.
 * The acid overdose survivor Arkady in Freakangels apparently starts talking in lolcat when drunk. "I can has vodka" indeed.
 * DC Comics's miniseries The Weird from the late eighties had the 'son' of its titular character speak in terribly inaccurate slang -- flying with his pseudo-father was apparently "bogus" and The Weird's abilities were "the dudest". Jim Starlin: good writer, terrible slangologist...
 * The front cover of DC's Raven miniseries proudly states, "Finally in Her Own Emo Series!". Someone at DC is apparently unaware that emo, when applied to a person, is generally considered an insult.
 * Fray's anning hab of abrevving half of the words in every sent she speaks has a sim eff to the more comm vers of this tro on a lot of peep; that is, making it both hard to under and frustringly diff to igno.
 * Lampshaded in Buffy Season 8 story arc The Time of Your Life, where Buffy is thrust forward in time and actually meets Fray. Upon hearing Fray speak, Buffy's response is, "Uh....English?"
 * Archie Comics are notorious for this trope. For example, one late-80s story had a lifeguard tell a surfing Veronica, "I really dig the way you attacked those waves with your rad moves". Around the same time, an in-house ad for an Archie calendar featured a cartoon teenager, sporting a ridiculous multi-coloured mohawk, oversized shades that Elton John would reject, and mismatched-colour clothes, telling the reader, "I ordered mine!" Like gnarly, daddy-o, if a rad hepcat teen like him bought one, I better slap down the bread too, yo yo yo.
 * Played with in a story titled "Lingo Lesson". In it, Archie talks like this, as does a brownie troop that his mom leads. It drives Archie's dad nuts.
 * Ah, Jubilee...she's like totally like radical. Y'know? Like with her ultimately killer shades, and like totally far out outfits? Like, too bad about like the parentals being all dead like. This is like how normal teenagers like talk...right?
 * During the 80s crossover series Secret Wars, most of the cast is notoriously guilty of this. In particular, She Hulk, when punching the Enchantress, declares 'Oh wow! That was, like tubular, you know -- TO THE MAX!'
 * 2000 AD's DR and Quinch written by Alan Moore has the title characters describe literally everything as "totally amazing," "unbelievably awesome," or, like, "incredibly stupid."
 * Hilariously subverted by Journey Into Mystery (which used to be The Mighty Thor), where Kid-Loki has gotten his hands on a Stark-Pad and is casually surfing the internet. One hopes he won't go Totally Radical on us, and then not only does he use the same formal grammar as any Asgardian while typing, but he explains what he has discovered on the internet in equally archaic terms, making for great one-liners:


 * Seriously, has anyone else reported the amount of porn on the internet in such a funny way?
 * He also gets called a troll, and is annoyed when the people he's chatting with don't accept his correction of "half-giant."

Fan Fiction
"Author's Note: If you didn't catch it from the summary, it takes place in 1985, which means we will be raping the 80's terms dictionary we found."
 * The characters of the D.Gray-man fanfiction Any Way You Want It use eighties slang heavily in their dialogue, thanks to the authors' love of the decade.

Film
"Tess: makes random hand signs Caitlyn: Okay, what is that? Ella: She said "Whatever, major loser.""
 * Spoofed in Slam Dunk Ernest, when the title character walks into his friends' locker room and attempts to use urban slang gain rapport with the African-American basketball players. His attempt backfires when he says, "Right arm. Out of state. Frozen." These malapropisms for "Right on," "Out of sight," and "Cool," are not well received by the other players.
 * This is part of the plot in the first Scooby Doo movie: the gang starts getting suspicious when those who arrive at the island resort speak like any average teenager, while those who leave speak using awful Totally Radical slang.
 * Sadly, a lot of the made-for-TV movies of yesteryear had a lot of this too with loads of god-awful monster puns and outdated slang.
 * The movie Gleaming the Cube is named after a particularly interesting-sounding skateboarding term one of the writers overheard from a crew member's son. The boy had made the phrase up on the spot.
 * The Jets in the stage/film musical West Side Story speak (and sing) in a street language that Arthur Laurents made up, but includes actual Fifties slang and words.
 * The film Juno suffers from this in the first half, though it's heavily debated whether the writer, Diablo Cody, was trying to be hip and "indie" or simply being ironic. Most agree with the former.
 * Honest to blog??
 * With the release of Jennifer's Body, it would appear Diablo Cody suffers from this trope on a constant basis.
 * Flight of the Navigator: When the technical-talking ship's AI scans David's brain, for some reason (not the least of which he's voiced by Paul Reubens), it starts speaking like Pee Wee Herman.
 * This scene from Camp Rock:

"Zack: You know -- bodacious, bad, tubular... Zack: As in, you are one bodacious babe."
 * This was outdated ASL slang from the 90s. She made a W, E (looking-ish thing), M, and L on her forehead.
 * In Better Off Dead, there is a scene where the teenage protagonist's father attempts to connect with his son while awkwardly using slang he is reading from a book on how to communicate with teenagers. He still gets some of it wrong, saying things like "Right off!"
 * Who can forget the immortal scene from Fern Gully The Last Rainforest? We still have no idea if it was meant to be a satire (note Crysta's reaction) or if the writers were serious:
 * Zack looks meaningfully into Crysta's eyes*

"Artie: Help! I've been kidnapped by a monster that's trying to relate to me!"
 * It was probably something resembling a satire; when it becomes clear to everyone that Zack is making sense only to himself- and that his exaggerated surfer dude persona prevents him from converting to normal English to explain just what the hell he thinks he's talking about- Batty quips, "Awesome use of the language, dude."
 * Spoofed in Shrek the Third, where Shrek spews out a string of hip-hop slang in a failed attempt to relate to Artie.

"Regina: Gretchen, stop trying to make fetch happen! It's not going to happen!"
 * In the movie Disturbing Behavior, Katie Holmes' character uses the term "razor" as analogous to "cool" or "sweet".
 * The Neverending Story III was just... ugh. Definitely only one of the many problems with this film (the primary being its existence) we had school bullies being referred to, by the other students, as "The Nasties", and Bastian's step-sister referred to his sense of style as being "Un".
 * Bill and Teds Excellent Adventure seems to intentionally embrace this. Much of the comedy comes from the two characters' flamboyantly silly version of California teen slang, which turns out to have swept the world in a utopic future. Their legacy includes two prime directives: "Be excellent to each other," and "Party on, dude!"
 * However, the movie was popular enough that its slang actually did catch on, for at least a while. (And admit it, you've used "Be excellent to each other" unironically at least once.) This is arguably a wellspring of a number of other Totally Radical attempts, because some people remember that the movie's slang caught on in a big way... but didn't notice when the fads passed.
 * Though hopefully nobody has ever used "That was non-non-non-non-heinous" unironically.
 * Nobody ever used "station" as the new word for "excellent", even though Part II sells it as hard as it can.
 * "Party on, X" also had a resurgence in the 90s thanks to Wayne's World (the SNL skits and then of course the movies).
 * Part of the reason for the outdated slang was very simple: The movie had sat on a shelf for a few years--long enough for terms like "excellent" and "bogus" to become outdated. But by the time it was released, nostalgia had built, and Bill and Ted actually brought it back.
 * In the modern remake of Freaky Friday, not only the dialogue, but the themes of the movie seem Totally Radical, adjacent to Adults Are Useless. The conversation in the restaurant where Anna (in the body of Tess, her mother) is talking with Jake over contemporary music (like they have a college degree in it) and then singing along with a rock cover "Baby One More Time" comes off as Totally Radical. The moral of the story seems to be that teenagers just need to be left alone, and not relate to their parents (or vice versa), because neither can understand each other.
 * A common complaint critics leveled at Steven Spielberg's Hook was that it invoked this trope with its approach to the Lost Boys, who ride around on skateboards, play basketball, and refer to Peter Pan as 'The Pan'. ('Pan the Man' at one point.) Leonard Maltin complained that they "would be more at home in a McDonald's commercial."
 * Bangarang!
 * Dogma parodies this with "Buddy Christ", a figure that the Catholic Church uses to convert young people who are turned off by the depressing nature of Catholic teachings.
 * This may be a spoof of certain churches that try throw in as many "cool" things as possible (skateboarding and biker ministries, rock concerts, "Christian" versions of presumably-popular things) in the name of getting in touch with a new generation, but are not only compromising their teachings to do so, but are themselves woefully out of touch with modern culture (passing off folk music as "current", using outdated slang and imagery). By taking the tropes of "pop Christianity" and applying them to Catholicism, Kevin Smith was trying to show how silly a lot of them are.
 * Mean Creek for the most part is a pretty strong aversion of this trope, the teen talk is realistic and full of realistic profanity instead of cheesy slang, things like drinking, smoking and marijuana use are straight up addressed, and the Truth or Dare game in it isn't your standard fiction one with only mildly embarrassing PG-rated aspects. However writer/director Jacob Aaron Estes did fail to realize that the teens of 2004 don't have the exact same interests teens in his day did, and don't consider Super Soakers the best thing since sliced bread or fantasize about Heather Locklear. Throwing your backpack in your direction only to pick it up and throw it again also seems more like a 90's thing than something common today.
 * In Mean Girls, Gretchen tries to create her own with "that's so fetch," to little success.

""I love the Power Glove. It's so bad.""
 * Though most of the dialogue in the film is unusually realistic.
 * Used deliberately in Ferris Buellers Day Off. The secretary Grace tells the principal "The sportos, the motorheads, geeks, sluts, bloods, wastoids, dweebies, dickheads - they all adore him. They think he's a righteous dude" in regard to Ferris.
 * A climactic scene in Pee Wee's Big Adventure shows Pee-Wee Herman escaping from pursuing Warner Brothers studio executives (long story) by activating a booster rocket on the back of his vintage bicycle. (Hey, this is a fantasy, so why not?) A prepubescent boy sitting on his own bike is awestruck by this sight, and shouts: "Radical!" Since this film was made in the mid-1980s, when "radical" was still considered a "hip" term, it's impossible to ascertain whether this was a Lampshade Hanging or not.
 * Averted at the last possible minute (i.e. the last script revision before shooting) by Star Wars: A New Hope. Lucas' original dialogue, in all its (literally) unspeakable glory, shows up in Alan Dean Foster's novelization, and the (cut later) scene of Luke meeting up with Biggs and friends at Anchorhead shows some horrifying attempts to render teenage slang on Tatooine. (The filmed scenes aren't easy to find, but it's a good thing the script doctors got to them before shooting...)
 * For an example of what Star Wars: A New Hope would have been like without this last-minute intervention, see The Phantom Menace, you sleemos.
 * The immortal line from the 90-minute Nintendo commercial known as The Wizard:

""Radical, man...""
 * Invoked Trope with Kevin Flynn's mannerisms in Tron: Legacy; he acts and speaks exactly as you'd expect from someone who's been trapped inside a computer since 1989.


 * Almost exactly. Flynn's mannerisms and speech are also reminiscent of an aging hippie guru left over from the 60's, making it an example of Two Decades Behind as well as a Shout-Out to another laid back character played by Jeff Bridges.
 * Inverted in Prince Caspian. They really, really tried to make the 1940s settings for the Earth scenes perfect and detailed... and then had the boys say "got it sorted," which is at least forty years ahead of their time. Twice. At dramatically important moments.
 * Disney's movie "Now You See It..." is full of this. The mains characters use phrases like 'a snowball's chance in you-know-what' and Danny talks like a ten year old girl at times.
 * Amy Heckerling, director of Clueless, invented her own Valley Girl inspired slang to prevent this.
 * The entirety of 1993's Airborne is like this.
 * JFK portrays Lee Harvey Oswald's lawyer Dean Andrews as constantly spouting beatnik phrases. The terms are period appropriate, but deliberately sounded horrible in the film's release date in 1991.
 * The 1986 movie Rad, which is about BMX racing.
 * The Smurfs: The Movie: Papa Smurf wearing Wayfarer sunglasses on the poster? Check. Smurfette turned into a shopaholic ditz right out of Sex and the City? Check. Smurfs rapping? Kill us.
 * Used to orient us into the '50s setting in Stand by Me, where Vern is so excited by news of a dead body in the woods that he can only say the now-ridiculous "This is so boss!" half a dozen times before explaining anything to the others.
 * American Graffiti (set in the 1960's) also features similar usage of boss.
 * The ABC Family TV movie Cyberbully suffers from this, with the teenage characters using terms like "bling" and "the clap". This movie was released in 2011.
 * Perhaps the strangest version of this is done deliberately in the 2006 film Brick. It is set in a moden day high school with teens and young adults but every character talks and acts like They are in a 1940's noir film, complete with hard-boiled slang and verbal tics that would sound like complete nonsense to modern teenagers (Or anyone else born after 1934). Needless to say, this adds immensely to the film's quality.
 * Pastor Skip from Saved knocks himself out trying to relate to his students.

Literature
"If you read your newspaper carefully, you'll notice that you're seeing fewer stories with uninviting, incomprehensible, newspaper-ese headlines like PANEL NIXES TRADE PACT, and more punchy, "with-it" headlines designed to appeal to today's young people, like PANEL NIXES TRADE PACT, DUDE."
 * The girls in the Babysitters Club books often use outdated slang, as much of the series seems to be stuck in Ann Martin's own 1960s childhood. In one particularly cringe-worthy example, Claudia uses the phrase "What a hoot!" in a completely non-ironic manner. The girls also have a habit of inventing their own words to use in place of "cool," such as "dibble" to mean "incredible".
 * Likewise, the band in The Last Days use the word "fawesome". Over. And Over. And Over. And Over. And Over.
 * Does the author know that that is an abbreviation of fuck awesome?
 * In Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Raoul Duke picks up some of the literature available at the anti-drug conference and flips through it. He notes that none of what is described as "drug culture slang" is incorrect, specifically noting the use of the word "tea shades" for sunglasses.
 * The Film of the Book further emphasizes this disconnect by having a lecturer using '50s slang (the story is set in 1971) as part of a laughably inaccurate description of the drug scene.
 * In Harry Turtledove's Timeline 191 series, the majority of which is set between 1914 and 1945, we get an early 20th century version that could be considered a subtle parody: numerous characters comment on the word "swell" replacing "bully," and their difficulty adjusting.
 * Turtledove is also fond of using the phrase "lick 'em" (It basically means "we'll kick their ass!"). It shows up in just about every time period his books are set in: 1880s, 1910s, 1940s, 2080s...
 * In the Dune prequels there are things called 'Cymeks,' apparently trying to combine 'cyborg' and 'mech' with a Really Kool K. Cybernetic and mechanical, huh?
 * Probably the oldest example here, PG Wodehouse used a lot of slang from the 1890s in his works.
 * Wodehouse falls gruesomely into this trope when he writes American characters, who are constantly, clumsily, forcing words like "gee" and "okay" into their speech.
 * The series Percy Jackson and The Olympians slips into this at times, but it's not too bad. You just see the occasional overuse of "totally", "dude", and the modern "tween" protagonists talking about how they're going to "whoop some monster butt". And it gets much better as the series progresses.
 * In the column "Dude, Read All About It," Dave Barry explains how newspapers have been trying to attract younger readers to boost their declining readership:

""Yo, my son. Which of these is the most stylish thing to wear?" "Hey, whichever I select.""
 * Subverted in Garth Nix's Keys to the Kingdom, when the characters seem to use offbeat slang. If the reader pays attention, they realize the series is actually Twenty Minutes Into the Future, and it's not confirmed that the characters are even speaking English.
 * E. E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series is set at some point in the indeterminate future in which interstellar travel and communication is a relatively casual matter. While "Doc" Smith essentially created the 'Space Opera' genre, his characters use slang based on 1920s United States constructions, such as a male addressing a female as "toots".
 * Of course, even if the 20s slang were missing, the mores and culture present in the books would still make the books wholly dated.
 * There's also a fair amount of constructed slang, such as the substitution "QX" for "OK," and the constant use of the word "jets" for... personal ability and competence or something like that.
 * Parodied hilariously in Randall Garrett's short story "Backstage Lensmen" where the slang gets so thick that even the characters don't understand what they are talking about.
 * Much of the communication in the series is done telepathically using the Lenses, which can be used to talk to everything from humans to Starfish Aliens. The author's use of 1920s-era slang may be a translation convention, intended to represent to the reader the way that Kinnison's thoughts sound inside his own head. It still sounds really weird, and it contributes to the Zeerust atmosphere of the series.
 * The Animorphs usually steered clear of Totally Radical by just not having their characters use slang. For a period lasting 2 or 3 books, however, they tried to introduce "honkin'" as a slang term. It didn't stick.
 * A less ambiguous example would be when Cassie worried that her mother, who was supposed to make a speech in front of her class, would embarrass her by trying to namedrop bands like "Boyz Eleven Men, Snoopy Doggy Dog, and Nice Is Neat". Rachel manages to translate the first two, but needs Cassie to explain where the crap she got "Nice Is Neat"; it turns out that "Nice Is Neat" is how Cassie's been getting her mom to let her bring Nine Inch Nails albums into the house.
 * Lampshaded in a Discworld footnote of a footnote describing the final test of the Monks of Cool:

"From Book 3: "A big ten-four to that, good buddy," said Tails. "We've gotta get hip and dig his crazy scene, find his pad, cash his chips and everything will be copacetic. It'll be very.""
 * Tattoo by Jennifer Lynn Barnes has this to a degree.
 * Diary of a Wimpy Kid made fun of this with Greg getting a book for Christmas titled "Math is Rad," with a picture on the front of a person with spiked hair and sunglasses.
 * The novel Night Runner contains the line, "I'm the Master Chief and you just got powned."
 * Scott Turow's Innocent (Sequel to Presumed Innocent) has the youngest character (28, compared to the main characters being in their 50s and 60s) talking in the most totally radical way, especially about how "completely tuned in" his girlfriend is.
 * Robert Bloch was rather prone to this in his short stories when he was sending up beats and hippies, making it more like Totally Hip, Daddy-O or Totally Groovy, Man.
 * In The Dresden Files Harry briefly talks like this to the Red King, since his words are being translated into the language the Red Court uses (presumably an ancient Mayan dialect) and he decided to annoy that translator by choosing words that would be difficult to give any kind of reasonable definition for in English let alone in a language dead for hundreds of years.
 * In a milder example, on one occasion he tells Michael "that's how I roll," much to Michael's amusement (given that by this point in the series Harry is pushing forty). Then it's lampshaded when Harry claims he heard Molly (Michael's daughter and Harry's apprentice) use it, so "it must be cool." Not a totally straight example, though, since he actually used the phrase correctly.
 * Turned Up to Eleven in a series of childrens' novels based on the UK Sonic the Hedgehog comics, where even the narration is done this way. "Sonic the Hedgehog in Robotnik's Laboratory" also included what one can only hope is a Lampshade Hanging, as Sonic and Tails gently mock the monkeys of Emerald Hill for using "totally out of date" Cockney accents.
 * There are four of these UK Sonic novels, and the later ones are composed entirely out of Lampshade Hanging, Genre Savviness, No Fourth Wall, anachronistic slang, and pop culture references. In places, they practically deconstruct Totally Radical.


 * Bill O'Reilly's O'Reilly Factor For Kids is worse than it sounds. The lowest point is the periodical mock instant messaging sessions with the most outlandish acronyms. There is a handy little glossary in the back that explain to you what phrases such as "YYSSLIBTO" and "-6%" stand for ("Yeah yeah sure sure like I believe that one" and "Not very clever" respectively).
 * Neatly sidestepped by Anthony Buckridge in his "Jennings" series of school stories, by making up most of the schoolboys' slang, so it couldn't be "wrong" or dated.
 * Averted in A Clockwork Orange: author Anthony Burgess, a professional linguist, actually thoroughly studied contemporary teenage slang, but then decided not to use it as he wanted his story to be set in an undecided point in the somewhat near future. The result was a special slang he invented named ‘Nadsat’ (from Russian ‘-nadtsat'’, meaning ‘-teen’), which was English mixed with some rhyming slang, archaisms (intentionally using Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe), a few neologisms and borrowings, and lots and lots of Russian words (as it was The Cold War and Russian, which Burgess spoke, was very intimidating, hence suitable for gangsters).
 * Arguably the most horrifying thing about Stephen King's The Langoliers is the dialogue given to teenage girl Bethany Simms ("Totally tubular!").
 * In Max Shulman's comic novel Rally Round the Flag, Boys!, Comfort Goodpasture speaks in what the narrative calls "an execrable mishmash of teen-age patois." The narrative sometimes imitates her habit of affixing "-sville" to adjectives and buzzwords.
 * "Execrable," by the way, is basically the polite way to say "shitty."
 * A combination of this and Most Writers Are Adults happens in Does My Head Look Big in This? by Randa Abdel-Fattah.
 * A 2011 issue of National Geographic (which tends to be aimed at ages 18 and up) introduced a story about the "teenage brain" with "Like, totally!" Teenagers haven't seriously used that expression for about two decades now.

Live Action TV
""You're pretty high and far-out. What kind of trip are you on, son?""
 * Lampshaded by Frasier when his brother Niles tries to use slang ("Who was that babe-o-rama?") Frasier begs him not to, because he sounds like Bob Hope when he tries to be The Fonz.
 * Harper from Andromeda did this a lot. For example, when the Eureka Maru pulled the Andromeda free from the gravitational pull of a black hole that it had been trapped in for 300 years, he said, "I just wanna say this once: we rule." Apparently, he's their Surfer Dude thousands of years in the future.
 * One of the most depressing examples was on Boy Meets World when they injected Ben Savage mentioning Beavis and Butthead at least once an episode, with the Studio Audience cheering wildly, all in a naked attempt to prove how Fresh And Hip the incredibly formulaic Family Sitcom was.
 * The masterful and hilarious Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! episode "The Derrick and Jim Show" creates an intentional nightmare of Clinton Era MTV clichés, What Do You Mean It's Not Awesome? moments and Xtreme Kool Letterz.
 * On Gap, a few of the lead characters use Totally Radical slang, such as "dude", "totally", and "awesome". However, the offhand and casual way the characters use it makes it seem more believable.
 * Freaks And Geeks deliberately averted this trope by taking place in the early-80's (when Judd Apatow and Paul Feig were in high school) rather than modern times. Thus, there's a considerable amount of early-80's slang on the show.
 * Witness any depiction of the 1960s youth culture in Dragnet 1967.

"Ja`mie: Oh my god, ties are so random. Like, what are they anyway, just pieces of fabric?"
 * The complete and utter disconnection of late-1960s/early 1970s television comedy from the sensibilities of the Baby Boomer generation was one of the things that spurred Lorne Michaels to create Saturday Night Live.
 * Rebellious urban teen sidekick Ace in 1980s Doctor Who. ("Gordon Bennett, what a toerag!") For once, not the fault of the writer, who based her original dialogue on actual teenagers he'd actually met, but of Media Watchdogs who decided that authenticity was no excuse for a TV youngster using that kind of language, thank you, and insisted it be Bowdlerised.
 * She also liked to say the word "ace" itself, which naturally leads to anyone not familiar with that slang term to think she's just saying her own name.
 * Russell T. Davies mocked this in his Virgin New Adventures novel Damaged Goods. When the Doctor returns to a rough 1987 urban housing estate he expects another teenage girl to talk and act like Ace. She puts him straight.
 * The otherwise enjoyable late '80's story The Greatest Show in the Galaxy features (and opens with) a rapping circus ringmaster whose rap falls somewhere between hilarious, and "Oh God, my ears". Fortunately he's balanced out by the Circus of Fear and Monster Clowns. Even the Doctor (briefly) gets in on the act.
 * Parodied in School Reunion with "Correctamundo!" which the Doctor immediately swears off.
 * Parodied again in The Eleventh Hour; having just saved the world in twenty minutes without a TARDIS or the sonic screwdriver, the Doctor gleefully bellows out "Who da man?!"... and sounds utterly Adorkable. Everyone stares at him in either scorn, pity or confusion, and he ends up sulkily declaring that he's never saying that again.
 * The audio special Cuddlesome has the Mark II's saying "like, totally," complete with American "dude" accents, in practically every. single. sentence.
 * Jo Grant, who talked like the writers' vague idea of how groovy young people talked in the 60s, despite it being the early 70s. (Or, depending on your view of UNIT dating, the late 70s.)
 * Brand-new invented slang was one of the keys to the success of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This has also helped prevent the show from becoming obviously (and painfully!) dated, as slang may change but the cadence and patterns mostly don't. The same can't be said for the show's abundant pop culture references, however.
 * In Power Rangers Operation Overdrive, the episode "Just Like Me", when a fight breaks out between Tyzonn and Will, team leader Mack tells them to "Put your personal junk in your trunk." This... doesn't come off sounding right. Makes sense if you think about it, though, since the one saying that was a two-year-old Ridiculously Human Robot programmed by and having only interacted with a middle aged man. It's a miracle his lingo was as comprehensible as it was.
 * Other well known examples from the franchise include "Morphenomenal!" from Mighty Morphin Power Rangers, and Alpha 6 in Power Rangers Turbo, who replaced his predecessor's "Ay-yi-yi!" catchphrase with "Yo, yo, yo".
 * Averted in Summer Heights High. Chris Lilley, the show's creator who also plays the three main characters, is unnervingly accurate as the teenage girl, Ja'mie. The show uses up-to-date slang and teenage mannerisms, as well as employing a realistic level of coarse language (which, amongst hormonal teenagers trying to sound cool, is a lot).

"Moon: I'm gonna moon you. Hotel owner: What? Moon: MOOOOOOON YOU!!!
 * Parodied in an episode of News Radio: Bill is hired to advertise a malt liquor during news breaks, and adopts a "ghetto voice" during his ads, much to the chagrin of Catherine. Catherine ends up giving Bill a stream of "street slang" that she says will make the commercial seem more hip, that just makes him sound ridiculous ("It's got that upstate prison flavor that'll make your feet stank all night long!").
 * Also parodied in their A Day At the Bizarro In Space episode, where "Gazizzah", one of the made-up words, has become a common greeting.
 * Relatively subverted in most kidcom who hire genuine teenagers, the reference at hand they represent it surely for something.
 * The show Pizza is responsible for putting the phrase "fully sick" and "stooge" into the mouths of thousands of bogans. And Uncle Toby's, together with Thorpie, helped kill it. To elaborate for non-Australians: if you want to kill slang, put it in the mouth of a metrosexual swimmer in an advertisement for cereal.
 * In fact, 'fully sick' had and still has pretty common use in urban Australia, at least in Sydney. And to be fair, 'stooge' was more a personal catch-phrase of the main character.
 * Played with in an episode of How I Met Your Mother: when Robin dates an older man, his Totally Radical speech patterns (part surfer, part stoner) make him seem even older.
 * Parodied in this Armstrong & Miller sketch. Have you ever asked yourself what it would be like if RAF pilots during World War II spoke like modern London teenagers?
 * In the US version of The Office, Michael frequently receives lessons in "black people phrases" from warehouse worker Darryl, never quite catching on that Darryl's just screwing with him.
 * "Dink and Flicka"
 * "Bippity boppity, gimme the zoppity."
 * Parodied in the first several season of The Red Green Show, with über-geek Harold trying to seem "cool" and "radical", but merely revealing himself as the dork he was. Red's own speeches to teenage viewers were ironically much more authentic, as he didn't even bother trying to relate to them in the same way and just talked like an ordinary middle-aged guy.
 * Season one, episode four of Veronica Mars is one big long Totally Radical marathon. Veronica and Wallace go undercover to end a credit card fraud scheme perpetrated by a pair of nerds called the "Silicon Mafia" developing a new game which will "make Quake look like Asteroids." Part of their scheme involves tricking the evil nerds into believing they've been invited to a demonstration of The Matrix MMORPG, which no one cared about in the first place. Apparently, it has "rag-doll effects." And "the physics engine is killer." The list goes on. And on. Also features a painful case of Pac-Man Fever. Fortunately, aside from this episode, Totally Radical is mocked and averted pretty thoroughly throughout the series.
 * "Japanime."
 * Dark Angel has its share of examples, but one seems deliberate: it is perfectly in character for hyper-square Normal to name his messenger service--wait for it--Jam Pony.
 * Mercilessly spoofed in the short-lived Funky Squad, an Australian take-off of American '70s cop shows like The Mod Squad.
 * Parodied in Not Going Out: Lee has found yet another dead-end job, so Kate asks him if he bothered to look at some career leaflets she got for him. He dismissively says that they're all aimed at kids, citing a slogan: "Do you want a career, innit?" Kate reads the leaflet; the slogan in question is actually "Do you want a career in IT?"
 * "Train for jobs in biotch."
 * Beach Blanket Boo Boo
 * The long-running Australian soap Neighbours caught on that youngsters spend lots of time playing computer games. Apparently they only got access to one game though, so for years, whenever they showed a character playing computer games, the soundtrack featured the distinctive sounds of Magic Carpet...
 * Similarly, an episode of Zoey 101 had stereotypical computer geeks saying stuff like "LOL!" These are typed expressions, though they're occasionally said out loud, either by the savvy in a spirit of ironic playfulness, or by the clueless through a lack of understanding. Guess which category the writers fell into.
 * Same thing goes for alternate spellings of certain words, such as "pwn" for example. Anybody who pronounces the "p" should be doing it in the most ironic/sarcastic way possible.
 * It seems that nowadays pronouncing the p is okay so long as the word still rhymes with "own". What's bad is when characters spell out acronyms that can be easily pronounced - usually "Ell Oh Ell". Guys, it's "lol". Or "lawl", if you can't figure out phonetics. Also, no one ever says "OMG" out loud. Ever. Please stop.
 * The Season Two episode from Ugly Betty when Betty writes an article for "Hot Flash", only to have Claire edit the hell out of it to make it sound more "youthful". Betty herself is indignant, and to her chagrin every single person who talks to her about the article comments on it. ("...Natch?")
 * Spoofed in an episode of Hannah Montana; Miley goes to see a dentist, who greets her using a mish-mash of outdated slang. When Miley calls him out on this, the dentist says that he's just trying to be relatable, to which she quips, "To what, the 1970s?"
 * The show also provides us with a use of pwned, pronounced with two syllables.
 * Two and A Half Men had an episode where Charlie invited his latest girlfriend (a near doppleganger for his own mother) and her two kids. Jake gives Charlie a series of advice on how to handle the kids: don't rub their heads, don't call them "little dudes", don't raise your hand and say "high five" and don't ask if they would like ice cream. When they arrive, cue Alan doing everything Jake had warned against, to the dismay of everyone around. Alan doesn't even notice and enthusiastically plows through the entire list.
 * In the early 1990s, the Game Show Wheel of Fortune tried out a "Slang" category for some of its puzzles. Most of the slang used was dated, obscure or just plain nonexistent (e.g., OFF THE BEAM, LET'S CUT OUT OF HERE).
 * Road Rules (the bastard cousin of The Real World) had a season simply titled Road Rules Xtreme (yes, with an X). This aired in the Aughties. And replaced the standard intro ("Throw out your old rules, these are the road rules") for a crappy metal song where the only lyrics were someone screeching "LIKE A MOTHERF** KER FROM HELL!" The show went on hiatus for a loooooong time after that.
 * iCarly: For the most part the writers invent 'cool' words, but a few like 'nub' have crept on to the show.
 * The Troperiffic Stargate SG-1 episode "200" mocked this rather thoroughly, when Marty speculates on casting younger and edgier versions of the team for the Wormhole X-treme movie, and SG-1 envision the potential results. It doesn't go well.
 * The ridiculousness is compounded by the replacement of walkie-talkies with cell phones, which can communicate between a ship in space and an alien planet instantly. Better watch those roaming charges, unless SGC has a deal with Goa'uld Telecom.
 * 2 things make this Hilarious in Hindsight. 1, that the reason cell phones look like they do today is because of Star Trek's communicators, and secondly, because they have started to use cell phones in this manner on Stargate Universe.
 * Parodied nicely in Weeds, when Celia's anti-drug campaign involves 'Sober the Sasquatch' visiting elementary schools to tell kids how "Drugs are wrong!" It's not too effective.
 * Just about every Disney Channel program falls victim to this trope. Justified in their made for tv movie series Zenon, since it was set in the future, leaving the writers free to make up whatever slang they wanted.
 * Invoked Trope deliberately by Emma Tutweiler of The Suite Life on Deck to promote the '80s dance.
 * The entire network Disney XD is the nutshell example of this trope. Every boy in their advertising is shown skating or surface-medium-here-boarding 'to the max', entire programs are filled with 'radical'-ly outdated lingo, and the network's announcer screams in every promo like he's selling the Bigfoot show on 'Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!' at the Centrum, which ends with a program or a commercial for the channel's original programming receiving an odd Checkmark of Awesomeness punctuated by some form of "Yeah!" or "Yes!", even if it's a laughably and totally unradical film no one finds awesome like Arthur & the Invisibles or Brother Bear.
 * Thankfully, the "Yeah!" or "Yes!" has been removed recently in some of the channel's ads...
 * Motherfucking Tokyo Breakfast was one unpredictable nigga, nigga!! (An intentional example of this and a number of other tropes, of course, as it was part of a Canadian sketch comedy pilot that ultimately went nowhere.)
 * QI naturally does this throughout its 'Groovy' episode. Mostly it's either Stephen being incapable of uttering any kind of slang in any way that doesn't sound affected, or the panel mocking him for it.
 * The Inbetweeners is amazingly realistic in its portrayal of how British teenagers act and talk. This did get both series an 18 rating, though - presumably under-18s can't deal with hearing language they use every day.
 * A Mystery Science Theater 3000 episode The Beatniks was set in the 1950s. Ax Crazy delinquent Moon makes the following threat, which was probably intended as a death threat, but was... phrased rather unfortunately.

Tom Servo: You know, hang my butt out."

"Vanessa: Hey Dan. Want to get together and download about the epicness last night?"
 * Brazilian channel Rede Globo has this in the ads for its afternoon movies, with a vocabulary that rarely changes - the word "confusion" appears for almost every movie! An example would be along the lines of 'This wicked gang will get into much confusion!'
 * In an effort to make Vanessa at least a little likable to the viewers the Gossip Girl writers gave her this gem of a line after a college party:

"Randy: But first, I am going to give my cool cousin a makeover! Liz: Is it going to be "fierce"? Randy: It would if it were 2006!"
 * In-Universe on Thirty Rock, Liz Lemon's slang is sometimes treated as such, even though she makes up most of her own slang and what she uses is never particularly old--at least, not by this trope's standards. See the following exchange, from a 2010 episode.

"Jenna: No more making fun of me when I misuse dated cultural references, okay? Are we cowabunga on this?"
 * Jenna Maroney has issues.

""...Like 'XTREME!' And 'TO THE MAX!' How about 'SUPERFLUOUS!'? And 'BALLS!'""
 * Uncle Morty's Dub Shack's Gag Dubs engage in the occasional parodic use of this trope... including a literal use when a mobbing scene is transformed into a mosh pit with the miracle of dubbing.
 * A parody of such things from The Kids in The Hall:
 * X-Play had, during its sketch comedy-heavy days, a character named Johnny Xtreme as a parody of the "so macho he bleeds testosterone" game hero. He would frequently engage in this kind of speech, as seen when he tries to come up with adjectives for his own video game:

"Sherlock: '" Laterz "'"
 * Dr. Grant from Eureka. Justified because he's a time traveler catching up on 60 years of everything.
 * In Community, Pierce is determined to make the phrase "streets ahead" (apparently just meaning "good") catch on. And it actually has among the fanbase. In another episode, some teenagers and one of their mothers use "pwn" with no irony.
 * Phil from Modern Family is made of this.
 * In an Australian TV retrospective about The Brady Bunch Eve Plumb remembers the writers would try to put in (then current) early 70s slang like "groovy" and "far out" in the kids' dialogue which always felt forced.
 * In one episode of Star Trek: Voyager the ship accidentally travels back to Earth in the year 1996, and Tom Paris uses his knowledge of 20th-century America to help the crew navigate 1996 L.A. At one point Tom helps Tuvok take data from an astronomer's lab, but the astronomer catches them. As they try to get out of the situation, Tom at one point says, "This lab is...pretty groovy!"
 * The Muppet Show: Perhaps it is forgivable since the series was a "family" show in the most literal sense and was attempting to appeal to older viewers as well as kids. But that doesn't change the fact that this late '70s/early '80s variety show sometimes had some pretty blatant-- and desperate-- '50s and '60s slang peppered throughout (although, occasionally it was done ironically). One episode had the word "square" (as in "uncool") used not only twice, but in two separate skits!
 * An episode of Friends has a particularly desperate Joey going after a role intended for a 19-year-old, so he first practices being convincing with Chandler. "Sup with the whack Playstation, sup?"
 * Deliberate example, Jocelyne Letendre, the psychologist in Radio Enfer. She uses it to try to connect with the youth (well, the show was made in 1995) and she epicly fails at it, practically creating some sort of weird language that only she can understand (the youth lingo of the nineties in Québec was mainly made of gratuitous English). However, she became an Ensemble Darkhorse mainly because of that lingo. Being rather over the top helped too.
 * Studio 60 On the Sunset Strip has a non-grammar variant. It revolves around a late night comedy sketch show which, like Saturday Night Live, is supposed to appeal to young people. The comedy sketches include references to Juliette Lewis, Pimp My Ride and a Gilbert & Sullivan parody sketch. The hosts and guests meanwhile include Rob Reiner, Sting, Felicity Huffman and Allison Janney. If that sounds like the painful efforts of a middle aged man to appear in tune with modern youth, thats because it is.
 * In-Universe. Saul on Breaking Bad calls one of Walt's suggestions "What the kids would call an epic fail". Then Saul doesn't exactly seem like the type of guy who's up to date on modern youth culture (Or any culture for that matter). Otherwise this trope is averted with Walter Jr who is helpfully played by an actual teen.
 * Played for laughs in 3rd Rock from the Sun. Tommy is Really 700 Years Old but is in the body of a teenager. When questioned about his unusual alien habits, he responds that "everything doesn't have to be about Pac-Man and the Bee Gees". His girlfriend gives him a very odd look.
 * Used by Sherlock. In Buckingham Palace.


 * Part of the premise of the "Miley Cyrus Show" sketch on Saturday Night Live is to parody her bubbly personality, and use of hyperbolic, Totally Radical phrases (including the Catch Phrase, "It's prrrretty cool!").

Magazines

 * Cracked (which was a print magazine until it went online in 2007), despite usually being pretty good about avoiding this trope, would occasionally stumble into it. One of the worst examples was in 1995, when they attempted to parody some of the new video games that summer and came up with something called NBA Gam - "the slammin'est, gammin'est game of them all!" (Groan.) The joke was that it was basically NBA Jam, but with the teams' cheerleaders playing, and the "cover image" showed screaming bimbos in shorts and tank tops hurling each other through the air (the cartoonist apparently having confused basketball with wrestling). In addition to the obvious Values Dissonance of the premise ("Look at these girls elbowing and shoving each other! They think they're guys! Ha, ha!"), the pun was an obvious reference to "gams," the early 20th-century slang word for women's legs (itself derived from the French word jambes, meaning....well...."legs"); problem was, that word had been outdated for nearly two generations by the time Cracked used it (and worse, most kids who were reading probably just assumed they had misspelled the word "game," thus nearly ruining the joke). In any case, the joke became discredited the very next year, when female basketball players launched their own version of the NBA.

Music
""Like a Pokémon I Pikachu.""
 * In general, most attempts to depict the musical interests of a young, "hip" character end up as this. For example, if the character likes "heavy metal," they will invariably listen to music which is either not actually metal at all, or such painfully bad metal that metalhead viewers usually want it to stop even more than the rest of the viewers.
 * The band Leetstreet Boys seems to be purposefully invoking this trope in their songs, most notably in the song "Yuri The One For Me". The band members can't possibly be younger than mid twenties, and the lyrics include such lines as:

""You and I make Nintendo Wii / Will together be WoW Level 70.""

""Sephy's mom has got it goin' on.""


 * A Washington Post review of Katy Perry's album Teenage Dreams and its song "Last Friday Night" says: But concerned parents of young Katy Perry fans, don't fret -- this woman might have more in common with you than with your kids. When it's time for Perry to reflect on her 3 a.m. follies, she stiffly sings "That was such an epic fail". It sounds like a clueless parent's attempt to speak teenager. (Be that as it may, the song was her fifth number-one hit from the album, the first time a female musician has pulled that off.)

Newspaper Comics

 * For Better or For Worse creator Lynn Johnston, in an effort not to sound dated ten seconds later, made up her own teenage slang phrases, which, since they were still being coined by a middle-aged woman, tended to sound pretty awkward anyway. Notable examples include "going/gone roadside" (i.e., putting out); also, "foob" (a portmanteau of "fool" and "boob"), close enough to the strip's actual acronym that snarkers now routinely call the strip Foob.
 * This really shone through because, well, it was a newspaper comic, which are not known for giving their readers the benefit of the doubt in intelligence... between that and just not having much space, Johnston would thus have to explain what her made-up slang meant... with slang or euphemisms that were Totally Radical.
 * In Zits, Jeremy had to teach his dad not to say "What's up, dood?" Unfortunately, though he could pronounce "Whatup, dude?" (relatively in use at time of publishing), he had no idea what it meant.
 * Parodied in one strip where Jeremy tries to get a slang word of his own invention to catch on: "Plasmic". It works about as well as you'd expect.
 * Calvin and Hobbes both averted and parodied this trope in a strip wherein Calvin made up his own slang, just to prove to his father that it was possible. ("Don't you think that's totally spam? It's lubricated! Well, I'm phasing.")

Professional Wrestling

 * Whether this counts as an aversion, an inversion, or a Deconstruction is open to debate, but World Wrestling Entertainment consciously avoids using its own insider lingo on the actual programming, even though that jargon is widely recognized and employed by the wrestlers themselves. This means practically zero use of the old "carny talk" terms such as "face" and "heel", or even newer terms such as "blade." (Occasionally a Genre Savvy performer will break Kayfabe and actually use one of the terms, but this practice is not encouraged.) On the other hand, this trope was crossbred with Bilingual Bonus on an episode of Monday Night Raw which had Alberto Del Rio introduce Jack Swagger, Dolph Ziggler, Christian, and Wade Barrett as rudos (Mexican wrestling slang for "villains").

Radio
"Reed: I told you, Adam, Antony and Cleopatra has nothing to do with rap! Adam: Oh yeah? Well, where does Cleopatra come from? Reed: Egypt. Adam: And what continent is Egypt on? Reed: Africa. Adam: Africa... African-Americans... rap! Boom! Hit it! There was a red-hot mama and her name was Cleo A babe born in Egypt but she moved to Italy-o She hooked up with a dude who was built like a tree Her old man's name was Mark An-an-an-an-an-an-an-an-"
 * The Reduced Shakespeare Company Radio Show:


 * In the theater version, they do Othello as a rap, in a similar style.
 * The published script to their stage show includes a tongue-in-cheek footnote remarking that they are only too aware that rap as a signifier of youth and coolness was hopelessly cliched even back when the scene was originally added in 1987, but they keep it in because it's consistently one of the most popular parts of the show with audiences.
 * Matt Smith (no, not that one), original presenter of Radio 4's children's show Go4It in 2001, was more than a little prone to this and extensively parodied on the radio version of Dead Ringers. His successor Barney Harwood was rather more restrained.
 * National Cynical Network's "Chap in the Hood", with a crisply accented Briton interjecting urban slang into his monologue, joined in the finale by a Cockney rival doing the same.
 * An episode of the CBC comedy news show This Is That had a teacher who switched to talking in this sort of forced slang in class. It worked.

Tabletop Games

 * Paranoia: Played for laughs with the Death Leopard secret society, who are among the few in any universe who would actually say "Totally radical, dude!" and mean every word of it. (In Zap games, talking like a dodgy take on a 1980s surfer dude is all but expected).
 * An unfortunate moment in Mutants and Masterminds: Hero High had Lucien Soulban jump into this, by recommending renaming a number of skills "Yo, dis da shizzle, boy!"

Theatre
"Wang: A yen? San: That's when someone sends you--and Ta sends her. Wang: What language are you speaking? San: That's bop, Pop!"
 * In Flower Drum Song, Wang San annoys his parents with his use of slang, for instance by trying to explain to his father that Helen has "got a yen for" his older brother:


 * All four characters in Title of Show occasionally indulge in this, with terms like "hangry" (hungry + angry) and "fuxellent" (you can probably guess). Somewhat subverted in that while most of the slang terms used in the show were more or less made up, the fanbase actually embraced them after the fact.
 * Originally, "The Rap" from Starlight Express was entirely plot-relevant, though it was clearly a product of The Eighties. In The Nineties, the song was rewritten to comply with the musical's newly changed plot, but sounded even more dated than before ("Nah, diesel's wicked! That diesel's sweet!"). Its final incarnation for the twenty-first century, complete with "Hip Hoppers" replacing the previous trio of boxcars, was, in fact, totally 'radical', to the extent that not a single lyric remained from the first version of the song. This version must be seen to be believed. Needless to say, a Camp Bisexual electric engine rapping "I've got the pull! I'm takin' you to school!" is hilarious enough even without the choral assertion that racing is "the fastest, the dopest, the meanest, the quickest, the raddest, the baddest."

Video Games
"Awesome! Awesome! Awesome! Ah! Awesome! Awesome! Ah!"
 * Awesomenauts. The game is one huge parody of 80's cartoons. Especially the theme song.

"Zelos: That was totally gnarly! Emil: People still use "gnarly"?"
 * Summon Night: Swordcraft Story 2 features a robot who initially talks in Spock Speak... but the main character can't understand him and asks him to speak more understandably, so he starts talking in obnoxious Totally Radical speech. He later goes back to Spock Speak, to the relief of the other characters, and likely the relief of the player as well.
 * Jake from Advance Wars: Dual Strike. "Black Hole is all up in our business." Cue cringing. Or laughing, depending on the player's temperament.
 * It gets worse from there: his victory line is "Get the plates, 'cuz you just got served!"
 * Waylon's slang in Days of Ruin is a deliberate self parody/Lampshade Hanging of the NoA localization team's work with the aforementioned Jake. "Would someone tell me why these Lazurians are up in my business?"
 * Totally Rad is a game absolutely loaded with this, to the point that it borders on (and actually is) self-parody. It was actually a translation of a painfully straight platform game called Magic John and was purposefully done over the top, but may have been too subtle.
 * Also a case of All There in the Manual, where you KNOW they're not taking themselves seriously. Those who didn't get the manual missed out on a lot of jokes, including where they basically give away the whole convoluted plot and interrupt it with a random picture break of an airplane, as well as one of the US president of Jaleco or a picture of some...random chick. Imagine a video game manual written by Bill and Ted... or a stoner. But hilarious.
 * Pokémon Diamond and Pearl have people saying things such as "If you don't have Gym Badges, people think you're a total n00b, right?" and "I just got owned!" Translator Douglas Dinsdale of Something Awful put in a lot of Internet memes (like an artist on Route 208 saying he will name a painting "My Pokémon Is Fight") as injokes. Thankfully, much of the dialogue was rewritten in Platinum.
 * "Jock" type characters in Animal Crossing: Wild World also refer to you as a "total noob" if you annoy them.
 * Likewise, Metal Gear Acid 2 had a nerdy Playful Hacker who used Internet slang in dialogue; unfortunately, Internet slang evolves so fast his use of it seems dated just a year later.
 * One word: DOOD! 3 more words: THAT'S SWEET, DOOD!
 * "Dood" was an addition by the original translators by Atlus, but kept by Nippon Ichi when they opened their US branch. In the original, the Prinnies constantly end their sentences with ?? (ssu), a colloquial contraction of the polite copula ?? (desu).
 * Becomes a plot point in the first game -- one of the Prinnies is special, and the cast calls her on it because she doesn't use "dood". So she tries, and sounds extremely awkward. The fact that she's pink (whereas every other Prinny is very, very blue) isn't brought up.
 * Moreover, "dood" is Dutch for "dead."
 * Pocket Kingdom: Own the World, one of the very few good-by-consensus games for the N-Gage platform, is intentionally filled with this, as it attempts to mirror an actual PC MMORPG. Players buy and upgrade their weapons with "loot", and losing characters are "owned", rather than simply being defeated.
 * Seifer's painful rejoinder in Kingdom Hearts II (made even more Narmtastic in the fact that it's delivered in a complete deadpan).
 * Xigbar of Organization XIII talks like a Surfer Dude, though in his case it's more his personal quirk than anything.
 * Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: Justice For All: "That monkey doesn't fake the funk on a nasty dunk." To say nothing of Sal Manella, the fat, geeky TV director in the first game who largely communicates in 1337-speak when agitated, prompting your sidekick to ask "What are 'suck sores'?"
 * Zelos from Tales of Symphonia is a milder version of this; he doesn't speak in it constantly, but when he does, it's painful.
 * "We're goin wit mah pimp plan"
 * Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World pokes some fun at this in a Victory Quote:

"Sho:You fractals have no future! QED. Class is dismissed!"
 * At one point in Tales of Legendia, an Oresoren acts as the translator for a huge, toothy monster whom his people reverently refer to as a "Mighty One". He speaks its words like a Surfer Dude, hilariously deepening his voice more then a few octaves as he does so. Some members of the party naturally question wheher it's actually talking that way, to which he insists that it is.
 * Parodied in Mario & Luigi: Partners In Time, where the plumbers encounter a Hammer Bros. duo mind-controlled by the bad guys via special helmets that talk 1337-speak. After they're freed from the helmets, they wonder who'd talk like that.
 * Parodied, again, in Super Paper Mario in the third chapter -- which is usually referred to as the 'nerd' chapter. The (accidental) villain of the chapter is Francis, a "high-technicaaaal" nerd who abducts Ninja Butterfly Tippi thinking it's a rare insect, with no worse intent than to take photos of her to show off his new camera.
 * Super Mario World uses this for the Special World level names, which even for the time were likely painfully outdated to the point of sounding ridiculous. Groovy, Awesome and Funky are somewhat okay level names, but 'Way Cool' and 'Outrageous' sound like Narm, and Gnarly and Mondo are about as outdated sounding as possibly imaginable. As for Tubular, apart from being That One Level, the name isn't exactly slang most people on the planet would have even heard of, and trying to use that in normal conversation would merely gain a lot of odd looks from others.
 * Pops up a lot in The World Ends With You. At one point, you have to help a pin salesman pass around Red Skull Pins by implanting catchphrases into his head, which consist of such hilariously/painfully corny '80s buzz words as "Totally gnarly!" and "Come get some hot stuff!" The other characters wonder exactly what he's thinking.
 * On the other end of the spectrum, we have Sho Minamimoto, who mixes mathematical phrases in with his dialog.

"Wave being: "'SUP?" Geo: "Uh... 'sup?" Wave being: "'SUP... YEAH! 'SUP!""
 * However, for the most part, the game uses modern slang, and properly, at that. The sheer volume of slang makes some conversations odd to listen to, though.
 * In City of Heroes, an officer representing Nemesis (a villain who's been around since the 1800s) tells a member of the cybernetic punk Freakshow: "I assure you, my good man, Nemesis is most definitely 'down with the street'. Word up, my homie, as it were."
 * Lampshade Hanging in Mega Man Star Force: When Geo travels to the AMAKEN compound, he meets a girl named 'Chatty Ditz' who's, like, totally having trouble, like, sending an e-mail to her friend, y'know? When Omega-Xis asks why she talks like that, Geo remarks that "it's some sort of dialect people used 200 years ago", to which Mega responds: "I'm not sure whether this means human language has reached its high point or its low point".
 * Also, parodied in Mega Man Star Force 3. One of the noise areas is inhabited by a corrupted wave being, which has a vocabulary that mostly revolves around one word, much to the confusion (and amusement) of the player.

""COME ON CRANKY, TAKE IT TO THE FRIDGE!""
 * White Men Can't Jump, a video game for the Atari Jaguar based on the movie of the same name, is notorious for playing this trope terribly straight. Bangin' up high the handle homey beef!
 * In Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3, the Japanese Commander Kenji will taunt you during skirmish matches with phrases like "Hey look! A noob in training." or "What? This wet nose scrub beat me?".
 * Considering that this takes place (presumably) decades earlier in its timeline, this is probably still cutting-edge slang in-universe.
 * In Tony Hawk's UnderGround 2, slimy movie writer/director/producer Nigel Beaverhausen talks in labored, outdated slang to the skating teams. Mainly to get the point across that he's a total square whose attempts to relate to them are just condescending.
 * In the previous game there was a Russian man who constantly spouted slang and apparently learned English from "American hip-hop videos, my man!"
 * Downhill Jam parodied this with Gunnar, one of the fictional playable skaters in the game. He absolutely mutilates hip-hop slang in a way that would have been cringe-worthy...if he wasn't an Arnold Schwarzenegger Expy.
 * In the English localization of Xenogears, Hammer the Supplier says, "Master, sir, did you just see my MAD SKILLZ!?"
 * Griffith "Griff" Simmons' speech in SSX 3 was... painful. And, indeed, he does say "TOTALLY RAD!" as he's hitting a particularly awesome trick.
 * Not to mention Mac Frasier's terrible street lingo, which aged pretty pathetically. Yeah, Mac, we can say "bling bling." But nobody has wanted to since 2004.
 * "Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the president?"
 * Many FMV games from the 90's suffered from this, particularly ones made by Digital Pictures. Make My Video, Slam City, Double Switch and Corpse Killer are particularly infamous cases.
 * Mr. Ekoda in Persona 3 attempts this in his first lesson to attempt to get students interested in his subject.
 * One of the villains in the second Sly Cooper game is Dmitri, a French Jive Turkey lounge lizard who learned all of his English from American music videos, and communicates in a mish-mash of outdated slang. Eventually lampshaded after Dmitri delivers a convoluted threat right before the boss fight with him, and Sly retorts with "I have no idea what you're saying. And your suit sucks!"
 * The infamous intro rap from Donkey Kong 64 is chock full of this, but that's what makes it pure, cheesy Narm Charm for many players.


 * Earthbound, being the game it is, is full of this.
 * The Sims 2 expansion pack Teen Style Stuff evoked this trope in their Recurring Gag: Like, totally reticulating splines, dude.
 * Kaluha, a member of the Quirky Miniboss Squad in Solatorobo, is a parody.
 * Kurow in Okamiden. Quite possibly Justified because a) he thinks he's the coolest thing ever and b),.
 * Rare Pokémon example: The mascot for the 2011 World Championships is a "skater-punk"-styled Pikachu.
 * The logo has a lot of Totally Radical in it. It sort of makes sense since Unova is based off New York and New Jersey, and that's stereotypical 90s Big Applesauce.
 * Suikoden V features Lu, a hyper teenage girl who uses 1337-speak and emoticons in her dialogue.
 * Sprung features constant overuse of baffling slang. It's hard to tell if it's earnest or ironic. Possibly both.
 * Take a shot every time you see or hear the word "extreme" in NBA Jam Extreme. By the time you're halfway into playing the Vancouver Grizzlies, the first team you face in Arcade mode, you will be too drunk to continue. At the very least, they spell it properly.
 * As can be expected from the title, the Cosmic Fantasy franchise used the word "Cosmic" on a lot of things, notably the Cosmic Pirates and Cosmic Hunters.
 * Totally Rad and Kid Niki: Radical Ninja for the NES were Japanese games that in localization got tweaked to fit the 1980s "radical" style.

Web Animation
"Cheerleader: Okay, my Spanish Galleons!"
 * Coach Z fits this trope. He loves to rap (badly), and uses dated slang.
 * Parodied on Homestar Runner, in Strong Bad Email #164, looking old. Strong Bad fears he's losing the "youth vote" of "young parsons who eat their yogurt through a tube", and thus calls an "emergency marketing meeting". The Cheat suggests frenetic, MTV-style editing, while Bubs thinks adding a lowercase "i" to the front of words is a good idea. Ultimately he undergoes a "lace-lift" which results in the opposite of the intended effect so that he ends up looking and sounding like his own great-grandmother.
 * Acknowledged yet avoided by the Teen Girl Squad, as their Totally Radical slang is so ridiculous, it can't be anything but fake.


 * Their 2010 April Fools gag is a Totally Radical revamp of the characters with Xtreme Kool Letterz. They're revamped for the nineties...a decade or two late.
 * Several of the "Awesome" videos on Newgrounds use this trope for comic effect with characters such as Sonic and Gray Fox. "Yo yo yo B-boy Snake-Dawg-G..."
 * My client has the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of chilling out!
 * The Lebrons is built on this trope, primarily due to being aimed towards African-American audiences.

Web Comics

 * Parodied throughout Kid Radd, as the main character is from an 80s Video Game which used this trope. "Woo, air guitar!"
 * This The Adventures of Dr. McNinja strip manages to replace the Totally with Epic. King Radical is a recurring character riff on the trope, a villain known for such deeds as hijacking trucks carrying "Xtreme snacks." Subverted with that example when the Doctor finds a note from Radical in the truck stating that while his guess was good, Radical prefers fresh and locally-grown organic food.
 * The teenage-drug-created-ninja-dudes in, like, part 1 of the D.A.R.E. arc, also use this crazy radical stuff. As does Doc's desperate-to-be-kool younger brother Sean, though it's part of a campaign of Obfuscating Stupidity. Even Dan McNinja, the epitome of a Cool Dad, is not immune (though in his case he's simply mixing up Kick Ass with Bust/Blast Ass, which are entirely different things).
 * Deconstructed in this Xkcd strip.
 * Achewood creator Chris Onstad makes a more successful effort to simulate teen slang indirectly than For Better or For Worse. "Little Nephew" Charley holds forth in a half-recognizable, half-invented hip-hop lingo with Xtreme Kool Letterz. See Charley's blog for best examples.
 * Parodied in the Remix Comic of Jet Dream. Cookie Jarr, the nerdy boy turned Action Girl, frequently speaks in n Bob Haney-esque indecipherable gibberish of "teen slang" as imagined by a middle-aged comic book writer circa 1970. She uses/misuses bits of slang from anywhere between 1950 and 1970, as well as some slang never uttered by a single teenaged human being before or since.
 * One of Cyanide and Happiness' animated shorts makes fun of the use of this trope in 90's commercials directed at kids. It involves a skater punk doing insane stunts and screaming his own made up slang ("Scrumpaduchious!") every several seconds. Eventually he loses control of his board while screaming the made up slang and lands on his head, putting him in a permanent coma.
 * Parodied in this strip of Loserz, when Ben tries to talk Jive Turkey to a black girl (who is upper middle class).
 * Dave Strider of Homestuck talks in a manner like this as part of his "ironic" style. In response, Terezi likes to send him pictures like the one on the top of the page with Dave's shades and t-shirt logo crappily scribbled in and ask D4V3 1S TH1S YOU?.
 * Dave's webcomic within a webcomic Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff is also drenched in a garbled form of this style of speech, generally played for Stylistic Suck purposes.
 * Gamzee is arguably worse. He talks in dated and occasionally Malaproper rapper slang, because he is a Juggalo. The other characters occasionally have problems understanding him as a result of this.
 * Given how the author seems to be stuck in the 90's, Sonichu seems to use a non-ironic version of this trope, like "da update".
 * Gleefully embraced in The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob in the Ninjas storyline by the eponymous ninjas, who speak in a torrent of ridiculous phrases and unapologetic abuse of sentence structures. There's considerable Lampshade Hanging, and the comic mascot 'Grammar Squirrel' is reported as rendered unconscious after several pages of the ninjas speaking.

Web Original

 * Linkara in Atop the Fourth Wall gets to parody this through his persona of "90's Kid" - a flannel and backwards-baseball-cap wearing teen who's obsessed with Nirvana, Rob Liefeld, and Doom.
 * In one episode of Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series, Bakura talks like this when trying to sound more American. Even though he's in Japan.
 * "Joey, stop trying to turn 'Brooklyn Rage' into a Catch Phrase."
 * The old Sierra Edutainment Game Turbo Science certainly LOOKS Totally Radical. "Hoverboarding aliens from the 90s? If that doesn't invoke dead slang then I don't know what does!"
 * Awesome Video Games runs on this trope. Almost to Stepford Smiler extremes.
 * Parodied in A Very Potter Sequel, when Umbridge promises the kids that having her as a teacher is going to be "Totally awesome!"
 * Rhett and Link have done this intentionally with their rap videos. The best example is Phatdippin', or going swimming fully dressed.
 * Parodied on Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog. At one point, the Lords Appellant take over the blog and rebrand it as ''Geoffrey Chaucer Hath an Extreme Blog! Go England! It Is Rad!"
 * Respect and Obey Authority. It's real.

Western Animation
"Kurt: Dude, that homie's lingo is wack!"
 * Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 1987 used (largely out-of-date) California surfer/valley-speak. It was primarily Michaelangelo who spoke like this. Except for the beginning and ending of the first live action movie, the other Turtles only did it sufficiently rarely that it was usually considered out of character when they did.
 * The Turtles' early overuse of Totally Radical speech was parodied in a sketch on Robot Chicken, where the Turtles said "Tubular!" "Radical!" "Awesome!" "Reaganomics!"
 * Heck, the Turtles parodied themselves in the live action movies. Donatello could never pick out the right word. "A Capella!... Perestroika? Oh, I know! Frere Jacques!"
 * In Turtles Forever, one of the 80s Turtles exclaim "Totally Radical!" when riding in the 2K3 Turtle Van.
 * Totally Spies uses this as part of its effort to deliberately evoke the late 80s, from its setting in Beverly Hills to its Valspeak. Judging from the technology the girls use, the adventures are probably taking place either in our own era or Twenty Minutes Into the Future....unless the show really is a period piece with modern technology interspersed throughout.
 * Kim Possible mostly used Buffy-Speak, but also threw in a few characters (such as Motor Ed, seriously) who spoke in out-of-date slang for comic effect.
 * Although they did use some words which are realistic slang, such as chillax, and coolio (which also shows up on Scrubs).
 * A throwaway gag in one episode involves Dr. Drakken learning the phrase "off the heazy" from a book on teenage slang, prompting Genre Savvy Shego to question its validity.
 * And apparently, he loved being "hip" so much that he continued to use terribly out-dated or poorly delivered phrases for the rest of the series. Thanks to Drakken's VA, John D4V3 1S TH1S YOU?, it was hilarious. "Why you got to leave me hangin' like that, yo?" and "Word to yo' mutha!" are examples.
 * Also briefly attempted by Mrs. Dr. Possible. Kim's reaction: "Mom, you're already cool. Don't push it."
 * Kitty Pryde in X-Men: Evolution originally used lots of somewhat-dated Valley Speak.
 * Jubilee in the original X-Men cartoon did the same thing, though the setting was New York; this was adapted from the comics, she was a "mall rat" from Southern California.
 * Justified for the Evolution version of Forge, who was literally caught in a timeless limbo since the mid-seventies, and sounds just "groovy".
 * And it was hilariously lampshaded by Nightcrawler:

"Headmaster: I am so l33t! Optimus Prime: Yeah? Well, I have no idea what that means!"
 * One of the many minuses of Rocket Power is its (mis)use of slang.
 * Oddly also lampshaded (sort of) in once episode where the cast laments the "Kooks" (non-local) and such stealing their "lingo" and using it without the proper pronunciation or usage.... Silly Nickelodeon.
 * Remember when the Squid totally BEEFED IT??
 * In season 1 of 4Kids 's dub of Winx Club, Musa seemed addicted to slang. Her use of it gradually toned down in S2.
 * Parodied extensively in an episode of Clone High with the product X-Stream Blu (which notably contains a hip spelling) in the spirit of Go-Gurt and like commercials. Among the blatant attempts to seem hip include the phrases "to the max", "legit-ass contract", and the random string "Sick! Tight! Cyber! Awesome!" Yeah, that energy drink is cyber.
 * One of the executives in the background during the Totally Radical moments tends to shout out how this type of pandering has destroyed his dignity. "My son won't even look me in the eye anymore!"
 * In one of the first episodes, Principal Scudworth goes undercover to a party and constantly spouts phrases like "raise the roof" and "tight", among others.
 * In the Justice Friends segment of Dexter's Laboratory, Val Hallan, Viking God of Rock, speaks in a combination of this and Ye Olde Butcherede Englishe.
 * In the direct-to-DVD movie Bratz: Rock Angelz, the main characters can't seem to go two minutes without exclaiming that something is totally "slamming", "rocking", "styling", "scorching", or, in the case of a punk rock night club, "punkalicious".
 * In Transformers, Jazz is supposed to be the young, cool, hip robot. Unfortunately, he's usually about 30 years behind with his "cool" phrases, and nobody seems to notice.
 * This is somewhat justified in the 2007 movie, where it is mentioned that the Autobots learned all their human cultural information from the internet. We're lucky he wasn't talking in LOLcat.
 * And Transformers Animated brings us the Headmaster, who uses gamer slang instead of the usual '80s works... but still manages to be just as bad (or So Bad It's Good), with his constant shouting of "lamer" and "ownage". They even lampshaded it:

"Stay flamin'! Hotman. (Hotman. Hotman...) Flameo!"
 * The worst part about this? Isaac Sumdac (a robotics professor in his 60s) has tried to adopt "Total OWNAGE, N00b!" as his personal catchphrase. It's hideous and it's a good thing that  stopped him.
 * In Beast Wars Transformers, Cheetor began the series as a version of this, constantly saying things like "Ultra Gear!" and other radical things. The writers and the voice actor all hated this, and the lame dialogue largely went away by the end of the first season.
 * In South Park, Chef describes a variety of words used in lieu of "house", such as "hizzy", claiming that blacks are changing the word to keep white people from using their slang. Eventually, the word for "house" is "flippity floppety floop".
 * Which Mr. Garrison (at that point a Flamboyant Gay) immediately steals, much to Chef's chagrin.
 * It severely chagrined my dazzle as well.
 * In the beginning episode Butt Out!, an anti-smoking group performs at South Park Elementary, trying (and horribly failing) to reach the kids this way. When they tell the kids that, by not smoking, they can be "just like them", the boys look at each other, horrified, and the show cuts to them chain-smoking behind the school as if their lives depended on it.
 * An episode of The Simpsons features N'Sync doing a self-parody in which every other word out of their mouths is either "square" or "old-school".
 * Bart Simpson's image in early 90s pop culture can be seen as Totally Radical, even though this was never really part of his persona in the actual show (his skateboarding in the opening sequence perhaps being the closest he ever came). The episode Bart's Inner Child parodied this phenomenon, right down to the quoting of "Cowabunga". When popular perception of the show began to focus more on Homer's antics, this aspect subsided.
 * Even lampshaded a few times such as at one point when Bart tries to show he's still cool by singing and dancing to the "Do The Bartman" song. Ralph comments "That is so 1991.". Another one had Bart complaining about Lisa using his old "Don't have a cow man" catchphrase to his mom. Marge retorts he doesn't even use it anymore.
 * Parodied by Poochie, a cartoon dog with "attitude" who's the kung fu hippy from the gangster city. It had the opposite effect the in-universe producers were going for.
 * Avatar: The Last Airbender has an in-universe example: When Aang is in the Fire Nation, he tries to blend in by using 100+ -year-old slang that gets him all kinds of odd looks. lmagine someone nowadays saying "Bully!" to mean "Awesome!" That's how Aang looked to the rest of the Fire Nation.

"Gwen: I'm at one with the cosmic mana, feeling the energy of the universe flowing around and through me. Ben: Groovy..."
 * In SpongeBob SquarePants Mr. Krabs asks his daughter Pearl if he's still cool. Pearl responds that the word "cool" is no longer considered hip, and that kids now say "coral". The minute Krabs starts saying "coral" (he pronounces it "corral"), Pearl calls her friends to tell them that "coral" is definitely out.
 * Meanwhile Pearl and her friends themselves sound like stereotypical eighties Valley Girls.
 * Also parodied in a later episode; Patrick, upon getting tanned, remarks that he feels like one of those hip young folks from the soda commercials. Cut to a live-action sexagenarian drinking from a can of soda on a psychadelic background, with dramatic zooms and loud rock music, while an announcer screams about how "radical" the drink is.
 * Ben 10 Alien Force:

"(kid with backwards baseball cap and shades skateboards up to the camera, pulls out a police badge): Kid: "You're busted!" Announcer: "Teen Cop: inner-city street drama with a fresh attitude." Kid: "Education RULES!""
 * Likely a subversion, as "groovy" is 1960s slang, and Ben's probably making the point that Gwen's coming across like a New Age hippie. Unless Ben's just an Evil Dead fan, that is...
 * Which is entirely plausible.
 * Disney Channel's American Dragon Jake Long is chock-full of awkward attempts at writing circa-early-nineties skater-boy talk among the lead Token Trio. It got toned down in the second season and was even called outdated by his sister.
 * It was half-deliberate. The writers originally wanted Jake to slip into progressively worse slang when he was about to do something stupid or morally questionable, but Disney missed the point and made them scale it up the rest of the time too under the delusion that this would make it relevant to children. Then they yelled at the writers at the end of season one when they actually read reviews criticizing the overused slang and made them tone it down in the second season. It ended up pretty close to where the writers wanted it all along.
 * Batman Beyond largely averted this trope by sticking to Future Slang, but one splicer's warnings to not "diss" him stuck out like a sore thumb in the second season premiere.
 * Parodied brilliantly in the Batman: The Animated Series/The New Batman Adventures episode "Mean Seasons," one of whose scenes shows a group of network bigwigs pilots:

"Professor Utonium: Bring it on, daddy-o. Mojo Jojo: Oh that is so lame. You will pay for your use of inappropriate dialogue!"
 * Batman: "You overplayed your part, yo".
 * Parodied in The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy by the hopeless Butt Monkey geek Irwin, yo. Quite possible a subtle jab at the typical Jive Turkey, since Irwin is the Token Minority.
 * Note that this was absent in the early episodes...
 * His dad is also a victim of this, although his grandmama is a badass grandma combined with this and can actually get away with it.
 * Also parodied with the Show Within a Show The X-treme Adventures of Brandon and Mallory.
 * The now infamous pilot for the Battletoads cartoon.
 * The games were hardly innocent of this, with Catch Phrases such as "Mad, bad, and crazy, 'Toads!"
 * This trope was one of the many things about Yo Yogi! that caused Yogi Bear to stop starring in regular cartoons.
 * Disney Channel has been doing this to their old shorts, called Disney Blam!
 * Lampshaded in an episode of The Powerpuff Girls, when Professor Utonium makes himself a super suit and joins the girls on their missions. He uses slang, but it's the slang from when he was a kid. The girls react appropriately.

"Poop Dog: Hey kids, do you wanna go magnet wit da monies? Kids: Yay! Child: What does that mean?"
 * Then there the knock off PPG in "Knock it Off" especially in the case of Buttercup's clone "Girl Power".
 * The twins from Superjail seem to fit into this category.
 * Danny Phantom suffers from this quite a bit. Especially with its rampant use of the word "waste".
 * Danny wasn't nearly as bad as Master's Blasters, though.
 * Mr. Lancer's book "How To Be Hip" that must be decades old. Even the kids at Casper give him weird looks and leave when he tries to talk to them from it.
 * To say nothing of Sidney Poindexter. To give you an idea, he's from the '50s.
 * Transformers: "DiMaggio / is punishING / his Gatling gun is ILLIN'!"
 * To say nothing of the big bad battlin' Bruticus. (Some forget, but it is in fact Onslaught who is the metamorphin' dudicus.)
 * In one episode of The Tick, where the villain was a super-intelligent child, the Tick attempted to relate with him by talking like this.
 * Futurama simultaneously avoids and parodies this trope: The youngest adult main character, Amy, uses semi-current slang with science-fictiony add-ons (For example, shmeesh=yeesh, splech=yech,, etc.)
 * It goes a little further than that. For example, people (not just Amy) in the future say "we're boned" instead of "we're screwed."
 * Conventional totally radical speech was parodied by That Guy in the episode "Future Stock". He was awesome... awesome to the max.
 * In Roswell That Ends Well, Leela goes all over the map with her 20th century slang ("What's up, Holmes?" - in 1940's America.)
 * And of course "ask" has been completely replaced by the slang "axe".
 * Spoofed in Johnny Test with Bling-Bling Boy, a rich jerk who's Johnny's recurring nemesis. He came up with the name in an attempt to be cool. A Running Gag is when people refer to him by his first name, he insists that you call him Bling-Bling Boy. It was eventually dropped when the characters learned to humor him.
 * In an episode of Garfield and Friends, Jon's teenaged niece talked like this and Garfield and the narrator had to do translating duties every time she spoke. Eventually, poor Garf' started talking this way himself. (The sound of Lorenzo Music uttering "Gag us with a spoon, dude" in that famously dreary voice of his is undeniably a hilarious moment.)
 * Boomerang's promo spot for their "Meddling Kids" block spotlights a clip of a character from Jabberjaw saying "Wowwy-wow-wow!" as an example of "the lingo."
 * Played straight and Inverted Trope at the same time in Disney's The Aristocats: The movie had Scat Cat and others saying "groovy" and "cat" in a film released in 1970 (when that kind of slang was going out of style), but the film itself was set in 1910, when none of such slang was in common use (or even invented) yet. Of course, the movie had swing to begin with...
 * Still counts, because that sequence also has the titular kittens (who are, as their name suggests, supposed to be Upper Class Twits) awkwardly joining Scat's crew in singing the jazz song "Ev'rybody Wants To Be a Cat." (Note that the song contains plenty of beatnik/hippie slang such as "square" and "where it's at.")
 * On an episode of Jimmy Two-Shoes, Lucius tries speaking in slang during a commercial for his cologne. Jimmy notes, "It's almost cool how uncool he is."
 * Chris DreadWING from Total Drama Island uses the words "dude" and/or "bro" every other sentence when addressing the contestants. This gets Lampshaded when Chef reads Chris's cue cards, showing viewers that Totally Radical language is not as easy as Chris makes it look.
 * May double as Actor Allusion, as Chris' voice actor also did Jude on Sixteen, who made heavy use of this trope himself.
 * Adventure Time branches off from the more commonly used math term of "radical" with "mathematical" and "algebraic".
 * In addition, Party Pat from the episode "The Belly of the Beast" is prone to a more standard usage of the trope: "that monster's gut was totally excellent".
 * Quack Pack, a mid-nineties reboot of Huey, Dewey and Louie, stated, in that obnoxious talking bubble-tape voice, that "they're not kids anymore. They're EXTREME TEENS!!!!" Followed by one of the ducklings riding a skateboard saying "Ex-treme!"
 * Regular Show basically lives on this trope, but not in the way you would expect. Its Eighties vibe is meant to appeal to older viewers.
 * On Toot & Puddle, the characters will sometimes say "Gee whilikers!" which surely went out of fashion sometime around the 60s.
 * Parodied in Invader Zim with Poop Dog, the gangsta spectre of defeat!


 * Happens to some extent in the Young Justice cartoon. For instance, Artemis insults Kid Flash by calling him "Baywatch", a reference to a TV show that ended when she would have been around 5 years old.
 * Widget the World Watcher and Mr. Bogus (both from Zodiac Entertainment) are guilty of abuse of the word "awesome" in their opening titles (compounded by the latter dragging in "bodacious"), which get in the way of their otherwise awe... good theme tunes.
 * Parodied in My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic, where Rainbow Dash insists that her pet must possess "coolness", "awesomeness" and "radicalness". When Twilight Sparkle points out those three mean the same, she is given an Affectionate Gesture to the Head by Rainbow.
 * It's quite possible she learned this from Gilda, given that said griffon talked in nothing but Totally Radical for the entirety of her episode.
 * Miss Grotke on Recess often makes use of outdated slang.
 * Judy Jetson in the 1980's revival of The Jetsons fits this trope to a tee, even going so far as to follow this trope when talking to her own mother!
 * Superfriends. In the first episode of the 1973/74 season, "The Power Pirate", Wendy and Marvin spoke like 60's hippies, regularly used terms like "groovy", "cool", "right on" and "far out". Apparently the writers figured out how silly this sounded and they didn't speak like this for the rest of the season.

Real Life
"Church Sign: "Have u tlked 2 ur bff Jesus l8tly?""
 * Church signs, newsletters, etc., are a fertile breeding ground for this trope:
 * This could be a Simpsons sign gag, and this (currently inactive link) is where the pic at the top of the page came from.
 * This is also worthy of mention.
 * World Youth Day 2008 took place in Australia, and the attendees got religious text messages on their mobiles. These switched the "you" for a "u" and so on. An article was published about how they were doing it to "speak their language", and quoting "experts" on how the message would be "seen as cool". They somehow didn't get that people use text speak because it's just quicker.
 * Another case of religious messages in texting format, was the following mind-meltingly bad church sign that went up in Pennsylvania.

"Zack: God's purpose 4 my life and what happens after death Jo: what have u found out?"
 * The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints tells us the meaning of life with txt, yo:

"Q: What did one cool alien say to the other? A: Yo! You're a far-out dude!"
 * Full-scale version.
 * Church marquee sign up for a while saying "Let's get crunk for Jesus!"
 * Church sign advertising a "Holy Hip Hop" event.
 * Church sign: "Faithbook: God has sent you a request".
 * The [[media:churchbarf1.jpg|old page image]] for this trope.
 * This "praise" song, which is indeed genuine.
 * Anti-abortion billboard spotted in Alabama: "god loves u girl and ur baby 2". What's especially odd is that "loves" and "and" are spelled out correctly.
 * Every youth pastor. Ever.
 * Anti-Drug PSA's, particularly during the late-80's and early-90's, were also infamous for using "hip lingo" and "cool characters" to keep kids off drugs.
 * And let's not forget that little gem by "Joey" at the end of this PSA: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTYXZ0qZZEA
 * A mid-90's Smokey The Bear PSA deliberately averted this trope by showing Smokey watching a video of himself rapping about forest fires, at which he wisely acknowledges that he was trying to be something he wasn't in that video. So he instead decides to say straight up that "Only you can prevent forest fires."
 * If anybody has heard of any of the 20 Internet Acronyms Every Parent Should Know, please contact your local police station post-haste; they could definitely use you as a telepathic detective.
 * The updated list of 50 acronyms contains some real corkers. A/S/L is legit, as pointed out, along with J/O. As are 1337 and 420 (the latter a marijuana reference) but both are a little out of place in a list that seems to concern itself mainly with cybersex. The rest seem to be initialisms of quite arbitrary phrases, or else it's slang particular to an individual chat community. Apparently, banana means penis. And "kitty" means vagina, obviously a pun on "pussy". Using either is a good way to give your cybersex session that little something extra.
 * What? You mean, not that you're connecting via using HTTP via an ISP to a LAMP stack which is running a MMORPG descended from a MUD that liked to call itself a PBBG programmed with PHP and you're connecting to it from a *NIX PC which != M$ after you've read the WSU about event at MIT hoping not to get a 404 reading UTF-8 rather than ASCII or ISO-8859 and the TLA increases as BOINC wants more RAM...
 * "Zerg" = "to gang up on someone"? If that someone is Hogger, I guess... Fun activity: Picture a bunch of juvenile Starcraft players "zerging" somebody on the playground!
 * Objective Ministries is a Stealth Parody of fundamentalist Christianity; their Zounds! Youth Rock Ministry is an equally stealthy parody of this trope, to the point where it was originally posted on this page as a straight example.
 * In 1992, a New York Times columnist wrote a glossary of "Seattle grunge slang" for that paper. He didn't make it all up, but his cunning informant did. The gullible reporter reported it as fact. Some of the slang actually made its way into the mediasphere in minor ways. For example, it inspired the title of the short-lived Harsh Realm a television series loosely based on a comic book called The Realm.
 * Michael Steele, the new chairman of the RNC, drew a great deal of satire for promising an "off the hook" PR campaign in "urban-suburban hip-hop settings", among many such 'cool' comments.
 * In a bit of a twist, the use of "tea-baggers" as a disparaging term for Tea Partiers is a case of a kind of double subversion. Before Rick Santelli's CNBC outburst on February 19, 2009, Ron Paul's younger followers, many of them video-gamers, sometimes talked of having tea parties and "teabagging" government officials the same way they ritually humiliated fallen opponents in their First-Person Shooter games. After Santelli's outburst sparked a popular conservative/libertarian movement, this kind of talk fell out of favor with the older and less video-game-oriented members making up the greater portion of these movements. However, left-wing antagonists then seized on references to "teabagging" as an obscene slur to use against Tea Partiers. Many on either side were unaware of the actual homosexual practice to which this term refers, and some still are. Others, especially the more libertarian Tea Partiers, have argued in favor of rehabilitating the use of the term as a metaphor for what should be done to government. After all, metaphorically speaking, which is worse: being the one doing the teabagging, or being the one getting teabagged?
 * The annotation to this article by Seanbaby points out an especially lame example from a company pamphlet shilling gamer chairs. His mockery may have even caused the company to pull the dialogue.
 * At some award show a few years ago, Joan Rivers made a comment about a rapper along the lines of "always getting some bling for him and his crew." * cringe, facepalm*
 * In an effort to "[tie] in nicely with the texting generation," Pizza Hut adopted the "secondary brand" of "The Hut", simultaneously if (presumably) unintentionally evoking memories of Spaceballs.
 * Speaking of shortened brand names, see "Mtn Dew", a name that to some suggests an attempt to save on ink costs, or the world's first mutton-flavored soft drink.
 * mmm, Mutton flavored soft drink.
 * While campaigning in 2008, Mitt Romney once attempted to relate to the people by having his picture taken with bystanders while talking about camera phones and (awkwardly) using phrases such as "Who let the dogs out? Woof! Woof!" and talking about "bling bling" to a crowd of composed mostly of African-Americans. On MLK Day. In 2008.
 * This horrifying joke, found on a Laffy Taffy wrapper:


 * Cue the Collective Groan.


 * Similar to the above-mentioned "The Hut", Radio Shack is in the process of changing its name to "The Shack". In fairness, Radioshack's employees have been privately calling their store "The Shack" for years.
 * Makes perfect sense given that ham radio, where the name comes from, is considered rather vintage nowadays. Unless you're an amateur radio hobbyist, that is.
 * To encourage young people to go to Lake District, the council re-recorded some beautiful Wordsworth poetry as a rap song, along with a rapper in a squirrel fursuit. Called MC Nuts. No, really.
 * From 2009 to 2010, Denver's CW station, KWGN, called itself "KWGN The Deuce" in an attempt to appeal to a younger demographic. On-air personality Chris Parente even said on the day of the change (March 30, 2009) that it was "totally radical". This isn't the half of it: early on in the name's tenure, promos ended with text-speak; for example, a promo for Two and A Half Men would end with "chkles and gigls!"; this was dropped early on in the name's tenure.
 * Huntsville, AL's ABC affiliate WAAY brings us the weather rap. Marvel at the sheer amount of Head Desk!
 * Articles in magazines trying to explain slang to parents. The words they come up with sometimes...
 * Channel 1, a news program that sponsors high schools' broadcasting programs, has started showing "The Week in Rap" every Friday. Because, you know, teenagers don't understand the news unless it is rapped to them.
 * Teenagers don't even understand that. Apparently they only understand the news when told in rhyme with a vague resemblance to rhythm.
 * Possibly the strangest example yet. The picture is safe for work, and must be viewed because... you wouldn't believe us if we tried to describe it.
 * Sweet Cred tries to sell candy and rocking horses with... outdated ridiculous slang?
 * This group's mascot, Hizzy.
 * ESPN sportscaster Stuart Scott's catchphrases are littered with these, particularly "Booyah!"
 * John Tesh, who hosts a radio advice show, had a segment explaining teen slang to parents. I don't know who his sources were, but I've never heard someone call their shoes "digs" or their friend "home skillet" unless they're joking around about this trope.
 * This bank has an 'extreme teen' site. Because fiscal responsibility is totally radical.
 * McLain (then nicknamed "the Deuce") was created in 1993 as a Totally Radical attempt at a younger, hipper version of ESPN, with "edgier" graphics, more informal attire by show hosts (infamously, Keith Olbermann was made to wear a leather jacket as co-host of the network's flagship show), and greater emphasis on extreme sports. Beginning in the late '90s the network de-emphasized its youth-oriented aspects, becoming more like a supplemental version of its parent network.
 * Third Rock, a NASA internet music station, is designed to "speak the language of internet-savvy young adults". The chief operating officer refers to these young adults as "today's 4G audience", demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of 4G.
 * In The Nineties there was a Dutch ad campaign to keep kids of smoking. Since Smoking Is Cool they tried to showcase that çool peope don't smoke. What the makers of these ads thought kids considered cool included: a waiter urinating in somebody's food, a guy punching his own father in the face for no reason whatsoever and another guy who made his mother believe his father had cheated on her and messing up their marriage For the Evulz. Let's just say the campaign was controversial.