It Will Never Catch On



""Groups are out. Four-piece groups with guitars particularly are finished.""

- Dick Rowe, Decca Recording Company executive, 1962 (turning down The Beatles)

Anachronisms are funny. As are "prophecies" uttered by people who are in a position to lose a great deal of influence, money or credibility if they are wrong.

The best thing about Alternate Universes is that they have things we can't possibly imagine being true. Why can't the reverse also fit?

Oftentimes, be it a medieval setting or anything else where things we know about have no business existing, something abundantly familiar to our modern audience is put forth as a hypothetical. The punchline is that no one thinks it could possibly be popular, allowing us to laugh at how wrong people's predictions of the future really are, and pat ourselves on the back for being so clear-eyed.

Compare Vindicated by History, Call Forward and Who Would Want to Watch Us?, which is specific to TV shows, and Historical In Jokes that re-interpret the past in terms of the show. Contrast I Want My Jetpack, where our present makes a wrong prediction about the future. Note that this is also Truth in Television, as many things/people that are now legendary were considered potential failures: neither Elvis Presley nor the Beatles got good reviews when they were obscure, and many people couldn't see any use for a home computer. The polar opposite is This Is Going to Be Huge.

People reinventing things that did catch on didn't know It's Been Done. Not to be confused with Hilarious in Hindsight. Contrast Cassandra Truth, where no one believes the dissenting voices who say that some new famous or trendy product, idea or phenomenon is wrong. See also And You Thought It Would Fail - and They Called Me Mad, Who's Laughing Now?

Music

 * George Gershwin's They All Laughed is almost exclusively this trope. Among the concepts ridiculed by the mysterious "they": Christopher Columbus claiming the world was round, Thomas Edison's recordings, the Wright Brothers' airplane, Marconi's wireless, the creation of Rockefeller Center, Eli Whitney's cotton gin, Robert Fulton's steamboat, the Hershey bar, and the Model T Ford. Needless to say, the singer's relationship, to which he compared the above, was a similar success.
 * Mind you, everyone already knew the world was round by 1492. The reason Columbus was laughed at was because he thought the world was far smaller than it is.
 * Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk used to be in a garage rock band named Darlin'. The band received a negative review by a critic from Melody Maker that their rock music was a "bunch of daft punk". The magazine was right and their rock band fizzled, but the two took the name "Daft Punk" from the review and went on to become famous.

Puppet Shows
"Old Dinosaur: What is this... a trick? Robbie: No, it's a treat, for the baby."
 * In one episode of Dinosaurs, after traumatizing the Baby with a scary story, Robbie is forced to pacify him with candy. However, the Sinclair household is out, so they go to a neighbor's;


 * The old dinosaur then rants on the absurdity of the two going to his house on October 31st, begging for candy, and slams the door on their faces. Robbie then wonders if they should have worn costumes...

"Robbie/Baby: Naaah!"


 * Robbie also once dropped a candy bar into a jar of peanut butter and after pondering the result for a moment dismissed it as idiotic.

Pro Wrestling
""The next day, one of the guys asked for my impression of Rocky. 'Hey, he's a nice guy,' I said, 'but he just doesn't have it. The office should really cut their losses and get rid of the guy'. I had no idea I was talking about the future 'People's and Corporate Champion.'""
 * Reportedly, after jobbing out "Stunning" Steve Austin to "Hacksaw" Jim Duggan in record time, WCW vice president Eric Bischoff had a phone conversation with Austin, who suggested a change in his character from Jerk Jock to no-nonsense Nineties Anti-Hero. Bischoff told Austin, "Steve, we can have you run around in your little black tights and your little black boots, but that just wouldn't be marketable," and then fired Austin. After a brief stint in ECW, Austin went on to the WWF, where he ran around in his little black tights and his little black boots—and became one of the two biggest wrestling superstars in the world (the other being The Rock).
 * Well, Austin did add a little black vest to the look...
 * As well as a shaved head and a goatee. Back in his WCW days Austin had flowing blond hair and a clean-shaven look.
 * WCW managed to do this a lot. While head booker, Ric Flair once asked the staff "Does anyone really see Mick Foley as the world champion?" and when no one defended Foley, Flair decided to keep him in mid-card status before Foley departed for ECW and the the WWE where he became a highly popular three-time world champion.
 * Speaking of Foley, he thought this way of The Rock back when he was Rocky Maivia. To quote his book, Have a Nice Day!:


 * Bischoff also took Jim Ross off of commentary because Ross was fat and Southern and wouldn't appeal to mainstream America. J.R. then left for the WWE where he's become the Howard Cosell of pro wrestling.
 * WCW also dropped the ball with one guy named Mark Callaway. Name doesn't ring a bell? Well, you might know him better as The Undertaker, one of the most famous wrestlers in WWE history, almost universally considered the best big man wrestler of the past 20 years, and whose winning streak at Wrestlemania is one of the highest draws in any wrestling event ever.
 * Eric Bischoff (notice a pattern), along with Hulk Hogan and Goldberg, felt that a Squash Match between WCW World Heavyweight Champion Goldberg and WCW World Television Champion Chris Jericho would not have been a draw. The same Chris Jericho who would later unify the aforementioned WCW World Heavyweight Championship with the WWF Championship to become the very first WWF Undisputed Champion, but not before winning them off of Stone Cold Steve Austin and The Rock.
 * Kevin Nash, while a booker in WCW dubbed many of the cruiserweights as "Vanilla Midgits," smaller wrestlers who could never hope to become popular main eventers and lacked any charisma. Chris Jericho, Chris Benoit, Eddie Guerrero, Rey Mysterio, Jr.. Nope, none of them ever caught on.

Radio

 * An episode of the Public Radio International magazine show This American Life involved the reminiscences of a man "with a negative ability to identify trends". At various points in his life, he had: watched a Detroit nightclub performance by a pre-record-deal Madonna and assumed she would never make it big because she couldn't sing worth crap, reviewed and rejected a manuscript submitted to a publishing house entitled Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus because it was trite and misogynistic, and turned down a job with a Japanese company that was working on a major precursor to the public Internet because only losers would talk to people through a computer terminal.
 * The BBC Radio 4 Afternoon Play The Tobacco Merchant's Lawyer, set in 1780, has the lawyer deeply sceptical of a fortune teller who predicts the housing bubble, that Glasgow will be razed and replaced by tall tenement blocks so the poor may have water closets, and that one day everyone will have a box-shaped recepticle in the drawing room that shows plays and the town-cryer. Also, when his company's ships are supposedly lost to piracy, his only consolation is the thought that "the dread Pirates of the Caribbean may presently be enjoying a degree of infamy, but in the centuries to come their exploits will be forgotten as surely as a shipwreck at the bottom of the ocean".

Theme Parks

 * This is a recurring joke in Walt Disney World's Carousel of Progress.
 * Back in it's early days, Disney Theme Parks in general, when Walt was trying to get funding to build Disneyland. The critics couldn't have been more wrong.