They Just Didn't Care



""So, again, we see that the creative team has thrown up its hands and declared 'Screw it, I don't care.'""

- Linkara during his Countdown to Final Crisis review (part 2)

'''This trope has been subject to misuse. Read the description before linking to this page or adding an example.'''

The lighting is so bad you can see the shadow of the boom-mike on the wall. The zippers and seams are visible on the People in Rubber Suits. The editing looks like someone playing with the wipe feature on Windows Movie Maker. There are times when you really start to wonder what is going wrong with a movie, in theory they should be trying to make the best product they can.

But that's not what happens. A strange combination of the lack of money, time, expertise, enthusiasm and simple talent sabotages the production. This is when the production values of a work are just so far below what should be expected that you can't help but figure that "They Just Didn't Care."

Despite all of that, this trope is generally a mindset, and not one that is universally bad. If someone didn't care about one aspect of the production, the reasons may be that they were more worried about something more important. Nearly every fan of the original Star Trek knows of the continuity flub of Khan recognizing Chekhov when the Ensign didn't appear in the show until following season. Obviously it isn't a horrendous mistake to begin with and Nicolas Meyer admitted to not caring about that mistake. (A light dose of Fanon fixes it anyway.)

The trope name can be used as a Stock Phrases, something that can be applied to a wide variety of issues. Examples for this trope are all about the production values. It is possible to "Just Not Care" in regards to other aspects of making a story, but we have another set of tropes for that. Compare:
 * Continuity Snarl
 * Did Not Do the Research
 * Digital Destruction
 * Edited for Syndication
 * In Name Only
 * Off-Model
 * Special Effect Failure

Compare The Problem with Licensed Games, Video Game Movies Suck, Trading Card Lame, Fanon Discontinuity, Macekre, Cowboy Bebop at His Computer and Dub Induced Plot Hole.

Consider They Changed It, Now It Sucks; Fan Dumb; and Unpleasable Fanbase, though, and know that every opinion on this site was written by some person you don't even know.

The Trope Namer is a repeated phrase during the segment of Mystery Science Theater 3000 Episode 418 - Attack of the The Eye Creatures (sic) (as seen in the the Trope Image), where Joel and the Bots give a point-by-point presentation to prove that the makers of the movie had little concern for the quality of the film. This includes forgetting to adjust the camera to properly shoot day for night, giant zippers running up the back of the costumes for the People in Rubber Suits, and after running out of monster suits and monster boots, using the excess actors stomping around in their monster masks, black wool sweaters and sneakers. And the fact that it's called Attack of The The Eye Creatures.

Contrast Shown Their Work and Doing It for the Art.

Anime and Manga
"Tristan: "Don't be hating on my blackface, playa!""
 * The FUNimation English dub of the first Dragon Ball movie used an almost completely different voice cast from the TV series, with only two actors returning to reprise their roles. This had nothing to do with budget or actor availability. It had to do with whoever was on-hand at the exact time of production. The original actors from the TV series weren't even contacted for the project, and most of the actors used in the movie didn't even do a good job sounding like the TV series actors. This can also be an example of The Other Darrin, but it's an easy example of this trope.
 * An episode of Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series had Yugi guess that the animators didn't even care about the size of Kaiba's nose. Another episode noted that they apparently turned Tristan's skin black in one shot where the whole gang is in profile. Hilarity Ensues.


 * When Digimon Adventure was released on VHS in the UK, volumes 1-5 contained the first 15 episodes of the original series, but volume 6 skipped straight to Digimon Adventure 02.

Comic Books

 * The first year's worth of the original Gold Key Star Trek comic books, done by people in Europe who never saw the show yet were hired to draw and write the book. One horrific example has some guy named Captain "Kurt".
 * There were also the Power Records comic book/record sets, one of which featured a white Uhura and a black Sulu, complete with a fabulous 'fro. They were recognizably drawn based on the actors, but then altered in the coloring phase. This wasn't so much lack of research as lack of clearance for the actors' likenesses, something which famously got them into trouble with Leonard Nimoy.
 * Reginald Hudlin's tenure as head writer of Black Panther is full of this. Hudlin's Panther is so different from everything that came before, and ignores so much of his previous adventures and characterization, it would have fit better in Ultimate Marvel as opposed to the main 616-verse.
 * Panther's supporting cast, one of the best in recent comic book history - gone, or changed beyond recognition. Goodbye Queen Divine Justice, Monica Lynne, Hunter, goodbye Everett Ross' personality, goodbye Kasper Cole. Black Panther's backstory? Butchered. So he wasn't the real Black Panther all those years? All he has to do to become Black Panther is win a wrestling match? No spiritual communion with the Panther god through the heart-shaped herb... just a knock down fight? Where the hell did his younger sister come from?
 * When Jeph Loeb started writing for Ultimate Marvel, fans noticed some odd continuity errors cropping up. The Wasp, an Asian in the Ultimate Universe, suddenly turned white like her mainstream counterpart. Meanwhile, Ultimate Pyro, who was a hero instead of a villain like Regular Pyro, and the duo of Forge and Longshot, heroes in the standard universe but villains in Ultimate Marvel, suddenly switched sides with nary a Hand Wave as to why. Pyro even wanted to rape a knocked-out superheroine, and lost the horrible scars that had been his most striking feature in Ultimate X-Men. Nobody knows exactly what went through Loeb's head, of course, but the most popular explanation is also the simplest - he didn't bother reading their appearances in other books before he wrote his own.
 * The Ultimate Universe in general is plagued by this trope, apparently being seen as the branch of Marvel where continuity doesn't matter. One of the first Ultimate books was Ultimate Marvel Team-Up, which ostensibly existed to create Ultimate versions of characters who didn't have their own books. Unfortunately, those versions were roundly ignored as soon as someone felt like using those characters in a different book. They included Ultimate versions of the Hulk, the Black Widow, and the Fantastic Four that bore far more resemblance to their 616 counterparts than to what would later become the canon Ultimate versions.
 * Everything about All-Star Batman and Robin The Boy Wonder just shows that Frank Miller just stopped caring about anything that made Batman good. All of the heroes are turned into complete sociopaths and nothing about the plot or writing makes sense. It doesn't help that new issues are published so erratically that we'll likely never see the series finished in our lifetimes.
 * As an added "bonus", it also shows Frank Miller also stopped caring about his own continuity. According to him, all of his Batman stories coexist in the same universe/continuity. And while the events on All-Star Batman and Robin The Boy Wonder would definitely explain why, there's no way, as Linkara pointed out, that Gordon would allow such a despicable person as this Batman is to roam around care-free.
 * In Jason Aaron's run on Wolverine, he had the demonically-possessed title character stab Colossus, drawing blood. Apparently he missed the memo that Colossus can turn his entire body into organic steel, not just his skin.
 * While the writing may be subject to debate, some of the artwork in Archie Comics Sonic the Hedgehog shows that whoever was in charge couldn't really give a dang, with issue 113 and the main story of Sonic Super Special issue 15 being so poorly done artwise that one has to wonder how they even got published in the first place.

Film
"Crow: Get ready to give chase to an injured eye creature; as you can see, he's wearing his Jack Purcell athletic shoes! Folks, they just did not care!"
 * Attack of (the) the Eye Creatures is the Trope Namer, but honestly, you can apply it to any of Larry Buchanan's films, especially any of the remakes of old AIP films like Invasion of the Saucer Men, or Zontar, Thing From Venus (It Conquered the World).

"Uwe Boll: You go for it, to please the game fans, but on the other hand if you have the hard core gamers, they live in their own world. And you cannot fulfill their ideas from a video game based movie, it's impossible. And to be honest, the real gamers are the typical download guys, right? They don't pay anything for movies, because they illegally download the movies. So why I should please these guys? I need the normal audience.""
 * In another MST3K experiment, Red Zone Cuba, Servo groans, "I see the movie has finally thrown up its hands and said, 'I just don't know'."
 * The Catwoman movie started out as a completely unrelated script. Warner Bros wanted to make a DC Comics-based superhero movie every summer and Batman Begins was simply taking too long. At the last minute, when it became clear that Begins wasn't going to be done in time, they grabbed a script about a woman who gains cat-like powers, changed some names around, and called it a Catwoman movie, even though it more closely resembles The Crow.
 * "My city screams"? In the original Will Eisner comics, The Spirit's city doesn't "scream". It kind of chuckles, with a slow, sad smile. On a more serious note, the movie gives Denny Wolverine-style healing abilities that kind of take away from the whole idea of the Spirit as a relatively down-to-earth (though with occasional flights of fancy) mystery/adventure series starring a likable everyman. Also, they changed the Octopus's gimmick from being a criminal mastermind who has never shown his true face to wearing a series of bizarre costumes, having eight of everything (even though he doesn't) and throwing bad egg puns who make Batman and Robin's Mr Freeze blush.
 * What makes the film's end result more inexplicable is that the comics work of its director Frank Miller was heavily influenced by Eisner (most obvious in Daredevil), and the two were good friends. (A book was published transcribing some of their conversations). On that basis, we might have expected Miller to care a lot...
 * After seeing his Twitter feed, it seems he enjoyed the movie and considers it a good tribute to Eisner because he thinks it was good. So it's not so much he didn't care about the character, just that he didn't care about what anyone else would have thought.
 * "My city screams" is actually a quote from Miller's own The Dark Knight Strikes Again (where it is said by Superman) which sort of tips off that the movie has more to do with Miller than Eisner.
 * After the obligatory crushed butterfly, A Sound of Thunder drops all pretense of following Ray Bradbury's original plot and instead turns into an action-thriller about people fighting off monkey-lizard creatures. The video game adaptation of the movie goes a step further, giving the hero time-controlling weaponry that isn't mentioned in either the movie or the book. Thunder was made in 2005, yet the Special Effect Failure makes it unbelievable that Jurassic Park could have been made 12 years earlier. Oh, and Baboon Lizards?
 * That was because during filming, flooding in Prague severely set back production and caused the film to go over budget, and by the time post-production came along, there was pretty much no money left for special effects, so there was little to choice but to do them as cheaply as possible.
 * This trope seems to apply to the works of Seltzer and Friedberg in general, as they are so concerned with pumping out the next year's installment to lampoon the current crop of movies that their film trailers will feature scenes parodying the movie you are waiting to watch.
 * The second Swamp Thing movie is of course, your standard case of Adaptation Decay, but what's interesting is, the author of the novelization hated the script so much, he almost completely rewrote, drawing more from the comics, and making the tone more horrific. The producers were truly consistent with their just didn't care, as they were fine with the book.
 * There's not really any need to throw in any examples, as every video game adaptation that Uwe Boll has ever made have little to nothing to do with the source material, just replaced with nothing but gratuitous sex, bad fight scenes, horrible special effects, and overall, is never able to get the story correct. His excuse for not caring about the source is just baffling.

""We will not sell the movie rights, not to you ... especially not to you.""
 * Which is why Blizzard Entertainment's response to Boll's request for the World of Warcraft film rights should be exceptionally pleasing to ... just about everyone:


 * This is parodied in UHF with the fake trailer for Gandhi II, where Gandhi's character suddenly resembles Shaft.
 * The Film of the Book of The Dark Is Rising. When the screenwriter freely admits he didn't even read the book, you know right off nobody cared. The director also admitted he hated fantasy, and the movie reflects their attitudes. Possibly the only person who did care was the kid cast as Will, who unfortunately Took the Bad Film Seriously. The result was a film that still holds the record for the fastest theater drop (that being the number of theaters that dropped it from their lineup after the obligatory three weeks). It also holds the distinction of having the second-weakest debut of any movie ever.
 * Despite M. Night Shyamalan's avowed fandom of the series Avatar: The Last Airbender, his film adaptation of the series' first season might as well be called They Just Didn't Care: The Movie.
 * So M Night really, really pisses fans off by referring to himself as a huge fan of the series...despite changing everything to be "more realistic", including the name pronunciations to sound pretentiously Asian and the bending choreography to make the actions look more like spell-casting than martial arts. After that, he does not get to be One of Us.
 * How is Freddy resurrected after seemingly being Killed Off for Real (obligatory Sequel Hook notwithstanding) at the end of A Nightmare on Elm Street III: Dream Warriors? Well, in Nightmare IV a dog pisses fire onto his grave. End of explanation. If that doesn't scream "they're not even trying anymore", nothing ever has.
 * Journey2 has about as much to do with The Mysterious Island and Treasure Island as Chipwrecked does, in that they're on an island and there's a volcano. It's clear that the writers at least skimmed the books, but decided to disregard them completely.
 * The infamous "Glock 7" scene from Die Hard 2, involving a mythical handgun that isn't detected by airport scanners. They were informed by their firearms consultant that the entire concept was nonsense, but they didn't care and insisted on keeping the scene.

Literature

 * I Still Know What You Did Last Summer had a Novelization. And by "novelization", the writers just made a bunch of exact copies of the script, put a price tag on them and called them novelizations.
 * The Inheritance Cycle. No, the author himself put his (albeit incompetent) all into his series. In this case it was the editor who was lazy. Aside from making sure that nothing was mispelled there are tons of minor and major continuity mistakes, Purple Prose abound, and somehow didn't notice that a sentence containing the words "descended upwards" doesn't make any sense.
 * The publishing company that picked up the series. Basically the CEO gave his kid a copy of the book, the kid said it was "okay" and instantly published the book as-is (and made sure it was released before the latest Harry Potter book).
 * Mass Effect: Deception is the fourth Mass Effect novel, written by William C. Dietz. Despite not being part of the BioWare team, Dietz was contracted to write Deception. What resulted was a book filled to the brim with poor characterization, numerous plot holes, terribly childish writing, and not several but dozens and dozens of contradictions to a well established and consistant lore, all of which the previous novels avoided entirely. Mass Effect fans compiled a list of the vast amount of mistakes, and BioWare has since essentially declared Deception non-canon.

Live-Action TV

 * Documentary series Wild West Tech includes some lackluster reenactments. The worst are the scenes where the actors are exchanging money. They are clearly using modern notes despite the fact that the scenes are set in the Old West. What puts this example over the top is that the same episode included a CG rendering of money appropriate to the era. They obviously had an example of period money, and but just didn't care enough to click "Print."
 * In the second season finale of Robin Hood, in a move that writer/creator Dominic Mingella described as an attempt to "rock the show" and "open up new storytelling possibilities." Translation: shock value. Interestingly enough, Mingella didn't stick around for the third season, being credited as a "creator" but contributing nothing to the script-writing or directing. The BBC obviously realised that the show had self-destructed, which led to a general attitude of "We Don't Care Anymore" for the broadcasting of the third season. There was very little publicity regarding the show (far less than previous seasons), the official website wasn't updated until a few days before the premiere, a "closed-mouth" policy seemed to be in place on the reasons behind, it was given a terrible time-slot, detailed plot synopses were released to the press which contained massive spoilers, and the premature release of the DVD box set ensured that the final episode was leaked on YouTube a good three days before it aired on television (not that many people saw it on television anyway: The BBC pulled it in favour of tennis and plonked it on a different channel only a few hours before it was scheduled to air). The icing on the cake is the poor build quality of the DVD boxset, which along with the minimal amount of extras further emphasises that series 3 was only shown at all just to get it over and done with; it's quite possible yours has fallen apart on the shelf.
 * Furthermore, the new batch of writers brought in for the third season clearly didn't bother to watch the previous seasons. Fan speculation is that they were simply handed a note that said, since this is the only major plot-line that is carried over from the past two seasons (and even that is more of an afterthought than any kind of sustained story-line).
 * The network that currently shows Top Gear in Australia has an editing policy that is best described as 'schizophrenic'. For the past few seasons, after the airing of the Australian version of the show (which may just be a coincidence), the British version has received numerous cuts to their airings. The thing is, there doesn't seem to be any definite logic or pattern to their cuts. They cut out the news most consistently, but have left it in on occasion, and have also at various times cut the Stig's power laps, the star in a reasonably priced car, and the Cool Wall (the last is particularly noticeable in the season 13 finale - when suddenly Hammond was stuck on top of a scissor lift at the end of the show for no apparent reason). Strangely, it doesn't seem they even have time constraints or advertisements to blame - entire episodes have been cut.
 * Ditto the American broadcast, cut for time and commercials. Many of the cuts described above have happened, sometimes they only have half of the SIARPC (a particularly baffling example was cutting an anti-drunk driving PSA shown during one), and BBC America refuses to acknowledge that the first Stig ever existed. Most cuts, however, are to to cultural/political jokes or references that would be lost on American viewers.
 * Near the end of the third season of Alias, the official ABC.com recap included a plot point (the reveal that Vaughn had been brainwashed by Lauren) that was deleted from the episode (when the season was released on DVD, it was included in the deleted scenes, though). The summary was fixed a few hours later. In the next episode, Vaughn refers to "Whatever Lauren did to me," which was never revealed on screen. In the season finale, the cliffhanger involved Sydney being alerted to secret documents about how she was some sort of pawn. When Syd read the file about the CIA's secret "Project SAB-47" (SAB = Sydney's initials, 47 = the show's recurring magical number), created by her father, Jack, with a starting date of the day she was born, she cries, and then her father appears and tells her that he was hoping she'd never find that. The implication is that her life was some massive CIA project started by Jack. When the website recap went up, they included deleted plot points AGAIN, this time from shots of the documents that were deleted to not reveal as much in the cliffhanger. Again, the recap was fixed within a few hours. After a long wait (the new season was moved from September to January), the first half of the season premiere ends on the reveal that (spoilered because this actually was official continuity) ... even though they used the Season finale scene as a flashback, which the new reveal didn't make sense as an extension of due to the date and project name. The writers decided that it was the best move essentially because they thought that they wrote themselves into a corner by making Jack potentially too evil, and they did it as haphazardly as possible. The show had a ridiculous amounts of dropped plots and other weird stuff at various points, but the sloppiness over the course of these few episodes really made it look like they just didn't care.
 * Oh, and then about half a season later, there was a two part episode where Sark went from knowing in the first half to "learning" it in the second half and being shocked by the information.
 * One example that straddles the line between They Just Didn't Care and Screwed by the Network is Power Rangers Wild Force. The series was being produced when the franchise was bought by Disney, so the former people in charge were gone, the new people in charge had no clue what they were doing, and the left hand didn't know what the right was doing. This caused Wild Force to be considered by the majority of fans the worst season ever. What parts that weren't directly lifted from the Sentai source material were flimsy, there was no direction, the acting was bad even by PR standards, and the writers gave the Zords more characterization than the Rangers.
 * The head writer for the series was a Promoted Fanboy, so you'd expect him to care a bit more. Turns out he cared most about putting his own fan work into continuity with the whole series...
 * On the other hand, Wild Force started to look a lot better once Ranger fans saw what Disney was doing to the series. They didn't outright hate the series, but Power Rangers RPM's producer said they did seem ashamed of it. (It should be noted that Disney never wanted the series, they wanted to buy the Fox Family Channel, and Power Rangers just kind of came with the deal somehow.) The violence of the show didn't work well with Disney's ultra-wholesome image, so they weren't really sure what to do with it, gave it very little promotion, and essentially left it to wither away.
 * When it was expected that Power Rangers RPM was to be the final series, the creators put out all the stops to make sure the franchise would end with a bang. It probably would've had the same effect In Space had in saving the franchise... had the TV networks not put it on five o'clock on Saturday mornings. Who is up at that time? Oh well, at least now Saban bought back the franchise...
 * Of course, RPM is a positive case of They Just Didn't Care. Disney point-blank told the producer, "The show is ending, do what you want," which led to the creators to just swing for the fences. It didn't work to save the show (at least in Disney's eyes), but it did become one of the best Rangers seasons so far.
 * ABC's short-lived game show Set for Life omitted the qualifying rounds that determined how much each contestant would be playing for in the rest of the game — resulting in a lame Deal or No Deal knockoff with arbitrary cash values.
 * When FOX doesn't care, they really don't care—not only did they cancel the much-loved Wonderfalls and Firefly ahead of their time(s), but they aired their respective episodes out of order, leading to confusion and a lack of continuity.
 * The writers of 24 notoriously admitted that they started each season with no idea where that season's complicated conspiracy plot would end up. This led to characters who would end up being in on the villains' plot being performed and written as though they were good guys, because it hadn't actually been decided that they were bad guys yet. Which, of course, led to them doing things that made absolutely no sense when you knew where their loyalties truly lied. Hey, why would you expect a series whose episodes are supposed to be taking place over the course of a single day to have tighter continuity?

Professional Wrestling

 * WCW itself at the twilight of the Monday Night Wars. The management of the owning company Time Warner, as described in many books, despised professional wrestling and actively wanted it to do so badly that it had to be taken off the air. Ted Turner, who had been WCW's protector, had gotten older and lost his position of power after the AOL/Time Warner merger, and thus was no longer able to exert influence over it. Internally, WCW had no effective management, no bosses who were able to actually control the egos of the wrestlers and hand out effective punishments. Instead it was run by Vince Russo, who chronically misunderstands everything about how pro wrestling works, and a bunch of smaller names who argued with each other and deliberately sabotaged the shows to keep anything besides their pet ideas from getting over.
 * At Wrestlemania XX, a truly Godawful match between Bill Goldberg and Brock Lesnar occurred. Goldberg and Lesnar were, at the time, two of the biggest names in the WWE. However, both were also leaving the company, and thought they could phone in their last match, so instead of a great battle, the fans got a slow-paced, boring match.
 * There's been a lot of discussion on why that match was so bad. The fans had started booing both men vociferously before the match even started, so neither likely felt inspired to perform. It's also been claimed that the WWE match planners deliberately designed the match to be as boring and shitty as possible in an attempt to sabotage their careers. Also, Steve Austin, who was more popular than either of them, was involved in the match as a referee because he wasn't in physical condition to work a match, but this irritated Austin fans who wanted to see him do stuff.
 * A large part of the problem (tied in with the Austin thing above) was that Goldberg hadn't been on TV for a month prior to the PPV (Real Life contract dispute, Kayfabe suspension), which shot the build up to the match (which, up until this point, had been some of the best build up of any feud going that year) in the foot. This left Austin and Lesnar carrying the feud, making it more about Austin and Lesnar than Goldberg and Lesnar. Hell, it was more about Austin vs Goldberg (a long-wished dream match) than Goldberg vs Lesnar, leaving the whole thing dead in the water.
 * This entrance video for Greg Helms. It's incredibly obvious that the higher-ups don't care about a guy when the best they can do for a character and entrance is "sunglasses" and "tilts head to the left."
 * Ditto for Gail Kim's final entrance video. Neither side was really interested in attempting to care. Gail was there solely for Money, Dear Boy, and, if you believe some of the rumors online, the only reason WWE hired Gail back was to keep her from turning TNA's Knockouts Division into any kind of credible threat. It's very telling that nowhere in her entrance video is she actually seen to wrestle.

Video Games
"What happened to Bill and Lance? The two guys who fought and destroyed Red Falcon in the original Contra? Who the hell are Mad Dog and Scorpion? Also note the typo that made it into the manual "Mad Dod and Extrodinare," hah!"
 * Action 52 for the NES. $199.99 buys you 52 games that are cheaply done, buggy, or plain don't work. It's obvious that the amount of effort that went into Action 52 was almost nil.
 * Interplay tried to cash in on its Fallout franchise by creating Fallout Brotherhood of Steel, a knock-off of its successful Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance series. The gameplay bore no resemblance to the original Fallout roleplaying games and made only passing references to the Fallout world. At the same time, Interplay canceled the highly anticipated Fallout 3 game and jettisoned its entire Black Isle Studios division, which had masterminded the real Fallout series. Fans reacted in outrage before the game even released, prompting the developers to insert a snarky Take That into the credits. The fans had the last laugh, however, when the game performed poorly and the company folded soon afterward. Interplay did recover from that... by selling the Fallout franchise to Elder Scrolls developer Bethesda Softworks, who went on to release an actual Fallout 3 game to enormous critical and commercial acclaim.
 * The amount of negativity from the fans reached such heights that Interplay locked their own discussion board for the game, possibly the only time ever that has happened with any game and developer.
 * An unusual medium for an example is the Video Game/Madden NFL franchise. It has had a bug for years on end that stops players in simulated games from getting tired, so the backups never play. This means that about five running backs break the all-time rushing record each season, and there are all sorts of other silly consequences. The makers cannot possibly be unaware of the bug, and they just don't care.
 * That error is prevalent in a lot of sports games - backup goaltenders in hockey games and bench players in basketball and football don't play nearly as much in simmed games as in real life, because there's no such thing as a "day off" in the simmed version.
 * The Madden games include injured reserve, a real NFL device which allows teams to open a roster spot by disqualifying an injured player for the rest of the season. In the game, unfortunately, placing a player on IR does not open a roster spot. It still prevents the player from seeing the field the rest of the year, making IR a worse-than-worthless feature. This has been pointed out to EA countless times and would seem a remarkably easy fix. The bug continues, however, and the only possible explanation is laziness.
 * Silver Surfer for the NES. On one hand, it does have great graphics (for the NES era), music, and play control. But on the other hand, the difficulty is way, well, difficult: Most of the game is the titular hero shooting up enemies like rubber ducks and ghosts (who take many, many hits to kill), and if Silver Surfer touches anything, he dies and weeps like a crybaby. It's obvious the developers had the talent and potential, but they didn't give two bleeps about it.
 * This trope is becoming a dominant present-day interpretation of the unforgiving nature of older Nintendo Hard games.
 * While we're on the topic of Marvel Comics games, Wolverine for NES. The title character loses health whenever he attacks using his adamantium claws. And not only is he vulnerable to attacks from others, the game doesn't even offer Mercy Invincibility. Oh, and his Healing Factor is powered by food scattered around the level.
 * The old Valis series was an epic tale of strong female Magic Knights with swords. Unfortunately, its original publisher went under and sold the rights to a porn game company. The resulting Hentai enraged fans and left everyone else cold.
 * The Dawn of War: Soulstorm expansion was outsourced to another company that closed down partway into development, and then released anyway. The result was "SPESS MEHREENS!", "We should take away their METAL BAWKSES!", and a few Game Breaking Bugs including one that could result in infinite resources...in multiplayer. All this is understandable, if hilariously awful, but then there were things like having the only recurring character's voice actor still on staff and giving the role to someone else, then only having him grunt a few lines and leave. Or a backwater factory shipping out the oft-cited "tank so big its guns have smaller guns attached to them and is only produced on the most technologically advanced planets in the galaxy" by the hundred (it isn't just game mechanics either. At the start of the said mission it is mentioned that there is a company of the said tanks deployed on the planet. Actually, getting three would be considered extremely lucky). Or, y'know, any of the script writing. Of course, some have speculated that, because Iron Lore Entertainment—the company responsible—was closing down after all, they literally didn't care. Perhaps only the ex-staff know.
 * The developers of Wild Arms: Alter Code F cared. Agetec, the company that localized it in America, did not. Agetec picked up the rights to localize the English version a few months after the game was released in Japan (November 2003), a move that was welcomed by fans considering their work publishing the Armored Core series, which included adding extras that weren't in the Japanese release. A year later, no one had heard a word about any work that had been done with the localization and absolutely no word of a release date. Small details trickled out through one insider, but even he expressed frustration when the game was finally released in America, in November 2005...without voices (the Japanese release had grunts and shouts in battle, and vocals in a few songs, all of which were cut out entirely without any replacement dub), without fixing the Game Breaking Bugs, without any extras (except a DVD of the first episode of the questionable-quality WA anime, Twilight Venom)...and worst of all, a Blind Idiot Translation that was barely any better than the original game, and certainly wasn't up to the standard of 2005 PlayStation 2 games. Agetec went mysteriously silent and didn't respond to any inquiries, even from the insider, as to how they managed to release a gutted version of the game after sitting on it for two years. Subsequent games in the series were localized by XSEED Games, who are widely agreed to have handled the process better.
 * Vergil mode in Devil May Cry 3: Special Edition. While some may have been satisfied just to use him as a playable character, others were hoping for a complete deal - cutscenes showing Vergil's interactions with the bosses, fights against Dante, Vergil's own take on wielding the weapons Dante gains etc. Regrettably, the only cutscene on Vergil's side made sense only as part of Dante's story, with no pre- or post-bossfight cutscenes or gaining the bosses' weapons. The "Dante" fights were with a mere Palette Swap of Vergil, sometimes Fan Nicknamed "Vante". It's playable, yes, and there is a certain amount of Squee to using Vergil... but it isn't exactly an expected complete package.
 * Similarly, Mortal Kombat Shaolin Monks has the unlockable characters of Scorpion and Sub-Zero, as well as the versus mode. While the two as well as the other playable characters in that mode do have their own movesets and fatalities, in cutscenes and in-game contexts they wind up playing the exact same roles as Liu Kang and Kung Lao, which means not only talking in their voices but such oddities as a cutscene where Sub-Zero conjours a hat out of nowhere to cut a clone of himself's eye. As for the versus mode, it has access to a good few of the characters in the game, but despite having full movesets programmed in for them (playable via hacking) certain characters like Kano, Goro, and Shang Tsung are not useable for no apparent reason. Also none of the characters playable in that mode besides Scorpion and Sub-Zero are usable in the story mode, again for no clear reason.
 * Also true for the Castlevania games from Symphony of the Night on, some of which have an extra mode allowing you to play with another character. True, the other characters have different sprites and movesets and require different playing strategies, but in those modes there aren't even cutscenes or dialogue, some gameplay elements are removed and some parts are unreachable. You could argue it presents a more traditional, NES/SNES era gameplay, but after playing with the new style, the old one is not as welcome. Also, for a 2D game which uses its "engine" for the cutscenes, adding a few cutscenes/lines of dialogue is very little work.
 * Last Battle, the English version of Sega's Hokuto no Ken II beat-'em-up game for the Sega Genesis, is notable for its hack job of a localization, making very little effort to hide its Hokuto no Ken origins. Instead of redrawing the game's graphics like they did with Black Belt (the English version of their earlier Hokuto no Ken game for the Master System), all Sega did was simply alter the palette of all the character sprites. The game's script is almost word-by-word translation of the Japanese original, changing only the names of the characters and fighting styles (i.e: Kenshiro became Aarzak). The problem with this is that the game's plot and dialogue makes no sense if you're unfamiliar with the source material (which is practically every American Genesis owner prior to the anime boom in the early 1990's). Moreover, the game's prologue practically spoils the ending, which again, made sense in the Japanese (since Japanese players would've already known the story anyway), but not everywhere else.
 * Chaos Wars' obscenely bad English dub. Wanna know how cheap the CEO of the company responsible for this is? He used his own family to voice act the game. This would be understandable if they actually had some sort of acting talent, but... Holy fuckballs. There are no words.
 * Alright, let's get this straight, Squaresoft of old. You bring Final Fantasy X to the PAL-region, a game that already had borders in the NTSC original, and you do absolutely no border-reduction optimization? Borders times borders equals massive borders. The bonus DVD showing footage from the almost-full screen NTSC version just rubbed it in!
 * The PC port of Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. First, Lucas Arts claimed they will never bother doing it as "no PC is powerful enough to run it". Then they changed their minds. Did they fix the horrible bugs? No. Did they optimize the gameplay so an average PC could run it? No. Did they cut it down to optimize it for a PC release? No. They tacked on a little bit of content, and called it the Ultimate Sith Edition. How big was it? 23 gigabytes. That's Blu-ray big. Problem is, few PCs have a BD-ROM drive. A Steam release fixed part of that issue, but also made the 23 gigabyte size all the more apparent, especially for those with slower internet speeds and lack of hard drive space.
 * In the manual for Super C, the following statement is made: "Red Falcon has also shuttled in The Babalu Bestructoid Mechanism, a giant alien attack tank, which was the primary weapon used to disintegrate the innocent solar system of Tralala." It must be noted that the European port Probotector II has no such inane gibberish. A retrospective also noted:


 * Pretty much every instruction manual put out by Konami USA was like this in the NES era. Apparently, the copy editors vastly overestimated their collective sense of humor, and that manifested in their tossing out the actual plots and character names from Konami's games so they could fill the manuals with all sorts of shitty jokes and Incredibly Lame Puns.
 * It wasn't limited to the NES era. I recall the manual for the Super Nintendo game Cybernator had gems like calling the enemy capital city "Suburbionsky, Uzbekistanksi".
 * Many console-to-PC ports fall into this. A prime example is Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. You know how in most PC games over the last fifteen years when you press the Escape button, you get a menu that has things like "save game", "load game", "settings" and "quit"? None of that for this game! Pressing Escape immediately quits to desktop without even a yes/no confirmation prompt. The saving system has not been altered in any way from the PlayStation 2 original, so the only way to load a game is from the main menu or dying on purpose. Changing the game settings is done by a completely separate program from the main game executable. This is all especially strange since the first Metal Gear Solid had an excellent PC port with none of the aforementioned shortcomings (Though it did miss out on the fun of the Psycho Mantis fight).
 * Valve Software has a tendency to leave beta textures in their retail products. Examples:
 * In Half Life, the Black Mesa Research Facility has posters of various locations and staff. What's the problem? They're using beta models/textures.
 * Team Fortress 2's gib textures, Ubercharge effects, and HUD icons for the classes and weapons use beta textures as well. The worst part about this is that the beta Ubercharge textures are misaligned on the final models.
 * In the Left 4 Dead games, the pair of legs left behind from a blown-up male Boomer have the wrong pants and sock colors. Female Boomers use male Boomer arms when you control them in VS mode (Male Boomers have boils on their bodies while females don't). Females Boomers also use a voice clip from their male counterpart when they are falling.
 * WWF Warzone by Acclaim for the Nintendo 64 had better looking visuals than the Playstation version, due to its higher resolution, but the music is atrocious. The Playstation version contained pre-recorded music for the wrestlers' entrances. Due to the limited memory, the N64 naturally used MIDIs, but they only bear little resemblance to the real music. Later games by THQ had surprisingly high quality MIDI-style songs, and their previous WCW games had versions of the Nitro theme that were very faithful to the real recording.
 * Earthworm Jim 3D has its share of problems, but special mention goes to the Earthworm Kim mode, unlocked after collecting all 1,000 marbles. This video demonstrates the carelessness of the whole thing beautifully. Try pointing out the flaws!
 * The US arcade version of Dance Dance Revolution X came with a truly awful new arcade cabinet that eventually ended up being recalled. The construction of the pressure panels and sensors within the dance stage was so bad that sensors would start sticking within hours, the HDTV display had a considerable amount of lag, the cabinet was covered with very gaudy strips of LEDs, and the computing hardware for this entire setup was a Dell Optiplex PC. Japanese arcade operators were provided with much better quality new-style cabinets, and they also had the option of purchasing upgrade kits for existing arcade cabinets instead, neither of which, of course, ever made it Stateside.
 * Dragonball Z: Ultimate Tenkaichi reuses a lot of voice clips from Dragon Ball: Raging Blast, which is fine and dandy in the Japanese version considering that each DBZ game tends to tell the same story over and over anyway, but in English half the characters had been recast for Dragonball Z Kai since then, leading to characters like Freeza and Gohan having their voice actors change constantly mid-game.
 * In Pro Cycling Manager 2011, a lot of stage races, even Pro Tour ones, uses the Tour de France scheme for jerseys (Yellow for leader, green for points classification, white with red dots for mountains and white for youth competitions). Most of this could have been found by using an extra 10 minutes on The Other Wiki.
 * Smackdown vs. Raw uses this as a game mechanic. With Dynamic Difficulty and pre-determined winners for a match, the computer will either act like The Undertaker at Wrestlemania or Mick Foley in Hell in a Cell. Either way the game really goes out of it's way to stack the odds in one side's favor, and if the computer is meant to lose then it just won't care about any offense or defense in a match.
 * From Mass Effect 3: After spending two games hyping up what Tali looks like, they reveal her face now. People who romance Tali can get a picture of her..
 * For that matter, nearly everything in Mass Effect 3. 3 endings that are literally (even named such internally!) the same ending with a different color filter, a "child" in the ending that's actually a resized adult over stolen artwork, a Last of Their Kind alien queen you saved coming back Brainwashed and Crazy being replaced by an inexplicably identical queen if you killed her,.
 * Where do we begin with Big Rigs Over the Road Racing? First, there is no way to lose to the other truck you're racing against, as pre-patch it goes nowhere, and post-patch it stops before the finish line, there's no collision detection, so you go right through the NPC truck (so you can't push it across, there isn't even a lose screen in the game's code) or indeed most things, like bridges and buildings, and if you hold down the reverse key for long enough, your truck will exceed the speed of light and instantly stop the second you stop pressing the key. It can't even be called an Obvious Beta, because that would imply that it had reached the point of beta testing.
 * Infestation: Survivor Stories, formerly known as The WarZ, is such a glaring exemplar of this that it could be considered a Spiritual Successor to Big Rigs Over the Road Racing. Where to begin with this one? Its failures, simply put are legion, be it the game's unfinished appearance, advertising that lies on what the game simply doesn't have, shoehorned zombies that barely even do anything, sleazy online payment system or the unbalanced gameplay. It doesn't help matters, as Totalbiscuit brought up in his "review" of the game, that some of the people responsible for Big Rigs were also involved with this game.
 * Air Control is notorious for being an obviously unfinished and buggy mess that would rival Big Rigs Over the Road Racing. In fact, everything about it screams either incompetence or outright laziness on the part of the creator that even now one wonders whether it's some elaborate video game equivalent of a Troll Fic.

Web Originals

 * The email button of Homestar Runner's Main 15/Powered by the Cheat contents page gives three different random remarks from Strongbad, and in one of them he says The Cheat's visual style "looks like you just don't care".

Web Comics

 * Living with Insanity's artist, Paul Salvi, takes this attitude. He cuts a lot of corners on the art by rewriting dialogue, cutting down the number of panels and even ignoring whole strips. This causes a lot of plot holes or makes jokes fall flat.
 *  Pitch Black illustrates the Hollywood creative process with a flowchart.

Western Animation

 * Felix the Cat: The Movie has almost nothing to do with the original Felix the Cat shorts, either from the 1920s or the 1960s, aside from a couple of references. The plot makes absolutely no sense, the final battle with the Master Cylinder is one gigantic Anticlimax, characters appear and disappear at random, and there's a ton of blatant exposition. Couple all that with a bunch of really bad jokes from Felix (who never shuts up), sound issues that make the music drown out what the characters are saying, and just plain lazy animation, and the whole movie comes across as a giant train wreck. The movie was apparently made to be the pilot for another Felix TV show, but it was so bad that the show never came to be. And if this movie is any indication of what was to come, animation fans can be thankful the series never saw the light of day. You can watch an Animated Anarchy review of the movie here.
 * Not to mention the noticeable banking. Clearly they thought that they could get away with recycling pieces of animation since it's a kiddie movie. Not the case.
 * Clerks the Animated Series was shafted by ABC who could only be bothered to air two of the six initial episodes and made matters worse by inexplicably airing them out of order starting with the fourth episode followed by the second, the latter of which contained jokes that only made sense if you had seen the first.
 * After The Thief and the Cobbler, Richard Williams' labor of love, was taken from his hands due to lack of funding, it was passed on to Majestic Films International, who hopefully would finish it cheaply enough to turn a profit. The results included Lull Destruction, uninspired animated film clichés, narration that describes exactly what we are seeing, bland Award Bait Songs and very Off-Model animation. Then it was released with minimal marketing and a low number of prints in an attempt to avoid spending any more money on it. Animation fans consider this a tragedy.
 * On networks where classic episodes of The Simpsons run in syndication, they are almost always cut to the bone to make room for more commercials. While this rarely compromises the storyline, many Funny Moments that give the classic episodes their charm are lost in the shuffle, exiled to the DVD box sets.
 * This trope was used many times during the early episodes in Family Guy. A character learned nothing after going through a life changing experience. The writers admit that this was their way of ending an episode without really adding much detail to it, simply because they didn't care how it ended.
 * Until they lampshaded it by having the characters break the 4th wall.
 * Disney XD airs episodes 20 onward of Avengers Earths Mightiest Heroes with an opening that promotes the movie The Avengers in a manner containing several inconsistencies compared to the show. First of all, Nick Fury narrates, even though SHIELD and The Avengers start out as two completely separate groups of crimefighters. Secondly, his speech mentions Iron Man, The Mighty Thor, The Incredible Hulk, and Captain America (comics) (who's referred to as "The First Avenger" even though in EMH he's not even one of the founding members), but omits three or more other members. Finally, the editors managed to keep three lines of the original theme song, but they don't rhyme at all.
 * Making the inconsistencies even more blatant, a subplot running through some of these episodes involves SHIELD trying to pressure the Avengers into registration, in Fury's absence. Also, when some of these heroes make prolonged disappearances, this intro still speaks of them as full-time members.
 * Played up intentionally for humor and parody in the Ren and Stimpy episode "Stimpy's Cartoon Show". The premise of the episode being that Stimpy wants to be an animator and make a animated film short to impress his idol, the old and nearly decrepit "godfather of all animation" Wilber Cobb. Ren is jealous and bitter towards this, so Stimpy crowns him as the "producer". It soon becomes apparent however, that Ren Just Dosn't Care about the production and his only real effort is to work Stimpy to the bone while presenting impossible challenges to him. (i.e: Taking month-long vacations, ripping up storyboards and tossing them in the trash, price gouging him on the cost of art supplies, forcing him to rely on shaving logs for animation cels, etc.) In the end, Stimpy's cartoon becomes an ineptly produced, incoherent, nonsensical, badly drawn, horribly animated, ridiculous and baffling load of gibberish called "Explodey The Pup" which demonstrates the very definition of this trope. For those curious, here is the ensuing result.
 * The My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic toys. Almost none of them look show accurate at all, one of the biggest offenders being Pinklestia. The toy department, which is separate from the writers and animators of the actual show, claims that they're at the mercy of the toy stores in a classic "the client is always right" relationship, and if anyone isn't caring enough it's the toy stores.
 * They don't sound like them, either. Pinklestia's lines ("I love it when you brush my hair!") have led some to joke that it's actually a Molestia doll.
 * It wasn't until two-thirds of the way through season 2 that an official white Celestia was made (as part of a set that seems almost tailor-made for the bronies).
 * The European comics also catch a lot of flack, accused of being written and drawn by people who have never seen the original show. The storylines are trite, OOC behavior abound, and the artwork relies on a handful of duckfaced vectors almost always showing ponies in full profile with no sense of depth. One comic has a snowball fight where the Mane six stand on their back hooves and throw balls with their front hooves, despite the show's insistence on keeping humanlike poses and behavior to a minimum. When amateur fan artwork looks better than the licensed product, you know there's a problem.
 * You're in the Super Bowl, Charlie Brown, the next-to-last Peanuts animated special in which Bill Meléndez had a hand. They don't have quite enough plot for 25 minutes, so they do cutaways with Woodstock's football team curb-stomping teams of various animals. The animation is exactly the same all three times (except with new species slipped in over top the existing ones — cats, dogs, then bison), meaning that the third team consists of bison who are no bigger than cats.
 * Despite being the source of most of the series' charm and humor, (most of) the VHS and DVD releases of Beavis and Butthead have the music video segments cut, despite the show being owned by MTV. Presumably this was either to keep costs down, or remove dated content, or fit more episodes on each disc, or because they were just too lazy to get all the clearances.
 * The first one. MTV made a deal, way back when, that they could, for little to no cost, use the music from videos in shows made for their network, something they gladly did, giving their nineties shows the coolest soundtrack. The deal never counted for home releases, which was barely a thing back when the deal was made, and the cost of securing the rights would simply be prohibitive.
 * The animated film Foodfight, which was originally meant for a 2003 release before sliding into a decade-long Troubled Production, is this. The finished product looks nothing like its relatively large budget would warrant. Whether it's the atrocious art, unfinished animation, Uncanny Valley, slapped-on random plot points or the fact that the movie was just shoved out as direct-to-DVD, it just speaks volumes about how the people involved simply didn't care anymore.

Other
"These shows didn't "jump the shark." That doesn't do them justice. No, these are shows where the creators simply said "fuck it", flew out of the water, broke the bounds of the earth's atmosphere and set a course for the center of the Sun."
 * A Cracked.com article, 6 TV Shows That Completely Lost Their Shit, talks about this process:


 * It should be noted that the article itself fits the trope, with a glaring, easily fixable error still there in the Roseanne entry: The article states that the show's finale rendered the entire series All Just a Dream: it was just the final (admittedly batshit) season that was the dream.
 * Maybe, maybe not. Some of the things that she changed for her book were way earlier than the final season (namely, she rearranged the Becky/Mark and David/Darlene relationships.) Fans can't seem to agree whether it was only the final season, from the first appearance of her writing desk (essentially, season 2 onward), or if it was the whole series.
 * One episode of the radio countdown show Bob Kingsleys Country Top 40 played back an interview with Carrie Underwood about her difficulty with a very high note in "All-American Girl"... then played an abridged version of the song that left out the note in question.
 * Wizards of the Coast stopped caring about Dungeons and Dragons third edition when fourth started coming out. The Tome of Battle errata changes mid-freaking-word into Complete Mage errata.
 * It may have been worse than that. In a couple of early interviews about the new game system, it sounded suspiciously like the designers actively disliked 3rd edition, the system they'd been selling us for the prior eight years, and wanted to make sure we stopped liking it too. Some of their folks practically went on record as saying "Yeah, our last product totally sucked. We can't believe anybody thought it would be fun. This new one, on the other hand..."
 * That's fairly common in design - after all, there's a reason it's 4th Edition and not 3.Xth Edition. They likely suspected that any attempt to "patch" old rules to fit (as they routinely do in Magic, fixing up old cards with new template wordings) was doomed to failure from the start. Which, of course, doesn't rule out them Just Not Caring about 3rd any longer.
 * The folks who actually wrote 3 and 3.5, meanwhile, went on to create the Pathfinder system that further refines it.
 * The Atlanta Spirit Group wanted to get rid of the Atlanta Thrahsers (now the second incarnation of the Winnipeg Jets after selling the team to True North Sports and Entertainment) since day one of owning the NHL franchise. ASG made it clear that they only wanted the NBA's Hawks and the operating rights to Philips Arena. Also, the group spent the bare minimum to run the team and claimed that they've lost more than $100 million during their ownership of the team.
 * The league also didn't care about keeping the Thrashers in Atlanta, as they would have not collected a $60 million relocation fee if a buyer was willing to keep the team in Atlanta. This is particularly egregious considering the league made significant efforts to keep the Nashville Predators, Pittsburgh Penguins, and Phoenix Coyotes in their respective markets after their experiences with ownership and arena problems.
 * The ASG now even considers the Thrashers an Old Shame, removing any and all reminders of the team from Philips Arena.
 * Salem, a gothic/"witch house" group from Michigan, played at Levi's SXSW fest in 2010. Not only was their performance disappointing (and a missed opportunity to give the audience a good introduction to their unique sound), it was god awful, bad enough to elicit comparisons to that one garage band on Youtube trying to cover "The Final Hour". One member (Jake, the long-haired one), looking rather weathered with a slight resemblance to Chester A. Bum from That Guy With The Glasses, raps/mumbles in a drunken haze during one song and lackadaisically hits electronic drums during another, clearly not giving the slightest fuck about keeping time with the other musicians. You really have to see it for yourself to understand... This came as a big shock to many fans of the group as their studio material is actually pretty fucking awesome. To the band's credit, it was an awkwardly intimate outside stage that would be more suited to a stripped-down punk band than one that relies on mystique and clandestine ambiguity as heavily as they do.
 * The Pan and Scan versions of TV movies and shows produced in the HDTV aspect ratio of 1.78:1 might have a greater chance of losing important details than the cropped versions of theatrical movies. The people in charge of cropping those TV movies and shows often focus entirely on the center portion of each scene, never panning to the sides, unlike the people who crop movies. This thread contains a handful of examples from High School Musical.