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Creator Backlash

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Fandom is an interesting entity. Nobody can quite tell how people will react to anything, making the creation of a popular work a crapshoot. However, it's assumed that most creators hold an equal or greater amount of affection for their work than their fans. After all, they had to actually make it in the first place. So obviously, anything that's popular must be something the creator likes, right?

'"'Ah, yes, I wrote 'The Purple Cow

 I'm sorry, now, I wrote it

But I can tell you anyhow

I'll kill you if you quote it!"
—Gelett Burgess

Not quite. See, the creators are just as human as everybody else and even if they're the origin of a particular work, that doesn't stop them from holding a negative opinion about it. This is what is referred to as Creator Backlash. It's the most high profile form of hatedom possible, since it's the very creator(s) of the work denouncing it. As they bring up their feelings of hatred for their work in interviews, public forums, and their other creations, it brings a certain amount of discord into being a fan when the very source has denounced it.

It can take on many forms and for many reasons. Many creators feel their work has been ruined by Executive Meddling. Perhaps the creator didn't really intend for it to become so popular, only making it to pay the bills and fund their more serious work (perhaps even getting forced into continuing it). Perhaps people completely miss the point. Perhaps it has them typecast to a sickening level. Perhaps they were going through a rough time while making it. Perhaps it has become their only work that is generally known, casting them as a "one-hit wonder" in the eyes of the majority. Perhaps it's all of the above.

It is quite common for creators who start early to simply grow out of their early work. Added to which is the common artistic trait of always wanting to move on: the criticism is just an expression of boredom; been there, done that.

Or perhaps they just really do hate the work they created after all this time. The reasons are as myriad as the reasons a fan might choose to like their work in the first place.

Not all Creator Backlash is permanent, though. They can just as easily choose to later embrace their work when they get over whatever was troubling them in the first place. This seems to be quite rare, however. When it does happen, it usually seems to occur after a lengthy period of time has passed between appearing on the show and the present.

Compare Old Shame, where the work in question neither caught on nor has many redeeming qualities in the first place; compare and contrast Bleached Underpants, where the work in question has... questionable history which its creators would like to dispose of.

Not be confused with Creator Breakdown or Artist Disillusionment, though they can definitely overlap with this. Artist Disillusionment is against fans while this trope is against works. Magnum Opus Dissonance is a Sister Trope, as is Disowned Adaptation. And definitely not to be confused with creators getting their backs lashed.

Examples of Creator Backlash include:


Anime and Manga

  • Kyoko Mizuki and Yumiko Igarashi have come to despise Candy Candy, due to all the legal fights between each other caused by it.
  • The creator of the Slayers franchise, Hajime Kanzaka, stated a few times in interviews that, despite working on it, he had come to dislike the third season of the anime adaptation, which was one of the first divergences from the plot of the light novels. When the belated fourth season came out, a Continuity Nod noted this: on the plane chart that lists the numerous Big Bads of the verse, the two that were slain in the second season were dented, noting their destruction, but one of the higher-level demon lord's spots on the chart was intact--this particular lord, Dugradigdu, was slain in the third season.
  • Yoshiyuki Tomino is rumored to have despised working on Victory Gundam. In an interview, he outright said that people shouldn't watch it. This hasn't stopped several fans from naming it their favorite Gundam show.
    • He later warmed back up to Gundam though. He loved working on Turn a Gundam and even wrote a memoir about it and how it cured him of depression. Just as well for the cast, as characters tend to die messily when Tomino gets depressed.
      • Tomino's dissatisfaction mainly stems from different source: Victory was under production when Bandai bought up Sunrise, and their desire to sell toys resulted in a good degree of Executive Meddling, including the first 5 episodes of the show being reshuffled with very little new footage, resulting in what was intended to be episode 4 being shown as episode 1. This was done to expose audiences to the titular Victory Gundam, with the hope of boosting the toy sales. Worth pointing out is the manga Crossbone Gundam, which Tomino worked on shortly after Victory ended, and is one of the most hopeful entries into the franchise as well as a fan favorite.
  • In a series of translated blogs, Takeshi Shudo, original head writer of the Pokémon anime, stated how he disliked the Strictly Formula that was pushed upon it, which led to his resignation....and then after he left, he disliked how his own prize creations Musashi/Jessie, Kojiro/James, and Nyarth/Meowth of Rocket Dan/Team Rocket going way past Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain and into harmless territory.
  • Osamu Tezuka hated one particular episode of the 1960s Astro Boy anime so much that he personally destroyed the negatives before the episode could even be aired. Too bad a copy of that episode had already been shipped to the US and dubbed. This episode would later see a VHS release as "Astro Boy: The Lost Episode".
    • Also, there are a handful of stories he wrote that he permanently pulled from circulation (i.e. not available, even in compilation form) due to said stories not being up to his usual standards.
  • Hayao Miyazaki worked on preproduction of the animated film adaptation of Little Nemo in Slumberland, and considered it one of the worst experiences he ever had in his career.
  • For reasons unknown the author of the manga Hyouge Mono along with the editorial staff quit as consulting staff or distanced themselves from the anime project. And in a pseudo Alan Smithee fashion Yoshihiro Yamada also asked his credit be changed. He did not demand he take his name off the series nor did he adopt a pseudonym but rather changed the credit from Original Story to Original Concept (or Original Work to Original Scheme depending on the translation).
  • In-universe on two occasions in Bakuman｡. Mashiro and Takagi dislike Tanto, even though it has some degree of popularity among children and most of the other characters besides Eiji and Nanamine like it, as it's difficult for Takagi to write gags and not popular enough to get an anime. After some difficulty, they persude the editors to let them end it. Eiji eventually wants Crow to end, so he invokes his right of ending one series he hates to end it at the height of its popularity.
    • For the spoiler: it's not so much that he hates Crow, as that he hates that he may loose the ability to end it on his terms. He's stated he could easily keep it going for some time, but wants to end the highest rated manga at it's highest point, instead of simply going on and on.
  • Hirohiko Araki is known for being extremely critical of his early works, and has gone on record in interviews as slamming some of his early series, such as Baoh The Visitor and Gorgeous Irene. He even considers the first two parts of Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure to be an Old Shame of sorts, as it was at his request that the VIZ translation skips the first two parts of the series.

Comic Books

  • Robert Crumb has come to hate Fritz The Cat, especially after the movie came out and he felt it ruined his work forever, so in a follow up comic he killed Fritz off and discontinued the books.
    • His single most hated work, however, is the "Keep On Truckin'" comic; mainly because of how well-known and overused it became, how closely identified he became with it, and the fact that no one else realized it was supposed to be a satire.
    • In a live appearance, he spoke about how much money other people have made off of that one work, screening it onto posters, shirts, the works, none of which he ever saw a dime from. He advised the audience to never ever ever ever so much as mention the words Keep On Truckin to him.
    • He's also indicated that he resents the cover of Big Brother and the Holding Company's Cheap Thrills because he was never paid for it.
  • Pierre "Peyo" Culliford hated The Smurfs, but continued to work on it because it was a Cash Cow Franchise. He had a lot of pressure from his publishing company, from the team that did the cartoon version, from some French TV animators (for those of you who remember French TV in the '90s: Dorothee), and of course from kids.
  • James O'Barr came to hate The Crow because it glorified revenge (though the fact that the comic's popularity and success indirectly resulted in Brandon Lee's death probably didn't help either). All royalties he received from the movie were donated to charity.
    • However, the Special Edition released in 2011 shows that now, O'Barr has come to terms with the work, seeing it as about true love and the importance of self-forgiveness. This is thanks in no small part to Brandon Lee's fiancée Eliza Hutton, with whom O'Barr became close.
  • Warren Ellis grew to despise Planetary and its fans after they constantly sent him e-mails asking when the new issue was coming out. However, the situation came to a boil after the death of Ellis's father. When he asked his fans not to contact him while he was in mourning, guess who kept on e-mailing him? There's probably a good reason the later issues were so slow to come out.
    • Though the backlash never seems to extend to the work itself, which never wavers in quality. He even wrote a final issue years after the series was thought to have been finished.
  • Dave Sim, the creator of Cerebus, gradually began to regret the female characters he created in the series (feeling they were idealistic and unrealistic depictions of women).
  • Similarly, Sonic the Comic writer Nigel Kitching expressed dislike for Amy Rose's development in the comic (which was actually the result of Executive Meddling insisting on having a more suitable female role model), resenting not having the freedom to develop her and making her one dimentional compared to her flawed male comrades.
  • Alan Moore seems to loathe all of his old works because of their hand in creating the Dark Age of comics.
    • It gets to an extent where he really has it in for DC. He has compared his relationship with the company to having a child you love, then having it kidnapped by gypsies in the night and every once in awhile they send you photographs of the kid working as a prostitute.
    • His loathing of the film adaptations of those same comics is particularly well-known; Moore goes uncredited in all.
  • At conventions, Kurt Busiek accompanies his signature on copies of Spider-Man/X-Factor: Shadowgames with the refrain, "I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry..."
  • Although Joe Quesada was the true diabolical mastermind behind Spider Man: One More Day, it was written by J. Michael Straczinsky, who absolutely hated it even as he was being paid to write it. He had asked that his name not be put on the infamous final issue (a request that was ignored) and tells people at conventions where to find Quesada as his own personal vengence.
    • JMS also hoped he could use OMD to undo "Sins Past", another story he wrote under protest (in his version the Goblin Twins were Peter and Gwen's kids; Quesada didn't like the idea of two teenagers having sex, and proposed the much less squicky idea of Osborn being the father). He was told he couldn't.


Fanfics

  • Post's reposting of his popular Teen Titans epic, "These Black Eyes", begins with this summary- "Noir, an incredibly overpowered Gary Stu, joins the animated Teen Titans. During his tenure with the heroic youngsters, many grammatical errors are made, many gross atrocities of the first-person narrative are committed, and a bunch of bloody drama is spilt in the name of lifeless nerdiness. Act One consists of his beating up the Titans and the Titans loving him for it. Act Two consists of predictable villains coming back to battle the Titans in a huge cataclysm of page length and sound effects. Act Three shall never again see the Internet because it sucks major donkey rectum. This has not been edited, but it has been preserved--not so much by me but by those few generous (depraved?) souls who felt this fic needed to stay in existence."
    • He deleted his earlier X Men Evolution fanfic, Between the Walls, for similar reasons. He never reposted it.
  • Since becoming a published writer, Cassandra Claire has disavowed The Draco Trilogy and it's no longer officially available. here it is.
  • Many writers have written a Lemon story, and come to hate it, as it becomes more reviewed, written and popular than any of their other works.
  • Greg X, one of the staff members of The Gargoyles Saga has, on several occasions, publicly disowned his TGS work. Many of his issues stem from story structure, to characterization (ask him how he feels about what TGS did to Demona some time), and too many fan-created characters who no one but their fan creator had an interest in. That, and he just prefers Greg Weisman's plans and comics. A very diplomatically written blog post can be found here detailing how he feels.
  • After completing the series and moving on to webcomics, Cassie "Alohilani" Thomas has several times affirmed her dislike of Both Syllables. Despite this, she still gets asked about it, to her great displeasure.
  • With thousands of reviews and numerous people saving docs of Fierce Deity's The Legend of Zelda fanfic series, you'd think that he'd be heartened. Nope, he wants nobody to ever mention those "pieces of crap" ever again, despite the latter story, "Eternal Ark" being reasonably written with an engaging plot and interesting original characters.
  • The Open Door by Academia Nut was abrupty declared dead despite its large fanbase on Stardestroyer and FF.net, mostly due to the author losing interest his own own story.
  • FF.Net and FIMFiction.net author Meowth Rocket/Meowth's Toon Dragon is known for his A New Face in Ponyville story, considered one of the better 'Human In Equestria' stories, as well as some decent Pokemon and Sonic stories and the famous Payback from a Pipe family guy fic. He's also written a couple stories that he considered so bad he purposely refused to transfer them over to his harddrive, all but erasing their existence forever.


Film - Animated

  • Richard Williams was so devastated by what happened to his masterpiece The Thief and The Cobbler that to this day, he absolutely refuses to talk about or even acknowledge the films existence to anyone.
  • Disney's Robin Hood. It was considered by the company to be a piece of crap, but it was and is quite a popular film.
    • They've never been excited about The Black Cauldron either, which only occasionally pokes its head out of the Disney Vault and gets little to no mention of even existing.
    • Don't forget Disney's Song of the South, about a Reconstruction-era freed slave telling folk stories to two young white children on a plantation. Yeah, they like to pretend that did not happen.
    • Walt Disney actually claimed he disliked how the Alice in Wonderland film turned out, that Alice herself had no heart, and was glad that it failed at the box office. In fact, unlike others of his films, it would never be re-released to theaters in his lifetime. It would not get a theatrical re-release until 1974, more than twenty years after its release!
    • Walt was also similarly uncomfortable with Dumbo, apparently. It was a low-budget, cartoon-like, hour-long movie that he had had very little to do with; and it ended up making more money than the high-budget, realistic, feature length films like Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Bambi that he was heavily involved in. Never mind that it was released at a time when he was trying to prove that animation was more than just cartoons (see the second Fantasia example below). According to Neal Gabler, Walt dismissed Dumbo as "just one of those little things that we knocked out between epics."
    • Although Peter Pan fared better at the box office than Alice, Walt didn't care for that film, either, claiming that the titular character was unsympathetic and unlikeable. However, unlike Alice, Walt must have been able to look past his misgivings about the film and its characters to allow Peter Pan to be re-released to theaters during his lifetime, its first theatrical reissue (there were five in all) being in 1958.
    • The Pastoral Symphony segment from Fantasia initially featured a full-on 'darky' caricature named Sunflower as one of the 'centaurettes'. She was removed in 1969 and, despite the presence of old, uncensored prints, Disney denied her existence until the release of the re-mastered edition in 2000.
      • Speaking of Fantasia, Walt Disney mentioned the film when he appeared during the 1942 Academy Awards to accept the Irving Thalberg Award. Trying to hold back tears, he said "Maybe I should have a medal for bravery. We all make mistakes. I shall now rededicate myself to my old ideals." He was ashamed of Fantasia, not so much of making the film as of its pitiful box office performance. He felt that audiences were ready for a film like that in the wake of Snow White, but when it flopped (and was right on the heels of Pinocchio being a flop), Walt's self-confidence was rattled. Fantasia's performance discouraged Walt from making anything else too artistic, which was why any films made thereafter, such as Cinderella or Peter Pan, were safer, more mainstream fare.
  • Don Bluth dislikes his 90s films like Rock a Doodle and A Troll in Central Park as much as his fans do. In fact, he hated The Pebble and The Penguin so much that he actually removed his name from the film.
  • Orson Welles, who played Unicron in Transformers the Movie, apparently couldn't even remember what it was called, and stated that his role was that of "a huge toy that does horrible things to other toys."
    • And he died five days after completing his work on the movie. That is some rapid Creator Backlash.
  • Dan Harmon, one of the screenwriters of Monster House, wrote a wonderful apology letter to a young girl after her mother, a friend of a friend, wrote him explaining the girl's nightmares over the movie, a letter in which he complained about the Executive Meddling on the movie.
    • "And next time Monster House is on, just remember that the guy that wrote it told you it was dumb."
  • Peter Sallis, voice of Wallace in Wallace and Gromit stated that he preferred the original shorts such as The Wrong Trousers to the duo's big screen debut in The Curse Of The Wererabbit, making him one of the movie's few critics. Nick Park has also stated that while he holds no regrets over the movie, he feels personally that Wallace and Gromit are better suited to the short films, rather than feature-length.


Film - Live Action

  • Jessica Alba has said that she dislikes most of the work on her resume.
  • Sir Alec Guinness grew to hate the Star Wars series over time and regretted having played Obi-Wan Kenobi, because of how audiences came to only remember him for said role despite his plethora of performances in other productions beforehand. He once famously told a fan that he could have an autograph if he never watched the film again. Ironically, Star Wars made him rich, as he was the only actor able to get a cut of the gross (2%).
    • The other cast members knew how much he disliked the series while filming, and even commented that he still remained professional despite his own feelings towards the film.
    • A great many of those involved in Star Wars up to and including George Lucas came to see it (temporarily) as a noose around their necks. Lucas especially felt this way since working on the movies led to a divorce from his first wife.
  • Author John Irving so hated the adaptation of his novel A Prayer for Owen Meany that he sued, successfully, to have the title character's name removed from the film--and his own name removed from the whole thing. The film was renamed Simon Birch.
  • Stephen King still doesn't want to talk about the adaptation of The Lawnmower Man.
  • Michael J. Fox regrets having been in Teen Wolf, which has maintained its cult popularity and even got a sequel. Fox refused to do the sequel, which caused problems because he was the title character. Ultimately, Jason Bateman was cast as a Suspiciously Similar Substitute.
  • Mocked up by Kevin Smith; when a group of people announced they were going to picket his film Dogma at a theater near where he lives, Smith himself showed up and picketed the film too with a "Dogma is dogshit" sign. He ends up being filmed by a news crew as a protester, and the reporter recognized him.
    • Hilariously, Smith--who was wearing the same overcoat that his character Silent Bob wears in the movie, and using the name of his close friend and fellow protester Brian Johnson--made a point of telling the interviewer that he hadn't seen it, "but [fellow Catholics] tell him it was really, really bad," despite thinking Clerks was really funny.
    • He also famously made a mock apology for how awful Mallrats was on the official movie website just to screw with all the fans who hated it.
      • Listen to the commentary track on the Laserdisc and DVD--Smith, Ben Affleck, and Jason Mewes destroy the movie all throughout.
  • The movie Galaxy Quest shows the cast of the Star Trek knock-off despising the show for both derailing all their careers and being their only means of support. Ironically, the Shatner counterpart is the only one who doesn't mind it.
    • Interesting in that in recent years, the real Shatner and the rest of the cast (Nimoy especially) have gotten over their Wangst over being typecast and hounded by fans for their characters and not themselves, and have accepted how wonderful the show was to so many people.
  • Gwyneth Paltrow was displeased with View From The Top and doesn't speak very positively about some of her film roles in the mid-00's.
  • David Fincher doesn't talk about Alien³ and refuses to put it on his resume to this day, chiefly because he was brought onto the film late in its already troubled production cycle (which had gone through three other directors and numerous rewrites), and his vision for the final product was hampered by major Executive Meddling.
  • Joss Whedon disowned the Buffy the Vampire Slayer film for similar reasons. He launched the series to correct the errors of Executive Meddling; its pilot retconned away some events of the movie. The pilot established that it was the script version that happened when the only specifics given are that she burned down the gym at her old school.
  • While we are on the subject, Joss Whedon's opinion about Alien: Resurrection is that it twisted around all the good ideas in his script.
  • Faye Dunaway regrets having played Joan Crawford in Mommie Dearest and doesn't like to talk about it, either.
  • Bela Lugosi had a love-hate relationship with Dracula for the rest of his life. On the one hand, typecasting destroyed his career. On the other hand, anything he had was due to Dracula, so he kept some gratitude. He was even buried in the cape, although that was the idea of his wife and son.
  • Joel Schumacher has apologized for Batman and Robin in this interview.
  • Tim Curry (AKA Dr. Frank N Furter) was VERY reluctant to talk about being in The Rocky Horror Picture Show for years, mostly due to some rather unpleasant memories involving stalkers and people digging through his trash. In recent years, however, he's become more open to talk about being in Rocky Horror and even sees it as a "rite of passage" for teenagers.
    • Most of the main cast of RHPS at first distanced themselves from the production, only to embrace it years later. The lone hold-out is Peter Hinwood, who played Rocky, who immediately and permanently tried to pretend it never happened.
  • Roland Emmerich regrets making the 1998 remake of Godzilla, but protects it all the same.
  • Sean Connery on James Bond, the character that made him a star:
 

 I've always hated that damn James Bond. I'd love to kill him.

 
    • Which may have helped spawn the longstanding rumor that he would play the villain in an upcoming Bond film.
    • Distancing himself from 007 is one of the main reasons he took the role of Zed in Zardoz. Needless to say, that worked beyond his wildest dreams.
    • Definitely averted now, as despite being retired, Sean Connery reprised the role of Bond for EA's video game adaptation of From Russia With Love (which he even considers his favorite Bond film), re-recording new dialogue and the like despite being more than 40 years older.
  • Chevy Chase hated Caddyshack II, even during production, so much so that after a take, he mentioned to the producer to call him when a laugh track had been added, and stormed off in disgust.
  • Disney has refused to release the movie Song of the South on video or DVD in the United States. This is mostly due to concerns that the film, which is based around African-American folklore, will be viewed as racist to modern eyes (although they seem fine with Peter Pan being readily available). Under current CEO Robert Iger, Disney seems to keep flip-flopping between deciding to release it and deciding to let it rest.
  • Kiss refuses to even discuss their So Bad It's Good film KISS vs. the Phantom of the Park. That film is as horrifically cheesy as it sounds.
  • Groucho Marx later regretted the Marx Brothers' first film The Cocoanuts, saying of its two directors, "One didn't understand English and the other didn't understand comedy."
  • Alec Baldwin claims to hate his long-shelved directorial debut The Devil and Daniel Webster/Shortcut to Happiness.
  • Bill Cosby hates his notorious 'comedy' Leonard Part 6 as much as audiences did - possibly even more, going on numerous talk shows telling people not to see it even before it was released.
  • Robert Pattinson, the male lead in the Twilight movie, has outright mentioned in interviews that he hates his character Edward and considers Stephenie Meyer insane. The female lead, Kristen Stewart, doesn't seem overly fond of the movie either, but she's less vocal about it.
  • Jared Padalecki has denounced his role in New York Minute with the Olsen Twins; although he does it mostly in jest, he still said that it's the one film credit he wishes he could erase from his resume.
  • Back in the 1970s, after years of making the character his own, a cheesed off and increasingly typecast Christopher Lee made a complete disconnect from Dracula.
    • It didn't help that Christopher Lee reported that Hammer Film kept him playing the role well below his actual payscale by essentially guilt-tripping him - 'you work at this pay we say or we'll have to put these crewmembers you like out of the job'. If his claims are true, no wonder he hated the role.
  • Orlando Bloom, while never outright complaining about or bashing his Pirates of the Caribbean character Will Turner, has made it bluntly clear that he wants nothing more to do with the character. Keira Knightley seems to share a similar disposition towards Elizabeth Swann. Predictably, both have stated that they will not return in On Stranger Tides (and they didn't). Though apparently, their dispositions toward their characters stem not from the characters themselves, but the romance story that took over the trilogy.
  • The real Patch Adams has publicly expressed his disdain for the movie based on his life.
  • The movie Field of Dreams has the character of Terence Mann (James Earl Jones) who just wants to be left alone by the fans of his writing.
    • Terence Mann is said to be inspired by the life of reclusive author J.D. Salinger. Salinger is the author sought by the main character in Shoeless Joe, the novel the film is based on. Salinger became reclusive after critics panned Nine Stories, his short story anthology published after The Catcher in the Rye.
  • Mark Romanek, director of the award-winning psychological thriller One Hour Photo, has refused to release his directorial debut Static (a quirky black comedy reminiscent of David Lynch) on DVD. He has expressed that, while he does not actually dislike the film, he considers it a "sophomore attempt" that does not stand up well when compared with his more recent work; and is best forgotten. This is exacerbated by the film's seriously Downer Ending.
  • Megan Fox has a history of badmouthing the director and franchise that made her famous, Michael Bay and Transformers.
    • Though she's certainly not the only one who feels that way, as Shia La Beouf has mentioned that he wasn't too fond of Revenge Of The Fallen himself, claiming that the film made no sense to him (or anyone else for that matter), and Bay definitely has a real talent for pissing people off, as several actors and actresses including Scarlett Johansson, Kate Beckinsale (who claimed that Bay made her feel "ugly" on the set), and Bruce Willis have all said in one way or another that they would never work with Bay again.
    • Even Michael Bay himself apologised for Revenge of the Fallen.
  • In her Razzie acceptance speech for Worst Actress, Halle Berry called Catwoman an "awful, piece of shit movie." And the crowd went wild.
  • Sylvester Stallone is not fond in retrospect of his various attempts to stretch into comedy, famously calling Stop or My Mom Will Shoot "the worst movie ever made in our solar system, including alien productions we have never seen."
    • Stallone has also expressed distaste towards Rocky IV and V, and to a lesser extent Rocky III. He said that if he could make Rocky IV again he would have hired Bill Conti to score it (this is the only film of the series to have been scored by someone else - Vince DiCola, if you're wondering) and would have punched Brigitte Nielsen in the face.
    • He also deeply regretted Rhinestone but did enjoy working with Dolly Parton nevertheless.
  • Many of Peter Sellers' early 1970s efforts, when his star had fallen far enough he was willing to do just about anything, qualify as this in one way or another. He tried to prevent the release of 1970's Hoffman and badmouthed 1972's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland before it opened. In fact, he called his 1965 through mid-1970s output a "bad patch" to Time magazine not long before his death. Sellers was infamous for being overly self-critical of his work, though - the truly shameful work didn't kick in until the '70s. (And Hoffman is surprisingly popular with the more devoted fans.)
  • John Wayne aggressively campaigned to be cast as Genghis Khan in The Conqueror. He would later shudder at the mention of the movie and claimed the moral of the story was "not to make an ass of yourself trying to play parts you're not suited for."
    • This movie did have a very good, and tragic, reason to be regretted; it was shot in Nevada near an atomic test site, and many of the cast and crew (including director Dick Powell, co-star Susan Hayward, and Wayne himself) were later stricken with cancer - studio owner Howard Hughes was so devastated he took the film out of circulation.
  • Fritz Lang came to dislike his best-known film, the sci-fi epic Metropolis, called it "silly" and "ridiculous" in interviews, and tried to draw attention to his favorite film M instead. There were many reasons for this: the heavy Executive Meddling by distributors who cut a quarter of the film's footage (Lang died believing that a full cut no longer existed), reports that it was Adolf Hitler's favorite film (especially bitter since Lang was half-Jewish, and emigrated from Germany in 1934 to get away from the Nazis [1]), and that the plot was a little silly (and was written by his ex-wife, whom he divorced over political and creative differences). Not to mention that it overshadowed the other three decades of his long film career.
  • Mike Judge hated Office Space for several years after its release. Due to insane amounts of Executive Meddling and lousy marketing, he had trouble watching it again without those memories popping up. He said that he never watched the whole movie again for many years until his daughter asked to watch it. Recently, though, he's felt a bit more positive about the film.
  • Could count as Old Shame too: J. D. Shapiro, the original screenwriter of Battlefield Earth, was fired from the film because Executive Meddling wanted to change his script too much, and he didn't want to - considering the end result of the changes, a wise choice. Shapiro even wanted to remove his name from the credits, and shows his disgust (and Self-Deprecation) by both receiving the Razzies of the film (the one for Worst Screenplay in a radio program, and the one for Worst Picture of the Decade at the actual ceremony!), and posting an apology letter, which included the line "The only time I saw the movie was at the premiere, which was one too many times".
  • Much like the Bela Lugosi example above, Orson Welles had a love/hate relationship with Citizen Kane, leaning often towards the latter, as he considered his later works The Trial and Chimes at Midnight to be much better. Of course, this is in large part due to the fact that after it was voted the Best Film Ever Made multiple times, Citizen Kane became the only thing anybody wanted to talk to him about.
    • It's also likely because, despite its historical acclaim, the film failed to win a Best Picture Oscar and Wells didn't win Best Actor for it. It also wasn't much of a financial success (largely due to William Randolph Hearst's smear campaign), which led to RKO Pictures prematurely terminating his contract.
  • Babylon AD was hit with this before it even came out. The director, Matthieu Kassovitz, has been quite open about how his initial vision of a dark but thoughtful cyberpunk world was edited beyond all recognition and turned into "a bad episode of 24." (For context, Rotten Tomatoes rates this movie at 7% freshness.)
  • Reportedly, the second Asterix movie suffered from this. The owners of the franchise decided that the movie wasn't Asterix-ish enough, so they dropped all the elements they didn't like for the third movie. Unfortunately for them, said third film was a spectacular failure, while the one they didn't like is still the most critically and commercially successful of all three movies.
  • Jerry Lewis to this day refuses to talk in any great detail about his unreleased film The Day the Clown Cried, a WWII comedy (with heavy tragic elements) about an inept German clown who is sent to a concentration camp and who, feeling unaccepted by the people on his side of the fence, decides to entertain the Jewish prisoners. Few people have ever seen the film, and Lewis apparently keeps his own VHS copy locked away for good.
  • Paul Verhoeven disowned Showgirls after Joe Eszterhas the film's writer edited the film without his permission. When the film won its numerous Razzie Awards, he accepted them to show his hatred of the film.
  • Hoo boy, Caligula. Writer Gore Vidal walked away from production because he hated how director Tinto Brass wanted satire in the film. Brass was then cut loose because producer Bob Guccione wanted hardcore sex involving his Penthouse Pets. Neither Vidal or Brass are officially credited in their roles. Most of the actors now look upon it as an Old Shame due to its reputation as a high-budget porno; Anneka Di Lorenzo eventually won a lawsuit claiming the film damaged her career (though the punitive damages were overturned on appeal).
  • Harlan Ellison has made it very clear that he is not a fan of The Oscar, which to this day remains his only feature screenwriting credit.
  • Screenwriter Mike White disowned School of Rock after the director decided to play up gay stereotypes without his involvement. Being bisexual and with a gay father, White was not pleased when he saw the final product.
  • William Gibson has distanced himself from the film adaptation of his short story Johnny Mnemonic, for which he wrote the screenplay, claiming that Executive Meddling turned what he and director Robert Longo had envisioned as a more experimental, independent film into a mainstream, generic sci-fi action movie.
  • The Farrelly Brothers disowned the film Outside Providence (co-written by them and based on a book by Peter Farrelly) after producer Harvey Weinstein insisted on numerous changes from the source material and recut the film in order to make it closer to their Theres Something About Mary rather than the coming-of-age tale the original story was. The final film was a flop with critics and audiences and has been more or less forgotten.
  • Michael Moore does not like the film Slacker Uprising, which was a documentary that he only did to complete a three film deal with producer Harvey Weinstein. He even personally bought the rights to the film so Weinstein would never release it theatrically and chose to premiere it for free online.
  • Wes Craven has disowned a pair of movies in his career. He disowned The Hills Have Eyes Part II as he only made the film for the money and felt the story ended with the first movie (he later co-wrote the sequel to the remake though, which may have been him feeling what he could have done to make it better). Many years later, he disowned Scream 4 due to the constant Executive Meddling the film suffered and the amount of rewrites and reshoots done on the film. He has hinted making a fifth film though.
  • Jim Sheridan has come out and disowned Dream House after the film's producer locked him out of the editing room after reshoots where done (which were done after the film tested poorly). It is not known what Sheridan's original cut was like.
    • As stars Daniel Craig and Rachel Weisz refused to do any promotion for the film, it's safe to say they aren't too fond of it either.
  • Please, please, PLEASE don't mention The Exorcist to Linda Blair. It's not so much the movie itself that she despises, it's the fact that 40+ years later it's the only thing people ever talk about around her. Especially don't speak of the power of Christ, nor whether or not it compels you.
  • Michael Biehn disowned The Blood Bond, a film he starred in and co-directed, after its nightmarish production and being fired as soon as filming ended (as the film's writer felt it was his movie and not Biehn's). Biehn's voice was also dubbed and he was horrified when he saw the released version.
  • In Universe in American Dreamer, the writer of the Rebecca Ryan books has his mother claim to write them, as he feels the books are just pulp trash.
  • Mickey Rourke severely dissed A Prayer For The Dying before its release (he said making it was "a nightmare"), and director Mike Hodges tried to take his name off the credits; needless to say, both have disowned it.


Literature

  • Older Than Radio: Gelett Burgess's exasperation over the popularity of his fluff 1895 poem The Purple Cow, as quoted above.
  • More a love-hate relationship than despise, but this is part of the reason Arthur Conan Doyle was led to kill off Sherlock Holmes, who overshadowed all of his other writings. He eventually got over it. To quote a letter that Doyle sent a friend after The Final Problem:
 

 Holmes is dead and damned! I have had such an overdose of him that I feel towards him as I do towards paté de foie gras, of which I once ate too much, so that the name of it gives me a sickly feeling to this day.

 
    • It's not so much that he got over it, but that he felt forced to resurrect Sherlock Holmes seeing as how people were shouting "MURDERER!" at him on the street.
  • Similar to the above example, Agatha Christie came to hate the famed fictional detective she created, Hercule Poirot. To quote The Other Wiki: "By 1930, Agatha Christie found Poirot 'insufferable' and by 1960, she felt that he was a 'detestable, bombastic, tiresome, ego-centric little creep'. Yet the public loved him, and Christie refused to kill him off, claiming that it was her duty to produce what the public liked, and what the public liked was Poirot." She would eventually tweak Poirot through one of her other characters, Ariadne Oliver, who was a mystery-writer turned detective. (Yes, Ariadne's an Author Avatar; yes, she exists; no, we don't blame you for not knowing that.) Unlike Doyle, Christie never got over it; just before she died, she released Curtain, a novel she had written years ago, in which Poirot was killed off.
    • She may have killed off Poirot in Curtain in part because she found him intolerable, but another reason was to prevent another author from taking over the Poirot series if she died during World War II. She began the book during the Blitz, when nobody in London knew if they'd survive.
  • Michael Crichton intended for his 1990 novel Jurassic Park to be a standalone work. However, he was more than happy with it being adapted into a film, selling the book's film rights before it was published and helping to write the film's screenplay. Once the film was a massive financial success, its creators began pressuring Crichton to write a sequel, despite the fact that he had never franchised any of his work. He reluctantly agreed, publishing The Lost World in 1995, which retcons a lot of plot points from Jurassic Park. Its film adaptation and second sequel Jurassic Park III were created with no involvement with Crichton whatsoever.
    • Crichton has tried to Torch the Franchise And Run twice to no avail. The first novel ends with the park being destroyed and all the dinosaurs being killed by the fictional Costa Rican air force. This was partially retconned with The Lost World, which ends with the characters noting that all the dinosaurs on "Site B" will die shortly due to a prion infection. However, a third Jurassic Park film ended up being made, without his involvement nor being based off a novel.
  • AA Milne grew to loathe his Winnie the Pooh books, as it typecast him forever as a "writer of children's books" and he could never go back to writing adult fiction. He even tried to kill off Pooh at the end of the second book. (Of course, it didn't work.) E. H. Shepard, Pooh's illustrator, also suffered from this, as it overshadowed his work in political cartoons. Similarly, Milne's son Christopher Robin grew to hate the works as well, for he was bullied constantly for being immortalized in them.
    • At one point, Christopher accused his father of exploiting him in the stories. Ironically, he later owned a bookstore, where it's pretty much inevitable that someone was going to ask that question.
    • Similarly, Lillian Moller Gilbreth didn't like Cheaper By the Dozen or Belles on Their Toes, which her children wrote, because they made her and her husband's life's work look silly.
    • Another similar example, Peter Llewelyn Davies is forever known as the basis for J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan. Davies hated being associated with "that terrible masterpiece" and it is believed that's what drove him to alcoholism and suicide.
  • In-story example: Misery by Stephen King is about an author who hates his popular character, kills her off, and then finds himself in the care of the character's biggest fan....
    • In Real Life, Stephen King has come to regret writing the novel Rage because someone decided to make life echo art with that book - or rather, make death echo art. Current copies of The Bachman Books no longer feature Rage. But the short story Cain Rose Up, which deals with similar topics, is still in Skeleton Crew. For those wondering, both Rage and Cain Rose Up concern a student who kills people on school grounds; the former has the main character/narrator "only" kill two teachers in the course of a long quasi-therapy session with his classmates and ultimately be shot by the police - but not fatally; he's last seen in a mental institution - whereas the latter features a sniper who is still killing indiscriminately at the end of the story.
  • Jack Kerouac found Visions of Cody to be a superior work to On the Road, and was disappointed at how much more people focused on the latter.
  • In the introduction to a rerelease of A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess called it "pornographic" and said the main reason for reading it would be for the "raping and ripping."
    • Anthony Burgess has always disliked the novel to a certain extent, as it was something that he dashed off quickly (in under three weeks) to help him cope with the sexual assault of his wife, meant to be catharsis (a rapist gets his due). He hated it more as time went on as Alex became glorified in pop culture and he felt people missed the point of the book, and his hatred was solidified when the movie came out and Stanley Kubrick, having received death threats for the film, forced Burgess and star Malcolm McDowell to handle all of the publicity work (McDowell, as a result, shares Burgess' backlash toward Kurbick.)
    • Burgess also adapted the stage version himself, heading off anyone who would try to channel the film version rather the the book version. He ends the play with cast singing "Ode to Joy," when Stanley Kubrick walks on trying to sing "Singing in the Rain", they respond by lynching him.
  • Richardson actually insulted his work Clarissa in the prolouge of one of the volume published, saying the main character was dull and didn't understand how anybody enjoyed the work. He later picked apart the morals in Clarissa in another of his works.
  • Mark Twain came to think of Tom Sawyer as the exemplar of everything that's shallow and stunted in the American spirit. His disgust found its way into Huckleberry Finn, in which Tom comes off as more of a thoughtless Jerkass than a mischievous scamp.
    • Perhaps Twain did come to dislike Tom Sawyer, but if his dislike shows in Huckleberry Finn, it certainly does not in the two sequels, Tom Sawyer Abroad (1894) and Tom Sawyer, Detective (1896). If anything, Twain seems to have grown irritated with Huck, who comes across as something of a boob in those two works, while Tom is intelligent and resourceful.
      • Then again, Huckleberry had already managed to ruin himself by the end of his own novel. Having spent the book on real-life, proud adventures, the instant he met with Tom he fell under the sway of his idiotic plan. If Tom Sawyer was an idiot for his plans to rescue their friend in a thoroughly inane and childish manner, Finn was even worse for agreeing.
  • Western author Louis L'Amour early in his career was hired to write a series of stories about the character 'Hopalong' Cassidy for a western pulp magazine. The stories were not about an original character and were extensively edited to tie in with a 'Hopalong' Cassidy TV show. L'Amour later in life denied ever writing them in the first place, even to his own family. They were only reprinted after his death.
  • Anne Rice, for a time, disclaimed her popular Vampire Chronicles series, as well as the connected Mayfair Witches series, due to converting to Christianity, but she got over it later.
  • Another in-story example: Sharyn McCrumb's novel Bimbos of the Death Sun features an author who despises the series of cheesy Conan the Barbarian-style novels to which he's become metaphorically chained by success and merchandising, all the while wanting recognition for his use of Celtic mythology in the books.
  • Isaac Asimov had a minor version of this regarding his famous short story "Nightfall", considering it to be far from his best work and in no way deserving of all the acclaim it received. This was partly because it was one of his earliest works (he wrote it when he was 21), and the notion that it was his best story suggested that he hadn't improved as an author in fifty years of writing.
    • Not to mention that one of the most-remembered paragraphs from that story (it's toward the end) isn't his work, having been added by editor John W Campbell.
    • Similarly, one of the reasons that it took 30 years for the fourth Foundation book to come out was that he was tired of the series. The main thing that got him to work on Foundation's Edge was the boatload of cash he was offered.
  • Stephen Crane believed that the best way of writing was to go experience something, then dash off your thoughts rapidly and without editing, while being careful not to go on too long. For reasons uncertain to biographers (a bet may have factored into it), he decided to write The Red Badge of Courage, based on nothing he'd ever seen, heavily edited, and by his own admission "too long." Naturally, "the damned Red Badge" made him famous, while not necessarily helping to dispel his conviction that Readers Were Morons.
  • Peter S Beagle called A Fine and Private Place (his first novel, and fairly well received) his "state of grace" novel, where he must have been protected by whatever spirit watches over young and self-important authors.
    • Double example with The Last Unicorn, whose popularity has overshadowed a LOT of Beagle's work, and questions about a sequel have increasingly annoyed him. He's finally going to give in, though, so he can't hate it that much...
  • Shocked by the conditions in which Dust Bowl refugees lived, John Steinbeck wrote a satire, L'Affaire Lettuceberg. He decided, however, that it would be better not to publish it, because it was to "cause hatred through partial understanding" and he preferred "making people understand each other." Reconsidering the subject, he wrote The Grapes Of Wrath, a much more direct and passionate work.
  • Akiyuki Nosaka can't even re-read Grave of the Fireflies because he hates it so much. It seems to be related to survivor's guilt, given that the ending of the story wasn't quite the same as the way his life turned out.
  • Upton Sinclair was severely upset that the only thing about The Jungle that stuck with America was the horrific conditions of the meat packing industry, as opposed to the socialist Author Tract that took up most of the book.
 

  "I aimed at the public's heart, and by accident I hit it in the stomach."

 
  • Arthur C. Clarke came to dislike Rescue Party due to so many fans preferring something so early in his career.
  • Though he acknowledges the significant influence it had on the science-fiction genre, William Gibson has stated that he now considers Neuromancer, "an adolescent's book", saying of himself at the time he wrote it, "I'd buy the man a drink, but I probably wouldn't lend him any money." Furthermore, his most recent novels have been set in the present day rather than the near future, with Gibson now claiming that he finds the emergent technology of today more interesting than any fictional tech he could ever dream up.
  • Lucy Maud Montgomery was sick of her most famous work, Anne of Green Gables, by the time she wrote its sequel. The creation of Emily Starr was a direct result of her own disillusionment with her work - though she went on to put out eight books in the Anne series anyway (it should be noted that the last two books feature Anne as a supporting character, rather than the main character she'd been in previous instalments). In addition, the series was written out of order, which meant that the last book she wrote wasn't Rilla Of Ingleside, which ends the series, but Anne Of Ingleside. By then she was thoroughly tired of writing Anne - and it shows.
  • Henry James grew to dislike Washington Square, mostly because of the comparisons it got to the works of Jane Austen.
  • JRR Tolkien said of his work that people "are involved in the stories in a way that I'm not" and that he was not sure that the tendency to treat the whole thing as "kind of a vast game" was a good idea. He also referred to obsessive fans who became so devoted to Lord of the Rings as "my deplorable cultus," and was surprised and alarmed by the way the books seemed to take hold of some people, especially those who came to gawp at his house or called him from California at 7 p.m. (their time - 3 a.m. his), to demand to know whether Frodo had succeeded or failed in the Quest (this specific question being asked in between the releases of The Two Towers and Return of the King), what is the preterite of Quenyan lanta-, or whether Balrogs have wings. Also, while not about the work itself, Tolkien put everything he hated into one of his fictional languages: the Black Speech. To his dismay, some fans thought it was cool...
  • Annie Proulx has had a very negative reaction to Brokeback Mountain fanfiction, for multiple reasons.
  • Douglas Adams suffered from terrible black moods, and in response to constant nagging from fans for a new The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy book, he gave them a dose of his depression in literary form: Mostly Harmless. It's a depressing, nihilistic book in which Everybody Dies and the Earth is irrevocably destroyed in all universes. Basically, it made any more sequels impossible, and was a big middle finger to all his fans. Years later, Adams said he regretted ending the series on such a depressing note, and was in the early stages of writing a sixth book that would have fixed it all when he died.
    • When Mostly Harmless was adapted for radio as "The Quintessential Phase" the Downer Ending was revised into a more optimistic version, although it's not entirely clear how authentic this was to Adams's unfinished plans.
    • He also regretted elements So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, which is happier, but perhaps less of an H2G2 book; in particular the bit where he snaps at the reader that if they want a Marvin bit they can skip to the end. He also commented that the book was backwards; Arthur as the seasoned galactic traveller amongst Muggles, and that part of him kept saying he couldn't just bring the Earth back like that. The last line of the book is "There was a point to this story but it has temporarily escaped the author's mind", and Adams once said that this was him "owning up".
  • Peter Benchley came to regret writing Jaws when he learned that drastic overfishing was driving many shark species to extinction, coming to believe he was at least partially responsible due to his book (and the eponymous film version) instilling a cross-cultural fear of sharks around the world. He spent the rest of his life trying to make up for it by becoming a vocal ocean conservation activist.
  • An In Universe example: In Frank Stockton's short story "His Wife's Deceased Sister", the protagonist writes the eponymous novel, which is so wonderful that he instantly becomes famous. However, this work is a one-off, and it is so good that it sets an unrealistically high standard to which he is held, and every other novel he submits is rejected, with the editors being insulted, thinking he he is foisting his rejects upon them. Driven to financial ruin, he comes to regret ever writing his masterpiece, and must write under a pseudonym to make ends meet. Eventually, when he manages to write another masterpiece, he ends up destroying it, fearing that it will again ruin his career.
  • L Frank Baum resented writing sequels to the Wizard of Oz, and repeatedly tried to end the Oz series altogether. Several books end with firm declarations that he has told the reader everything there is to know about Oz, or that Oz has cut itself off from the rest of the world, and he can no longer give the reader new stories as a result. Yet Baum's other books never sold well, and for strictly financial reasons he was forced to repeatedly return to the tired franchise.
  • Dr. Seuss came to feel a deep regret for the racist anti-Japanese cartoons he drew during World War II, to the point he dedicated Horton Hears a Who to a Japanese friend.


Live Action TV

  • Dave Chappelle came to loathe how people started showing up to his stand-up comedy exclusively to demand that he replicate skits from his TV show. This even led to a nervous breakdown, ensuring that the third season (or any after it) of Chappelles Show would never get finished. People would yell at him, "I'm Rick James, Bitch!". Took about two minutes for him to feel Dude, Not Funny. The significant Misaimed Fandom from his sizeably white audience who were there simply for the Uncle Tomfoolery and completely missing how Chappelle was satirizing and mocking such attitudes didn't help matters much, either.
  • Eddie Murphy refuses to acknowledge his old Saturday Night Live characters, though they are some of his most enduring legacy.
  • Both William Shatner and Leonard Nimoy (and to a lesser extent, most of the original cast; Galaxy Quest was based partially in reality, after all) had a period of Creator Backlash after Star Trek the Original Series ended, mostly because they were being typecast as Kirk and Spock, and the rest of the crew. It seems that they all got over it, though. Having your angst, and the revived franchise make you richer 'n Croesus does tend to change your viewpoint.
    • In fact, the author of I Am Not Spock not only went on to write I Am Spock, but also has now officially become the original cast member with the longest on-screen association with the franchise, with his role in the 2009 film. And Shatner is not in the film only because there was no plausible way to bring Prime timeline Kirk back from his bridge-dropping.
    • However, there are some Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Enterprise alumni who are very much straight examples of this trope;
      • Robert Beltran (Chakotay) made disparaging comments about Voyager for years, even while the show was still running. He's often criticized the quality of the writing, the technobabble and the fact that he wasn't given a whole lot to do over the series' 7-season run. He's also expressed sincere disdain for the character of Chakotay during chats with fans. It's believed that Beltran was given an out-of-nowhere relationship with Seven of Nine by the producers in order to shut him up long enough for the show to finish.
      • Jolene Blalock takes a similar tack with Enterprise. In fact, several members of the cast (including Scott Bakula, Connor Trinneer and Blalock) joined the chorus blasting the show in media interviews in the months following the series finale, "These Are The Voyages", which was roundly criticized by reviewers and fans.
    • The casts of Star Trek the Next Generation and Star Trek Deep Space Nine are fairly notable for generally avoiding this trope; for example, even though Patrick Stewart doesn't want to be Picard anymore, he doesn't regret his role in the slightest. Most of the other cast members hold a similar fondness for the show, and don't mind a little typecasting if only because they're touched by the love of the fans and are proud of the best moments of the shows.
      • The only one with real regrets about his time on TNG is Wil Wheaton: a large portion of his autobiography Just a Geek focuses on his coming to terms with his (in retrospect) ill-made decision to leave the show due to Fan Backlash and increasingly being sidelined by the show's creators. It probably didn't help that his character was one of the most hated on the show, either. Nowadays, he seems to look back on his time on TNG with real nostalgia, and doesn't seem above some good-natured ribbing of his old character, either.
      • Marina Sirtis felt that the worst of the Trek movies was Insurrection, saying that she fell asleep during its premiere.
    • Brannon Braga quite justifiably hates the Voyager episode "Threshold" (as do all the cast) - to the point it never happened, complete with later Discontinuity Nod. Equally, the TNG first-season episode 'Code Of Honor' has the same thing.
  • Is there a half-way point to this trope?? If so Richard Dean Anderson fits the bill. Before he was Colonel Jack O'Neill he was everyone's favorite mullet-sporting hero, MacGyver. Now, while Anderson has always been deeply appreciative of the show (going so far as to appear on the SNL spoof MacGruber and doing a well received Super Bowl ad for Visa as the character) he's been noted as having been greatly stressed out by it since he was THE star of the show and thus he never could take a break. It was one of the reasons he stated that SG 1 had to be an ensemble show, so that he wouldn't have to "carry" it by himself.
  • Amy Jo Johnson, the first Pink Power Ranger, has shown everything from visible discomfort to outright shame in regards to the role that made her famous (and probably typecast her forever). This has affected many of her fellow actors, but most of them were martial artists first and foremost and didn't have as great a desire to make it as serious actors as Johnson. Many of them have commented that they'd love to come back for cameo roles every year if asked, and look back fondly at their years on the show.
    • The best example of that is probably Jason David Frank, who played Tommy, the Green/White Ranger. He comes back for a cameo just about every third season and is apparently more than happy to stop and talk about Power Rangers to those who recognise him on the street. Plus he's gone on to own a martial arts dojo in LA, do MMA and invent a martial art style... He gets around for sure.
    • Johnny Yong Bosch also doesn't mind too much about his Power Rangers past either. In fact in it one of the main factors that propelled him into a successful career of voice acting.
    • For years, David Yost (who played Billy, the original Blue Ranger) seemed this way, but in a 2009 interview he admitted that the main issue was his getting gay-bashed behind the scenes, and that he didn't hate the show itself or the fans, who have been very supportive.
    • If Amy Jo is the best example of this from Power Rangers, Lost Galaxy's Danny Slavin is a very close second. It's believed that he only took the job to pay for law school, and has repeatedly turned down invitations to Power Morphicon. Not helping matters, reportedly the producers screwed Trakeena's actress out of most of her paycheck during the Lost Galaxy/Lightspeed Rescue crossover episode, which lead to him walking off the set in protest. It took a miracle for him to cameo in the 10th anniversary episode "Forever Red".
  • In an interview, the widow of Ray Goulding (of Bob & Ray) noted he didn't like to have the early episodes of the duo's 1951-53 TV show brought up in later years because "it was infancy for television" and he was "appalled at how really naive they were about what to wear and how to appear." Different times...
  • Tom Baker was reportedly keen to distance himself from Doctor Who after leaving the show, refusing to appear in the 20th anniversary episode "The Five Doctors", and for a long time refusing to do conventions and public appearances related to the show. This was at least partly due to the length of time he spent on the show and being quite burnt out about it and partly because his iconic performance largely overshadowed everything else he did since then. He seems a lot more comfortable being associated with the show in recent years, however.
    • It's worth noting that by 1980, sources show Baker as alcoholic, despondent, and nearly impossible to work with; executive meddling and heavy typecasting had taken a toll, his marriage was on the rocks, and he was not at all enamoured of newer writers like Christoper Bidmead or producer John-Nathan Turner. He was nearly 50, and had little career left.
    • In 1993, Baker filmed a small part for the short "episode" Dimensions In Time. It's said there was far more planned using a different script, but Executive Meddling and a primadonna host got in the way.
    • From 2009, Baker returned as the Doctor for three five-part series of audio dramas for BBC Audio, and in 2011 began to star in audio dramas for Big Finish Productions. He has shown some regret about not doing "The Five Doctors" and distancing himself from the series at large, but at over 70 years old his health will not allow more involvement.
    • It took a long time for Peter Davison to become comfortable with his tenure as the Doctor. With most of his career still ahead of him, he had been terrified of being typecast and did everything possible to prevent it, including insulting the show to the press. This doesn't seem to be an issue since Davison's Cameo in the mini-episode "Time Crash" as part of a charity drive. David Tennant used the short as a massive fan-gasm shout-out to Davison's tenure on the show. "You were MY Doctor." Tennant has repeatedly cited Davison's interpretation of the Doctor as his primary inspiration, and reason for becoming an actor.

      Davison had always felt that he was too young for the role. In "Time Crash" he felt he was at a more fitting age to play the Doctor, and had a grasp on the character that he was happy with. Ironically, the role of the Doctor being played by a younger man (and the contrast between the character's physical age and his actual age) was one of the primary things that carried over into the new series, thanks in part to Davison's example.
      • Davison also has had no problems acting as the Doctor in the Big Finish radio dramas, having been there from the beginning and having had a long and prolific moonlight career (alongside his TV role on Law and Order: UK) as the Doctor in new audio adventures.
    • The Second Doctor Patrick Troughton quit the show in 1969 to avoid being typecast, and because he was rather sick of the job and wished to return to other programmes. He went as far as to urge Frasier Hines (Jamie McCrimmon) and Wendy Padbury (Zoe) to depart at the same time.
      • Troughton did make comebacks in The Three Doctors and "The Five Doctors", and finally alongside Colin Baker in The Two Doctors, and looked like he was thoroughly enjoying himself in all of them. Of course Troughton didn't hate the character -- he would make himself available at conventions, and any time he and Jon Pertwee were at the same convention, the two would appear at joint panels and jokingly mock-bicker as Two and Three did in The Three Doctors and the Five Doctors. Troughton also counseled Davison to stay on only 3 years, and this aided in his decision to leave the show in 1984.
    • Janet Fielding has stated that she was pretty bitter towards the show when she left because she wasn't happy with how she and her fellow companions were treated. She's since gotten over it and is much more comfortable with the show now.
    • Surprisingly subverted by Colin Baker, who you would think -- given that he was the only actor playing the Doctor to be fired from the role, that his era was for a long time not incredibly popular with fans and that, well, he had to wear That Coat -- would have plenty of reason to not want to have anything to do with the show again. Instead, barring some rather understandable regrets, he's always appeared quite enthusiastic about the show, being associated with the show and returning to it in some form on occasion. Baker, long before David Tennant took the trope and ran with it, was the Ascended Fanboy on Doctor Who, having been a childhood fan of the show. He too has done numerous Sixth Doctor Big Finish dramas, and he (and the writers) went the extra mile to completely rehabilitate Six's reputation, leading to him being a poster boy for Rescued From the Scrappy Heap.
  • Robin Williams does not like being called "Mork", or being greeted with "Nanu nanu". Even as far back as "Reality, What a Concept..." (1979) he had to let the crowd (chanting "Mork! Mork! Mork!") know that he preferred doing stand-up. On his "Live 2002" album, something similar happened, and he actually said he'd rather forget Mork. Most notably, for years he's been unwilling to say "Nanu nanu" even as a reference... until recently, it seems (at around 2:18). Perhaps he has mellowed.
  • Actor and singer Danny Smith is rumored to be annoyed at people who still think of him as Merton Dingle from Big Wolf On Campus. It's unknown whether it's true or if he's over it.
  • Morgan Freeman does not want to be remembered for being Easy Reader, and has made as much clear when interviewers try to ask him about it. He's mellowing a little bit about it, but still feels that he stayed with The Electric Company for too long.
  • Tina Louise was NEVER Ginger on Gilligan's Island. Don't ask her about it, she won't talk about it anyway.
    • To the extent that she refused to reprise the role even for the Filmation cartoons (in one of them Dawn Wells voiced both Mary Ann and Ginger).
  • Gene Rayburn did not recall hosting the 1985 game show Break the Bank as a happy experience. Him being replaced in the next season didn't help matters either. Thus we'd never again see any reruns of Rayburn Break the Bank (less so since GSN can't/won't show that particular series).
    • The embargo of the Rayburn episodes goes all the way back to the late 80s, when CBN Cable Network only showed the Joe Farago episodes.
    • Rayburn was infuriated when Rolling Stone magazine revealed his real age in an article, claiming that the information would probably get him fired due to insurance problems. And he was right: shortly after the article appeared, he was fired. Making it even worse was that they told him to host the show seriously; never mind that he was known for being a total goofball on Match Game and Break the Bank was a stunt show which called for a goofy host.
    • A possible related Rayburn-embargo is the case of The Match Game - Hollywood Squares Hour. Gene Rayburn was not happy on the show, partially due to having to share hosting duties with the inexperienced Jon Bauman. But this is as likely (or less so) as it just being chalked up to a dual-ownership issue, as Fremantle Media and MGM have the rights to the respective shows now.
  • Chuck Henry will not allow his 1989 version of Now You See It to be seen in reruns, fearing that his credibility as a newscaster would be hurt if people remembered that he was a game show host at one point — consensus is, however, that Henry was a competent host. GSN does show the earlier Jack Narz version, off and on again.
  • Harlan Ellison publically denounces, to this day, The Starlost which he started out on as the writer/creator. Executive Meddling ruined it.
  • Contrary to rumors, Joe Odagiri, the lead in Kamen Rider Kuuga, doesn't despise his tenure as a Kamen Rider, but he tends to dodge the subject in interviews as he's been trying to make it as a serious actor. Milestone Celebration Kamen Rider Decade has an Alternate Universe Kuuga as a major character, played by another actor (Ryota Murai, who conveniently enough is a Promoted Fanboy of Kuuga).
    • Likewise Shigeki Hosokawa, who played the title character in Kamen Rider Hibiki, made a blog post just after the show ended in which he talked about how badly the second half of the show was mismanaged, in particular complaining about how they got rewrites for the final episode while filming it. Like Odagiri he apparently dodges the subject of Hibiki in interviews, and though in that same blog post he said he'd be glad to come back (if someone competent were in charge), he's practically the only main cast member who didn't return in Decade.
  • Tamao Satou, the actress of Oh Pink in Chouriki Sentai Ohranger, had shown dislike for the role since the season ended. It took time, but she's apparently had a change of heart since then, taking part in a photo shoot for the theater premiere of one of the recent Sentai VS Movies in-uniform, and most recently performed a cameo role of the character alongside Oh Red actor Masaru Shishido amongst other Sentai alumnists in the 35th anniversary series Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger.
  • Most of the adults of Full House did not like the show and hated its Tastes Like Diabetes nature, with Bob Saget and John Stamos being the most vocal (Dave Coulier appears to be the only adult male lead who has expressed no regret over his role). Unusual for this trope, the entire cast got along extremely well and remain close friends to this day. Stamos has mentioned on talk shows about having a psuedo-Revival where him, Saget and Coulier would be roommates after the kids had grown up and left. Saget has joked about an event where him and Stamos were near a car accident, and speculated on what the driver must have thought when they saw "Danny and Uncle Jesse" coming to the rescue.
  • The Star Wars Holiday Special. George Lucas said of it, "If I had time and a hammer, I'd smash every copy."
  • John Moschitta Jr. dislikes being known for his fast-talking Micro Machines commercials, and has called Micro Machines "some of the lamest toys" in interviews.
  • It was rumored around the fandom of Lexx that Michael McMannus loathed playing Kai, since the character was an actor's worst nightmare, someone who, as mandated by plot, always looks exactly the same and can't even show a facial expression. He stuck it out for the show's entire run, though.
    • This does seem fairly plausible because he does seem to be having a lot of fun on the few occasions that he gets to play Kai as anything other than the dead assassin.
    • Eva Habermann, however, was an aversion; she left the show because it took so long for news of whether or not season two was coming that she would've had to have given up other work to stay. She was under no obligation to come back for the first two episodes, and did it just to give them time to work The Nth Doctor into the plot instead of forcing the writers to just drop it on the audience out of nowhere.
  • "Weird Al" Yankovic hates most of The Weird Al Show because of all of the Executive Meddling behind it.
  • An in-universe example: in Extras, Andy Millman (Ricky Gervais) finally achieves his dream of writing and starring in his own sitcom, only to see Executive Meddling and Fan Dumb turn the whole thing into a total (though very successful) embarrassment.
  • Although he doesn't outright hate it like most examples of this trope, John Cleese has stated he always had a mixed reaction to Fawlty Towers most famous episode The Germans because of all the Memetic Mutation surrounding the episode and the loss of its original meaning.
  • Patrick McGoohan seemed to bounce back and forth in his opinion on his creation, The Prisoner, embracing it at times (witness his participation in "The Computer Wore Menace Shoes" on The Simpsons) and refusing to talk about it at others. He reportedly declined an invitation to appear in the 2009 remake, though this was likely due to poor health (he died before it was broadcast).
    • He did allow himself to be quoted as saying he was pleased with the remastered DVD (and later Blu-Ray) version of the original series.
  • Henry Winkler hated being remembered only as Fonzie, and refused to answer to fans who called him that. However, some references in Arrested Development suggest he's mellowed over time.
  • Robert Reed absolutely hated The Brady Bunch (but not the Brady Bunch - he loved the kids), feuding with creator Sherwood Schwartz throughout the run, trying to get out of his contract and flat-out refusing to appear in the final episode because the script was so bad (had the show been renewed for a sixth season, Schwartz would have seen to it that the family would be without Mike Brady). However, he returned for the later TV movies and series (and the TV movie adaptation of Barry Williams' memoir Growing Up Brady is dedicated to Reed's memory).
  • Margaret Cho has expressed regret and frustration over her short-lived sitcom All-American Girl, which was very loosely based on her stand-up comedy. She was reportedly told that she had to lose weight, and then was told she wasn't acting Asian enough and was made to work with an "Asian consultant." When that didn't work, they got rid of most of the Asian family members and replaced them with white friends. Unsurprisingly, the show failed, and she spiraled into drug and alcohol problems as a result.
  • Ashley Pharaoh, co-creator of the much-derided Bonekickers, penned a "letter to my younger self" article containing sage nuggets of advice... one of which was "Do not write Bonekickers".
  • Castle has an In Universe example when the title character, a novelist, got bored with his current hero (Detective Derrick Storm) and Dropped a Bridge On Him at the end of his last book. He then starts up a new series about Detective Nikki Heat, based on Beckett.
  • James Gurney joined in the backlash against the miniseries and TV series versions of his Dinotopia books.


Music

  • Commonly happens to One-Hit Wonder bands that never came near the success of that one hit with anything else. For example, the band A Flock of Seagulls came to dislike "I Ran" because for their entire three decade existence, nobody cared about any other song they released.
    • This general concept is parodied amusingly in the Barenaked Ladies song "Box Set": "I never thought I'd be regretful/Of all my past success/But some stupid No.1 hit single/Has got me in this mess..."
      • Which is ironic, in hindsight, as that's what "One Week" turned out to be: their stupid No.1 hit single. Not a bad song, but definitely atypical. BNL's reaction? Call their greatest hits collection "Disc One" after another line in "Box Set" ("Disc One, it's where I've begun/It's all my greatest hits"), try to name one of the new songs on that collection "One Weaker" (it didn't stick), mock it on their next album, Everything to Everyone ("Kinda like the last time/With a bunch of really fast rhymes/If we're living in the past, I'm/Soon gone."), and move on. They still play "One Week" at concerts, but they often swap it out for an acoustic version.
  • Devo basically dumped the albums, "Shout", "Total Devo", and "Smooth Noodle Maps" in the crapper, and haven't performed a thing from any of them since reuniting in 1995.
    • Devo's also lambasted their brief foray into CD-ROM gaming, "The Adventures of the Smart Patrol".
      • Comments on the ill-fated Devo 2.0 project with Disney have been more about how absurd it was, and that being the reason why they did it.
  • Not sure if it's backlash against the song itself or just the circumstances, but Madonna has said that if she knew she'd be called the "Material Girl" for almost thirty years, she would have never recorded the song.
  • Radiohead grew to hate their first hit song "Creep" because people would show up to their concerts exclusively to hear it, acting indignant until they play it and leaving immediately afterwards. They continued to play it reluctantly, usually stating how they have no respect for the people that want to hear it right before. They eventually cut the song from their playlist altogether for a long period of time, and wrote "My Iron Lung" about it (sample lyrics: "This/This is our new song/Just like the last one/A total waste of time/My iron lung")
    • Ed O'Brien has said the distinctive guitar crunch in "Creep" resulted from guitarist Jonny Greenwood intentionally trying to ruin the even-then despised song during recording. The band felt it improved the song so they kept it in.
    • Thom Yorke also dislikes another early hit, "High and Dry", described as "It's not bad...it's very bad." Radiohead hasn't played it for a decade.
    • While they weren't particularly hits, the band also quickly disowned the single "Pop Is Dead" and the Pablo Honey album track "Prove Yourself" - they consider the former a poorly written song, and just quickly stopped playing the latter live because they were unsettled by the audience singing along to the repeated line "I'm better off dead".
  • One of the reasons that a Led Zeppelin reunion took so long to fully materialise is because Robert Plant came to utterly abhor "Stairway to Heaven", calling it "that bloody wedding song."
  • The Jimi Hendrix Experience eventually grew to hate their cover of "Hey Joe". Famously, during a televised performance on British talk show It's Lulu, Hendrix cut the song short, announced "We'd like to stop playing this rubbish," and launched into an impromptu cover of Cream's "Sunshine of Your Love".
  • Alain Jourgenson, leader of the pioneer industrial rock band Ministry, repeatedly voices his complete disgust for their early synth-pop years, especially their debut album With Sympathy. Jourgenson claimed that they recorded "an abortion" due to their record label demanding that they record a synth-pop album. Jourgenson allegedly destroys any copy of the album that he can find.
    • He also hated the song "Stigmata", which was one of the band's first popular songs. He got over his dislike for the song after a while, but it was very rarely played live during the band's career.
  • Neil Young is unwilling to rerelease his Time Fades Away live album due to bad memories of the preceding tour and Young's decision to have the album processed on the unreliable "Compumix," an early computerized mixer (which a worker referred to as "the Compufuck"), hindering any hopes of remastering the album. Time Fades Away is currently the only Neil Young album of completely original material that is not reissued on CD.
  • Kurt Cobain often mentioned in interviews that he thought "Smells Like Teen Spirit" was one of the worst songs he wrote and wondered why even one of what he considered his better songs (like "Drain You" which was played at every Nirvana concert from its writing until the day he died) wasn't a hit like "Teen Spirit".
    • Cobain also hated the polished sound of Nevermind.
  • Bobby McFerrin has completely disowned "Don't Worry, Be Happy" because of Misaimed Fandom: he intended it as satire, but most fans of the song took it at face value. When he signed up with a new record contract, he went through great trouble in negotiation to insure that he never, ever, ever, ever has to play that song ever again.
  • Sting started to hate how "Every Breath You Take" was being interpreted as a romantic song. He refused to play it after a certain point except at one concert, where he changed half the lyrics.
  • The Beastie Boys started refusing to play "Fight For Your Right" at concerts because the very crowd that they were criticizing with the song adopted it as their anthem.
    • They have also apologized for that entire album (Licensed to Ill) due its misogynistic, homophobic, and generally irresponsible lyrics. Their work has become a bit more classy since then. This has led to other protests about Completely Missing the Point that their early lyrics were satirical and exaggerated, and they're not fun anymore.
  • Cage recorded a violent, drug-oriented album called Movies for the Blind. Though considered a underground Hip Hop Cult Classic by fans and critics, he dismissed it as being too random and fragmented, and said that it glorified drugs.
  • Billy Joel got sick of "Piano Man" for a time and refused to sing it in concert. He got over it, though the audience tends to save him the trouble of singing it when he plays it nowadays. And reportedly, he's not any too fond of "Just the Way You Are," either, because it's a love song to someone he ended up divorcing. Joel also retired "Uptown Girl" (another love song to an ex-wife) from his stage show for a long time, but he eventually reintroduced it.
  • Five Iron Frenzy came to hate "Combat Chuck" and completely stopped playing it at shows. Eventually, on their farewell tour they reinstated it as part of the "Medley of Power Ballads and Bad Taste".
    • And they even expressed their hatred here, replacing the last part of the lyrics in the medley with "This song sucks/Put it back, Put it back."
  • Stephen Sondheim has often expressed disdain for his West Side Story lyrics, especially "I Feel Pretty". In Time magazine, he commented to the effect that the song in question sounded more like Cole Porter than anything an urban Latina would be likely to sing.
  • Holst had this kind of feeling towards The Planets because it overshadowed his other compositions.
  • Similarly, according to The Other Wiki, Grieg referred to his famous In the Hall of the Mountain King as an "infernal thing reek[ing] of cow-pies and provincialism." He also had an Old Shame in the form of a symphony in C minor.
  • Brazilian band Los Hermanos made success with a catchy pop-rock song named "Anna Julia", and the band eventually grew a hatred for this song. Amazingly, the closest circle of fandom also hates it, probably because it's "too commercial". Apparently, music is Serious Business, too.
  • Also from Brazil, Herbert Vianna of Os Paralamas do Sucesso doesn't like very much their first album, Cinema Mudo, which he considers full of Executive Meddling.
  • One of the reasons Tom Lehrer had such a short "active" musical career was that he quickly learned he was bored stiff by the idea of performing the same set of songs over and over and over. Some of his performances only happened because he wanted to visit the place were they were located. (Australia being a major example.)
  • Noel Gallagher of Oasis describes their third album, Be Here Now, as "the sound of a bunch of guys on coke in the studio not giving a fuck." He also started to dislike "Roll With It", calling it "appalling".
    • This is why "Roll With It" doesn't appear on the band's best of album despite being (nearly) their first No.1 single. There are also no songs from Be Here Now although there were a few that could reasonably have been included (most notably "Don't Go Away", which remains one of the band's biggest hits in the US and is reasonably popular back home; Noel considered another, "D'You Know What I Mean?", but gave up since "its length upset the flow of the record"). Liam, incidentally, does like Be Here Now, in a rare case of Broken Base extending to the actual creators.
      • Noel and Liam Gallagher not agreeing on something? Shocking.
    • Liam Gallagher's opinion on "Wonderwall":
 

  "I can't fucking stand that fucking song! Every time I have to sing it I want to gag. Problem is, it was a big, big tune for us."

 
  • Several Beatles have tried to disown The Beatles or their work at some point in their solo careers.
    • John Lennon says "I don't believe in Beatles" at the climax of "God." This sentiment is also expressed in some of his writings: "they picked on Yoko, so..."
    • Early on, Paul McCartney was so desperate to distance himself from The Beatles that his 1973 college tour included no Beatles material--at a time when he didn't have much solo material. Possible subversion later--in the '80s, Paul was presumed to be trying to distance himself from the Beatles when he was also heavily covering his part of their work.
    • George Harrison said that his biggest break was getting into the Beatles, and his second biggest break was getting out of the Beatles.
    • John, George and Ringo have all gone on record as utterly detesting "Maxwell's Silver Hammer," partially because Paul insisted on recording it and re-recording it so many times, and partially because John and George considered it "granny music" to start with. Ringo, on the other hand, is on record as stating that he loathes the song because of the excessive-to-the-point-of-creepy dissonance between the song and its lyrics -- what seems like a cute pop ditty is actually a celebration of a serial killer of the Ted Bundy type.
    • Also worth noting is John's Parody of Paul's biggest hit "Yesterday": "Yesterday / I'm not half the man I used to be / That's because I'm an amputee..." Supposedly John never cared for the song and didn't particularly like having his name on it.
      • Paul and their producer George Martin did originally want to release it as a solo song, but Executive Meddling proved otherwise.
    • Jane Asher never wants to talk about her relationship with McCartney anymore. So don't ask her.
  • Elton John's 2002 hit "This Train Don't Stop Here Anymore" is basically one long Take That at his entire career, with special emphasis on the syrupy ballads. "Reality's just black and white/Those sentimental things I'd write/Never meant that much to me..."
    • More of an acknowledgement of his weariness of love, perhaps fictionally portrayed. Anyway, Bernie Taupin wrote those lyrics.
    • True, but the preceding line makes the point much more explicit: "All those things I've said in songs/all that purple prose you bought from me..."
      • The singer seems (in the song) to be more "dried up and sick to death of love" than love songs.
    • Elton has expressed displeasure of his 1986 album, Leather Jackets, claiming it was "one bag of coke after another" and that he was "not a well budgie" when he recorded it. Taupin has voiced displeasure of 1997's The Big Picture due to its slick production values. Elton has also described 1973's Don't Shoot Me I'm Only The Piano Player as a disposable "bubblegum album" he recorded under pressure while sick with glandular fever and on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
  • A much older example: Frederic Chopin never wanted Fantaisie-Impromptu to be published because of its similarities to Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, and asked his friend Julian Fontana to burn it (the Impromptu, not the Sonata). However, after Chopin's death Julian published it anyway and since then it's become one of Chopin's most well-known melodies. One can only wonder what Chopin would be thinking from beyond the grave...
    • Well, he might be thinking, "What the hell is wrong with Japan!?"
    • Beethoven himself is said to have been exasperated with the success of Moonlight Sonata, saying "Surely I've written better things".
  • Novelty songs, when they are recorded by artists who primarily do serious work, almost invariably become a major thorn in the side of that artist. Nobody likes seeing the serious compositions they worked so hard to bring to life ignored in favor of some silly thing they did as a joke.
    • Chris Rice has expressed great disdain for his frequently requested "Cartoon Song".
      • Scooby-Dooby-Doojah.
        • Ask David Bowie what he thinks of "The Laughing Gnome"... if you're tired of life.
    • Steve Taylor, another Christian artist, didn't dislike his song "Lifeboat" until his audience kept screaming for it every night of that album's tour. And of course, since the video featured Steve wearing drag to play the teacher, that was expected of him to do on stage as well, which Steve of course greatly enjoyed.
  • King Crimson refuse to play anything from their first few albums live for fear of "...becoming old dinosaurs." Aside from official pronouncements, the period between Islands (4th album) and Lark’s Tongues in Aspic (5th album) marked the permanent departure of lyricist Peter Sinfield, along with every other band member (and writer) save Robert Fripp himself, and the adoption of a completely new musical style, with an entirely different instrumental line-up. It would be reasonable to infer that royalty considerations, difficulty in adapting the music for the new lineup and desire not to revisit an era that was so carefully abandoned have all played a part.
    • This has not stopped Fripp in recent years from overseeing extensive remasters of the early albums. He'd probably deny that money was the prime consideration...
  • Frank Loesser was rather annoyed about "Thumbelina" being one of the most popular songs he'd written.
  • In similar fashion, Eric Boswell (1921-2009) was rather annoyed about nativity hit "Little Donkey" - he’d composed many other songs, many of them witty, satirical, irreverent and rooted in his native Northern England. Plus, people kept assuming that he must have been old when he wrote it in 1959, and hence must have died in the mean time. He did admit liking the way that the royalties covered all his bills, though.
  • Bloodrock turned away from hard rock on their last two albums (partially due to their original lead singer being replaced by a born-again Christian). During live performances, the band often refused to play their earlier songs with morbid or cynical themes such as "Whiskey Vengeance" and "D.O.A." (their only actual hit).
  • "American Pie" made Don McLean a success and then just as quickly killed his career. McLean got so annoyed that the one song was all anyone ever wanted to hear from him that he began refusing to play it in concert; naturally, attendance dwindled to almost non-existent levels. McLean was also rather irritated at constantly being asked to interpret the song's admittedly obscure lyrics.
    • "It means I never have to work again" is apparently his favourite response to that question.
  • REM is trying their best to pretend that "Shiny Happy People" does not exist. The song was not included on the group's best-of despite being one of their highest charting hits, and the band never plays the song in concert. Michael Stipe has openly admitted that he hates the song and refuses to discuss it in interviews.
    • "Shiny Happy People" has since finally appeared on an official R.E.M. compilation, albiet their farewell release before retiring, "Part Lies, Part Heart, Part Truth, Part Garbage 1982-2011", though the song could be the 'part garbage' part.
    • This one and "The One I Love" are prime examples of fans not quite realizing that they're supposed to be satire.
  • Anton Bruckner composed a symphony that he was so disillusioned with that he didn't see fit to assign it a number, and simply fled "gilt nicht" ("doesn't count") on the score. It was later known as the Symphony No. 0.
  • Paul McCartney seems to have disowned "Spies Like Us", his Top Ten recording from the film of the same name. The song has not appeared on any of the numerous best-ofs Paul has released. To date, the song's only appearance on a McCartney album of any sort is the CD reissue of Press to Play, one of his rarest and least sought-for albums.
    • This could simply be bad timing. McCartney has yet to release a compilation that includes material past 1984, and "Spies Like Us" came out in 1985.
      • The song also does not appear on the film's soundtrack album (though to be fair, Varese Sarabande could hardly have been expected to be able to license one of the most famous artists on the planet back in 1985 - or indeed today, Sting and Bryan Adams' presence on the Racing Stripes album notwithstanding).
  • Vanessa Carlton was sick of only being known for the traveling piano in her music video for "A Thousand Miles", so she had the video for "Nolita Fairytale" start with the piano getting destroyed by a passing taxi.
  • While it wasn't commercially successful at first, Weezer's Pinkerton gradually developed a large cult following and is still the favorite album of many of their fans. However, after the band returned from a lengthy hiatus in 2001, Rivers Cuomo took to disowning it due to its Creator Breakdown fueled lyrical content and initial commercial failure, refusing to perform any of the material live, and comparing it to "getting really drunk at a party and spilling your guts in front of everyone and feeling incredibly great and cathartic about it, and then waking up the next morning and realizing what a complete fool you made of yourself". In more recent interviews he seems to have more positive things to say about it though, and a song or two from it will still make setlists.
  • Besides the movie example already mentioned, KISS tries to forget the existence of the Concept Album Music from "The Elder". One of the songs was included in the MTV Unplugged by request of the fans. The band tried playing some of the others in recent years... only to discover they had long forgotten the lyrics.
  • Leslie Fish's Star Trek filk "Banned From Argo", about a rowdy Enterprise shore leave, proved very popular over the years both with its original lyrics and with the many, many rewrites others have done to the same tune. At this point, Leslie absolutely will not play it, nor will she abide others playing it or any of the rewrites. On her website, she states that this is her song that she's the least proud of.
  • Petula Clark was not the biggest fan of one of her big American hits, "My Love." She does perform it from time to time at concerts, though, usually as part of a medley of '60s hits or in a different style.
  • And be careful in mentioning "Boom Bang-A-Bang" or "I'm A Tiger" to Lulu.
  • Camille Saint-Saëns thought that his Carnival of the Animals would be so popular that it would make him a one hit wonder and thus ruin his standing as a serious classical musician. he only allowed one movement (The Swan) to be published in his lifetime. He consented for it to be published after his death, and not only did it prove extremely popular, but also gained widespread critical praise for its genius. Today, Saint-Saëns is a classical one hit wonder, known for virtually nothing else (unless you are a classical music aficionado). You probably know at least some of it, even if you think you don't: Many parts of it, particularly The Aquarium movement are now Standard Snippets.
    • Not quite true; in 1977 he had a #3 hit in Britain with the organ theme from the final movement of his 3rd Symphony. It was disguised as If I Had Words by Scott Fitzgerald and Yvonne Keeley. The song appears, somewhat acoustically modified, over the credits of the film Babe giving it a huge international audience.
  • Pink Floyd's Atom Heart Mother got to number 1 in the UK album charts and was taken on tour with a full brass section. But, as the 1970s progressed, the band went off the title piece entirely. Their public statements on it (see the Other Wiki) indicate that they consider it badly done, meaningless and pretentious. They have also stated that during that period (between the departure of Syd Barrett and the completion of Meddle) they had no idea of what they were doing or where they were going. Roger Waters has stated that he wouldn't perform it again even for a million pounds. However, it is still quite popular with the fans. David Gilmour's attitude towards the suite has since warmed, and in 2008 he guested on a performance of the suite by a Pink Floyd tribute band, the suite's co-songwriter Ron Geesin and an orchestra.
    • Pink Floyd have also suffered varying levels of this with "Money", the hit single from The Dark Side of the Moon, Roger Waters being most affected. It wasn't for any of the usual reasons, more that it was symptomatic of a major change in the relationship with the fans. Prior to Dark Side of the Moon, the audience would keep quiet during the quiet pieces and applaud at the end. After the huge success of the album, their vastly increased audiences were a lot louder and rowdier, and spent a lot of time shouting requests to play "Money". (This ultimately led to the incident on the Animals tour when Roger Waters spat on a particularly loud and rowdy fan. And the fan liked it.)
    • David Gilmour hated nearly all of 1983's The Final Cut, partly because some of the tracks on that album were rejected songs from The Wall and party because Roger had all but taken over at that point. He liked several of them though, and included 'Fletcher Memorial Home' on their self-picked greatest hits double-album.
  • Air have expressed displeasure with "Pocket Symphony", blaming their work on Charlotte Gainsbourg's debut for taking up all of their creative effort.
  • A-ha dislikes what is possibly their most well-known song, "Take On Me." Magne Furuholmen stated, "We've done better songs. It's great to be recognized, shame it's 'Take On Me.'"
  • Simple Minds never liked "Don't You Forget About Me." They dislike it even more now. In fact in the original recording Jim Kerr intentionally slurred his vocal in parts because he hated some of the lyrics ("I'll be around, dancin' you know it baby" for instance).
    • In recent years Jim has come to appreciate the song, mainly because he loves the crowd reaction it gets and because he has since rerecorded the song to his liking (For instance the Special Mix by Hu-Mate which appears on Live And Rare).
  • While 853-5937 was one of Squeeze's biggest U.S. hits, both Chris Difford and Glenn Tilbrook (the band's only constant members and songwriters) hated the song and prevented it from being on any compilations.
  • Jeff Lynne, leader of Electric Light Orchestra, came to detest the music he wrote for the movie Xanadu, due to how the music was used. He seems to have lightened up about it, though, as he covered Xanadu's theme for the compilation album Flashback.
  • Sir Mix a Lot, who wrote Baby Got Back, has admitted to being incredibly annoyed by the song, as he has re-written it at least 3 times for different shows and has virtually eclipsed the rest of his career.
  • Iron Maiden hasn't played any song from No Prayer for the Dying since Bruce Dickinson's departure in 1993, other than "Bring Your Daughter to the Slaughter" (and this one hasn't appeared since 2003!). Likewise, the only track from Fear of the Dark that survived in setlists was the title track (Bruce's not-very-popular replacement sung another from that album during his tenure).
    • On the subject of the 'not-very popular replacement' (Blaze Bayley), you're unlikely to hear many songs from his albums The X Factor or Virtual XI.
      • Steve Harris also despises the first two albums that the band released. They still play songs from them, but that's not to say they won't call it the "Jurassic period" or something else along those lines.
  • Meat Loaf, for over 20 years, refused to perform the song "For Crying Out Loud", even when taking audience requests. In 2003 he sang it on his Live from Melbourne album, introducing it by saying he hadn't wanted to perform it for years, his current band hadn't practiced it, and he was out of practice with it. His reasoning has never been mentioned in any interviews. Also, he refuses to sing "Two Out of Three Ain't Bad" if it's requested, but does sing it when he feels like it.
  • Singer-songwriter Mandy Moore regrets her teenage Idol Singer years, and has said that she will provide refunds to anyone who bought her first two albums. Her music nowadays is indie folk-pop.
    • Apparently she actually did refund someone's money for the album So Real when they called her bluff on a radio show.
  • Kelly Clarkson has been complaining about the studio including the song "Already Gone" on her album All I Ever Wanted, because the final cut ended up sounding like "Halo" by Beyonce. Both songs were written by the same songwriter (Ryan Tedder) and 'have the same backing track.
  • David Johansen, lead singer for seminal proto-punk band New York Dolls, recorded the highly popular pop tune "Hot Hot Hot", under the pseudonym "Buster Poindexter". He refers to the song as "the bane of my life"; because of the way that it has so totally overshadowed all the work he has done before and since, eclipsing an otherwise substantial musical career.
  • Latin singer Ricky Martin hates "Livin' La Vida Loca." Whenever he performs it now, he does it in a different style.
  • Gareth Campesinos!, singer and songwriter for Los Campesinos! has stated that he despises "We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives" and "You! Me! Dancing!" even though they are respectively the band's biggest (and so far only) hits.
    • He still enjoys performing "You! Me! Dancing!", and especially since he's begun singing the opening verse of Pavement's "Box Elder" during the build up, but the band hasn't played "We Throw Parties, You Throw Knives" in years.
  • God help you if you happen to say the word "Misfits" within earshot of Glenn Danzig. There is a very real possibility of being physically assaulted.
    • Until 2004 that is; these days he sometimes plays mini-Misfits sets with Doyle, unsuccessfully tried to reform the band with Jerry Only, and even let the 90s version of the band with Michale Graves open for his own band.
  • "Dance with the Devil" by Cozy Powell. "I only cut "Dance with the Devil" for a laugh, but then it escalated until I felt I was losing credibility..." It led to him quitting music and going into motor racing full time for a few months.
  • Hawkwind (and particularly its writer, vocalist Bob Calvert) never had a problem with their hit single Silver Machine, but a fair bit of ongoing tension arose over Ian "Lemmy" Kilminster (bass, backing vocal) taking over the lead vocal on account of him having the best voice for that particular song.
  • Former Hot Hot Heat member Dustin Hawthorne once said of the band's biggest hit, Middle of Nowhere, "I hate ('Middle of Nowhere') and I wish it was never written. I can't deny that it definitely did something good for our career, for sure. But, to me, it's adult contemporary. And it's kind of funny to me, because I grew up playing punk and here I am playing this jackass-sounding song."
  • The Lemonheads' cover of Simon and Garfunkel's "Mrs Robinson": It was a single due to Executive Meddling and became one of their biggest hits, but even at the time it came out they refused to play it live. They've since done live performances of the entire It's A Shame About Ray album and left it off (though it was technically tacked onto that album as a bonus track to begin with).
  • Ska band Madness really don't like their 6th album "Mad Not Mad", with advertisements for their upcoming twentieth anniversary editions of their old albums implying that they're not going to re-release it, instead deciding to re-release the album "The Madness" which only four out of the seven original members actually contributed too.
    • Though in the end, "Mad Not Mad" was indeed included in the reissue program.
    • They also have a dislike for their single "Sorry" and consider it a mistake.
  • Even though it's one of their biggest hits and the song that got them rolling in the US, Depeche Mode hasn't played "People Are People" live since 1988 because lead songwriter Martin Gore thinks the lyrics are too straightforward.
    • Also, they've pretty much renounced "It's Called a Heart" and "What's Your Name?" as the worst songs they ever recorded.
    • Not to mention their Narm-tacular videos from 1982 ("The Meaning of Love", "See You", "Leave in Silence"), which they refuse to include on video releases. Interestingly, they are available on the band's website.
  • Matthew Good regrets ever writing "Rico". It's often requested at shows, and his animosity towards it is well known, to the point where one of the Matthew Good fan sites sells a shirt with 'RICO' inside the red 'no' symbol. Matt posted a picture of himself wearing the shirt on his Flickr account.
  • One of Oingo Boingo's best-known songs, "Weird Science", (the theme song of the film and TV series of the same name) was actually despised by the band, who rarely (if ever) performed the song live. Supposedly, the song as it appears on the album was an unfinished version; the band was still working on a final composition when record executives misinterpreted their latest take as the official recording.
  • Boy George has shown irritation at the Culture Club song "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?". With a few exceptions aside, he refuses to perform the song live on his solo shows.
  • Eminem became so sick of "My Name Is" that after a while, he would only play snippets of it at his concerts - often stopping the song to declare that he was sick of it.
    • That probably explains the following lyrics
 

 I'created a monster

 cuz no body wants to see Marshall no more

They want Shady I'm chopped liver

 
    • In "Not Afraid", the first single from his Recovery album has the lyrics "Let's be honest, that last Relapse CD was "ehhhh" / Perhaps I ran them accents into the ground".
  • British band Killing Joke started with a hard-edged sound in the late 70s, but incorporated synthpop and dance music elements through the 80s. This culminated with synthesizer-driven albums "Brighter than 1000 Suns" in 1986, and 1988's Outside the Gate (a highly controversial release, often regarded by fans as a solo project by singer/keyboardist Jaz Coleman). After some down time, the band reformed with a harder than ever before industrial sound. Still performing today, they don't speak of their 1986 or 1988 releases and have reportedly never since performed any of the material from those two albums.
    • Is there a Creator Backlash sub-trope for rock bands who were mesmerized in a field of synthesizer poppies, only to later distance themselves somehow from it? Bands such as Killing Joke, Rush, Ministry or Neil Young?
  • Jo O'Meara, formerly of the pop group S Club 7, went through a stage of wanting to be disassociated with the band and its squeaky-clean image, referring to their music as "total crap." Since then, however, she's reunited with former bandmates Bradley and Paul to perform the group's music on tour.
  • Helloween refuse to play any songs from the albums Pink Bubbles Go Ape and Chameleon, both of which were released after Kai Hansen left the band, but before Michael Weikath got fed up with Michael Kiske and kicked him out of the band. Fortunately, the fans don't want them to play any songs from these albums.
    • Speaking of Kiske, he openly hates metal (despite being one of the most iconic voices of Power Metal) and only produces light acoustic music these days. He will, however, appear as a guest on some power metal albums, particularly for Gamma Ray and Avantasia.
  • Alice Cooper never performs any of the songs off his 1982 album Zipper Catches Skin or 1983 album Dada live. Both albums were recorded during a period of particularly heavy alcohol abuse on his part and he allegedly has no memory of making them. It's a shame as there are a couple of gems buried in there.
  • Gerard Way, the frontman of My Chemical Romance has expressed disdain for their first album, and as such, songs from it are rarely played live. He has also stated that he doesn't want to write songs like that anymore because he doesn't want his daughter to perceive him as a "whiny victim."
  • Weird Al Yankovic doesn't like his debut album, mainly because it was rushed and recorded in a very short time. He once said he wishes he could go back and re-record it.
    • He also doesn't have strong feelings for "Girls Just Wanna Have Lunch", which was pushed onto him by execs to do a Cyndi Lauper parody.
  • Sergei Rachmaninoff reportedly hated his Prelude in C sharp minor. Harpo Marx has a story in his autobiography about moving into the apartment next door to Rachmaninoff, being driven crazy by his constant piano practice, and having the management be too much in awe of Rachmaninoff to do anything about it. His solution? Constantly repeat the first four notes of the Prelude in C sharp minor on his harp at maximum volume, and wait for Rachmaninoff to ask for a different apartment because he can't stand to live next to "that mad harpist".
    • In an interview, Rachmaninoff once said that his favorite performance of the C-sharp minor prelude was Duke Ellington's. Fridge Brilliance kicks in when you realize.... Duke Ellington never played the C-sharp minor prelude.
  • Tchaikovsky reportedly hated The Nutcracker, which is quite possibly his best known composition.
  • After Lifehouse had a hit with "Hanging by a Moment", it was common at that time for the members of the band to express their anger in interviews about how everyone would leave right after they played that song. Since then, they've had a number of other hits so it didn't happen much longer, but the song is now always near the end of their sets.
  • Charlie Simpson, leader of the British post-hardcore band Fightstar, would like to pretend he was never a member of the boy band Busted. He did make an exception in 2010 to vigorously deny that he would be joining his ex-bandmates for a forthcoming reunion.
  • Outside of some Beethoven covers, Vanilla Fudge isn't too fond of their experimental second album, The Beat Goes On, a project force fed by producer George "Shadow" Morton. Bassist Tim Bogert has even gone so far as calling it "the album that killed the band".
  • Tool almost never performs the song "Ticks & Leeches" live. There's a good reason for this, however: It's probably the only song by the band that is almost all screaming, and singer Maynard James Keenan blew his voice out while recording the song.
  • Anthony Kiedis, lead vocalist of the Red Hot Chili Peppers doesn't like "The Greeting Song" very much - it only exists because Rick Rubin told him to write a song about girls and cars.
  • Elvis Presley had a well-documented dislike for many of the songs he was required to record during his movie contract (and for most of the films, too). The book "Elvis: The Illustrated Record" quotes him as once saying during a recording session "What can you do with s*it like this?" and refusing an audience request to perform "Viva Las Vegas" during one of his Vegas concerts. Indeed, except for a few exceptions, most notably songs from Blue Hawaii such as "Can't Help Falling in Love" and several songs from his 1950s-era films, Presley generally refused to perform movie songs during his live concerts. He also tended to shuffle off most of his 1950s hits either in medley form or in very truncated, almost joking fashion ("Hound Dog" being the prime example), though this is less likely due to distaste for them as it was a desire to focus on more current music.
  • The members of Autopsy had mixed success with the band, so they reformed into Hardcore Punk band Abcess, just as their early material was being Vindicated By History. They were less than pleased when all people wanted to talk to them about was the band they just left, causing them to take shots at their old material.
  • Timo Tolkki expressed in an interview his dislike towards the self-titled album for Stratovarius.
 

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  • David Bowie doesn't think well of 1984's Tonight and especially 1987's Never Let Me Down, which followed in the stylistic footsteps of Let's Dance, his biggest-selling album. Never Let Me Down's supporting Glass Spider Tour turned out to be the only time he performed songs from it live. "Loving the Alien" (Tonight) and "Time Will Crawl" (Never Let Me Down) are apparent exceptions, since the former and a rerecording of the latter made his compilation iSelect; the former also appeared in a stripped-down arrangement on the Reality Tour.
  • Although it was released on an EP, the lead track of which was 'Bad Days', Space's record company sent CDs of their cover of 'We Gotta Get Out Of This Place' to radio stations, and it ended up being the song that featured in a car advert, got played on the radio and on TV, and had a video made for it. The band were not pleased and felt that the record company had manipulated them. 'Dark Clouds' also incurred Creator Backlash, probably because it came out around the time Jamie Murphy was having a nervous breakdown and Tommy Scott had lost his voice, plus Tommy sees it as being 'too wacky'. Before they split up, they played a garage rock version of 'Dark Clouds' at a couple of their gigs.
  • Blur, particularly Graham Coxon, are not particularly keen on The Great Escape, the album which served as a rival piece to Oasis' (What's The Story) Morning Glory. Damon Albarn said it was 'messy' and one of what he considered to be the only bad albums Blur had done, and 'Country House' became an embarrassment. It probably doesn't help that the album is associated with the Oasis rivalry and the burgeoning 'lad' culture of the time. Perhaps unsurprisingly, they decided to go in a more lo-fi direction for the follow-up, Blur. (That being said, they did play some songs from it at their more recent comeback gigs, including "Country House".)
  • Lauryn Hill doesn't particularly like her songs anymore, especially the ones from The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. During performances she often perfoms unrecognizable remixes that are either sped up too much, too loud, or both.
  • Given his taste for the weird, it's not surprising that Captain Beefheart disowned his 1974 albums Unconditionally Guaranteed and Bluejeans And Moonbeams, his two least experimental albums. While he was no stranger to conventional compositions, he felt that the resulting albums were too conventional.
  • Jason Martin of Starflyer 59 can't stand to listen to his first album, Silver, anymore.
  • Christina Aguilera has all but forgotten her Bionic album (2010). No tour, two singles....
  • Despite being a fan favorite, "Runaway" has been called by the band Linkin Park as "their worst song" and the band has even gone so far as to retire the song from their concert sets. Frontman and co-lead singer Chester Bennington has shown disdain for the song "One Step Closer" as well.
  • The Rolling Stones with 1967's Between The Buttons (UK version). One interview has Mick Jagger refer to the album as "rubbish", with the exception of "Backstreet Girl".
  • Bob Seger refuses to re-release a lot of his early work, which is a pity because the studio version of "Turn the Page" off of Back in '72 is really good.
  • Fountains of Wayne, the band behind the hit single "Stacy's Mom", have expressed dislike for the song due to the fact that out of all their songs in all of their albums, the one tongue in cheek song they ever did makes it big. In order to deter attention away from the song, they've stopped, or rarely ever play it live. The fandom tends to agree with them on this notion, arguing that if it weren't for Stacy's Mom, the band would have made it huge by this point.
  • The Foo Fighters have resented their fourth album, One by One, which due to its Troubled Production they consider rushed and mostly subpar. Also, Dave Grohl on the band name:
 

 If I had taken this career thing seriously, I would have thought of something else, as it’s the worst fucking band name in the world.

 
  • Lita Roza had a UK number one hit in 1953 with "How Much Is That Doggie In The Window", but her Creator Backlash began before she'd even recorded it - she hated the song so much that she would only, and very reluctantly, agree to do one take, and then refused to sing it ever again.
  • Lou Reed was somewhat hesitant to play "Heroin" with the Velvet Underground after some fans told him they'd shot up to the song.
  • The members of Christian Rock band Audio Adrenaline, only two or three albums into their career, were rather quick to distance themselves from their first album, going so far as to say they wished they could burn all existing copies of it. They would also collectively groan whenever someone brought up their song "Jesus & the California Kid".


Theater

  • Henrik Ibsen was not happy about having to change the ending of A Dolls House. The term he used was "barbaric atrocity". Ironically, due to changing values, the original ending is now perfectly acceptable. The redo is something of a Writer Cop Out. He also did not react well when feminists began lauding him for the play's support of their movement, which he denied.
    • A similar thing happened with Pygmalion, which higher ups wanted to change the ending so that Eliza and Higgins to get married in the end so it could have a standard happy ending rather than letting Eliza leave Higgins to marry Freddy. Needless to say, George Bernard Shaw would not be happy about the musical adaptation.
  • The Broadway flop 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue by Leonard Bernstein and Alan Jay Lerner was Bernstein's last and least successful musical; he was so ashamed of it that he didn't let it be recorded in his lifetime. As with Saint-Saëns and "Carnival of the Animals," one number escaped the ban: "Take Care of This House." Years after Bernstein's death, a concert version was issued titled A White House Cantata.
  • Love Life, a vaguely similar (and somewhat more successful) musical Alan Jay Lerner wrote with Kurt Weill, could not be revived in Lerner's lifetime because of his personal disdain for it.
  • Gilbert and Sullivan really came to resent their trademark comic operettas, claiming they would have liked to have been remembered for their serious works, too.


Video Games

  • Factor 5, the people who made the Rogue Squadron games, reportedly got sick of making them by the time they finished the third one, and it shows. While working on Lair, someone on the staff made a public comment about being glad that they didn't have to make X-Wings or yet another rehash of Hoth. Lair, of course, didn't do so hot.
  • Something Awful forumers who run particularly popular Lets Plays tend to get antsy when they become notorious enough for Tropers to start Gushing about them in further depth than throwing up a blurb and a link on the LP page.
  • Will Wright defended the changes in Sim City Societies, saying that the series had gotten too complex, and that he enjoyed each one less and less. That didn't go over well.
  • Keiji Inafune, who played a large role in the Onimusha and Dead Rising franchises, has gone on record say that he absolutely hates his job and wants nothing more than to retire. He also constantly rants about how the Japanese gaming industry is in serious decline.
  • Masahiro Sakurai has said that he regrets aiming Super Smash Bros Melee so strongly towards the hardcore gamer crowd, making it inaccessible to newer fans, and calling it a mistake he wouldn't repeat again.
  • Both Zelda creator Shigeru Miyamoto and director Eiji Aonuma have expressed their regrets in the production of The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess. They don't dislike the game at all, but feel that it never turned out the way they had envisioned it. Miyamoto simply stated that he felt it was "missing something", and Aonuma felt that he didn't create the game that was intended to be "120% of what The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time was".
    • Miyamoto wasn't exactly too fond of his involvement in Star Fox 64 either, as stated in an interview found in the official Player's Guide. Again, he didn't hate it, but felt it wasn't what he'd have liked it to be.
    • Amusingly, Miyamoto isn't very fond of Toad.
  • Portal's writer, Erik Wolpaw, is absolutely sick of "The Cake Is a Lie" jokes that spawned nonstop from the game. He said he wouldn't be making any references to it in Portal 2....
    • ...which turned out, ironically, to be a lie. There are TWO references to cake, but they's subtle, easily missed and nowhere near as in-your-face as the original references. Apart from that, there are no more cake jokes, even to the point of removing cake icons from existing test chambers that re-appear in the second game.
  • Following their departure from the Crash Bandicoot series, original developers Naughty Dog have given mixed feelings towards other developers' attempts at recreating the franchise. Naughty Dog co-president Evan Wells states that "It's a little bit like watching your daughter do porn". On the other hand, character designer Charles Zembillas actually liked Crash's redesign at the hands of Radical Entertainment, actually desiring further involvement in the series while co creator Andy Gavin at the very least praises Crash Bash for staying true to the original games.
  • Chris Avellone, one of the original creators of Fallout is known to be openly hateful of the more Black Comedy portions of the canon and the fact that games like New Vegas give the impression of a recovering world, claiming that the whole point of the series was to be a barren, post apocalyptic wasteland where death and anarchy reign and altuirism and all other good qualities are either dead or backfire horribly. He's vented his anger in the Fallout Bible, where he unceremoniously destroyed much of the lighthearted content of Fallout 2, and has threatened to do the same to New Vegas.
  • Trey Parker and Matt Stone are said to have disliked the South Park video games published by Acclaim during the show's early run, despite the fact that they were closely involved with their creation.


Webcomics

  • Kittyhawk of Sparkling Generation Valkyrie Yuuki fame started out with a fairly popular webcomic called The Jar. Sometime around when she was having problems with her domain because of traffic, she took the whole website down. During the downtime between it and SGVY, she came to really, really hate The Jar and absolutely refused to put the archives back up. This seems to have faded recently due to her now selling it on CD format.
  • In-story example: Justin in Punch An' Pie submitted an absurd story about a bat with a gun to a publisher. They published it. People ate it up. Now he's one of the most popular writers around, and he's sorry he ever wrote that story.
  • Before Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw gained fame as a games critic, he wrote several webcomics. In his words, they "came out of a dark time in his life from which he has determinedly moved on without a backward glance."
    • Moreover, just to make sure no-one would be fooled into thinking he cares about his old works, he has gone on to officially disown them, including every webcomic he ever made, every game made before The Trials of Odysseys Kent and every work of fiction he has written before the age of twenty, encouraging his readers to dispose of them in the nearest possible natural disaster should they ever get their hands on his old work.
  • This is the rule, not the exception, for virtually any Matt Wilson production (namely, High Score and its animated spin-off Bonus Stage) to date.
  • A humorous parody happens in an issue of Mac Hall. During a con recap in which about twenty webcomic artists are on stage at once, the others give non sequitur-esque answers (Sluggy Freelance was my grandma's nickname), Ian simply holds up a sign that has "YOUR MOM" on it.
  • Josh Lesnick seems to feel this way about his older webcomic Wendy, seeing as he's just recently taken the whole thing offline since it's already been there long enough in his opinion. The characters themselves, however, continue to live on in comics such as Girly and whatever22.
  • This is actually the reason for the creation of Exterminatus Now; the four writers once made a Darker and Edgier version of Sonic the Hedgehog by adding Warhammer 40,000 elements, and later realised how stupid the concept was and decided to make fun of it.
  • The creator of Arcana abandoned the project completely and reinvented her online identity so bitter fans wouldn't bother her about it. Or So I Heard from those who know her in Real Life.
  • Pretty much the main reason RPG World ended prematurely when it was on the verge of finishing. Creator Ian J. came to resent the direction he had taken the comic and in the end just flat out abandoned it. He did offer anyone interested to come finish it, but when the fans voiced their opinion he pretty much told them to "F** K OFF!" and retracted the offer. Leaving the series to rot with No Ending.
  • Rick Fortner and Rebecca Burg hate the original Job Hunting, the second story in their A Loonatics Tale series. The final form was hastily edited with unfortunate restrictions on the amount of weapons and violence (ie there couldn't be any) in order to make it fit a school assignment. They're currently drawing a remake, Rehired, which is the canon version. They use the original version as a barometer of peoples' ability to detect quality and/or speak frankly; anyone who says they liked the original Job Hunting lacks the capacity to offer meaningful criticism.
  • Bittersweet Candy Bowl, The author got rather fed up at the unsettling number of fan characters in the community and the amount of focus they got.
  • Jay Naylor has expressed his disdain for his old comic Better Days:
 

  "Better Days was created when I was a very different person. I had very different views, values, and priorities, and I evolved as a person as I was doing Better Days over the course of six years. There's a lot in Better Days that I wouldn't include if I was doing it today. There's a lot of things that I wrote that I wouldn't have written that way, now. I don't like looking at the old pages. I don't like looking at the old art. It's embarrassing and bad in my eyes. I don't like lingering on the past. It's enough that I've left the archive in place, and find myself having to explain some of the themes and events depicted in Better Days, by a much younger, less mature creator, compared to who I am today."

 
  • It is no secret that Tim Buckley ultimately came to utterly despise the characters of Scott the Linux guy and his pet penguin, Ted. Not only has he effectively writtem them out of the comic, he's gone to increasingly severe lengths to ensure no one knows who they were or even remembers that they even existed, up to and including banning anyone who says that they do remember them or even mentions them in any way.
  • James Kochalka discusses it with his son in this American Elf comic.


Web Original

  • Matt Wilson, creator of Bonus Stage, seems to hate his most famous creation, or at least, all of the fans. He had stated after the end of the series that he hardly, if ever, plays video games any more. Also, he is embarassed by the poor animation quality of many of the episodes, and doesn't find a lot of the jokes funny anymore.
  • McMaNGOS, creator of the "This Video Contains Win" YouTube Memetic Mutation, has apparently now come to despise it, to the point of irreversibly replacing the audio with some random song that nobody knows of. This may have something to do with all the imitations it has spawned, and the fact that the fad was forced by McMaNGOS making sequels and demanding that people follow in his footsteps (Although some of them were pretty funny).
  • This tends to occur to a lot of YTP videos. Most poopers despise the "PINGAS", stating that it is overused and not funny anymore, and Stegblob has said that he only keeps the "Hotel Mario (nouns replaced with PINGAS)" video up because his fans love it so much. Lots of people have incredibly popular poops that they just made as a test or one of their older videos that are filled with things such as unoriginal humour, memes and poor editing. Often, they edit the video title to be something like, "THIS VIDEO SUCKS, STOP WATCHING IT" and block it with annotations.
    • Ironically audioswapping a video and plastering annotations over it has become a small fad too.
  • Alvin-Earthworm, creator of Super Mario Bros Z, has been incredibly annoyed by fans constantly asking him to work on new episodes, to the point where he has completely stopped working on the series. He claims that it's not forever.
    • He wasn't lying. He's started making him again and most of his fans are listening, seeing as it seemed like they made him quit the internet.
    • He still updates his Deviant ART account, although you may wish to be cautious before observing it. The comments sections still partially consist of SMBZ fans asking for more.
      • He created a second account as well. His first post stated that so much as mentioning SMBZ on that account is a blockable offense.
  • Not the straightest example, but Brian Kendall has apparently a love/hate relationship with that one flash movie he made. Much of the "hate" part comes from the amount of effort he thought he could put more into this movie.
  • Serris, the creator of the Darwins Soldiers universe has explicitly stated that he hates the rebooted Furtopia RP and he will not write an ending to it. When asked what he hated about it, he had this to say:
 

  Serris: One of the characters is a Fur-dragon in a diaper! Scenes of diaper changing and baby care do not fucking belong in a dark high octane RP! And of course, it under-emphasized the role that the terrorists played in the invasion and gave too much spotlight to the rogue scientists.

 
  • John Solomon, the webmaster of the "Your Webcomic Is Bad And You Should Feel Bad" blog, came to loathe his own creation. He made it perfectly clear that he loathed fanboyism, even when it was his own, and was bothered by fans parroting his opinions. He finally deleted the blog entirely. When he learned that The Bad Webcomics Wiki had archived his reviews, he got a little peeved.
  • A Something Awful user who claims to have created the "Deal With It" meme posted in the comments of the Know Your Meme article that he hates how widespread it became and regrets ever posting it.
  • Troy Wagner and Joseph DeLage, the creators of Marble Hornets - better known as 'the guys who play J and Alex Kraile' - absolutely HATE the 'Gimme 20 Dollars' meme that spawned from a parody of one of their entires. It's now impossible to go into a Slender Man video without seeing at least one reference to that song in the comments. Troy and Alex have said they refuse to acknowledge the meme in their videos, and have asked fans to stop referencing the joke to them in emails and responses.
    • The boys from Everyman HYBRID, however, don't seem to mind, and in fact referenced the meme in the episode One step forward, two steps back. (Although Jeff, the writer of the series, said this scene was written a lot earlier in the series and didn't know it would become so hated.)
  • It is not uncommon for creators of Abridged Series to grow dissatisfied with early episodes as their series progresses and they become better writers/editors/etc. Often they will remake their old episodes with updated voice acting and visuals, and sometimes the old episodes are completely rewritten.
  • "You internet types ruined Trogdor! Just like you did zombies, pirates, ninjas, and Strong Bad! Er, wait, no. Yeah!"
  • Chuggaaconroy to Steve.
  • Mixermike662 was once a rather respected part of the My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic fandom, most notable for creating "Fluffy Ponies" - pony characters with Baby Talk speech patterns and extremely fluffy fur. But then massive amounts of "fluffy abuse" stories started flooding the image boards, in which people wrote gruesomely detailed descriptions of slaughtering and torturing fluffy ponies (similar to what happened to yukkuris in Touhou fandom). This has led Mixermike662 to leave the MLP fandom entirely.


Western Animation

  • Chuck Jones grew to hate almost all of his pre-1948 cartoons (sans certain shorts like The Dover Boys), so much that he said if he had the choice he would have burned the negatives to all of them.
    • Additionally several WB staff such as Frank Tashlin expressed dislike for Porky Pig, due to having less flexibility and humor value compared to zanier characters such as Bugs Bunny. According to animator Mike Fontanelli, this resentment still stands with many modern executives at Warner Bros and is partly why the character is so sparsely used in revival features and merchandise.
  • The Warner Bros. animators grew to dislike much of their early work, especially the sappy Disney-like cartoons and Buddy cartoons they made from the mid-to-late 30s.
  • Shamus Culhane disliked his sole Popeye cartoon "Popeye Meets William Tell", citing it as "an interesting failure" in his autobiography, mainly because he never wanted to make a regular Popeye cartoon in the first place, instead wanting to make a short centered around Wimpy, which was vetoed by the Fleischers.
    • Culhane was also not proud of how his animation on Fleischer's Gulliver's Travels was ruined by sloppy inkers and bad in-between work, and that he would have quit if it wasn't for his contract.
    • Culhane also despised working on the Hearst Studio Krazy Kat theatrical shorts that he did inking work on. His humble feelings on them are as follows;
 

 "The films were atrocious, the worst crap you can imagine. They never used the characters. Offisa Pup rarely appeared, Ignatz Mouse was not in love with Krazy [2]; they never used the desert landscapes. The staff just batted the stuff out as fast as they could for something like 750$ apiece."

 
  • Max Fleischer considered Mr. Bug Goes to Town to be a failure, and refused to adknowledge the film as one of his achievements in a 1950s interview--although it may have been because it was the film that contributed to destroying Fleischer Studios and getting him booted out; the fact that he and David Fleischer had a terrible falling out while they were making the film probably didn't help matters either.
    • He also hated the Made-For-TV Out of the Inkwell cartoons, and was horrified when he first watched them.
  • Strange as it sounds, some sources claim that Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera hated Scooby Doo, and only kept the show running because of how insanely popular it was.
  • Both Bob Clampett and Chuck Jones grew to hate the cartoon "The Daffy Doc", not because they thought it was a bad cartoon, but because it used an iron lung as a gag prop during a time when polio deaths were on the rise.
  • Hugh Harman of the Harman and Ising claimed late in his life that he grew to hate all but three of the shorts he made--"The Old Mill Pond", "Blue Danube", and "Peace On Earth".
  • Ian Pearson and Gavin Blair of Re Boot fame were once famous for the computer animation in the Dire Straits Money For Nothing music video. They were proud of their work... at the time, but they despised that they had the suffix title of "Those guys who did Money for Nothing." They showed their feelings in an episode of ReBoot, where two look-alikes for the CGI movers from the video audition at Enzo's birthday party, only to get sandbags dropped on them from high offstage.
  • Donald F. Glut was one of the few members of the Transformers Generation 1 cartoon staff who openly expressed distaste for the series, lambasting its quality as actual art (including the episodes he wrote) and claiming that he only worked on it for the money.
  • J Michael Straczynski expressed a similar opinion for his work on He-Man and The Masters of The Universe.
  • Trey Parker and Matt Stone don't seem particularly proud of the early seasons of South Park, which had the highest ratings of the show's run, but came before its metamorphsis into a satire on current events and pop culture.
    • In fact they hate season 2 so much that they didn't even do commentaries on the DVDs like they did for the other seasons.
  • The Simpsons
    • "The Principal and the Pauper," which retconned Principal Skinner's past, saying instead he had assumed the life of the "real" Skinner and then brushed these revelations under the rug in a blatant reset button. Both Groening and Skinner voice actor Harry Shearer have publicly criticized the episode. The later "Behind the Laughter" episode referred to this one as "gimmicky" and "nonsensical."
    • "A Star Is Burns," a crossover with The Critic forced upon the show by the network. Groening removed his name from the episode in protest.
  • Disney director Wilfred Jackson was so ashamed of his first directorial effort, a Mickey Mouse short called "The Castaway", that he vowed never to make a film that didn't feel like a Disney picture again.
    • Walt Disney (the man) hated the 1935 Silly Symphonies short "The Golden Touch" after he finished it he never directed a short again. According to Jack Kinney's autobiography, he allegedly blasted an animator over a mistake and the animator shot back that he was the one who directed The Golden Touch. Walt stormed out--but came back later and angrily warned him to never, ever mention the cartoon again.
    • Walt also had some dislike of Goofy, as mentioned in Neal Gabler's biography on Walt. According to Gabler, Walt "threaten[ed] constantly to terminate [the Goofy series of shorts] before relenting, largely to provide work for his animators."
  • Thurop Van Orman HATED a handful of episodes from the second season of The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack. So he added a Laugh Track to them, along with a "drawn in front of a live audience" gag.
  • The Bananaman cartoon series was hated by just about virtually every cast member that starred in it, as well as Steve Bright, who wrote the Bananaman comic strip. To a lesser extent this also applies to the strip's original artist, John Geering, who liked the series overall but wasn't fond of how his characters had been redesigned.
  • Tex Avery expressed a dislike for his character Screwy Squirrel, even going so far as to kill him off for real at the end of Screwy's fifth and final short.
  • An in-universe example from Rocko's Modern Life: Ralph Bighead has Wacky Deli created so that he will be released from his contract in order to become a real artist. It doesn't work.
  • John Kricfalusi of Ren and Stimpy fame has warned his fans not to study his cartoons from the original series. He summed it up saying "For one thing that we did right, there was a million of mistakes". However, when using examples of a well-constructed story and good dialogue, he uses the cartoon "Stimpy's Invention" quite a lot.
    • He was so embarassed for having directed the "Nurse Stimpy" episode due to the heavy amount of editing it went through, he ended up crediting himself as "Raymond Spum" at the title card.
    • He also doesn't like the Adult Party Cartoon episode "Fire Dogs II" for its slow pacing and abysmal timing, although he thought the story and characterizations were fine.
      • In fact, he dislikes the fact that the whole series had to be "adult", the adult content actually being forced on him by the network (while he's constantly blamed for having Protection From Editors and thus creating the unpopular adult series by his own choice), so it could stand next to the likes of Family Guy or South Park. When recently asked if he'd like to continue making Ren and Stimpy cartoons, he replied with "yes, but just the ones for kids".
    • The Ripping Friends is also apparently very hard for him to watch because of all the Executive Meddling.
  • One seems to get that impression watching the 3rd Family Guy Star Wars special It's A Trap! with Stewie quickly mentioning they were going to do Return of the Jedi and Peter sighing and saying "Let's get this over with." followed by the opening scroll turning into a massive rant about how they (they being Seth MacFarlane and the rest of the crew) never wanted to do this nor Something Something Something Dark Side and only did so so Seth could do other projects without them (them being 20th Century Fox) complaining.
    • On the other hand, Family Guy does a lot of throwaway lines, so it's hard to tell if they really meant it.
    • Judging by Quagmire's epic Take That Scrappy rant to Brian in a season eight episode the writers really, really regret "Not All Dogs Go To Heaven" and its moral that "religion is for idiots".
    • Recent episodes of Family Guy use tons of Self-Deprecation gags about the show or other works the creators are responsible for (the Star Wars specials also include several jibes to Seth Green's Robot Chicken). Granted given the overall tone of such gags (and the fact they are expressed by less than sound individuals in the show) it may also count as Take That, Critics!.
  • Phil Vischer - upon giving an interview regarding his new series, Jelly Telly - mentioned that he now considers his earlier series, Veggie Tales, as something of a failure because it stressed basic morals while largely downplaying the Christian beliefs behind those morals; Vischer says that Jelly Telly was created to rectify this problem.


Miscellaneous

  • Mild case: Vincent Connare, designer of the "Comic Sans" typeface, sympathizes with its detractors.
    • Oh. Now I feel guilty. Not that guilty, but guilty nonetheless.
    • Interestingly, he "credits" the lettering on Watchmen (done by artist Dave Gibbons) with part of the inspiration for the font. Dave Gibbons is... conflicted about it.
  • On Deviant ART, Fan Art naturally gathers more popularity than original art because of the fans of the respective series. This could mean that a single good piece of fanart can be the single most popular item in a user's entire gallery. Reactions to this vary from indifference, to bitterness, to internet drama.
    • Likewise with writers who write one comedy story which becomes very popular, and their new and serious stuff gets ignored from then on.
      • There's at least one example of an artist being rather dissapointed that they got a Daily Deviation... on a joke piece they made ABOUT Daily Deviations. Understandable in that they had so many examples of attractive, interesting art in their journal that had always been overlooked.
    • Also, Stamps - little things (made to look like postage stamps), which usually have something like a quote, or a refernce to a show, or a particular stance on something (you name it, there's probably a stamp for it), which generally get a lot more favourites and comments than any other work in someone's gallery.
    • This is also often the case for YouTube users who upload an extremely popular fad video that took no effort, only for it to overshadow their more elaborate videos.
      • Great example is Dom Fera, of Lazer Collection fame. The series often completely overshadows the rest of his work.
        • He expressed this sentiment in Lazer Collection 4. That said, he doesn't hate the Lazer Collection, he just thought it was ridiculous that people expected him to put out 4 so soon after 3.
  • Speaking of Deviant ART from above, moderately-popular Deviant ART cartoonist BrokenTeapot initially used to draw comics and characters involving Fetish-Fuel driven material, mostly related to Hypnofetishism as either his own pieces or fan-commissions. Somewhere along the line he has since become ashamed of them in general, critisized the attraction and attention he had gotten from said fetishes, and went on to draw almost predominantly video game-related parody one-page comics. Later, he would begin a Castlevania-inspired spoof called "Nosfera" which become relatively popular. Soon after eventually finishing the ongoing comic, he would go on to write a surprising post about how it "sucked" and stated he would begin doing it over. He's currently in the process of doing just this.
  • Illusionist David Copperfield is reportedly not happy with his 10th TV special "The Bermuda Triangle." On a DVD commentary he mentioned that he didn't like the final illusion (to be fair it is VERY hokey) and that it came "during a very rough part of my career." However, the special did feature one of Copperfield's signature tricks...The Death Saw.
  • Albert Einstein considered the cosmological constant term he added to his theory of general relativity to be his "biggest blunder", as he put it in in an attempt to make his theory consistent with a static universe. Shortly after, Edwin Hubble published observations that the universe was in fact expanding, in accordance with the original theory of general relativity… However, as of circa 2000, a nonzero cosmological constant has become part of the standard model for cosmology, as there are stars that are older than the age of the universe as computed using original general relativity (if expansion is accelerating, then it was previously slower, and it would therefore have taken a longer time than predicted by original general relativity for the universe to expand to its present size).
  • This Cracked article.
  • Spen King, the designer of the Range Rover, said in an interview in 2004 that his creations had become "oversized toys for pretentious city slickers" and that people who drive 4x4s in town were "pompous and stupid". He added that his creations were "never intended as a status symbol but later incarnations of my design seem to be intended for that purpose".
  • The late Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie (also known as Ras Tafari Makonnen) disliked the eccentric Jamaican religion of Rastafarianism, which worshipped him as a god. A strong Ethiopian Orthodox Christian, he famously once implored the prime minister of Jamaica to "help these people" during a visit.
  • Cosplayers--particularly those who make their own costumes--do this quite often. It's not uncommon for such cosplayers to look back at their older cosplays and go, "what the hell is this?!", even if others find these cosplays to be impressive anyway. Doesn't help that they'll probably have photos of their cosplays floating around on the Internet.
  • Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. They even created a website dedicated to getting people to drop it.
  • Surrealist artist Rene Magritte once titled a painting of a pretty blue sky with clouds "The Curse". Scholars have debated what kind of "curse" may have prompted that title, but some believe that it refers to Magritte being thoroughly sick of how his other works featuring pretty blue skies with clouds were the ones that were most popular.
  1. ↑ As well as the Jewish ancestry, which the Nazis knew about, Lang’s previous film, The Testament of Doctor Mabuse, had shown his titular villain spouting Nazi propaganda phrases as part of his insane rants, and had been banned for incitement to public disorder. Controversially, Lang recounts that Josef Goebbels called him in for an interview, claimed to have had no personal part in the banning of Doctor Mabuse, and offered to make him the boss of the government controlled film studio UFA, overlooking Lang’s Jewish ancestry as part of the deal. Lang asked for time to consider, then fled the country that night.
  2. ↑ This is a mistake on Culhane's part, as it was the other way around in the comics
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