Never Live It Down/Film

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• Star Wars: Darth Vader, ever since the Revenge Of The Sith, will forever be known as that guy who screamed "NOOOOOOOOO!" On a lesser extent, in the original trilogy, he has the You Have Failed Me... trope as his Never Live It Down.
  • He only did it twice on-screen in the movies. (He would have done it three times, had Tarkin not stopped him.) But he casual manner in which Darth Vader dispatches his incompetent underlings, as well as taking into account The Law of Conservation of Detail, suggests that this is a common occurrence. There's also how the other officers/troopers react to it. They look uncomfortable, but not really shocked or surprised. Their reactions suggest that this is indeed a common occurrence.
  • Leia kissed Luke precisely twice, once for luck and once specifically to make a point to Han. There is nothing particularly sexual between them, but some people seem to genuinely believe they were screwing like incestuous bunnies before Return of the Jedi. Wishful thinking? Squick!
    • The other thing that people conveniently forget is that neither Luke nor Leia learned they were brother and sister until Return of the Jedi. And neither did the writers.
  • A more unfortunate Star Wars example: it seems no one can mention General Grievous without someone bringing up his... less than dignified ending.
  • Boba Fett will never live down looking cool, despite all his attempts to prove that he is whiny and untalented. Not to mention Han dispatching him with a stick, while blind.
  • Conversely, because he didn't immediately jump at the call, Luke is characterized by some fans as being forever whiny.
  • In the Expanded Universe, we have Kyp Durron, who will never live down blowing up a star. Tahiri Veila has become sort of the same thing after trying to seduce Ben in Invincible.
  • Lando is perpetually known for betraying Han and the others in Cloud City despite the fact that he did so to protect the city from the Empire, orchestrated their escape from the city, hid in Jabba's palace undercover to rescue a frozen Han, and piloted the Millenium Falcon into the reconstructed Death Star at the Battle of Endor. Lampshaded on an episode of Robot Chicken.
    • Various sources claim that Billy Dee Williams really will defend Lando's actions at length, in the very same way that he does in the Robot Chicken sketch.
    • Lando has never lived down the incident with the Millenium Falcon's hyperdrive, either, simply because he was under the impression that his mechanics would fix it rather than the Imperials sabotaging it further. While he did truthfully claim "It's not my fault!" (same as Han did), in later Expanded Universe works ships he attempted to fly never worked as intended, with him once again spouting his new catchphrase.
• James Bond has become known as the film series where 'The main Bond girl works for the villains until she falls in love with James Bond'. In fact, this has only happened on one occasion; in Goldfinger. Most of the other times, the Bond girl is either an ally of Bond from the first (e.g. You Only Live Twice, On Her Majesty's Secret Service), an innocent drawn into the villain's schemes (e.g. Dr No, A View to A Kill, Goldeneye), working with the villains but unaware of the true nature of their plans (From Russia With Love, Octopussy), a willing accomplice/BigBad who never changes sides (The World Is Not Enough) or effectively a slave rather than an ally of the villains (Thunderball, Live and Let Die).
  • Complicating matters, several Bond films (such as Thunderball, Goldeneye and Die Another Day) have genuinely evil beautiful henchwomen as well as heroines, and Bond will sleep with said evil henchwoman, in almost every single film. Doesn't help that Bond is also a frequent offender of tropes like Sex Equals Love and "It's Not Rape If You Enjoyed It".
• In-universe example in Superbad:

Seth: Hey Greg, why don't you go piss your pants? Greg the Soccer Player: That was like 8 years ago, asshole! Seth: People don't forget!

• • And then there's McLovin.
• Indirectly in Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back's depiction of Jason Biggs, eternally remembered as "the pie fucker".

"I'm haunted by it!"

• • Clerks II both plays it straight and subverts it with Dante and Randall's former classmate Lance "Pickle Fucker" Dowds, who had earned the nickname in an incident of high school hazing. After Randall recounts the incident where Dowds earned the nickname, Dowds replies that nobody but the aimless Randall Graves would remember the incident at all. Cue Jay walking in and referring to saying "Hurry up Pickle Fucker, I wanna get my cow tipper on!" As Jay is leaving, he yells off-screen "Hey, Silent Bob, some pickle fucker just gave us free eats!" revealing that Jay occasionally just randomly calls people 'pickle fucker.'
• The Parody Disaster Movie The Big Bus contains the immortal line "Jeeze! You eat one foot and they call you a cannibal!"
• Invoked in David Cronenberg's The Brood when Robert Silverman's character intends to sue the psychiatric clinic (run by Oliver Reed) that he believes to be responsible for his lymph cancer. He knows he's going to lose the case, but he also knows that in a few years, people won't even remember the verdict.

All they'll remember is the slogan: "Psychoplasmics Gives You Cancer." Catchy, huh?

• In For Your Consideration, Harry Shearer's character, Victor Allen Miller, a dramatic actor who has been a veteran of stage for 40 years, yet all most people seem to remember of him is being a hotdog pitchman on TV when he was younger.
• Joel Schumacher is seen by many as the director that killed the 90s Batman franchise with Batman and Robin. A prolific director with interesting films under his belt, yet for the fan(boy)dom he's branded as the director of Batman & Robin.
• The Other Guys: Mark Wahlberg's character, Terry Hoitz, became a pariah within the NYPD and the city as a whole when he shot a man in a Yankee Stadium corridor during the World Series, not knowing it was Derek Jeter. Although he's been on desk duty ever since then, his coworkers STILL don't let him forget.
• Look at all the Labyrinth fanfics that include Jareth saying "precious" or "precious thing". He only said that phrase ONCE in the whole movie.
  • Also, David Bowie's rather tight pants that draw the eye no matter how much you try to resist.
• One wonders if Chyler Leigh has a rule about doing interviews; that they never bring up Kickboxing Academy. If you're a regular visitor of Cracked.com, you know why...
• Joe Dirt: After being abducted by "Buffalo Bob", everyone asks Joe if he was harmed in certain ways, even though nothing terrible really happened.
• Despite the fact that the inexperienced Superman had no real way of preventing all the destruction Zod and his team of ultra-powerful Kryptonian warriors caused while having to simultaneously take out a destructive terraforming machine, Man of Steel will forever be remembered as the movie where a heartless Superman completely destroyed Metropolis without giving a damn about the civilians in the eyes of the film's detractors.
  • To be fair, the most common criticism of Man of Steel is not that Superman failed to avoid collateral damage but that he didn't try to avoid collateral damage, which are two entirely separate things. Inexperience is a valid excuse for trying and failing, but its not an excuse for failing to even make an effort.
  • Furthermore, there are at least two sequences where Clark has the opportunity to choose where the fight will occur -- when he does a flying tackle on Zod into downtown Smallville, and at the end of the movie when he drags Zod down from orbit into the heart of Metropolis (and Clark is clearly in control of their flight path for at least the latter half of that dive, given that he lands with Zod already in a submission hold) and in both instances Clark steers himself and Zod directly into the center of the nearest city instead of aiming for any one of countless acres of uninhabited land that he could have potentially used instead. The final sequence is particularly egregious because they'd just fallen from orbit, and could have potentially landed anywhere in the Western Hemisphere... and Clark still steers them straight back to downtown Metropolis.