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[[File:gorga.jpg|frame|[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubYC5h0jmq0 WATCH OUT! IT'S A BIG GIANT HAND-PUPPET!]]]
{{quote|''"[[Godzilla]] is either breaking the laws of physics or he's throwing around an empty rubber suit!"''
|'''Tom Servo''', ''[[Mystery Science Theater 3000]]''}}
The key to a good science fiction, fantasy, or horror movie or series is the presentation... Something these examples are sorely lacking.
When [[Special Effects]] look really cheap and dodgy, to the point of pulling the audience out of the narrative, you have a '''Special Effect Failure'''. All-too-common prior to 1980, and still with us today despite relatively inexpensive digital effects that look realistic.
To be a true Special Effect Failure, it must fit one of two criteria:
# It has to have looked bad (and remarked on as such) ''by the standards of the time it was made''. For example, it is obviously a dummy being thrown from a train in [[The Great Train Robbery]]
# It can also be where the special effects actually just don't seem to work and no attempt is made to fix them.
Sometimes a Special Effect Failure is caused by resorting to [[Off-the-Shelf FX]]. Sometimes, the creators try to [[Justified Trope|justify it]] with the dangers of [[Showing Off the Perilous Power Source]] (''no one'' can see it as it is). Many examples are just plain [[Blooper
Might lead to the work becoming [[Nightmare Retardant]]. Sometimes cheesy FX are regarded as part of the [[So Bad It's Good]] charm of a work.
Compare [[Uncanny Valley]], [[Fight Scene Failure]], [[Stock Footage Failure]], [[Styrofoam Rocks]], [[Conspicuous CG]], [[Slurpasaur]] and [[Off-Model]]. See also [[Narm]], a frequent consequence. Contrast [[Visual Effects of Awesome]]. Often caused by [[No Budget]]. This can be an [[Invoked Trope]] when aiming for [[Stylistic Suck]].
{{examples}}
== [[Advertising]] ==
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4-e4nlfdRI The Eagleman!] No clue how the EagleMAN lays an egg.
* The Bush's Homestyle Chili advertisement featuring the Chili Changer had a pan across bowls of chili near the end, with some cans of the product tossed in for good measure. Sounds pedestrian in itself, but once you actually see this moment in the commercial, you'll notice that the cans are actually photos added to the shot in an unconvincing matter. It seemed like they wasted most of their budget making Duke the dog's mouth move (which they always do in these commercials). [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q4n8i5pegsg Just watch the failure in action.]
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* This old Scanimate (A precursor to modern CG) demo reel shows us what happens when you [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ispW6-7b2sA film a circuit board with light blue Capacitors with dark blue highlights against a blue-screen that's a similar color to said highlights] - it's at 4:30 in if anyone's curious.
* Blue Tax. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lh67uyFK-R0 It speaks for itself, really.]
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Db52uepxANg The General] isn't much better than the
== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==
* All examples of [[Off-Model]], this also applies to American animation and a few other projects (The Live-Action Transformers movies for example).
** Likewise, all examples of [[Conspicuous CG]].
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** There was one weird instance when one of Scorponok's eyes was actually rendered ''over'' his visor, while the other was behind it. And his visor isn't meant to be see-through.
* The Blue Water dub of ''[[Dragon Ball]]'' had [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Er1kOz5w9iE&feature=related this] as its opening. Ignoring the fact that the song could give any of [[4Kids! Entertainment|4Kids']] songs a run for their money (it was translated from French after all). The non-Anime sequences are marred with [[Conspicuous CG|horrendous looking CG]] and even worse Scanimation (which unfortunately, also affects a few of the scenes from the Anime).
* Parodied in ''[[Panty & Stocking with
== [[Fan Works]] ==
* In ''[[A Very Potter Musical|A Very Potter Sequel]]'', Joey Richter (as Ron) fails to take down a Taylor Lautner poster from Umbridge's office ([[It Makes Sense in Context]]) while switching scenes. He tries to play it off by saying it was held on by magic, and in the next scene "They're all over the school!" It's a shame that {{spoiler|it messed up a plot point, since Peter Pettigrew was no longer on top of Ron.}}
==
* In ''[[The Nightmare Before Christmas]]'', you can actually see where the bats are held up by strings.
* The ''[[Iron Man]]'' animated movie looks like it was made [[Iron Man (film)|in a cave. With a box of scraps!]] All the [[Powered Armor|suits]] as well as the elemental gods are poorly done cel-shaded effects, which jar horribly with the traditionally animated background. They also have clunky and weightless animation in comparison to the pretty decent animation of the characters.
** Iron Man is supposed to be lying on the ground, except something's just off so that he looks like he's floating a foot above it.
* ''[[Team America: World Police]]'' probably has the best puppetry any of us will see in our lives, but it's a medium hilariously unsuited to the action movie genre and [[Lampshade Hanging|the creators know that as much as anyone]], so several of the special effects are deliberately [[Stylistic Suck|off]].
* Parodied in the [[Hilarious Outtakes]] Pixar did for ''[[A Bug's
* Given their [[Direct to Video]] nature, the mediocre CGI used in the ''[[Bionicle]]'' movies can be forgiven, however there are a handful of errors that could have been easily avoided with simply paying attention to the animation. The most notable offenders are:
** The floating mountain slope in ''Mask of Light''. As Kopaka braces for the Rahkshi's attack, one of the mountains in the background seems to be made up of only one slope, with the snow magically clinging onto its sides.
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** ''Web of Shadows'' has Visorak spiders clearly walking in air, and never once touching their webs. In nearly every freaking shot that had them crawling "on" webbing. In a particularly badly animated shot that doesn't even look finished, one of the spiders is floating in the air ''upside down'' and another one is freakishly deformed, as if someone had been playing around with its animation model.
*** Other special effect failures include Keetongu being visible from ''behind'' a wall as a tiny spot as he scales the Coliseum; Roodaka's catcher claw passing into her motionless arm which should be shaking wildly with it; and in one of the [[Bullet Time|slo-mo shots, as the camera angle changes]], Matau being revealed to be a ''2D'' image.
** The fourth film, ''The Legend Reborn'', being animated by a different company,<ref>
*** Also, the Skrall squad running in place at the start of the battle.
*** Barix's poorly animated shadow when he's running in the Hot Springs.
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* The makers of the animated film of ''[[Dragonlance]]: Dragons of Autumn Twilight'' made the strange decision to make the dragons and dragonkin CGI in what was otherwise a cel-animated movie. At ''best'', it looks jarring and ugly.
* ''[[Heavy Metal (animation)|Heavy Metal]]'': Following the climax of the Taarna segment when the Loc-Nar explodes and takes the whole house with it, the house that blows up is just a small model that was simply filmed with a blue filter.
* The animated film ''Samson and Sally: The Song of the Whales'' has some sync fails where the [[Mouth Flaps|characters' mouths]] [[Hong Kong Dub|don't match with the words they're saying]].
* ''[[Birdemic]]'' has [[Attack of the Killer Whatever|killer]] [[Big Badass Bird of Prey|eagles]] which appear to be animated gifs—they are two-dimensional and frequently out of scale relative to the background, and hardly move their wings. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwSTDzaZ234 See here.]
* ''[[Turkish Star Wars]]''. Ever single special effect (excluding the ones [[Stock Footage|stolen]] from ''[[Star Wars]]'') looks cheaper than cheap. Most notable are the hilarious costumes of the various monsters.
** Internet humor writer Seanbaby [https://web.archive.org/web/20061112194912/http://www.thewavemag.com/pagegen.php?pagename=article&articleid=22122 points out] exactly one glorious aversion: in one of the movie's [[
** The funniest has to be the [[Big Bad]]'s death: torn in half. How do we know this? Because the camera showing his face has a piece of cardboard on the right half, then on the left half, both sides having the whole nose. [[Special Effects Failure]] doesn't ''begin'' to describe it...
* ''[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=roYo5EQi7A4 The Mighty Gorga]''......
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* The ''Shark Attack'' TV movie series are examples of the aforementioned junk ''Jaws'' rip-offs, especially ''[[Shark Attack 3: Megalodon]]''. Awful rubber sharks and ludicrous green-screen-meshed-with-stock-footage [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nzd0R_OeOc appears].
** The titular Megalodon is frequently seen rising up out of the water to grab victims in its mouth. This is accomplished by superimposing footage of the victim over the mouth of footage of a shark head. The (main) problem is that the superimposed victim is always the same size relative to the shark head, whether said "victim" is a person, raft full of people, or entire boat, leading to the impression that the shark can change size.
* The eponymous ''[[media:
* ''[[Attack of the Eye Creatures]]'' had so many failures that when it was featured on ''[[Mystery Science Theater 3000]]'', Joel and the 'Bots catalogued a thorough list of them as evidence that the filmmakers ''[[They Just Didn't Care|"just didn't care!"]]'' Not the least of which was a night scene that was clearly filmed in broad daylight. As Tom Servo put it, "You couldn't have picked a ''nicer'' day to film a night sequence!"
** The Eye Creatures themselves have heads draped casually over their shoulders and visible zippers.
* Robert L. Lippert's ''King Dinosaur''. The numerous alien life forms of the planet Nova are all clearly animals from Earth. The eponymous dinosaur is just an [[Slurpasaur|iguana on a miniature set]]... which would be tolerable had one of the characters not claimed that it "resembles the [[Tyrannosaurus Rex]] of Earth's prehistoric past."
* ''[https://web.archive.org/web/20120726055146/http://www.stomptokyo.com/scott/yongary/movies/yonggary-99/yonggary-pictures.html Reptilian]'', a 1999 Korean Kaiju film made to cash in on the 1998 ''[[Godzilla]]'' remake, and somewhat of a ''Yongary'' (See below) remake, has to have some of the absolute worst CGI EVER. And the sad part is, it is apparently an upgraded version, so it may have looked worse.....
* ''Yongary'', a Korean version of Godzilla, has, at the very least, a visible nozzle during a close-up of the the title monster's head as it was breathing fire and a visible fifth wheel to prop up the rear half of a jeep the monster had sliced in half with a laser shot from its horn.
* Basically anything toted as a "Sci-Fi/[[Syfy]] Original". Particularly bad in Sci-Fi (or Syfy, for the move VD inclined) sequels to big-budget theatrical releases. ''Dragonheart'' had the main dragon splendidly rendered, scale by scale, while its sequel had a scale textured but smooth and shiny skin on the [[Mary Sue]] replacement.
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* Bats on strings in old ''[[Dracula]]'' films, from [[Universal Horror]] to a late [[Hammer Horror]] film.
** Plus the "rats" actually being ''armadillos and opossums'' in the 1931 version...
* ''The Cyclops'', a 1957 film. [https://web.archive.org/web/20131122183819/http://cinemassacre.com/2010/10/04/the-cyclops/ Just watch this review to see some of the "fantastic effects"].
* Despite being touted as "the most realistic effects to date", the CG para-surfing scene in the ''[[James Bond (film)|James Bond]]'' movie ''[[Die Another Day]]'' was criticized as being easily recognized as fake, especially in comparison with other, more realistic CG effects of fellow blockbuster smash, ''[[The Lord of the Rings (film)|The Lord of the Rings]]: The Two Towers''. Particularly jarring since ''[[Die Another Day]]'' starts off with a very well-done surfing sequence. (done with actual waves in Hawaii...)
** This is not the only dodgy effect in the series. ''[[Live and Let Die (film)|Live and Let Die]]'' features a particularly bad shot of a man being killed by an inflating bullet.
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*** In the same movie, the very obvious dummies that are thrown from the zeppelin. Their extremities buckle in several places.
** In ''[[Goldfinger]]'' the statue decapitated by Oddjob's hat has a clearly visible break at the neck, and the head starts falling off BEFORE the hat makes contact.
*** This is especially strange because the [[
* The movie ''[[Driven]]'' had most of its racing scenes actually filmed with real cars, but a few are CGI, and it shows. The CGI quality is actually pretty good, and it would have been marvelous in a space setting where nobody expects battleships to be too realistic. But since ''Driven'' had real-life subjects, the contrast between real and CGI scenes made the latter really jump out.
** ''[[Two Fast Two Furious]]'' has the same problem. On the DVD commentary, John Singleton points out which cars during the two races are real and which are CGI. They're actually pretty obvious, so he didn't have to do that.
* [[Lampshade Hanging|Lampshaded]] in ''[[I'm Gonna Git You Sucka]]'', where Ma Bell's stunts are obviously performed by a man wearing her dress and hairstyle. He even has a mustache.
** A joke also used in the previous year's ''[[Spaceballs]]''.
* A similar gag appears in ''[[Seltzer and Friedberg|Epic Movie]]''. During a fight scene, camera angles make it gradually more obvious that Fred Willard's stunt double is a much younger, Asian man. At first, it isn't even clear that the revealing is
** Now, now, ''Epic Movie'' had some pretty awful Special Effects Failure on its own. One [[Egregious]] one was when [[Pirates of the Caribbean|Captain Jack Swallows]] is breaking [[The Chronicles of Narnia|Edward]] out of prison, where he pretty much just swings a plastic brown dummy with a featureless brown head around. [[The Agony Booth]] [https://web.archive.org/web/20140312160915/http://www.agonybooth.com/recaps/Epic_Movie_2007.aspx?Page=7 had a field day] with this.
** Hell, just about every movie these two have made include cheap special effects.
* ''[[Apocalypto]]'' has some very good, fairly disturbing effects of headless bodies bouncing down steps, people being stabbed, and generally horrifically bloody action. Other shots of panther puppets being thrown at their victims, are frankly adorable.
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** Parodied in ''[[Back to The Future]] Part II'', where Marty stands near a movie theater in the future when a holographic projection of a cartoony, poorly-rendered shark emerges and advances towards him. Marty at first freaks out and ducks, but when the hologram disappears, he straightens up and comments, "The shark still looks fake."
* Occurs all the time in the ''[[Evil Dead]]'' series. The first ''Evil Dead'' suffered from it, but ''Evil Dead 2'' was more lighthearted and ''Army of Darkness'' was pure comedy, so it didn't matter so much. Indeed, it's arguable that in ''Army of Darkness'', this was the point.
* Zaphod Beeblebrox's second head in ''[[The
** Though at least it wasn't a mannequin head on a stick shoved onto his shoulder...
* ''In Harm's Way'' was praised for its excellent acting and storytelling, but is infamous for the extremely fake-looking model ships used in the sea battle scenes. In fact, starring actors John Wayne and Kirk Douglas were embarrassed at how badly the naval scenes compared to the rest of the movie. It's rather sad, really, considering how much they tried to avoid [[Artistic License Ships|another trope]].
* An especially absurd example: [[House of the Dead (film)|The film]] by [[Uwe Boll]] ''very'' loosely based on the ''[[House of the Dead]]'' video game series intersperses actual gameplay footage from the games. ''In a live action film.''
** By the way, it wasn't even ''true'' gameplay footage, it was footage of the ''demo run'' from the arcade version, with the "insert a coin" message blinking! Apparently, the two quarters required to actually play the game would have tripled the film's budget.
* ''Megaforce'' has some awful moments. [https://web.archive.org/web/20131106094442/http://cinemassacre.com/2011/03/18/megaforce-movie-review/ See this review].
* ''[[Godzilla]]''. The monster king's movies have featured quite a few notable special effects... flaws. But it's notable that wires holding up puppets, like Mothra, are all but invisible in most movies. Then came ''Godzilla vs. Megaguirus''. The villainous monster, Megaguirus, is a spectacularly menacing-looking monster. Except that in the big reveal scene, Megaguirus takes off, she is held up by incredibly obvious strings. And this is in a movie made in the year '''2000'''. It is very jarring.
** It can partially be blamed on Sony's handling of the film. When they put it on DVD, they used a brighter version of the print. The strings weren't visible in Japanese prints as those particular shots were too dark for the strings to be visible.
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** And he was the one who designed them!
** ''[[Mystery Science Theater 3000]]'' posited that it looked like he was wearing Depends.
* One of the [[Dueling Movies|three versions]] of ''[[The War of the Worlds (novel)|The War of the Worlds]]'' released in 2005 was set during the same period as the book, and claimed to be the most faithful adaptation. While the quality may be up for debate, the quality of the effects is not. The heat-ray was straight out of a '90s video game, the tripods clattered along independently of the surfaces that they were standing on and the [[Hollywood Night|nighttime]] was represented by superimposing starry night sky over ''some'' of the visible blue afternoon sky while being filmed in bright sunny daylight.
* Straight-to-video movie ''Earthquake in New York'' is an example of CGI that was not just terrible, but also unnecessary. For those unfamiliar with this movie, [[Exactly What It Says on the Tin|an earthquake happens in New York]], trapping some kids in the Statue of Liberty. Whenever we cut to a scene featuring said kids, we get an [[Establishing Shot]] of the statue, which is a computer-rendered graphic, slowly rotating against a background of grey mist. Not only does it look terrible and unrealistic, but they could have just used ''actual footage'' of the statue instead. The idea is that the statue is slowly falling apart (and each scene shows more damage), but if they'd just dispensed with using an [[Establishing Shot]] altogether, they could have avoided their movie looking like a 12-year-old knocked it up on a laptop.
* The creature (a murderous alien) in ''[[Alien (franchise)|Alien]] 3'' runs at ridiculous speeds through tunnels, and the effects look dodgy and dated.
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** Worse still is the fact that the cut was intended to be seamless from dummy to live actor, with no change of camera angle or an in-between shot. Made even worse later when Parker sets the (now dummy again) head on fire which blows off its skin, revealing a white plastic head underneath without a hint of mouth, nostrils, defined eyes or indeed anything to suggest that it's something other than a piece of solid plastic. Couldn't they just cut the shot a few seconds early?
*** Also in ''Alien'': the chestburster darting across the table after its grand entrance, and the full-grown alien once it's been thrown out of the shuttle (allowing us to get a good look at the entire creature).
*** The bizarre
* ''[[Star Wars]] Episode I - [[The Phantom Menace]]'' has good special effects in most cases. However, when Obi-Wan kills Darth Maul, you can clearly see Maul bounces sides of the pit it falls into like he was a rubber model.
** ''Episode II - [[Attack of the Clones]]'' has some pretty poor moments, for instance when Anakin and Padme are on Naboo and he's rodeo-riding a big-assed herd animal before getting bucked off.
** Even worse is the scene when Anakin and Padme are infiltrating the foundry of Geonosis, Anakin's head ''clips through'' the metal door.
** In ''Episode IV - [[A New Hope]]'', similarly to the aforementioned ''[[Jaws (film)|Jaws]]'', the creature in the garbage compactor wound up looking so awful that it was filmed as little more than a bunch of tentacles reaching from the
*** While fan-outcry against [[The Dog Shot First|Greedo shooting first]] had more to do with messing with Han's character than anything else, it doesn't help that they illustrated the change by using the "Nudge" command in Photoshop to twitch Han three inches to his left and back again. It looks completely unnatural and happens at ridiculous speed. Thankfully, they corrected this in the re-re-release.
*** The special edition also introduces a scene where Han meets Jabba, originally shot with a human actor in a fur coat and now replaced with the most poorly animated and rendered version of Jabba the Hutt imaginable. When Han walks behind Jabba, the Failure is complete. Fortunately that was also fixed in the latest Special Edition version, where the awful CGI Jabba was replaced with the much better one from Phantom Menace and the interaction done more believably.
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* The introduction of CGI to the ''[[Indiana Jones]]'' franchise in ''[[Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull]]'' had mixed effects. Notably, the car chase in the jungle had some really dodgy green-screening.
** To say nothing of the {{spoiler|1=Shia LaBeouf Tarzan sequence}}. Not everything is better with monkeys. Actually, let's extend it to everything involving animals in the film, because there are some of the fakest prairie dogs ever committed to film. And there have been a lot.
** CGI had appeared briefly in the 1989 ''[[Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade]]'', to
* The elevator crash in ''Earthquake'' was considered laughable even in 1974. It probably would have been laughed at in 1934, for that matter.
** For those unfamiliar with the movie, a full elevator is caused to plummet by the earthquake. After several seconds of people screaming on the way down, to show that it's hit the ground, the camera lens is 'splattered' with cartoon looking blood that's bright red.
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** Theoden's fellow riders are often swinging at nothing at the end of ''The Two Towers'' because the CGI orcs have already fallen by the time they get to them.
* Much of the action in ''[[Space Mutiny]]'' takes in a building with visible bricks and sunlight, and this movie is supposed to take place in a ''space ship''.
* In ''[[Labyrinth]]'', when [[David Bowie]] (as Jareth) is singing "Dance Magic Dance"
** And the obviously fake bubbles turning into a glass bauble... Yeah.
** When they're looking out on Jareth's "kingdom", Sarah say it doesn't look that far. And it really doesn't:
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** Also from the third movie, it is incredibly easy to tell they used scale models for the DeLorean and train crossing just after Marty goes back to the present.
** Part II isn't immune either. Watch the vents on the back of the DeLorean when it lands for the first time after the opening titles. You can clearly tell it's a subpar model they used for some of the shots, as the vents are the wrong shape and all the gadgetry on the back end looks like cardboard.
* The quality of special effects in ''[[Star Trek V: The Final Frontier|Star Trek V the Final Frontier]]'' is noticeably worse than in the earlier ''[[Star Trek: The
** In the extended TV edition of ''[[Star Trek: The
** ''[[Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan|Star Trek II the Wrath of Khan]]'', ''[[Star Trek III: The Search For Spock|Star Trek III the Search For Spock]]'', ''[[Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home|Star Trek IV the Voyage Home]]'', and ''[[Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country|Star Trek VI the Undiscovered Country]]'' contracted the special effects to Industrial Light and Magic. ''Star Trek V'' fell victim to ILM being booked up. With a writer's strike on, it was never going to get the extra time in post it needed before being punted out to starving theatres.
** Though the climactic battle between Kirk and the Klingon commander in ''Star Trek III'' does very little to hide that the Genesis planet is, in fact, a soundstage.
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*** Made more jarring by the fact that Riker ''clearly'' orders a full spread of torpedoes to be fired because "we'll only get one shot." When the Klingon ship begins to decloak, the Enterprise only fires a single torpedo despite his order, because only one was used in ''Star Trek VI''.
* ''[[Mortal Kombat: Annihilation|Mortal Kombat Annihilation]]'' had a climactic fight scene that was too badly done to describe with words.
** [https://web.archive.org/web/20040803092922/http://www.jabootu.com/mka.htm This review] nominates the animation of a "velosphere" rolling into a tunnel as "quite possibly the single most inept special effect to hit the screen in the last twenty years of theatrical cinema."
* Even in 1972, ''[[Night of the Lepus]]''' use of cute little bunnies filmed on a scale-model set didn't exactly produce the intended scare.
* ''[[Seltzer and Friedberg|Meet the Spartans]]'' has a particularly confusing example of this: In a scene where Leonidas addresses the fat Spartan who just had his eyes punched out by an enraged opponent in a Yo Momma joke contest, [http://img380.imageshack.us/img380/3438/snapshot20081219235401rr2.jpg the fat Spartan's eyes are chroma-keyed out of the picture]... and you can clearly see the stone wall behind him through his eye holes, which would imply he's missing the back of his head as well... except he isn't, because just one shot ago the audience has a clear view of the back of his head, and he looks fine.
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** Also that's a nice wire on Batman's back as he crashes through the glass into the art museum
* ''[[Batman and Robin (film)|Batman and Robin]]'' has a number of bad effects, most notably the rubber icicles.
* ''Zu Warriors''
* The "ninja fight" from ''[[Blade]] 2''. Even [[Guillermo del Toro]] hates it, and it's his damned movie.
* [[Steven Seagal]] movie ''[[Under Siege]] 2'' is notable for the least convincing CG flame effect.
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* There is one special effect shot in ''Reds''; a ship tossing on a stormy sea. Not only is it a blatantly poor miniature, it's also a very unusual shot for the film which was otherwise always in the actors' faces.
* Probably done deliberately in ''Taoism Drunkard'' with the Watermelon Monster costume, with [[So Bad It's Good|memorable results]].
* ''[[
** Earlier, when Augustus Gloop is sucked up the tube in the Candy Room, the effect of him being sucked up by... suction force is very clearly done via stop-motion. The chocolate river surrounding the tube also reveals that the video was visibly sped up for said scene.
*** The "molten chocolate" looked more like brown water or sewage. (Appropriately enough, it ''was'' brown water.)
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*** Blueberry Violet doesn't look very genuine.
* ''[[It Conquered the World]]'' (later remade as ''Zontar, the Thing from Venus'') The monster... suffice it to say that the scene where it strangles the heroine had to be shot several times because the actress, Beverly Garland, kept bursting out laughing.
** Believe it or not, this is because the creator of the monster was actually trying to make it work as a believable alien
** Initially, it was supposed to be much more squat, as part of the "high-gravity origins" idea. Then Beverly Garland walked up to the outfit during a break, shouted, "Try to take over my planet, huh? Take THIS!", and kicked it over. They added the three feet of head.
* In ''[[X-Men
** How about Professor X's cameo at the end of the movie? Let's just say that if the CGI technique to make Patrick Stewart look younger looks worse than the third movie (which predates ''Wolverine'' by three years), you're doing something wrong.
* ''[[Beginning of the End]]'', a black-and-white fifties monster movie, had giant locusts invading Chicago. It was painfully obvious that it was really grasshoppers crawling over photographs of Chicago, because you could see that the perspective was wrong. Also, when they destroy the locusts by luring them into Lake Michigan to drown, we discover that Lake Michigan has a white porcelain bottom.
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* In [[John Carpenter]]'s original ''[[Halloween (film)|Halloween]]'' film, when Michael smashes one of Marion's car windows, he obviously has a wrench taped to his hand.
** There is also one scene in ''Halloween H20'' where Michael's mask is CGI. Really, ''really'' bad CGI. [[Word of God]] says that the director decided well into production to go with a different mask, so certain scenes with Michael had to be re-shot. However one scene couldn't be re-shot, so the mask had to replaced with CGI, frame by frame.
* Remus Lupin's werewolf form in the film version of ''
** Although the biggest issue with [[Suspension of Disbelief]] was not the less-than-excellent effects, but the fact that the thing didn't look remotely like a wolf, but rather like a giant monkey-man-were-chihuahua.
** There are also the atrocious "captives" during the Second Task in ''[[Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (film)|Goblet of Fire]]'', which are very clearly some sort of mannequin. Ron is all right, but Cho in particular ends up looking more like a BJD than anything human.
** The [[Chroma Key]] effects in the first film were pretty poor. When the Trio talks to Hagrid outside his hut near the end of the film, it's particularly obvious that the view of Hogwarts behind the Trio has been pasted in. The quality of the film's Quidditch match also suffered for this reason. Fortunately, they fixed these issues on the second film and the Quidditch match in that film looks much better.
** In the eighth movie's "19 years later" epilogue, the makeup and costuming used to make the characters look older... left a lot to be desired. Harry and Ron looked about five years too young, Ginny looked about ten years too young, and Hermione ''looked exactly the same''.
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* The two ''[[Lara Croft: Tomb Raider|Lara Croft Tomb Raider]]'' films have examples of this. In the first, there are the stone monkeys in the Cambodian temple and the deconstructed Husky dogs (and various other objects) in the time storm. The second however seems to be far worse. The underwater sequences at the start of the film feature bad CGI fish, but the most triumphant example has to be when Lara Croft is rescued by a submarine, and the matte work of the sunset in the background is just awful. Elsewhere in the film, we have the studio backlot as a bad substitute for a Kazakh prison, rancor lookalikes that emerged from the shadows, some clumsy [[Wire Fu]] involving a fight on top of the heads of terracotta warriors, and the [[Big Bad]] melting in acid.
* ''[[Tombstone]]'': Morgan Earp dies, and the music picks up as Wyatt stumbles out into the street with his blood on his hands, weeping, during a rainstorm. The wide shot makes it obvious that the "rain" is only falling within a twelve-foot radius around Kurt Russell.
* ''[[Damnation Alley]]'' features an uber-cheesy motorcycle vs. giant scorpions scene that looks like it was done as a 4th-grade summer-school project. What's truly mind-boggling is that this ''wasn't'' a [[B-Movie]]
* ''[[Ocean's Eleven|Ocean's Twelve]]'' suffers from this in any scene involving the laser net at the art gallery. Some of the statues in the scene where {{spoiler|Toulour reveals how he used someone with mad acrobatic skills to get past it}} are this as well.
* ''[[Death Wish 4 The Crackdown]]'' has one scene guilty of this. When Paul Kersey kills the two mob members with the wine bottle bomb, the two mobs are obviously still shot dummies just before the explosion.
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* The [[Nicolas Cage]]-starring film ''[[Knowing]]'' contains a fair bit of [[Conspicuous CGI]], including the forest animals on fire and several of the disaster sequences. The train crash sequence doesn't seem to possess any sense of weight.
* A 1999 straight-to-video film called ''Avalanche'' (or ''Escape from Alaska'') definitely falls into this trope. During the climactic scene when an avalanche strikes a town, you are treated to such special effects wizardry like people running away from an obviously superimposed white mist and models that fail to convince in every way imaginably from problems with scale to lack of convincing detail. The movie is actually worth watching for these scenes alone (including one in which a woman stands stock still in the middle of the frame staring pointedly at the camera while people run around her in a panic).
* Not a specific instance, but this trope is what caused [[C. S.
* In ''[[Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil]]'', there is a character who is accompanied everywhere he goes by a swarm of trained flies. The wires connecting the flies to the actor's body are painfully obvious in every shot they are in.
* Here's a film you wouldn't expect to see on this list: ''[[Inception]]'', which won an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. The effects in the film are almost entirely spellbinding and very well executed - except for one tiny instance when Arthur sends the elevator flying up to initiate a kick, and the passengers floating inside thud down to the floor in a very artificial manner.
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* The kill effects in ''The Summer of Massacre'' are so terrible the film makes ''[[Birdemic]]'' look like ''[[Avatar (film)|Avatar]]''.
== [[Live-Action TV]] ==
* The original ''[[Land of the Lost (TV series)|Land of the Lost]]'' was basically one long Special Effect Failure, except for the surprisingly well-done stop-motion dinosaurs.
* The entire ''[[Ultraman]]'' series was infamous for having quite cheesy special effects, especially ''Ultraman Taro.''
* According to Steve{{who}}, you will find it in every single scene of ''[[Double the Fist]]''.
* The ''White Collar'' season 1 finale ends with {{spoiler|a parked airplane exploding}}. It's painfully obvious it was either CG or a really sloppy matte job, though to be fair the show is a relatively low budget comedy-drama that normally uses basically no special effects.
** Not only there. When Tiffani Thiessen was pregnant during season 2, they pretended her character was in California. Ridiculous green screening of the Golden Gate Bridge ensued.
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* The original ''[[Doctor Who]]'' television series, particularly in its early years, brought home the cliche of "Incredibl(y Cheap) BBC Special Effects" to entire generations of fans, such as the use of Dalek ''[[Off-the-Shelf FX|action figures]]'' for scenes featuring a Dalek army. (Which ''might'' have worked, except they were ''very bad'' Dalek action figures.) The shoestring-budget look has become one of the most warmly remembered parts of the show, and a major fear of many fans prior to the premiere of the new series is that it would look too well-done.
** It was still ''generally'' good for its time (compare other sci-fi from the same time period), except for the earliest seasons and the seasons made during the UK recession of the late '70s.
*** As well as the final two seasons from 1988-1989. By the time ''Doctor Who'' had ended, a minute of the show cost one-fifth as much as a minute of ''[[Star Trek: The
*** In addition to being lovable because of its Special Effect Failures, there were times when the inability to properly articulate humanoid aliens or robots put them squarely in the [[Uncanny Valley]].
** Even the new series sometimes has
** In "[[Doctor Who
** Colin Baker's response to the people who "loved" the poor special effects is that you ''didn't'' love them: you ''tolerated'' them, you ''forgave'' them. Claiming otherwise is just your [[Nostalgia Filter]] operating.
** Tom Baker once said of the "[[Doctor Who/Recap/S14
** "[[Doctor Who/Recap/S11
** Even compared to the other creatures that have appeared on ''[[Doctor Who]]'', the beast that menaces Romana in "[[Doctor Who/Recap/S16
** "[[Doctor Who
** And then there is the memorable ''Creature of the Pit'' which bore and uncanny resemblance to a giant penis and scrotum - how BBC effects missed this is a mystery.
** In ''The End of Time'', you can see the point at which the Vinvocci's rubber cap joins their heads very clearly. It's particularly noticeable with the female actress, who has a tendency of furrowing her brow while the top of her forehead remains suspiciously immobile.
** In the otherwise beautiful "[[Doctor Who/Recap/S20
** [[Tear Jerker|The impact]] (no pun intended) of [[Alas, Poor Scrappy|Adric's demise]] in "Earthshock" is unfortunately lessened when you see the actual freigher "crash" and realize that ''it isn't even moving.'' And the explosion itself seems to have been inspired by Atari games.
** "[[Doctor Who/Recap/S31
** The [[Monster of the Week]] in "The Lazarus Experiment" would have been much more frightening was the CGI quality not in line with ''[[World of Warcraft]]''.
** "[[Doctor Who/Recap/S16
** The most egregious example of this may have been ''The Ark In Space'' where a mid-stage version of the Wirrn is literally an actor wrapped in green bubble-wrap. In fairness, bubble-wrap was new at the time.
** The Daleks went through a phase of using fire extinguishers as their main weapon. The initial effect was cool - this weird alien could that just causes people to die, like an ersatz flamethrower. Unfortunately, it lost its menace whenever the camera focused on the corpses and they were soaking wet.
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*** It's bad enough that [http://youtube.com/watch?v=GLXQm3vTv_Q Abaddon] looks like something from a video game, but the way that he's integrated into the live-action shots is just laughable.
** In ''[[The Sarah Jane Adventures]],'' the entanglement shells from ''The Warriors of Kudlak'' looked so much like jellybeans.
* Then there's ''[[Blake's
** The third season episode ''The Harvest of Kairos'' is particularly exemplary. The ''better'' of the two main types of aliens seen is modelled by a rock.
*** ''The Harvest of Kairos'' can only be enjoyed as comedy.
* In ''[[The
* ''[[Star Trek]]'' itself was resilient to this syndrome, given its budget for the time, but still occasionally fell down.
** The aliens at the end of the 'Catspaw' episode are clearly puppets with very visible strings.
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** That's not the only time. In the episode where Gibbs quits because the SEALs are ordered to take down the boat with the terror suspect on it despite his advice. The suspect promptly blows himself and the ship up. Cue another diabolically bad CGI explosion. What happened to physical special effects? Or is the entire point for these "whizzkids" to show us "Hey Ma, look what ''I'' can do on ''my'' computer!"
*** Worst of all, the team was watching the ship on satellite: if the CGI wasn't up to the task they could have simply shown the blast in low-res background shots.
* ''[[The Benny Hill Show]]'' did this on purpose; one of their most notorious [[Running Gag
** ''[[Married... with Children]]'' did the exact same thing (usually on the episodes where Al has to fix something on the roof of the house and he ends up falling).
** As did ''[[The Goodies]]'', frequently.
** ''[[Family Guy]]'' paid homage to this, despite being animated.
** As did [[Homestar Runner]] in the sbemail ''[http://www.homestarrunner.com/sbemail80.html stunt double]'', again despite being an animation. (Although technically it is within the context of a movie being made by the characters; see below.)
** Done in the [[Melee a Trois]] [[The Colbert Report|Colbert]]/[[The Daily Show|Stewart]]/O'Brien [[Crossover]], when an obvious stunt double of each host is thrown down the stairs by the other two. Conan lampshades it by jumping into frame too early and asking his double if he's
** ''[[SCTV]]'' used obvious dummies quite a lot, to hilarious effect.
** And ''[[Saturday Night Live]]'' (whose show has been filled to the brim with Special Effects Failure since 1975. It's been toned down ever since the show switched to high-definition in season 31 <ref>The 2005-2006 season; the one featuring the debuts of Bill Hader, Andy Samberg, and Kristen Wiig -- who didn't appear on the show until the episode hosted by [[My Name Is Earl|Jason Lee]]</ref>), but it does crop
** ''[[Monty Python]]'' often used this gag.
** Stuntman extraordinaire [[Super Dave Osborne]] would almost invariably be horribly injured and mutilated when his stunts went awry... or rather, a completely obvious dummy would be (often it seemed they simply stuffed an empty jumpsuit with rags, considering how it flapped and twisted in the wind as it fell from great heights).
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{{quote|''"An '''eagle-eyed''' viewer '''might''' be able to see the wires. A '''pedant''' might be able to see the wires. But I think if you're looking at the wires, you're ignoring the story. If you go to a puppet show, you can see the wires, but it's about the puppets, it's not about the string. If you go to a Punch and Judy show and you're watching the wires, you're a '''freak'''."''}}
** The quote was in reference to a sequence where the protagonists were being chased by supernaturally animated everyday objects suspended from ''incredibly'' obvious wires. Another memorable sequence in the same show was a motorbike chase in which they were on pedal bikes with motorbike noises dubbed in and against an incredibly obvious "POV behind moving vehicle" blue screen.
* The wires holding Apollo and Starbuck up during a spacewalk scene in the ''[[Battlestar Galactica
** They probably also didn't realize at the time that the "space suits" didn't cover the skin where the sleeves and gloves didn't come together.
** In "Hand of God", the final episode, the view through a porthole window is very obviously a matte painting behind the set. It would be far less noticeable, however, if the scene didn't open up ''with the camera zoomed in on it''.
** Additional failures in ''Galactica'':
*** In the pilot movie, there are scenes where Zac's spaceship is missing the left side of the cockpit shortly before he's killed by Cylons.
*** Several times throughout the series, when someone needs to use the joystick inside the Vipers, the hand on the joystick is Boomer's (a black man), even when the pilot is white.
*** In a scene where Starbuck's Viper is hit, sparks shoot out of the cockpit, but fall through the empty hole where the cockpit glass is supposed to be, never mind that he's supposed to be in space, so the sparks shouldn't ''fall'' anyway.
* Speaking of ''Galactica'', the [[Battlestar Galactica
** In the season 1 episode "Water", the water gushing out of the punctured containers reeks of bad CGI.
** In the season 3 episode "Rapture", when the sun goes nova, the characters see it framed between the natural pillars of the Temple of Five. Moment of symbolic significance... except the sunlight on the Temple comes from a source to the left and slightly behind the camera, not from the nova in the dead center of the screen. Though in the above 2 cases the [[Rule of Cool]] means it doesn't really detract from the effect.
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** Angel's big failure was the attempt at redesigning vampire makeup in the pilot episode. They quickly went back to the Buffy-style stuff.
*** There's one scene in "Spin The Bottle" where David Boreanaz and Vincent Kartheiser's stunt doubles are clearly visible, and another in one of the Pylea eps where the bulge of Amy Acker's microphone pack under her costume is seen.
* The 90's series ''Werewolf'' was a ''[[The Fugitive (TV series)|Fugitive]]'' clone featuring a young man on the run because he got bitten by a wolf, and every full moon after that... well, you get the idea. The actual werewolf costume looked pretty scary and
* The 2002 Taiwanese television series ''Wind and Cloud'' received an unfortunate reputation in Finland because of this. It featured an infamous magical-sonic-beam-attack of a sort... Which was basically created by having the user throw a bunch of hula-hoops at the opponent. Other special attacks were fairly similar in quality, too.
* ''[[Knight Rider]]'': The obligatory Turbo Boost sequences were frequently convincing, but were just as frequently lame, including at least one instance where, rather than a stunt car, what we see is plainly a matchbox toy being tossed over a miniature
** Even if a stunt car is used in a [[Ramp Jump]] or Turbo Boost scene, one can often see through the empty engine compartment. The landings aren't always cut away properly either, so parts of K.I.T.T. can frequently seen come off and fly away.
** Pretty much every episode of Knight Rider has a multitude of special effect failures. Besides the visible ramps and cheap car bodies used for jumping scenes, every time K.I.T.T. is supposed to be driving really, really fast is actually just a sped-up scene, which becomes obvious when the vehicle is making unrealistically sharp turns at full speed. Theres also a stunt driver that looks nothing like David Hasselhoff (mainly due to his big head/hair), the console in the car and car windows disappearing and reappearing in outside shots, a clearly visible "ghost driver" wearing a weird flour-bag to conceal himself driving K.I.T.T. when the car is on autopilot, and many, many more. There was even a whole german website just listing every instance of this trope for Knight Rider.
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* ''[[Goosebumps]]'' was a kids TV series, which already means it'll have a low budget. But combine that with the fact it's a horror anthology and you get some of the most awful special effects this side of the live-action ''[[Animorphs (TV series)|Animorphs]]''. Of course, kids watching it won't notice, but when watching it as an adult for nostalgia reasons... yeah.
* Parodied in ''[[The Colbert Report|A Colbert Christmas]]: [[Christmas Special|The Greatest Gift Of All]]'', which is every cheesy Christmas trope you can think of turned [[Up to Eleven]] ''[[Up to Eleven|eleven]]''. Elvis Costello is amazed when Stephen reveals that the "reindeer" hired for the show are actually just goats with antlers. "Well, you can't tell!" Cut to a miniature goat with a pair of toy antlers tied to its head.
* An episode of ''[[The Professionals]]'' had a car going off a cliff in slow
* Happens in ''[[Lost]]'' during the scene in which Locke {{spoiler|is falling out of a building after his father pushes him.}} The green screen/CGI is pretty blatant.
** Also happens any time one of the polar bears is shown closely. They look like they were modeled on a 10-year old Macintosh.
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** An episode of Season 2 suffered from a shockingly bad computer-rendered plane that clashed very badly with the show's general adherence to believable practical effects.
** A {{spoiler|suitcase nuke going off}} early in Season 6 looked pretty obviously fake, but then, it's understandable; they couldn't exactly film {{spoiler|an actual nuclear weapon exploding}}.
* ''[[Merlin (TV series)|Merlin]]''
* The 1996-1998 TV series ''The Adventures of Sinbad'' came in just as CGI effects started to get somewhat affordable. Alas, cheap CGI effects were still horrible, and to make matters worse, any CGI monster they had would be recolored re-used (same animations and all) at least a couple of times throughout the show. Couple this with a nearly fetish-like love for making the heroes fight giant, badly bluescreened animals, and you've got a show that's so bad it's good.
* ''[[Raven]]'' tries not to use special effects all that much, but when it does, it smashes into this trope -- ''hard''. It includes such things as "floating" orbs of fire, "demons", who look exactly like what's playing them (namely blokes standing around in robes), and people "disappearing", or being "brought back" in flashes of light.
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** An equally unconvincing rat puppet appears as a [[Cat Scare]] in the third installment of the ''Rose Red'' miniseries. Its gaping mouth in close-up is obviously plastic, and doesn't even have a rodent's buck teeth. To make matters worse, the real rat shown scampering away from the scene is a different shade of gray-brown.
* In the 1950s show ''The Adventures of William Tell'', the famous crossbow bolt that pierces the apple in the first episode is quite obviously riding a very visible wire. This wouldn't be so bad if that shot hadn't been used in the opening credits every single week.
* The early seasons of ''[[Hercules: The Legendary Journeys]]'' were among the first on TV to use CGI (it was about 1993). They were cheap, and
* One of the powers associated with becoming a werewolf on ''[[Big Wolf on Campus]]'' is apparently [http://www.bigwolfoncampus.org/images/episodes/1-01/cap7990.jpg growing a sixth finger on each (rubber) hand]. Additionally, Tommy's later [http://www.bigwolfoncampus.org/images/episodes/3-07/lmage228.jpg less lupine appearance] is a result of [[Real Life Writes the Plot|actor Brandon Quinn being allergic to the original make up]].
* ''[[The X-Files]]'' usually made their effects fairly believable, but the episode "Piper Maru", which featured a submarine that could not have been more obviously fake.
** The same could be said for the "monster" in "Arcadia" and the cat that attacks Mulder in "Grotesque".
** And the cat that attacks both Mulder AND Scully in "Tesos dos Bichos". It was a cat puppet, but because Gillian Anderson is allergic to cats, they had to use rabbit
** In "Shapes" the onscreen transformation was great, the two times the werewolf actually appeared it looked laughably fake. To their credit, they seemed to realize this limitation and kept it offscreen almost the entire episode; Even during its two actual appearances it was either out of focus or only briefly seen running across the screen.
* ''[[Jason of Star Command]]'' is rather notable for the quality (relative to its time and the fact that it was a Filmation production) and ''quantity'' of its model shots and space footage, but in the ''very first episode'', Jason goes on a spacewalk ([[Batman Can Breathe in Space|Protected only by an invisible force field]]) to rescue his commander (Played by James Doohan!). The role of "space" is played by a black curtain with shiny spots on it. You can ''see over the top of'' '''space'''. You can even ''see'' '''space's''' ''curtain rod!''.
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** The "rip in the universe" effect in the episode ''As Time Goes By'' was awful.
* In the Christmas episode of ''[[Corner Gas]]'', Oscar and Emma's car has been digitally added into the exterior shots of the house.
* ''[[The Brittas Empire]]'' has an episode with an Emu or Ostrich running wild in the centre, which leads to several amusing effects failures. They actually managed to get a live version of the animal, but presumably it was too dangerous to let the actors interact with it. So you either get a live ostrich/emu running down a corridor dragging an obvious dummy, or human actors interacting with a hand puppet sticking over a bathroom stall. To their credit, the people involved seemed to realise this problem so the shots with the fake ostrich/emu are so obviously fake that it actually adds to the comedy.
* ''[[Farscape]]'' is known for its rather impressive special effects, but there's just one scene in which it fails miserably. In the ''[[Die Hard]]'' episode "I Shrink Therefore I Am", which is filled with (mostly) very well-done effects in which people are shrunk and grown and interact with each other, a glimpse we get through a viewscreen of Noranti floating out in space rather clearly indicates the strings holding her up. Given that the scene is [[Played for Laughs]], though, it may or may not be deliberate.
** Not to mention the episode "Beware of Dog" where a creature brought on board Moya has two forms: the first a very convincing animatronic puppet, and the second a goofy looking costume that the cast and crew took to calling the "Tandoori Chicken."
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* While ''[[The Greatest American Hero]]'' never did have the Greatest American Special Effects, some episodes were downright painful. In one, Ralph has to stop some Soviet agents from getting picked up by a sub, so he collides with the sub to scare it off. The collision with the "conning tower" is laughably bad (the clearly wooden structure shakes), and it obviously takes place inside on a soundstage.
* At the climax of the second-season premiere of the 80's ''[[War of the Worlds (TV series)|War of the Worlds]]'', the Blackwood Project team and mercenary John Kincaid run to escape their home, which had been rigged with enough explosives to completely destroy it. The resulting explosion as the characters reach safety is an obvious model miniature that looks poorly designed and flimsy, with thin pieces of cardboard flying around as the "building" explodes.
* ''[[Have I Got News for You]]'' often introduces incredibly cheap props or animations for one-off bonus rounds.
{{quote|'''Paul Merton:''' "The visual effects on this programme are so stunning, we're ''almost'' doing radio."}}
* ''[[Gilligan's Island]]'' has its share of failures:
** In Season 3, When they use the bamboo car, you can often see the rope pulling the car.
** In the episode where Gilligan is invisible, When Mary Ann holds a glass of milk for Gilligan to drink, the milk appears to be disappearing through a straw, but you can see the tube coming out of her sleeve and into the bottom of the glass.
* Invoked in ''[[Hello Cheeky]]'''s parody of disaster movies, ''The Blazing Bedsitter''. An underlying joke throughout the whole sketch is that the actors make up disasters going on outside the room, because they don't have any other set.
{{quote|'''John:''' ''(looking out the window)'' And oh my god, here comes a tidal wave! ''(is splashed with water -- deadpan)'' We are all going to drown.}}
* The 1980s revival of ''[[Mission: Impossible]]'' would have been justified in disavowing some of its special effects. Example: the fight on Sydney Harbour Bridge in "The Golden Serpent, Part 1" combines actual footwork shot on location with studio-bound green-screen work which was unconvincing even in 1989. Now... well...
* Deliberately done for period flavor in the 1950s and 1960s-flavored episodes of ''[[WandaVision]]''.
=== Game Shows ===
* A compilation of prop and animal screw-ups can be seen [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ajb87uDShbU here].
** And [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGmgihoa5G8&feature=related another].
*** [[Crowning Moment of Funny|You broke our wheel!]]
* Two examples of this on ''[[The Price Is Right]]'':
** During the dreaded "Drewcases" era of the show (first half of Season 37), the graphics for trips were briefly replaced by green screens. [[Fremantle Media]] had promised that they would instead be replaced by video walls, but they supposedly instead chose green screens because they were cheaper. This is actually a [[Subverted Trope|subversion]] of this trope, as the change was almost universally hated by fans on ALL sides of the show's [[Broken Base]] not because it looked bad on TV, but because it looked bad in the studio. Since the contestants and audience wouldn't be seeing exactly the same thing the viewers at home saw, and since contestants couldn't be accommodated the same way that, say, a meteorologist doing a weather forecast could, the change was very jarring. So hated was the change that, on the episode airing February 12, 2009, Fremantle finally sucked it up and implemented video walls!
** When Clock Game was played for the first time after the Turntable change in March 2003, the producers discovered that the chroma key area (where a headshot of the contestant appears) was the exact same shade of blue as the blue spot in the pink, purple, and blue Turntable wall. Their first solution was to put a yellow circle background behind the game, but when that didn't work either, they just repainted the game. In May 2003, Clock Game redebuted with a somewhat ugly-looking yellow border and a green chroma key box. As of November 2005, the game's border is now a much more tolerable...'''[[Double Subversion|light blue!!!]]'''
* There were actually a few times in which something broke in the American version of ''[[Big Brother]]''. One challenge had to be repeated because someone's machine was malfunctioning.
** There were also a few in Big Brother 8.
*** Supposedly, Jameka's machine in the final veto challenge was malfunctioning, but nobody seemed to notice.
*** During the first part of the final 3 head of household, the contestants had to hold onto their keys and jump over a spinning rabbit. (while water was pouring down on them) Unfortunately, one of them (Probably Danielle, since she did hit it when she was eliminated) accidentally kicked or landed on the rabbit as it came by (at least several times) and the machine broke. This meant that Zach and Dick (The two left after it broke) were more or less just standing there.
* This [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Izet8zN1vmE moment] from Catch Phrase....it's hard to believe this was an accident.
* ''[[Password]]'', ''Password Plus'' and ''Super Password'' has actually had this happen quite a bit. There were a few moments in which the other passwords that have yet to have been played were accidentally revealed, another moment where the wrong word was revealed at the start of the puzzle.
** There's the time where one of the celebrity contestants couldn't quite see the password. Whoops.
* In ''Countdown'' Carol [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPne-KkQ3rA suddenly has a stagehand's hand] appear from behind the letter cards.
** The same thing happened with a puzzle board on the last episode of ''[[Body Language (TV series)|Body Language]]''.
* ''[[Wheel of Fortune]]'' has some pretty sloppy editing across the board. To wit:
** On a 1988 episode, a round was thrown out and re-shot. However, they didn't remove all of the thrown-out round, so you got "Our category for this round is Phrase…" [10 seconds later] "…once again, our category is People."
** In fall 1989, some of the puzzles had zeroes instead of O's. These were blatantly obvious, as they didn't match the rest of the letters at all.
** When the show still had returning champions, the contestant backdrops would display the contestant's running total for their combined episodes. These displays held five digits, but one particularly lucky contestant was north of $100,000 by her third day, so host Pat Sajak taped a "1" to her backdrop.
** Back when the board was still mechanical, both Vanna White and predecessor Susan Stafford sometimes turned letters so hard that the letters themselves slid partway off the trilon (the little three-sided boxes they turned).
** Similarly, with the electronic board, sometimes a letter just won't reveal itself when Vanna touches it. She's had to wait as long as 10 seconds to get the stubborn letter to reveal.
** Sometimes, the camera over the Wheel doesn't catch it as it stops to show what the contestant landed on. As a result, a spin from another episode may be dubbed in. Most of the time this is very obvious, as the spin may come from a different round, or show the different episode's Prize wedge still present.
** This is also present during the Final Spin. If Pat hits Bankrupt or Lose a Turn, they edit it out and he spins again. Sometimes, you can tell that the original spin was re-shot, because the Wheel will suddenly jump to a totally different spot as it comes to a stop.
** On several occasions, the graphic showing the puzzle category has disappeared. And at least three times, they've put the wrong one in.
** At least twice, a letter was revealed in the [[Bonus Round]] that the contestant did not call. On both instances, it led to a win, and it was decided to let the contestant keep the prize.
* Every so often, the crew would engineer the entryway to the ''[[Match Game]]'' set not opening as a prank to Gene Rayburn. On one memorable occasion, Rayburn [[Dungeon Bypass|smashed right through]].
* While Ray Combs was host of ''[[Family Feud]]'', the electronic portion of the game board (which displayed the show's logo in the intro and going into commercial, and the answers in [[Bonus Round|Fast Money]]) was prone to errors. In one instance, it erased the "FE" from the opening logo, leading to Ray and one family making several jokes about the "Family Ud".
== [[Music]] ==
* In a rare auditory example, the [[Laugh Track]] skips at one point on the third verse to [[Ray Stevens]]' "The Streak".
* The car morphing into a pimpmobile from Coolio's "Fantastic Voyage" video. THAT IS NOT HOW MORPHING IS DONE. It's so bad the copyright owner is embarrassed.
* [[Invoked Trope]] in the video for "Jurassic Park" by [["Weird Al" Yankovic]]. Most of the video is done in [[Stop Motion|Claymation]], but when the park's gates are shown a second time, one of the torches has gone out - so an arm reaches in and lights it with a lighter.
* The effects for [[ZZ Top]]'s music video for [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y9zw_79tlgM&feature=related "Doubleback"] are pretty bad.
* The poorly Photoshopped bus stop sign in the "Friday" music video by [[Rebecca Black]]. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CD2LRROpph0\]
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* The borderline [[Body Horror]] [http://i40.tinypic.com/55m1c7.jpg 'floating' effect] from Blancmange's 'Lose Your Love' music video. Not to mention it failed as soon as it started, unless [[Surreal Music Video|it was intentional]].
== [[Professional Wrestling]] ==
* During the ''[[World Wrestling Entertainment|WWE]] Summerslam 1997'' match between [[Mick Foley|Mankind]] and [[Triple H|Hunter Hearst Helmsley]], Mankind, at one point after getting beaten down, suddenly ripped his shirt off, then had a [[My Name Is Inigo Montoya]] comeback, leaving fans wondering what was going on. Mick Foley (aka Mankind) later shed some light on the subject in his autobiography: turns out, there was supposed to be a heart-shaped tattoo on his chest, symbolizing his transformation into his former fantasy persona from his high school/college days, Dude Love (who fans had been introduced to through a series of [[Worked Shoot]] interviews in the weeks before the match). Unfortunately, Mick forgot to get the tattoo done, and didn't realize it until he was due to make his entrance for his match. Thinking quickly, he scrawled the heart on his chest with a magic marker; unfortunately, by the time of [[The Reveal]], it had sweated off. Oops.
* And then there's the big unmasking of [[Kane (wrestling)|Kane]] at the hands of [[Triple H]]. Kane's backstory had him as a childhood burn victim, so naturally, this was a big deal. Unfortunately, the burn makeup under the mask completely failed to hold up through the match, so when Kane did unmask, he didn't look like a victim of a horrible house fire so much as a victim of an attack by a psychotic Mary Kay lady and a deranged barber with a thing for [[The Three Stooges|Larry Fine]]. Thankfully, rather then press on with the storyline, the next week, Kane appeared without makeup, but still claiming to be terribly burned, thus making the false scarring yet another dimension of his uniquely psychotic delusions.
** There have been some theories as to why Kane's make-up job was so horrific. The most popular one was the heavy black eyeliner Kane wore under his mask started to run. Thus when he unmasked, his face was covered in black make-up splotches. It also did not help that when he removed his mask, it was revealed that Kane was completely bald on the top of his head save for the hair on his sides. The long locks he sported for years were actually part of the mask itself and he grew out what hair he had left. The WWE quickly reacted to this; having Kane lose the make-up, shave himself completely bald and have him wear a towel over his head for a few weeks afterwards before making another reveal.
** Well, they ''tried'' to continue it. For a while when they showed video of the unmasking they slowed the tape down, added a silly sound effect that was supposed to be ominous or something, and used a cheesy effect to distort his face. To point out how bad it was, when something is simply too cheesy for [[Vince McMahon]]...
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5oMiqJRVqs Shockmaster]. You really need to watch it, but lets give a rundown of what happens. 1. Explosions go off. 2. Shockmaster trips and falls through the wall. 3. Shockmaster's mask, a purple-silver spray-painted [[Star Wars]] Storm Trooper one, falls off, revealing the bald head of Fred Ottman, AKA "Tugboat". 4. Everyone present starts cracking up (clearly dropping a couple f-bombs on live television), including the announcers 5. Voice-over guy who desperately tries to salvage the segment and fails, due to the voice modulator sounding like a cardboard tube.
** What makes it worse is that the only part of this that could have been salvaged was the "trip and fall" part. Ottman had actually had a few practice-runs and everything had gone fine, but when it came time to do it live, an extra cross-beam was added he didn't see until he was already mid-jump. If things had gone off without a hitch, it would have been a really bad-ass entrance. The costume and voice, however, still would have been atrocious.
* During one [[World Wrestling Entertainment|WWE]] PPV, [[The Undertaker]]'s entrance made it appear as if he was floating down to the ring. This would've looked cool, except the cameras filming the entranceway were angled completely wrong and revealed the board he was standing on.
== [[Theatre]] ==
* Stuff like this has been known to happen during a play. Even professionally trained actors can probably tell you of a story where something either went wrong during the rehearsals, performances, or even Opening Night! Generally it's best to just improvise.
** Sometimes it can be amusing, such as [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_kx3byv8ow Peter Pan destroying the Darlings' bedroom and Jane suddenly flying out of bed], the latter of which seems to [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vQya_JZpsFw&feature=related happen] a bit more [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCXULpnV_rI&feature=related than you think].
** The [http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/61/Fiasco! first story] is a Crowning Moment of Awesome in abject special-effect failure.
* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8MkuzG-rNU Not to fear little children, I will hel-"]
* ''[[Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark]]'' had a first preview that [http://www.avclub.com/articles/spiderman-turn-off-the-dark-preview-goes-off-witho,48361/ didn't go so well.]
== [[Video Games]] ==
* The ''[[Call of Duty]]'' series could be a certain offender of this, since certain effects in multiplayer looks 2D contrary to today's gaming which features full around 3D explosions.
* In ''[[Star Control]] 3'', there is a race called the Harika/Yorn. The Harika are a race of green goblin-like aliens, while the Yorn is a rodent species they use as food. As with most aliens in ''Star Control 3'', they are played by puppets. At one point, the Harika captain you speak to eats one of the Yorn... which is done by having the Yorn puppet slide in an incredibly awkward fashion up the Harika's chest, go into his mouth, and ''sit there'' for about thirty seconds before the screen [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScwquQ8wjvo#t=0m27s abruptly cuts to the original shot of Harika with Yorn in pocket].
** For that matter, pretty much all of the aliens fall under this trope. It was actually marketed as a feature that they were 3D (this being about the time when 3D computer graphics were the Next Big Thing and thus had to be used regardless of whether it was a good idea or not) but the models were so poor that they all looked considerably worse than the stylised animated 2D pictures used in ''SC2''.
* The original ''[[Twisted Metal]]'' has, in its endings, a picture of Calypso... played by an actor with burn makeup that looks like a community theater version of [[A Nightmare on Elm Street|Freddy Krueger]]. This is a holdover from the nine-different-levels-of-failure original FMV endings, which feature such highlights as Needles Kane played by a man in a pathetic clown mask. Understandably, the series has used animated or CGI endings ever since.
* The ''[[Command
** [[Emperor: Battle for Dune]] wasn't all that better. The actors' skin will occasionally have green highlights when there is no green light source nearby. The imperial crown is also very clearly made of rubber, and characters may occasionally stretch it out when placing in on their heads.
* The 2006 teaser video for ''[[Duke Nukem Forever]]'' had sequences showing nothing more challenging than Duke doing arm curls with a dumbbell; after ten years, they couldn't accomplish this without badly clipping his arms.
* ''[[The Force Unleashed]] 2'' had amazing graphics for the most part. Of course, if you start blowing up barrels, the barrels in the three-dimensional world look like some two-dimensional thing out of the [[Nintendo 64]].
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* In the [[Obvious Beta|infamously unpolished]] ''[[Ultima IX]]'', a cutscene has [[Big Bad|the Guardian]] chucking a fireball at {{spoiler|Samhayne}}. The fireball ''misses the victim by a yard'', upon which he spins ''in the wrong direction'' (from how he would have spun if the spell had actually made contact) and collapses.
** Not to mention, when you poison Lord British with bread, he grabs his neck and falls...then stands right back up...then falls down again.
* In the ''[[
* Both ''[[Guitar Hero]]'' and ''[[Rock Band]]'' neglect to give their characters guitar straps, likely to make it easier for them to easily swing around in grandiose fashion, if not for technology limitations. However, the problem is that they're still motion-capped as if they're wearing them, so you'll see several moments of guitars floating in front of their musicians or just plain being held as if they're there.
* One scene in ''[[Xenogears]]'' has Citan and Sigmund drinking tea on the Yggdrasil during one cut scene. As they drink, their sprites do not move at all, while the tea cups simply float to their mouths. They messed up ''tea cups...''
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* ''[[Mario Party]] 8'' has this for its wide screen mode. Only the menus and the game boards are displayed in wide screen. The mini games themselves are displayed in standard mode (4:3) with colorful borders on both sides to fill in the gaps if one is playing in wide screen mode.
* ''[[Dragon Age II]]'' can have odd graphical failures appear for seemingly no reason, such as any fire animation being replaced with white pixelation, and Orsino and Meredith's outfits being rendered as unfinished grey. It's not a widely reported problem, but it happens.
* In ''[[Rune Factory]] 2'', there are some maps that are presented with a top-down camera angle, and others (like areas of the town) that are closer to the ground with more of a side-view camera angle. The problem is when it rains, it's simply an overlay of the rain animation on top of the screen. It looks okay in the top-view, but in the side-view you'll see the rain fall and splash on the sky itself. And sometimes [[NPC
* The ''[[Fallout: New Vegas]]'' add-on ''Dead Money'' pushes the limits of the Gamebryo engine when in dialogue with Christine. For the first half of the mission, she is unable to speak, so her conversation is a bracketed description of her physical responses to your dialogue. The game tries its best to have her character model imitate what the text says, to jarring results, especially when a "nod" is her expressionless face looking down and then up very quickly.
* Opening Remake 101: When remaking the [[Dragonball Z]] opening in CG, there's three things you shouldn't do - make the characters look like arthritic Lego people that barely emote, have Chaozu look like he came from the [[Uncanny Valley]], and make sure that when Gohan flies past; not to noclip through his head. Sadly [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2FmKGZZNggI&feature=related the opening to Budokai does all three].
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* ''[[Halo]] 2'' really pushed the limits of the Xbox's graphics rendering engine, and it shows, mostly in the cutscenes. They sometimes took up to a minute to completely render, leaving the graphics fuzzy and indistinct, characters not appearing where they should be or most jarringly of all ''missing body parts''. It's quite amusing when for about thirty seconds, you get told how awesome those indistinct blobs of the Orbital Defense network cannons are by a headless Sgt. Johnson, who is speaking to a floating helmet and arm.
** Averted in ''[[Halo 3]]'' where the explosions look beautifully rendered, especially in Theater mode. [[Bungie]] ''[[Enforced Trope|HAD]]'' to make the game look good because of Theater, since now the plaer would allowed to examine the landscape as long as he wanted, wherever he wanted. The fact that they had to use so many cheats in the first ''Halo'' game is the reason why Theater wasn't included in the ''Anniversary'' rerelease.
* ''[[Knights of the Old Republic]] 2'' had Kreia's flashback about her last days as Dark Lady of the Sith. When Sion grabs her head and slams her against the wall, his arm briefly runs through the camera. The developers would note post-release that the engine was particularly bad for cutscenes, to the point they'd have used less visual storytelling if they knew that going in and had to force many of the plot events to happen on the player's ship to minimize issues with the animation system.
** In the original, Mission pleading with the player to help her brother Griff could easily be spoiled if, for example, she was holding a vibroblade. Because she never actually puts ''down'' her weapons before begging, she proceeds to ram about three feet of vibroblade through her own head.
* Lara's teenager model in ''[[Tomb Raider
== [[Web Comics]] ==
* Parodied by ''[http://freefall.purrsia.com/ff500/fv00448.htm Freefall]''.
* Referenced in ''[[Skin Horse]]'' where UNITY refers to Tip's new wolf form as a [[media:
* Ever-omnipresent, as long with [[Off-the-Shelf FX]], in ''[[The B-Movie Comic|The B Movie Comic]]''.
== [[Web Original]] ==
* In a combination of this trope and [[Revealing Coverup]], in [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8SMorJXe5l4 this video of a beer-bottle domino experiment], it's quite apparent that the π sign 40 seconds in is a CG coverup of [[No Swastikas|a rather more infamous symbol]] in the original footage due to the jitter of the sign.
* ''[[Homestar Runner]]'' poked fun of these with the ''Dangeresque'' films, with such things as scaling a skyscraper that's really a piece of cardboard on the ground with the camera tipped to one side. And then Homestar drops his glasses on the cardboard.
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* [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI0TC4xBkqY This] [[So Bad It's Good|fantastically bad]] [[Slender Man Mythos]] video, inventively titled "SLENDER MAN," features quite possibly the worst costume of the titular character in existence. Since they also managed to mess up ''video distortion'' effects, it's all the more obvious.
== [[Western Animation]] ==
* Parodied in the ''[[Futurama]]'' episode guest starring (and spoofing) ''[[Star Trek]]'', where the energy-being Melllvar looks like the standard bad effect used in the original 1960s series. He even Lampshades this when told that he looks like a cheap effect by screaming that he's not and electrocuting a [[Red Shirt]]. '''Again.'''
* In the Finale of [[Avatar: The Last Airbender]] the airships are [[Conspicuous CG]] rendered at a noticeably low and choppy framerate that gives the impression of a [[Super Nintendo Entertainment System]] Super FX game.
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** When the fairies go to Cloudtower, and the Trix take temporary control of the school (which is basically a living castle), the entire building shakes and even rotates slightly. When doing this, it ''blends'' with the rock of the mountain it's built on.
** In the last episode of the season, there's a scene with rocks falling in water, rendered in an ''atrocious'' way.
* Despite the otherwise high quality of the show, ''[[Justice League Unlimited]] ''[[Conspicuous CG|had moments where it was quite obvious that CGI was used.]] Most notably where the Batplane was trying to Intercept a Nuclear Missile over the
** The CG intro for the first season was pretty jarring and, frankly, just outright ugly. Later seasons used more traditional animation and better CG effects.
* Parodied in an episode of ''[[Freakazoid!]]'' that introduced the invisible Egyptian wizard Invisibo: The [[Narrator]] announced that the special effects aren't very scary, and asks the viewers to pretend they are. For the next couple of minutes, Invisibo is represented by a rod suspended by very obvious strings. After this goes on for a while, the narrator announces that they've embarrassed the network executives into giving them a bigger special effects budget, after which Invisibo's rod actually floats and [[Power Glows|glows]].
* ''[[Voltron The Third Dimension]]'' had pretty lame CG already, but it actually had a disturbingly glaring flaw kept in the ''[[Stock Footage]]!'' When the Lions' control sticks slide into place, you can actually see them ''clip through the pilot's knees'', and they kept this everytime the sequence is shown!
* [[
** This is probably just [[Stylistic Suck]] though.
** It could also be for Nickelodeon pacing the production company for the short (all the shorts for the show are made in separate studios, save for ''[[Action League NOW]]'' and the Henry and June shorts, which were made in-house), causing them to have less time to edit in order to get the finished short to Nickelodeon on time.
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* Deliberately invoked by the 1947 [[Tex Avery]] cartoon ''Lucky Ducky''; during one chase scene, the two dimwit hunters and the duck they're chasing run past a "Technicolor Ends Here" sign, beyond which the characters and scenery [[Color Failure|lose all their color]]. One of the hunters gets run over by the other one right next to the sign as the chase resumes, leaving him half in monochrome and half in color.
* ''[[Rollbots]]'' has had a few.
** Anytime Spin runs the [[Stock Footage|training
** At several points in ''Prophecies and Guesstimates'', once Spin's [[Eleventh-Hour Superpower]] activates, Spin is not glowing when supposed to be.
*** In the same episode, when Bunto confronts Spin, the blockade he's set up disappears after a few seconds.
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** ''One Shall Rise Part 2'' has Miko being dragged away from the base with very jerky animation and poor lighting.
* ''[[G.I. Joe: Renegades]]'' has horrible effects to show slow moving falling debris around the start of the Tomax & Xamot episode. It's very embarrassing.
* Parts of ''[[Captain N: The
** If you want to compare. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNygeXcd8_4 Unfinished] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BM1ZCStJ_a4 Version] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMtziF4tEXY One] and [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMx_9wgqgIw&feature=related The] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9SkiSuG5d4o&feature= Finished] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ajDEFdN9SY4&feature=related Version] [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDmwxgA9g5E&feature=related Two]
* [[Batman: The Animated Series]] has one noticeable one. In the episode "Clock King", there's a scene with Batman and Alfred in a Rolls Royce, normal quality animation except the only thing visible through the car windows is pure white. This is a failure for two reasons - no background and the series was known for having backgrounds created on black paper.
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