Stylistic Callback

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Somewhere between Mythology Gag, Development Gag, Continuity Nod and Production Throwback. This is when a work references stylistic changes since prior works in the same series.

When this is used to refer to events that happened at the time of the referenced style, it's a Retraux Flashback.

Examples of Stylistic Callback include:

Newspaper Comics

• Garfield marked its 25th anniversary with a Story Arc where 2003 Garfield meets 1978 Garfield.
• This Luann strip that ran several days before its 25th anniversary has the 2010 main characters commenting on their 1985 designs. "I'm glad WE never looked that dumb..."
• In one "Ginger Meggs" strip, Ginger has a caricature done and says it looks nothing like him. The caricature is the original, when-your-grandparents-were-young artwork.
• There was an Alley Oop story arc a few years ago where Alley's no-good cousin Early Oop shows up in Moo and makes trouble by impersonating Alley, despite Alley's insistence that they look nothing alike. Early is designed to look like Alley's original appearance.

Video Games

• At one point in the original Paper Mario, there's a pot Mario can jump into. If he does, he comes back out as his sprite from Donkey Kong.
  • There's a similar curtain that does this in Super Mario RPG.
  • In Paper Mario: The Thousand-Year Door, There's a curtain in an area near the end of the game that does this to Mario and all of his partners.
  • Mario's blue-clothes-red-overalls Palette Swap in the Super Smash Bros.. games is the color scheme he used in his first Video Game appearance as the protagonist in Donkey Kong which was also famously featured on the cover of the first issue of Nintendo Power.
  • Super Mario Odyssey has whole 2D sections that play out across the flat side of buildings and objects, with sprites based off the original Super Mario Bros. games.
• The Timeless River in Kingdom Hearts II is one big one to black and white Disney shorts. Also in the same game, at the start as well as in the Timeless River Sora wears his outfit from the original game.
• The "1st gen ring" from The Legend of Zelda Oracle Games.
• Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots is full of these, starting with flashbacks to the PlayStation-era graphics of Metal Gear Solid, up to and including a fully playable flashback sequence with graphics and gameplay straight out of Metal Gear Solid.

Web Animation

• This occurs in the Homestar Runner cartoon No Hands On Deck!

Homestar Runner: Yeah, melonade! We haven't talked about that much lately! Maybe we can eat some (His head turns into his 2000 design's head) 2000 Homestar: marshmallows (His head turns back to normal) Homestar Runner: too!

Western Animation

• In the The Simpsons episode "Homerazzi" there is one scene where Marge is taking a picture of Homer, Bart, and Lisa as they appeared on "The Tracy Ullman Show" under a banner saying "Happy 1987". After the picture is taken, they fix their hair to become the normal versions.
• In Runaway Brain, after the mind swap Julius finds some photos in Mickey's wallet. One of them is of Mickey as he looked in Steamboat Willie.