True Art Is Foreign

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
"And the Japanese, the true geniuses behind the world of video games. Pah, I throw my scorn upon such incompetents of the West who would mock the true art of the Japanese with 'games' such as Baldur's Gate and Madden. Perhaps it is that the West is not as intelligent as the East, but this is a matter for another day."
—Pump, Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden
"Critics first loved the episode, but that all changed when they found out it wasn't European."
—Leonard Maltin, Freakazoid

Art is an interesting thing. It comes in a multitude of regional and cultural variations, each one with a unique voice. Each culture produces some great works, and a lot of horrible works, which may have a general cultural style underlying them. Every now and then, somebody finds a particular cultural voice that speaks to them on a deeper level, and they become a fan of it. So far, we're at perfectly healthy and reasonable levels of enjoyment.

In each of these groups, however, there is a small, but vocal, subset that becomes rabidly obsessed with the output of a given culture. They will insist that anything produced domestically is purest garbage, and that the only True Art Is Foreign – and further, from their specific chosen country only. Anybody who disagrees with them is an object of scorn; the uneducated, unwashed mouth-breathers who are so very, very blinded by the regurgitated pablum their country calls "art". They just don't understand the pure vision and artistic integrity that is inherent in this other culture!

A Sub-Trope of Foreign Culture Fetish. Needless to say, the bizarre monomania and arrogance of these folks is a leading cause of Hype Aversion.

This attitude may be caused in part by the Import Filter; since critics don't see much of the tripe that comes out in foreign countries, it leads them to think that the grass is greener on the other side. Though in recent years with the advent of faster internet, the Import Filter concerning media has weakened somewhat since dreck also gets uploaded.

See also Cultural Cringe, Germans Love David Hasselhoff and Made in Country X.

Examples of True Art Is Foreign include:

Anime and Manga

  • Anime is constantly put on a pedestal over most Western Animation. Most fans shrug Western Animation off as childish kids shows or films. By the way – in Japan, "anime" refers to anything that's animated, regardless of its origin.
  • Some of the Japanese fans prefer English dubs to the original Japanese. Likewise many fans will argue dubs are a disservice to the original product. The arguments can get pretty ugly.

Comic Books

Films

  • In film criticism circles, the paragon of artistic virtue is, again, France, though this has been so roundly mocked that many critics take refuge in Eastern European films instead.
    • Although (South) Korean cinema is being hailed by many as essentially the new "French New Wave".
    • Recently, Iranian film is the coming thing. In Europe, at least.
  • The horror genre tends to be very big on foreign films. 1970s Italian horror receives a lot of praise, as do modern East Asian horror films and 1920s German silent films. Lately, Western Europe, particularly France, has come to be a major center for the genre. In keeping with this trope, the general consensus in the horror community is that most American horror is either too sanitized, mass-market and teen-focused or too schlocky and poorly-made to be truly effective, the last great era for it being either The Seventies or The Eighties depending on who you ask. And don't get a horror fan started on American remakes of foreign horror films.
  • Canadian film is a bit screwy in this respect. Canadian films are often thought of as arty and weird (consider The Sweet Hereafter, and lesser-known works like Kissed and Last Night). However, this has the inverse effect because this means hardly anyone goes to see them in Canada, while they're often praised at foreign film festivals like Cannes.
    • This applies within Canada as well, where True Art Is Québécois. This and the director's suicide are the only possible reasons why so big a fuss could be made over Mon Oncle Antoine.
  • Michael Bay insisted that, for the Transformers movie (2007), the person hired to paint the flames on Optimus Prime must have been born in Mexico and not speak any English. They found the perfect guy and he delivered.
  • Akira Kurosawa. You can't even be respected as a real director unless you list him as one of your influences.
    • Something the Japanese find hilarious since Kurosawa is about as Western as it gets (not that he isn't brilliant, but John Ford was an influence). If you want real pretentious street cred among American Japanese film nerds, you go with, say, Hiroshi Teshigahara, or Seijun Suzuki.
  • Ingmar Bergman.
  • On the commentary for El Mariachi, Robert Rodriguez mentioned that many people tried to find deeper meaning in the movie when it was first released simply because it was in Spanish. He went on to say that English-speaking audiences typically declare any non-English movie as works of art for whatever reason. As it stands, El Mariachi was initially meant to be a simple, straight to video action movie that was believed would never be released outside of Mexico.
  • This tendency in film is parodied in the Cracked.com video, "A Trailer for Every Academy Award Winning Movie Ever", when the "movie" in the trailer is directed by "Famous and/or Foreign director".
  • It's worth noting that part of this is a function of how films are made elsewhere. In America it's driven by the free market, but in other parts of the world, films can and often are made with some degree of state support. True Art is Foreign because it's easier for artists to get money overseas.

Literature

  • Kevin Murphy – yes, that one – gushed at length of his love for foreign films in his book A Year at the Movies. How much so? He compared Stand by Me to an Icelandic coming-of-age film. Needless to say, the latter won, and he praised it for having a four-minute-long scene of a kid staring at a clock, something that would earn harsh criticism from him in a domestic movie, by stating "what kid hasn't done something like that before in real life?". Well, kids get diarrhea in real life too, Kevin, that doesn't mean anyone needs to see it onscreen.

Live-Action Television

  • British comedy is considered by many Americans to always be better than American comedy.
    • Yet American networks always seem to want to 'convert' British comedies into American ones. Coupling, The Office, Red Dwarf, The IT Crowd...
      • They can earn more money with a knockoff than they can showing the original, especially since they fear that mainstream TV viewers in the US won't accept characters with English accents who don't fit into certain specific tropes.
      • Many of the reasons for the U.S. remakes boil down to plain old capitalism. Many British programmes are limited to a small run, often as few as six episodes per year for comedies. As the U.S. entertainment industry is an industry, doing a U.S. remake they can produce well over twenty episodes a year and this makes the producers significantly more money. Additionally, many older foreign (and even older U.S.) programmes, especially when produced for non-commercial media such as the BBC, were produced at lengths that don't fit very well in the current "at least sixteen minutes of advertising per hour" network timeslot, relegating many of these programmes to be aired only on public television, or not at all. Some BBC programs (such as the new Doctor Who) are produced with foreign distribution in mind: in 42 or 43 minute lengths with room for all those commercials.
    • It should also be noted that many US remakes of British programmes are (or at least were) very successful: All in The Family, Sanford and Son, Too Close for Comfort, The Office, Three's Company... not to mention various non-narrative programmes (American Idol, Antiques Roadshow, America's Got Talent' Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, etc.)
    • But there are a lot of Americans who can't understand a damn word they're saying or why it's funny.
    • It helps that Americans only get the good British shows sent over, while they send the British the good and the bad.
      • On the other hand, some British shows (Coupling being the perfect example) are basically the British version of some American counterpart anyway... they just don't bother with the whole "Mind if we adapt your show?" bit first.
  • The Game Show site BuzzerBlog and many of its readers consider that British game shows are always better than American ones. They often Accentuate The Positive for many British and European game shows and will often Accentuate the Negative for any new American Game Show, regardless of show's actual quality (They have a immense Hatedom for Minute to Win It, for example). They even have a segment called "The British are Better Than Us" because of this.
  • Although we're talking about a Trans Pacific Equivalent show here, many diehard fans of the original Iron Chef absolutely loathe Iron Chef America, and will eagerly Accentuate the Negative when given a chance. It's not uncommon to see Iron Chef diehards praising the original show as a "work of art" while using as many references to excrement as they can over ICA's Iron Chefs, their challengers (who have just as much talent and credentials as ICJ's own), and the supposed "blandness" of its theme ingredients (most which appeared on ICJ before).

Music

  • Very few operas are performed in English; most famous operas were written in other languages, and performing translated versions is generally frowned upon – instead, translations are projected above the stage. As operas are generally imagined to be True Art, this tends to lead opera fans toward this kind of opinion; foreign operas are True Art, but Broadway musicals aren't. (It doesn't help that opera singers are trained to sing in a way that sounds very musical but makes the lyrics difficult to understand, even for native speakers of the language the opera was written in.) For a while all operas were written in Italian, even those performed in England or Germany.
    • Operas are not translated, though; such a task would be almost impossible given that the music was usually written after the libretto and was meant to make the most out of whatever the librettist wrote. It therefore should not matter where the music is performed; if someone is so xenophobic that they can't bear to hear another language being sung, they can stay away from the opera. Really.
    • Operas in English can also considered True Art – but only modern, dissonant ones. Catchy tunes are verboten.
      • The exception to this rule is Porgy and Bess. Though it originally was presented as a Broadway musical, as an opera it's universally acclaimed today. In Gershwin's time, however, there was a minority of Serious Music Critics who criticized him for trying to pass off a work riddled with show tunes as True Art.
      • In Russia, most Italian operas are performed in translation. Which tends to hinder Russian opera singers' career abroad, because they have to struggle with Italian pronunciation.
    • To put this in perspective somewhat, here's Mozart on the subject: "I would say that in an opera the poetry must be altogether the obedient daughter of the music. Why are Italian comic operas popular everywhere – in spite of the miserable libretti? Because the music reigns supreme, and when one listens to it all else is forgotten." In other words, Mozart thought that operas could be proficiently written in any language, as long as the music was good, and he proved his thesis for German opera with Die Entführung aus dem Serail. In his time, translated operas were not appreciated either, and it was not until Mozart that original operas in German had significant success.
  • The majority of good metal comes from Scandinavia, it seems. First off, pretty much any recognizable black or power metal band is either Finnish, Swedish, German or Norwegian. As for other notable metal bands, I give you these. Nightwish? Finnish. Sonata Arctica? Finnish. Sentenced? Finnish. Apocalyptica? Finnish. Hammerfall? Swedish. Dream Evil? Swedish. Dimmu Borgir? Norwegian. Emperor? Norwegian. Mayhem? Norwegian. In Flames? Swedish. Satyricon? Norwegian. Soilwork? Swedish. Two members of Dethklok? Scandanavian (and look at the name). Noticing a pattern here? Though some notable black and power metal acts do come from other countries, such as DragonForce and Cradle of Filth (UK), Helloween and Gamma Ray (Germany), Rhapsody of Fire (Italy), Symphony X (United States), or X Japan.
    • Manowar is an American band, but the majority of their fanbase is European. Maybe Europe is the only place that produces good metal fans in any quantity.
    • Lampshaded by the show Metalocalypse, two of Dethklok's band members are from Scandinavia (Norway and Sweden). The majority of the concerts Dethklok makes are also taking place in Scandinavian countries (the pilot takes place in Norway, "Dethbirthday" opens with a concert in Denmark, the season 1 final is in the Gulf of Danzig). When Toki brings his bandmates to his village near Lillehammer, he shows them the word's first Death Metal record store. The owner of which, despite being a long time friend of Toki, does not sell Dethklok albums (a group so popular they are a greater economy then Belgium) because he finds them too electronic.
      • Do note, however, that while some of the characters are European, all of the music is composed and performed by Americans (series creator Brendon Smalls on vocals, guitar and bass and Gene Hoglan on drums).
    • In The Seventies and The Eighties, though, most good metal came from Britain.
    • Germany also has Blind Guardian and Edguy/Avantasia – not to mention the Wacken Open Air, which is the world's biggest metal festival. However, not all metalheads are European; metal is also very popular in Japan.
    • Also in South America. You could say metal is popular everywhere but N. America.
      • Conversely, in America, people often barely make it past nu-metal and metalcore. Look at the Family Values Tour lineups for more details: the only non-metalcore/numetal band from 2006 was Dir en grey and that's because they're Japanese.
      • That's not entirely true. The vast majority of thrash metal in the 80s and early 90s was American. All four of the Big Four of Thrash (Metallica, Megadeth, Slayer, and Anthrax) were American. Other than the Teutonic thrash scene with Kreator, Sodom, and Destruction, thrash was almost entirely concentrated within America. Only recently have other countries put out well known thrash, such as Britain's Evile and Gama Bomb. Also, groove metal, being one of the biggest current genres of metal (unfortunately or fortunately), is mostly American. Let's not forget that old school death metal, which is commonly considered the best, had a major American founding. Death and Atheist, for example, are both American.
  • Similarly, Europe (especially Scandinavia) is the global mecca for club, electronica, and Demoscene music.
    • Don't forget Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. The Belgian band Telex practically invented electronic music as we know it now, along with the Germans of Kraftwerk. Also, New Beat was a Belgian speciality in the Eighties.
  • Every so often, British rock music and British rock musicians will become regarded as the pinnacle of the music genre. This is, in part, influenced by the number of influential rock bands which originated in Britain during the formative years of the genre in The Sixties and Seventies, although it also owes something to the traditionally greater presence of rock music in British culture, and the consequently greater opportunities for innovative or experimental bands to attain success.
  • Lampshaded and inverted in the song The Roast Beef of Old England. French food is assumed to be overcomplex and effeminate while English food is fit for good hearty Englishmen.

Professional Wrestling

  • Many American Smarks (those that like their Pro-wrestling serious, heavy on athleticism and mat ability, and without the silly gimmicks and T&A) often repeat about wrestling in various nations the phrase "In Canada, it's a tradition, in Japan it's a sport, in Mexico it's a religion, in America it's a joke."

Theatre

  • There was an article in the UK Times in which an Englishman in his 60s, who had taken up play-writing late in life, bemoaned the fact that it was hard to make a breakthrough because everyone wanted young Irish playwrights.
  • There once was an artist living in Berlin (in the 1920s) who stated: "If you want to have success in Berlin, you should be dead or perverted or a foreigner. Optimally, you should be a dead perverted foreigner."

Video Games

  • Many Japanese prefer English-language acting to Japanese-language acting. Both of the PS2 Kingdom Hearts video games, and the first two Metal Gear Solid games, were released in Japan with special editions that made many enhancements, in addition to replacing all the voice acting with the voices from the US version. Thanks to Woolseyisms, replacing their own language with English is sometimes an improvement.
    • Some games, like Resident Evil, God Hand and Metal Wolf Chaos, don't even have a Japanese voice track, getting released in Japan in English with Japanese text and subtitles. In the latter two's case, actually voicing it in Japanese would probably ruin half the fun.
    • Yahtzee at one point explained that he preferred Japanese vocals to English because they made silly or badly acted dialogue easier to accept.
      • Make that all three of them. Resident Evil's intentionally B-Movie script and acting is a big part of the series' image.
  • The same thing as before has been happening with a lot of games in the western worlds. They either have Japanese voice acting, or it's Japanese and it has an option to put the original voices on.
    • Conversely, the great Subbing Versus Dubbing war also extends to video games, though usually just ones where the English voice acting was particularly bad.
  • Any and all games that look Japanese on their surface but were developed in, say, Quebec are prime targets of this trope. Oni, Shadow Madness, Shogo Mobile Armor Division, Black Sigil, and X-Blades (a Russian game) and many others are examples of the Haagen-Dasz phenomenon of taking a homegrown product and mimicking foreign aesthetics.
  • Some fans of the Silent Hill series exhibit this attitude; apparently the American and British-made Silent Hill Homecoming and Silent Hill Origins sucked compared to the oh-so-perfectly-Japanese Silent Hills 1 to 4. Silent Hill Shattered Memories seems, at least to some extent, to be bucking this trend; the game was made by the British team Climax Studios (which handled 0rigins) and for the most part has been accepted by most of the fandom.
    • The problem is that the American creators worshipped the earlier iterations of the series too much, and failed to bring any original ideas onto the table, whereas every Silent Hill prior to their involvement had involved unique ideas and perspectives. If they learn to do more than ape their predecessors, this trope is likely to shift.
  • Parodied in Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, where the Save Points go on massively pretentious tirades of how Western games are inherently inferior to Japanese games in every single way, with the above page quote being from the first save point of the game.
    • Considering all the tirades are actual rants taken from forums, this seems less a parody an outright demonstration of the attitudes involved.

Real Life

Fashion

  • France also reigns supreme in the high-end designer fashion and luxury items markets since the days when Paul Poiret, Coco Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent walked the Earth.
    • Don't count out Italy. Dolce & Gabbana, Versace, Armani, Gucci....all Italian.
    • In this case though there is some reasoning behind the trope. Historically, Italy had a large textile industry and guild structure. If you wanted to make clothing, you had to be a part of the guild. This standardization resulted in consistent work at a time when many things may have still been mostly hand made and resulted in the association of clothing with Italy. Whether or not it's still true today...
      • The same thing could be said of France. Anyone who wants to work at a great French fashion house (at least on the production side of things) has to attend classes and pass a rigorous series of examinations. Haute couture is partly about snobbery from the marketing side of things, but on the production side the main emphasis is on quality of design and manufacture.

Food and Drink

  • Beer. Hoo, boy, beer.
    • In the United States, Corona is a trendy import beer. In its native Mexico, Corona is cheap swill. (For the record: Guinness, Carlsberg and Heineken are the trendy imports in Mexico[1]). Similarly, Foster's is the most popular Australian beer... outside of Australia, where almost nobody drinks it.
      • Corona is mostly trendy because it's cheap swill, therefore you can get tore-up more efficiently.
    • Inverted in Britain; continental lagers abound, outselling native alternatives by far, but most are mass-produced brands brewed within the United Kingdom, and, often because of this, rather looked down upon in their own country. The beer of the connoisseur is instead ale, a thoroughly indigenous tradition, and many of the more acclaimed small-brews are only available on tap in a particular region. True Beer, in this case, Is Local. Interestingly, Stella Artois has a unique and mostly-bad reputation in Britain compared to elsewhere (commonly referred to as "wife beater"). While Fosters is common, in many cases it is commonly held that the only truly good thing about it is that it is cheap. One of the main beers to avert this may be Carlsberg Export (not to be confused with Carlsberg, which is one of the aforementioned locally made variants).
    • The only Irish people who drink Guinness are old men who have been drinking it since there was basically nothing else on offer and aren't about to change now. What do Irish people drink? Heineken.
      • Not quite the same thing: Heineken is a beer, whereas Guinness is a stout. Plenty of people never develop a taste for any kind of stout.
      • Something Dutch people don't generally care for too much if they're really into their beer.
      • The Heineken that Irish people drink is brewed in Ireland.
    • On the other hand, Germans know without doubt, that with the exception of maybe some few Irish beers, there's not any good beer at all that isn't German.
      • Don't forget the Czech beers, they are quite good. But it's true this trope doesn't apply to Germans. Also the beer we export, Becks and Löwenbräu Export, is totally disgusting.
      • The best and most varied beers of all are from Belgium. This doesn't include Stella Artois or Jupiler by the way.
    • The Pacific Northwest seems to have grown out of this trope in regards to beer, and will proudly proclaim that the best beer is the stuff made by local breweries, hardly surprising as Portland has the more microbreweries than any other city in the world.
    • Boston/New England has a truly insane number of breweries, to the point where macrobrews with huge advertising budgets have real trouble getting the same level of sales they enjoy elsewhere. New Englanders usually get a rude shock when they venture outside of the region and discover that Magic Hat, Harpoon, and other beers they take for granted are at best weird and obscure to most of the country.
    • Also the case with whisk[e]ys – if they're not either Scottish or Irish, then they are not "real" whisk[e]ys. Somewhat justified in that these countries are the indigenous home of the drink, and so the natural experts, but it means that American whiskey, a legitimate heir to the same tradition, is unfairly overshadowed.
      • A local version of this trope appears within Scotland itself: most high-quality malt whiskys are produced in the Highlands and Isles, while those produced in the Lowlands – where the majority of Scots live – are mass-produced blends. Ironically, these same Lowland brands are placed on a pedestal outside of the United Kingdom as "genuine Scotch".
  • French Cuisine Is Haughty: In the food world, France is often considered as the kings of cuisine. Integrating French ingredients and techniques in one's cooking is a sure-fire way to get rave reviews from restaurant critics.
    • French food also tends to be somewhat hard for people who are used to more Asian diets to digest – perhaps adding an element of True Art Is Indigestible.
    • And good luck trying to find French food from other cities when you're in Paris: chances are you will find an Indian, Arabic, or African food before you'll find a restaurant specializing in food from, say, Marseilles. (There's one halal butchery for every two non-halal butcheries, for example, on account of Paris' large Muslim population).
    • Similarly French wine. Although Chile and Australia are pretty well thought of, too, these days.
      • In the 1970s a French magazine had a blind wine-tasting contest between French and Australian wines. The (French) critics overwhelmingly chose the Australian wines. The guy who came up with the idea became spectacularly unpopular in France!
      • There is also the (in)famous Judgement of Paris, where French wine experts were hoist by their own petards when they insulted top-notch French wines under the impression they were Californian. Bottle Shock was one of the films dealing with the subject (the other one, The Judgement of Paris, was caught in Development Hell). Wine is Serious Business.
      • Most of the grape-types in the modern France are in fact American vintage, brought in after most of the French crops failed due to a plant disease. Only a few native strains remain. There is some small difference in taste, though Your Mileage May Vary on whether either of them is in any way better.
      • This belief is the subject of a prominent B-Plot in an episode of the Britcom Chef!, where the main character is a French-trained British chef who still has loads of British pride. Thus, when attending a cooking competition in France, he vows he will use English wine. Most of the people he mentions the concept to (the majority of them English themselves) break down laughing at the very idea. Not only does he nearly sweep the competition, he gives a leftover bottle to a friendly French chef, who's actually very pleased with the gift.
    • Interestingly, when people unfamiliar with French cuisine (especially Germans) try to use this trope, the results are usually unpalatable to the French.
    • Subverted in countries like Italy and Spain, which have strong culinary and viticultural traditions of their own and treat French productions as gutless and overhyped.
      • In countries where Italian, Spanish and Portuguese (and to a lesser level German) influence in gastronomy is much bigger than the French influence, like in most of South America, French restaurants are also something most people just don't bother with all that much.
    • And it seems a truth universally acknowledged that chocolate bars – that is, your standard, run-of-the-mill chocolate bars sold at the drugstore counter – which are made in Europe will be ridiculously superior to American chocolate bars. And don't try and tell me chocolate isn't art.
      • The irony in all of this is that chocolate is, in fact, a product of the Americas where it was cultivated first.
        • Cultivated into a savoury drink which settlers found disgusting. It was then sold in Europe as hot chocolate before being made into chocolate bars in England.
      • One also needs to keep in mind that Americans like their milk chocolate to have a slightly sour note to it, mostly due to the influence of Hershey Bars. It's so pronounced that any other chocolate manufacturers that want to market their product on a mass scale in America have to add chemicals to their milk chocolate in order to re-create the sour taste produced by Hershey's closely-guarded recipe.
  • Ice cream. If it's not Italian, it better be Norwegian.
  • While (to a Westerner) all tea is technically foreign, some tea is specifically produced by Western-owned or -influenced companies to be exported, becoming the common bagged teas one finds in a supermarket. Their production facilities generally care more about output and having a consistent flavor than being healthy or having a good flavor. Gourmet loose-leaf tea is often simply the tea that small-time traditional Asian farmers would be making for themselves and to sell to their neighbors, which is produced in small batches using only the best leaves.

Other

  • The allure of "genuine Cuban cigars" is really just hype brought on by the idea of Forbidden Fruit. Before the trade embargo went up Cuba did, indeed, produce some of the best cigars in the world. After the embargo, many Cuban cigar companies packed up and moved to the Dominican Republic and kept making the exact same product under the same names, but with "Dominican" on the wrapper instead.
    • Not quite the exact same product, as the tobacco is being grown elsewhere. Soil and climate affects production to a greater extent than most city people realize. Grapes are a better example: if you grow the identical variety of grapes (even going so far as to used cloned plants) in two different locations and ferment the juice of each in the same way using the same equipment, the resulting wines will not taste the same.
    • They're considered "forbidden fruit" to Americans, but to the rest of the world, unaffected by the United States' embargo, aficionados appreciate Cuban cigars for their high quality and unique tobacco, not their rarity or legal restriction.
  • Cars. In many circles, even in the United States itself, American-made cars are seen as the worst of the bunch, and only cars from Japan, Britain, Germany, or Italy merit any interest. The badness of home-built cars compared to foreign ones is often exaggerated and sometimes nonexistent, but the US did have a history of making bad cars and the reputation has been hard to shake.
    • On the other hand, dyed-in-the-wool Detroit fans tend to have an element of True Art Is Ancient to them, as well. Otherwise, the Chevy Camaro, the Dodge Challenger and the Ford Mustang from 2005 and onwards wouldn't end up looking like modernized variants of their late 60's counterparts.
    • In France, everyone owns a French car, but they are nonetheless horribly bad: only German ones are good.
    • Less prevalent in Great Britain than in the United States, because Britain's crippled automotive industry means that almost all cars are foreign anyway. Comes into play at the higher end of the market, however, where several surviving companies (most now foreign-owned) remain competitive.
      • In the absence of actual British cars, in some areas of the UK where there are prominent manufacturing bases for foreign car companies, the residents of the surrounding towns often favour these brands over other foreign marques. While the parent company itself is foreign, the purchase of a car from these companies support the local franchise and, by extension, the local jobs in the automotive industry.
    • The rule of thumb with American cars is said to be: Don't buy an American car unless you work in the factory it's made in. Though with the American auto industry's recent swing towards greener and more efficient technology (the crash may have clued in the designers on the fact that nobody wants to buy shitty cars) this may change in coming years.
  • The aristocracy of the Roman Republic of the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC adopted several aspects of Greek culture and philosophy en masse with an unrivaled passion. A select inner circle of Moral Guardians like Cato tried to stem the tide to no avail.
    • A close look at history and you'll find this trope has always been around. The Greeks themselves had a thing for Egypt. During the Medieval period, England had a thing for French culture (The Norman conquest helped), before the two countries winded up at war for the most part of the next few centuries. During the Renaissance, all of Europe could not get enough from Italy. During the Victorian period, stuff from India and China was "En Vogue" in the higher echelons of British society. It wasn't only foreign, but it showcased the greatness of the Empire. It also occurred within specific domains, during the 18th and 19th century, the big thing for Philosophy was German or French (People would migrate to these countries to study these things). Same thing for Mathematics.
      • Another example: 19th century America, which openly belittled and ridiculed everything about the United Kingdom while apishly copying the British at every turn.
  • This trope has been one of the defining parts of Russian culture... and politics as a whole, since Peter the Great at least. Of course, the ardent preference of anything European (and, more recently, Western in general) to anything Russian, inherent to the Russian elite, did give us quite a few nice things, but for the most part though... *sigh*.
  • A few Genre Savvy business people have realized that if you take a domestic product and make it seem foreign, you'll increase sales easily. Rich Corinthian leather is from New Jersey, Häagen-Dazs's name is actually complete gibberish, however, when combined with a map of Scandinavia on the carton, people have been tricked into thinking it's top-shelf imported ice cream.
  • It has been noted that the most surefire way to win a Pulitzer prize in literature is to be a Homosexual Asian Communist Feminist woman whose prose is so convoluted that it passes into True Art Is Incomprehensible territory.
  1. ↑ Outside their native countries, where aren't they the trendy imports?
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