Trend Killer

Every era is defined by trends. They tend to vary in period of popularity and quality, but they don't last forever. Sometimes, it may be because of changes in society or technology marching on, causing it to become a Discredited Trope. There may also be times when any works making use of a particular trend bomb on a regular basis, leading to creators abandoning said trend.

This is one level below Genre-Killer, though the reasons why both occur are similar — Genre refers to a category, while a trend refers to an element or trope. For example, Action is a genre. Action Heroine is an element in Action films.

Trends tend to be cyclic, which means that their popularity ebbs and flows. If it returns, it is experiencing a Popularity Polynomial, or else it is Condemned by History.

Genres can be considered a type of trend, as their popularity can be cyclic and they are capable of defining eras. While deciding whether an example falls under this or Genre-Killer, consider the following:

• If your example concerns a Narrative Trope, it falls here.
• If it is based on Meta Concepts such as technologies and adaptations, it is a trend.
• If your example concerns a Stylistic Trope, it falls under Genre-Killer.
• If the "Trend" can be described as a Sub-Genre, it probably fits under Genre-Killer.
• If you are still unsure, check this page to see what is considered a genre, and this page to see what is considered a trend.

Contrast Totally Radical, where creators try to implement (often outdated) trends in their works as an attempt to stay hip with the current audience. Compare The Red Stapler for when a work of fiction inspires a trend in real life, and Baby Name Trend Killer for when a work makes a name fall out of favour.

As TV Tropes does not know time, please wait at least five years until after the offending work's release. If the trend got revived, there must be a minimum five-year gap between the "killer" and "reviver".

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The anime adaptation of My Hero Academia was the nail in the coffin on the trend of continuous anime adaptations of shonen manga. Prior to it, anime adaptations of long-running shonen manga like Naruto and Bleach were aired non-stop; while it kept the franchises always visible, the overall quality of their animation was never consistent and the need to avoid overtaking the manga caused frequent filler arcs (Naruto's pre-Shippuden Filler Arc being a notorious offender, having been blamed for causing Toonami's initial shutdown). My Hero Academia, in contrast, took a seasonal approach, adapting a group of arcs once a year and releasing it as a season. In addition to all-but eliminating filler and providing much better pacing and animation quality, the format was also better suited for binge-watching, which had become popular by the time the anime came out. Subsequent big shonen titles like Jujutsu Kaisen and Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba all followed this format, while the former trend of adapting was left behind.
• The Viz Media dub of Naruto is often credited for ending the Dub-Induced Plotline Change as a strategy for anime distribution. Prior to this, it was common for mainstream anime dubs to completely rewrite scripts, rename characters, edit down plot points, compose new music and sound effects, and do all manner of things to try to localize the series. Viz Media's dub of Naruto did only the bare minimum of edits, sticking as close to the Japanese script as broadcast standards would allow, and became a smash success, proving that such efforts (and the associated production costs) weren't necessary. This was further contrasted by the infamous 4Kids dub of One Piece, which did all of the above and became a significant bomb. After Naruto, most future dubs followed suit, and 4Kids, the main purveyors of this in the 2000s, quickly faded from the public eye before going bankrupt. Nowadays, the only place the trend still remains is in Long-Runner franchises aimed at children, whose dubs keep up the old practices (albeit to a reduced degree) more thanks to the Grandfather Clause than anything.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion firmly killed the notion that anime appealing to a wide teenager and adult audience were viable only in OVA form. It also ended the "kodomo" era of the mecha genre (as there was declining interest in mecha from the tween and younger teen audiences who overwhelmingly switched to battle shonen series by the late 1990s) and ushered in a second otaku era, with a noticeably more "anything goes" era, a looser definition of what exactly can be mecha and more serious themes being explored once again, to an extent not seen in the genre since the peak of the Real Robot boom in the early 1980s.
• Space☆Dandy in 2014 is often credited for ending the long-standing history of Late Export for You when it comes to anime's and getting English dubs in the west. Previously, it was not unheard of for anime series to take a long time for any anime focused distribution company to officially release or have shows available for the western audience, and dubs would sometimes take months to come out, with very rare situations where a show would come out and quickly be dubbed or available. Space Dandy was one of the first anime to have a release and dub almost simultaneously with the original airing in Japan, proving that it was possible to do so. From there, anime dubbing and distribution companies began picking up the pace, and quickly dubs were coming out. What few shows take a long time to be given overseas releases often are ones that require some form of extra work to do so.

Comic Books

• Kingdom Come is credited with ending the trend of the '90s Anti-Hero by presenting a strong argument against the kind of cynicism and apathy that were rampant in the comic industry at the time. The bright, realistic art by Alex Ross also helped, serving as a stark counterpart to the darker and more unrefined drawing styles popularized by people like Rob Liefeld. Also not helping was Deathmate, a crossover between Valiant Comics and Image Comics that showcased the worst excesses of the Dark Age (More bleakness and edginess than you or your grandma could handle, Continuity Lockout, Schedule Slip, and questionable art), taking the comic industry and small comic book shops (alongside killing Valiant) with it. "Their love will end worlds", indeed.

Film — Animation

• The critical and commercial failure of Home on the Range in 2004 was the beginning of the end for Hollywood-produced traditionally animated films, which were already experiencing diminishing returns as audiences gravitated toward CGI films. And while efforts were made to revive the trend to its old heights with The Princess and the Frog in 2009 and Winnie the Pooh (2011), the relative underperformance of both films (partially as a result of competition against Avatar and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2) ultimately proved the final nail in the coffin. Nowadays, the only traditionally animated movies being produced for the big screen are based on TV shows, and even that is changing (e.g., SCOOB! and The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run are CGI movies based on the traditionally animated Scooby-Doo and SpongeBob SquarePants).
• The failure of Mars Needs Moms resulted in the death of full-form motion-capture animation, as many felt it reached the highest levels of Unintentional Uncanny Valley. However, Serkis Folk mo-cap animation for live-action features is still very much alive.
• The Plague Dogs is known for being one of the most depressing animated films ever made. The Western audience wasn't ready at all, so the concept of dark, almost entirely un-comedic animated feature films was shelved in the aftermath. It wasn't until the late 2000s that the concept found a revival with works such as Persepolis and Waltz with Bashir. Even these, however, were not widely released in the United States.
• The box office failure of The Rescuers Down Under and DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp, coupled with the success of both The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast is the reason why almost every animated movie throughout the 1990s was a musical (this was at a time when practically all animation was Disney, and movies by their competitors barely achieved the same level of attention).
• The underperformance of Rugrats Go Wild! (2003) ended the trend of theatrically released, animated adaptations of American cartoons. This coincided with the decline of traditionally animated films in Hollywood, which is notable as most American cartoons were traditionally animated. It wouldn't be until the second SpongeBob movie, Sponge Out of Water, that it was seen as viable again. Attempts at continuing this trend have been mixed — My Little Pony: The Movie (2017) and Teen Titans Go! To the Movies were Presumed Flops, while PAW Patrol: The Movie was a legitimate hit (earning over $100M worldwide).
• Titan A.E. (2000) is often blamed for putting the era where more mature, artistic animation dominated much of the medium throughout the late 1980s to the 1990s to its coffin. Its inability to be defined as either a film for kids or a film for mature audiences, along with rampant Executive Meddling by Fox over budget and time constraints, cost them $100 million according to its supervisor, Chris Meledandri.

Film — Live-Action

• Airplane! was not only a temporary Genre-Killer for the Disaster Movie — it also killed the aerial subgenre retroactively, as the airliner-in-peril/stewardess-lands-the-plane trope of the previous Airport series was destroyed, and all the drama with it, since no one could take it seriously anymore. The only films made since then in the subgenre were either based on a true story or had snakes and Samuel L. Jackson on said plane.
• Avatar is widely credited by analysts with ending the dominance of film stock in the motion picture industry. Shooting on film had been commonplace for over a century, mostly due to the lack of viable competition, but even after professional-quality digital cameras rose to prominence in the late '90s and early 2000s, most directors and studios stuck with film. Avatar, meanwhile, used digital video to facilitate its 3D display and copious use of CGI, and its skyscraping success resulted in the rest of the movie industry quickly adopting the technology as well. Over a decade later, usage of film stock for new projects is limited to much smaller niches, with digital cameras overwhelming them in prominence.
• Batman & Robin killed the trend of superhero movies with a lighthearted, borderline comical tone. The success of Blade, X-Men, and Spider-Man convinced studios that more grounded and realistic takes on comic book characters were the way forward for the genre. It would not be till 2014's Guardians of the Galaxy (and the failures of many Darker and Edgier comic book movies, most notably, the DC films of Zack Snyder) that such a tone would be deemed acceptable again.
• Catwoman (2004) killed off the idea of the Action Girl as protagonist in Hollywood cinema for quite a long time. Later big-budget Hollywood relegated them to secondary roles as love interests or fanservice characters. The massive success of The Hunger Games franchise brought it back, while the success of Wonder Woman (2017) solidified the viability of female-led action films as major blockbusters.
• Child's Play helped kill off the fad that started with Cabbage Patch dolls and ended with the "My Buddy" dolls. Since those dolls looked a lot like Chucky — the Big Bad of the films — the line of dolls were effectively scrapped.
• Coming to America's unflattering parody of the Jheri Curl hairstyle, which was very popular among the African American community in the 1980s and early 1990s, is largely credited for eventually killing off said hairstyle.
• The box office underperformance of the third Divergent film, Allegiant (2016), and the eventual cancellation of its planned sequel, Ascendant, struck a one-two blow to major trends in film adaptations of literature in the 2000s and early 2010s:
  • The film ended the trend of adapting young adult dystopian novels. Attempts to rectify this haven't had much success, with film adaptations of The Darkest Minds and Chaos Walking (2021) bombing and receiving poor reviews. While Maze Runner: The Death Cure (2018) fared much better, it was part of a pre-established franchise rather than an attempt at adapting new material, and even that series was experiencing diminishing returns. Another exception is the 2023 adaptation of The Hunger Games prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, which did moderately well at the box office and received generally decent reviews, though this was over seven years after Allegiant's release and it was also assisted by the enduring popularity of and nostalgia for The Hunger Games.
  • Allegiant also killed the trend of splitting the final book into two movies started by Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in 2010/2011, with the The Twilight Saga and The Hunger Games adaptations all following suit and The Hobbit adaptation being extended to three films (based on one book). The Divergent series went down the same path, intending to divide Allegiant into Allegiant (2016) and Ascendant (2017). Unfortunately, Allegiant performed poorly at the box office, which resulted in Ascendant never being made, and The Maze Runner Series' third film, The Death Cure (2018) not being split. Even The Avengers renamed Infinity War Part 2 to Endgame in 2019, while Justice League (2017) Part 2 was put on the back burner and eventually Quietly Cancelled before the first movie even came out.
• Fantastic Four (2015) and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice killed the trend of superhero movies made to serve as a Darker and Edgier Continuity Reboot, one that began with Batman Begins. Batman v Superman's underperformance at the box office and negative critical reception is especially notable, because several of the DC Extended Universe films that were in various stages of production at the time were retooled to be Lighter and Softer in response, to mixed results. Fantastic Four also killed off the trend of Movie Superheroes Wear Black, as even the X-Men movies that started this trend were moving away from this aesthetic starting with X-Men: First Class.
• Doctor Dolittle proving to be a surprising critical and commercial bomb despite receiving a massive marketing and merchandising push put the kibosh on merch tie-ins to movies for a while. There were a lot of unsold animal toys clogging up store shelves in the late sixties, and it caused executives to decide that merch was a high-risk endeavor, scaling it back considerably in future projects. Consequently, a decade later, Fox thought nothing of giving the director of a crappy-looking throwback sci-fi flick full licensing and merchandising rights in exchange for substantially reduced pay.
• The critical and commercial failure of the film adaptation of George & Mildred in 1980 ended the trend of adapting Britcoms into feature-length films in the 1970s, with it not being until Bean in 1997 that the idea was even revisited.
• In the 2000s, most romance-themed movies could be split into two camps: (A) pandering rom-coms occupied by the likes of Jennifer Aniston, Katherine Heigl, Cameron Diaz, and Reese Witherspoon playing sassy characters, and (B) weepy, melodramatic movies that copied The Notebook. How Do You Know in 2010 and Bridesmaids in 2011 killed the first type, the former due to going over-budget and bombing, and the latter by featuring a female protagonist thoroughly independent from the romantic male lead, while successfully adapting the Judd Apatow style of raunchy humor and character-focused writing. It did not help matters that a new generation of young actresses had no interest in playing either "ditzy girls" or killjoys and the sexist undertones of rom-coms were emphasized, even by Aniston and particularly Heigl themselves, who had sworn off many of their movies.
• The 2000s trend of Hollywood remaking Asian horror films that began with The Ring died out due to the poor receptions of One Missed Call, The Eye, and Shutter in 2008. Attempts to relaunch the trend have all failed. It should be noted that, aside from The Ring, these Hollywood remakes consistently received savage reviews from critics, but they did reasonably well in the box office until the 2008 trio.
• The trend of doing PG-13 remakes of R-rated horror films was killed off by the remakes of Prom Night and The Stepfather. The former did OK at the box office but received almost universally negative reviews from critics and horror fans alike, and the latter, in addition to bad reviews, barely made back its budget. Nowadays, attempts at doing the same are met with raised eyebrows.
• School of Rock in 2003, being a send-up of inspirational teacher movies, basically killed that trend (alongside scathing parodies from Mad TV and South Park) and created a new trend where the teachers are rather useless (such as Half Nelson and Bad Teacher). Attempts at reigniting inspirational teacher movies (such as Freedom Writers and Larry Crowne) have been critical and box office disappointments.
• After the success of Forrest Gump, a common method for neurotypical actors looking out for an easy award was to play a character with mental disabilities while affecting the mannerisms of the condition, using the mental transformation angle as proof of their skill. Even otherwise panned films such as i am sam would often get nominations if it featured an actor using this method. Then, 2008's Tropic Thunder ruthlessly mocked this in an extended sequence where the actors explain it to be an obviously mercenary ploy for awards made by actors who don't actually care about the people they portray and show them as Inspirationally Disadvantaged to avoid making audiences uncomfortable, with Tugg Speedman's performance of Simple Jack being regarded in-universe as a massive critical and financial bomb. The idea was becoming increasingly controversial by the film's release, especially as, unlike Forrest Gump, most of these pictures treated such characters as incompetent morons with no chance at accomplishing anything in life, but after Tropic Thunder, no such film would ever get an awards nod again, and what few films did feature mental disorders, such as Silver Linings Playbook, would have their actors avoid changing their mannerisms. The only major film since then to fit the old template is Music (2021), which was a critical and commercial bomb.
• Twilight in 2008 and The Hunger Games in 2012 killed the child-led blockbuster franchises that Harry Potter had popularized. Young adult novels featuring child protagonists either aged up their protagonists (eg, The Giver and Seventh Son (2015)) or used teenage/adult protagonists instead.
• Adult-geared sex comedies remained wildly popular for most of the 2000s and early 2010s, but due to changes in cultural sensitivities and the Me Too movement in the late 2010s this made it even harder to sneak more intense material. For example, 2011's Bad Teacher and the sequels to 2009's The Hangover were subject to greater scrutiny than previous works. While 2012's Ted and 2014's Neighbors (2014) gave adult comedy a shot in the arm, its reputation was affected in 2016 by Dirty Grandpa. It did well at the box office but received such an overwhelmingly negative response that subsequent attempts at adult comedy in the same year either became financial disappointments or outright flops. The slipping box-office numbers (aside from lack of success outside the English-speaking world) largely reduced comedy films to direct-to-video/streaming material with the odd theatrical release, mostly aimed at a female (Bad Moms, I Feel Pretty) or unisex "date night" (Blockers, Good Boys) audience. 2023's No Hard Feelings and Anyone But You aimed to reformulate the sex comedy for a mostly female audience to relative success (the latter being a Sleeper Hit).
• The failure of Watchmen killed any attempts at R-rated graphic novel-based movies for nearly a decade. It wasn't until the success of Deadpool in 2016 that they were considered again.
• xXx: State of the Union in 2005 killed the early-to-mid-2000s trend of fast, modern, teen-oriented action films centered on extreme sports. While the Fast film series, which pioneered the trend, is still going strong today, later installments have focused more on straightforward action and car chases as opposed to the earlier, more extreme sports-centered installments.

Literature

• The Cold Equations was written as a deconstruction of a Science Hero who could never really fail because he would always Techno Babble up a Deus ex Machina solution to whatever scrape he'd gotten into that week. This fact is much less well known than The Cold Equations itself because the archetype ended up discarded and forgotten, due in part to this very deconstruction.
• The inter-war fashion for Purple Prose-laden novels of rural life would probably be considered a trend, drawing on an existing literary pattern, though it may have become a full-on sub-genre — until Stella Gibbons' Cold Comfort Farm killed it by the power of effective parody.
• It may have simply showed up at the right time, but the full-length novel format of the Harry Potter books ended the dominance of the 90s "kid pulps" such as Animorphs and Goosebumps, which released a new book every month on average. From the early-to-mid 2000s onwards, it's much more common for Middle Grade Literature to be much longer and have at least a year between releases; it's also increasingly common to see Doorstoppers aimed at the Young Adult demographic.

Live-Action TV

• The advent of digital video in the 2000s singlehandedly ended the prominence of TV shows shot on videotape. While videotape's lower costs and faster turnaround made it more practical than 35mm film, it was also limited to a specific look and resolution. Film, meanwhile, could be remastered for better-quality displays, allowing shows on the latter to fare much better in reruns. With digital video, not only were the practical advantages even greater than videotape, but it could also be processed to closely resemble film, resulting in it becoming the dominant medium for TV production by the 2010s.
• The cancellation of Doctor Who in 1989 marked the final death knell of traditional television serials, which had already been declining considerably by then. By the time the show returned to regular airing in 2005, serialization was mostly limited to the miniseries and anthology formats, with long-form shows (including Doctor Who itself) shifting towards season-long story arcs rather than multi-episode serials.
• Star Trek: Discovery, despite helping to relaunch the TV side of the Star Trek franchise, played a major role in killing off the Darker and Edgier, heavily Story Arc-based sci-fi that had been largely standard for the genre since Battlestar Galactica (2003). By the late 2010s, the genre was seen as increasingly plagued with shows that suffered from Continuity Lockout, The Chris Carter Effect and unlikeable characters, and the three-way combination of Discovery getting a mixed-at-best reaction, the simultaneously-released The Orville (a Serial Numbers Filed Off homage to Star Trek: The Next Generation) getting a much warmer reception from audiences, and the long-derided Star Trek: Voyager (which the Battlestar Galactica remake was designed to be the Spiritual Antithesis of) being increasingly viewed as Vindicated by History caused the Star Trek franchise and the wider genre to refocus away from this kind of storytelling. Star Trek: Strange New Worlds and the final season of Star Trek: Picard were subsequently viewed as having did a better job of updating the Star Trek while staying true to the franchise's ethos, while the announcement that Discovery would be cancelled after its fifth season was widely met with a shrug.

Music

• The debut of the Sony Walkman in 1979 quickly killed off the 8-track tape as the premier portable music format and served as a Killer App for the cassette. Compact cassettes had already been making a steady climb as a viable alternative to both vinyl records and 8-tracks thanks to advancing hi-fi technology surrounding them, their easy recordability, and their higher storage capacity, among other things being able to store many double albums on one tape each and more closely follow LP track lists than 8-tracks (which often had to Re-Cut albums to fit a four-program format). The 8-track was also falling out of favor due to declining build quality causing cartridges to break. However, the Walkman rapidly solidified the ousting of 8-tracks by introducing an even higher degree of portability, making it possible to listen to music anywhere at any time (whereas 8-tracks could only be played at home and in car stereos). Within a few years of the Walkman's introduction, prerecorded cassettes were outselling even LPs. Vinyl held on as the format for singles until the arrival of cassette and CD singles.
• The cassette and the Walkman, in turn, were done in by a combined death blow of portable CD players with anti-skip and affordable recordable CD formats in the second half of The '90s. While portable CD players existed before, they were expensive and would skip when even slightly jostled, making them impractical in actual mobile use. Music fans would either have to make a cassette copy or purchase a prerecorded cassette if it was one of the increasingly common longer albums to listen to music outside the home. Anti-skip made it possible to actually listen to CDs on the go (albeit at the expense of battery life) as portable CD player prices came down. CD players also became standard equipment in new cars around the same time, and cassette/cigarette lighter adapters made it easy to retrofit existing car stereo systems with portable players. The advent of recordable CDs also eliminated another niche for the cassette, becoming the recordable digital audio format of choice after the failures of DAT, DCC, and MiniDisc. Later MP3 players would do away with physical media altogether. Cassettes largely disappeared from developed markets by the turn of the millennium, though they would have a minor revival similar to that of vinyl records in the 21st century.
• The Sony BMG rootkit scandal in 2005 played a major role in the death of copy protection in popular music. The rise of home taping in the late '70s instigated a push to deter consumers from copying songs and albums, which resulted in things such as the "Home Taping is Killing Music" campaign, industry lobbying against Digital Audio Tape, and the inclusion of DRM software on CDs in the early 2000s. The latter was highly criticized by audiences, analysts, and even Philips, one of the Compact Disc's co-inventors, as intrusive and self-sabotaging. However, Sony and BMG's attempts at copy-protecting CDs earned particularly loud condemnation for the fact that it revolved around covertly installing malware on Windows computers. Following this, copy-protected CDs would disappear from the music industry, which instead embraced the rise of digital downloads, streaming, and the Vinyl Revival as piracy deterrents.
• The relative commercial failure of Fleetwood Mac's Tusk struck a major blow to the popularity of double albums in popular music that would span the next thirty years. The format had long existed on shaky ground due to its high production costs, but Tusk underselling compared to the blockbuster sales of Rumours made labels and artists alike far more reluctant to release double albums except out of necessity. When the rise of CDs made longer albums fashionable again, the LP versions would either pare down the material or pack the grooves closer to avoid using more than one disc, and double-CD releases are still rare outside of live albums, compilations, and reissues of double-LP albums that don't fit on one CD. It's also common for proposed double albums to be Divided for Publication. Double-LP albums would only become popular again with the Vinyl Revival, which made it easier to profit off of a Multi-Disc Work on vinyl (which was often necessary due to many newer albums still featuring CD-centric runtimes).
• In the late '90s and the oughties, the music industry sold song snippets usable as ringtones for up to $5 apiece. This practice started to fall out of favour in the late 2000s, when the novelty wore off, and consumers who still wanted ringtones discovered that they could just use third-party software and tutorials to make them themselves. Then the rise of smartphones finished off what was left of the ringtone market — why buy an overpriced song snippet when you can just connect to the Internet and get the whole thing for a fraction of the price on iTunes or Amazon? It doesn't help that smartphone users will often either use the default ringtone or set it to silent or vibrate, which defeats the purpose of buying ringtones.
• Apple's iPod singlehandedly ended the Compact Disc's reign as the dominant format for popular music. With its intuitive design and ability to hold entire libraries of music at one's fingertips, it convinced music fans that they didn't even need physical music anymore. The iTunes music store also served as The Moral Substitute for file sharing by providing a convenient way to buy digital music (as opposed to other efforts backed by major record companies, which fell flat on their face due to various stupid rules and restrictions on what you could do with purchased music). Even after physical music made a comeback in the form of the vinyl and cassette revivals, the CD never fully returned to its original popularity as a format for music distribution.
• Spotify popularized music streaming at the expense of digital music sales, convincing music fans that they didn't even need to own their favorite albums anymore. The Vinyl Revival complemented the rise of streaming for people who missed building their own music collections.

Professional Wrestling

• The Authority was the breaking point for the evil authority figure in wrestling. Due to it exposing all the wrong things that can happen when the role is given to a Villain Sue (the fact that they can never lose or be exposed/humiliated, their infinite power which they abused at will), their long bout of Too Bleak, Stopped Caring, and especially after the confusing payoff in the WrestleMania 32 weekend in 2016, the whole angle gave the McMahon family (sans Shane) a LOT of X-Pac Heat, forcing them to go into hiding, then the WWE proceeded to remove the General Manager figure after TLC 2019. Then all other wrestling companies followed suit.
• Ready to Rumble: Professional Wrestling was at the peak of its mainstream popularity in the late '90s due to the Monday Night Wars between World Championship Wrestling and World Wrestling Federation (now World Wrestling Entertainment), with many wrestlers guest-starring in dozens of shows and movies. That all changed when WCW helped make Ready To Rumble. The movie flopped hard (not helped by portraying wrestling fans as morons and the unpopular "David Arquette as WCW champion" storyline meant to tie into the film, which was the first Gooker Award winner in WrestleCrap history). Coupled with many problems inside the industry that eventually led to WCW going out of business, no one in Hollywood would show much more interest in aligning themselves with the product.
• The once quite lucrative wresting "shoot interview" DVD market was killed off by the trend of basically every notable retired wrestler starting their own podcast in the late 2010s, along with the sharp decline in the sales of physical media in general. Sean Oliver, who produced and hosted many of those interviews for his company Kayfabe Commentaries, finally threw in the towel and began hosting the Kliq This podcast with Kevin Nash in 2022, though the archived interviews are still available on the Kayfabe Commentaries website, and some are on YouTube.

Radio

• The advent of radio news broadcasting in the 1930s was what killed off the newspaper "Extra". You could say that most media appearances of "Extra! Extra! Read All About It!" is an artifact of sorts.

Sports

• The Ultimate Fighting Championship, as well as Mixed Martial Arts in general, basically discredited Supernatural Martial Arts and Artistic License – Martial Arts tropes that had been growing popular with the films of Bruce Lee, Chuck Norris, Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Damme, and later revitalized with the Wire Fu films popularized by The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon outside of anime like Dragon Ball Z. Before MMA became widespread, the wider world had no idea what real martial arts or self-defense looked like, allowing frauds, con men, and glorified cult leaders frequently posing as Old Masters to get away with claiming that their fighting styles could defeat anyone or do anything. Actual MMA competition quickly showed that many popular martial arts styles were just plain old unviable in a real fight against a resisting opponent.

Theme Parks

• During the 2010s, Universal Studios theme parks built a large number of "screen" attractions, motion simulators that emphasized action-packed spectacle and big-name actors reprising their roles from the movies that the rides were based on. While theme park enthusiasts had long derided the trend, feeling that Universal had come to prefer them over more traditional rides for the purpose of saving a buck, the opening of Fast & Furious: Supercharged in the Orlando park in 2018, whose contents were lifted wholesale from the Studio Tour in Hollywood, marked a tipping point where even casual guests disliked the ride. Thierry Coup, the senior vice president and chief creative officer of Universal Creative, considers it the biggest mistake of his career, and afterwards, Universal quickly swung back to using physical props and dynamic ride vehicles in their rides, including opening two new full-on rollercoasters, Hagrid's Magical Creatures Motorbike Adventure in 2019 and the VelociCoaster in 2021.
• The opening of Paris' Walt Disney Studios Park is typically credited with bringing the "studio park" era to an end. Dating back to the 1960's with Universal Studios Hollywood and their Studio Tour, it caught on in the 90s with the duelling openings of Universal Studios Florida and Disney–MGM Studios (today Disney's Hollywood Studios), two parks that embraced the theming of a Hollywood studio backlot and a heavy focus on "riding the movies." Companies loved this for its relative budget-friendliness (given that a studio backlot theme doesn't demand intricate, immersive theming) and potential for corporate synergy. Even Paramount and Warner Brothers would try and get in on the trend, purchasing regional parks to highly variable levels of success. Walt Disney Studios Park in 2002 marked the point where the issues with studio parks became impossible to ignore; its bare-bones theming and lack of attractions drew attention to how cheap and incoherent these parks could be, particularly when contrasted with their lovingly detailed late 90's contemporary parks such as Disney's Animal Kingdom and Universal's Islands of Adventure. Today, only Universal Studios continue to get away with the concept thanks to the Grandfather Clause, and even there the studio theming is becoming more of The Artifact as the company seeks to retrofit more immersive "living lands" such as The Wizarding World of Harry Potter and Super Nintendo World into them.

Toys

• During the '80s, there were several "transforming vehicles" lines on the market, like the big two of 1983's Challenge Of The Go Bots and 1984's The Transformers, 1985's M.A.S.K. and Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors, and 1986's Centurions. By 1987, Transformers were the top dog, but already suffering from declining sales, at least part of which was thanks to the debut of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and the Nintendo Entertainment System. ^note Another big factor was the lack of a concurrently airing cartoon to help sell the characters and thus the toys, thanks to Takara and Hasbro having vastly different ideas on where the series should go. By 1990, the Transformers toyline died with a whimper, taking the concept of transforming vehicles as a key point of a toyline with them. The Transformers franchise would make a huge comeback thanks to 1996's Beast Wars reviving the franchise, followed by a string of increasingly successful entries like the Unicron Trilogy and the Michael Bay films pushing them back into the spotlight, making it into an old warhorse franchise that isn't going anywhere. But it's the only "transforming vehicles" series to do so; toylines featuring the concept as a whole haven't been widespread since and the idea is largely seen as the exclusive gimmick of Transformers specifically, to the extent that many of Transformers' former rivals — most notably the Go-Bots — have since been bought out and welded into the Transformers canon.
• 1986 saw the release of both Rambo: The Force of Freedom (based on 1982's First Blood and 1985's Rambo: First Blood Part II) and The Real Ghostbusters (based on Ghostbusters (1984)) along with accompanying toylines. While Rambo was in essence a ripoff of G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, it was still a modest success. Combined with the runaway success of The Real Ghostbusters, this led to a number of children's cartoons and toylines based on non-child-friendly properties. (While Ghostbusters was rated PG and could be seen by the cartoon and toyline's target demographic, it was a "hard PG", so to speak, with references to sex, profanity and frightening imagery.) 1989 saw the release of RoboCop (based on 1987's RoboCop, a film that nearly got an X rating for its Gorn) and Police Academy: The Animated Series (based on 1987's Lighter and Softer PG-rated Police Academy 4: Citizens on Patrol rather than the hard R-rated original). 1991 saw the release of Toxic Crusaders (based on 1984's The Toxic Avenger, most assuredly not suitable for kids). 1991/1992 also saw kid-friendly toylines released for Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Aliens despite both properties most assuredly not being kid-friendly. The Real Ghostbusters puttered along until 1991 (where a combination of Executive Meddling and resulting Lighter and Softer tone eventually killed it), putting an end to the trend of marketing adult-oriented properties to children. However, a new trend of having characters from adult-oriented properties appear in children's media emerged instead.

Video Games

• The Nintendo DS was released during the mid-2000s, in an era before internet-accessible smartphones became widespread. As such it received a large amount of non-gaming "games", including literature, cookbooks, horoscopes, language tutors, fitness trainers, and even ones that teach players to quit smoking. By the time the late 2000s rolled around, iPhones and Android smartphones became commonplace, and such apps can be downloaded for free while capable of receiving regular updates. Today, such DS apps are seen as curiosities at best, and a time capsule of the DS's heyday. It is very telling that the DS's successor, the Nintendo 3DS, largely lacked such apps.
• Final Fantasy XIII in 2010 was the nail-in-the-coffin for the No Sidepaths, No Exploration, No Freedom trope trend that Eastern RPGs had been moving toward during the the sixth and seventh generation of console games. The game was heavily criticized for leaning so hard into the trope that every single map felt like a "hallway" with no towns or NPCs to interact with. Every subsequent Final Fantasy (including its direct sequel), as well as most other Eastern RPG games, opted to go with a Wide-Open Sandbox approach starting in the late seventh gen and continuing into the eighth gen.
• In addition to serving as a Genre-Killer for the pulp-cinematic modern military shooter, Homefront also served as the nail in the coffin for the No Sidepaths, No Exploration, No Freedom trope that first-person shooters had been moving towards in the seventh generation of console games. The game was heavily criticized for leaning so hard onto this trope (among numerous other things) that it actually made the game feel boring. Since then, almost every First-Person Shooter has tried to add more options to explore the level.
• Donkey Kong 64 dealt a huge blow to the late 90's trend of 3D Collect-a-Thon Platformer with open-ended levels like Super Mario 64, Banjo-Kazooie and Spyro the Dragon which became popular as a way of showing off large 3D worlds and 3D movement. DK64 got criticism for focusing too much on its excessive amount of collectibles, which was seen as Padding to some. Further releases in the genre would often be shorter, lower budget affairs that usually garnered mixed reviews and became Cult Classics at best, while mainstream platformers like the Super Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog and Rayman series returned to more linear world design. The trend would experience a resurgence in the late New 10's by games like Super Mario Odyssey and A Hat in Time, as well as remakes of older games like Pac-Man World and the aforementioned Spyro.
• Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite was considered the nail in the coffin on cinematic story modes in Japanese Fighting Games. This was a trend that caught on thanks to NetherRealm Studios' 2011 reboot of Mortal Kombat, which featured a robust story campaign. Injustice: Gods Among Us, Mortal Kombat X, and their sequels also featured similar campaigns, and were thus seen as a new industry standard. However, when the trend hopped across the Pacific and Japanese game developers tried to emulate this success with games like Soulcalibur V, Street Fighter V, and Tekken 7, the results were considered lackluster at best and detrimental to the games at worst. Then, when MvC: Infinite was released with a cinematic mode that was widely panned and reputedly had a negative effect on the game's sales (along with many other scandals), that feature was quietly downplayed or absent altogether from subsequent Japanese fighters such as Samurai Shodown (2019), Soulcalibur VI, and Guilty Gear -STRIVE-. ^note In the case of Soulcalibur VI, the story was presented in a fashion similar to previous installments of the Soul Series, blending art-and-text-based exchanges with a handful of cinematics a la Tales of Souls in SCIII and the story mode of SCV (ironically enough given the latter game nearly became the death knell for the series). Guilty Gear -STRIVE-, on on the other hand, continued the Kinetic Novel approach adopted by Xrd, once again abandoning the "story progression between battles" template featured in earlier titles that's also more common in Japanese fighters. However, 2023's Tekken 8 not only featured a cinematic story mode — one that was much better received than its predecessor's attempt — but also brought back Arcade Mode with character-specific endings, something that the Tekken series had started to phase out with Tekken 6 a decade-and-a-half earlier, suggesting the trend may be on life support for now.
• While the general idea of a Dream Match Game isn't dead, its initial features of non-canonicity and lacking plots were killed when SNK, who pioneered the concept with The King of Fighters '98 and The King of Fighters 2002 and made a few similar titles for other series of theirs (such as Samurai Shodown), ended up with the complete bomb that was The King of Fighters XII, which was near universally lambasted for being massively bare-bones compared to its predecessors and essentially being an open beta for the canon The King of Fighters XIII. While updated re-releases of both '98 and 2002 both performed relatively well, XII ultimately caused too much damage to the initial concept — tellingly, other "dream match" fighting games since then such as Tekken Tag Tournament 2 and BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle have had some degree of plot and character development, with even SNK's own SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy outright being Loose Canon.
• Skylanders and the entire Toys-To-Life Game genre was killed due to market oversaturation, largely in part to Disney attempting to hijack the craze with Disney Infinity, which saw a new version every year that added some new content but wasn't compatible with previous versions. Two series that were both very Merchandise-Driven put a large amount of strain on the idea, which wasn't helped when LEGO jumped on the bandwagon with LEGO Dimensions, now draining even more consumer satisfaction and money. Activision at this point began to try to prioritize new games, in order to not get drowned out by Disney and LEGO. In Q3 of 2015 alone, three different major toys-to-life games were hitting the market. That many different games largely made consumers realize the money spent wasn't worth it for cash-grab games, and thus the market for toys-to-life began to die, and by 2017, all three game franchises had been killed off due to disappointing revenue. The failure of Starlink: Battle for Atlas that same year served as proof the market had been oversaturated, and all four game franchises haven't had a new release again. The only survivor of the genre was Nintendo's amiibo, in large part due to not being tied to any particular game and instead functioning across their systems as a whole.
• Initially, 2D Fighting Game series tried adapting to the rise of 3D fighters, and gamers in general thinking 2D graphics are obsolete, by making 3D games that combined 2D and 3D fighting game mechanics, such as Street Fighter (the Street Fighter EX sub-series), Mortal Kombat (Mortal Kombat 4 and its sixth-gen installments), and The King of Fighters (the Maximum Impact sub-series). Once Street Fighter IV was released to critical and commercial acclaim with its 2½D gameplay, these 2D-3D hybrid fighters were gone, with later The King of Fighters and Mortal Kombat games also employing 2½D gameplay as well as other 2D fighters who never tried adapting to this trend like Guilty Gear. ^note Street Fighter EX actually is something of an unbuilt example in this regard, as its use of the z-axis was only employed for dynamic camera angles during certain moves; contrary to popular belief, all fights remained confined to a 2D plane, with EX essentially playing like a polygonal version of the earlier Street Fighter Alpha games.
• The widespread backlash to Star Wars Battlefront II (2017)'s lootboxes caused enough of a stir that legislators were starting to take notice, considering them a form of gambling. This controversy caused the industry to largely shift away from luck-based microtransactions and toward Battle Passes instead.
• For a while, there was a trend for independent developers to take up crowdfunding to support their games, with Broken Age kick-starting it by formerly holding the record for most funded Kickstarter project. However, a series of controversies surrounding them, most notoriously the failure of Mighty No. 9, resulted in many independent developers using crowdfunding much less due to the stigma associated with them. While crowdfunded games still exists, they are very unlikely to ever receive the same amount of popularity, with Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night being the sole exception.
• The Atari Jaguar and Sega 32X's commercial failures and widespread negative reception are often credited by analysts with ending the "bit wars" that had dominated the home console market in the early '90s. Whereas the TurboGrafx-16, Sega Genesis, and Super Nintendo Entertainment System all tried to appeal to consumers by describing themselves as "16 bit" systems and their third-generation predecessors as only "8-bit," the Jaguar and 32X tried to one-up all of them by positioning themselves as 64-bit and 32-bit systems, respectively. However, journalists quickly exposed how empty Atari's claim was, and this plus the Jaguar and 32X's lack of differentiation from the competition sowed increased skepticism towards bit-based marketing. While "X-bit" distinguishers still stuck around in the public consciousness for the fifth generation (especially with the Nintendo 64), they were no longer used as selling points by console makers, and the Nintendo 64 ended up firmly beaten by the 32-bit PlayStation (while it actually was 64-bit, few if any of its games were actually capable of making use of this). Come the sixth generation, "8-bit," "16-bit," and "32-bit" would only stick around as labels used by gamers to describe specific styles of games, with newer systems no longer being described in terms of bit width. The increasing plateauing of technology that followed proved a further nail in the coffin; 128-bit computers are still mostly impractical, and 64-bit has long become the standard for home consoles, making bragging about one's bit size a rather pointless endeavor.
• Dedicated controllers for home Rhythm Games were once a staple of the genre. Many BEMANI ports on PS1 and PS2 have associated official controllers for them, most notably the DanceDanceRevolution mat, and Guitar Hero would popularize the dedicated rhythm game controller concept in the West with its guitar controller, with Rock Band further expanding on this concept with a drum controller as well; in the late 2000s, it was quite common for a full Rock Band setup of two guitar controllers, one drum controller, and one microphone for karaoke, to be used at parties. However, this trend went away in the 2010s as the latter two series faded out and Konami stopped producing BEMANI games for consoles (only to return half a decade later to a subscription-based service for PC BEMANI ports, which is much less accessible than traditional console ports for a variety of reasons). Nowadays, most players would rather play rhythm games that use something they already have or which has more utility, such as a keyboard,^note PC rhythm game players in particular love mechanical keyboards for their durability, feel, and how they are also great for other games and for typing gamepad, or the touchscreen on smartphones and tablets.

Western Animation

• invoked A Charlie Brown Christmas: Aluminum Christmas trees were a popular trend in the late '50s and the first half of the '60s. Their depiction here as a symbol of soulless holiday commercialism is credited with killing their popularity. The special even inspired a trope on this site, which defines something that sounds fictional, but actually isn't.
• Because of the negative reception of the eponymous show it attempted to bring into the U.S., the PBS Kids version of Caillou killed off framing devices to sandwich foreign shows together in order to make them more marketable to Americans, as no show of this sort has been attempted since.
• The monster successes of shows like PAW Patrol and Doc McStuffins has mostly ended the use of Fake Interactivity in preschool shows that Blue's Clues and Dora the Explorer made popular. Now, most preschool-aimed content tries to teach kids lessons without faking interactivity. A research study done by Disney in 2010 provides further insight into why this is the case. Before the Disney Junior block was conceived, the company surveyed parents and asked them what they wanted to see in the shows their kids watched. Most parents wanted their kids to watch stories that would make them happy and that they could tell back to their parents, a change most likely resulting from the rise of tablet and smartphone apps teaching preschool concepts. In comparison, when Disney conducted the same survey five years prior, parents wanted their children to learn educational concepts from these shows.
• The fall of animated TV shows made to promote celebrities, the Children's Television Act of 1990, which killed the Merchandise-Driven cartoons that were oh-so-prominent in the 80s and changing tastes would eventually deliver the coup de grâce for the Saturday-Morning Cartoon block. The rise of kid-oriented channels on cable such as Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network, which had original, creator-driven cartoons that were shown on every day of the week instead of just on Saturdays only accelerated this trend by the 2000s. After the Nick on CBS block ended in 2006, Saturday morning cartoons on network television became strictly edutainment fodder with the exception of FOX's 4KidsTV and the children's blocks on The CW before dying out entirely in 2016 in favor of cheap-to-produce live-action edutainment shows that exploit loopholes to allow for product placement and more advertising than would otherwise be allowed.
• The runaway success of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987) gave rise to a whole genre of cartoons starring a team of mutants or Funny Animal heroes and accompanying toylines, resulting in Bucky O'Hare and the Toad Wars! (1991), Toxic Crusaders (1991), Wild West COW Boys Of Moo Mesa (1992), Biker Mice from Mars (1993), Street Sharks (1994), and Extreme Dinosaurs (1997). The original TMNT cartoon was such a successful Long Runner (lasting till 1996!) that after its cancellation (which was due to more serious and melodramatic superhero cartoons like X-Men: The Animated Series and Batman: The Animated Series making the campy TMNT cartoon seem like an outdated joke in comparison. The series tried to adapt to this trend with the "Red Skies" seasons, but ratings continued to go down the toilet until it was cancelled.), the concept of a Funny Animal or Uplifted Animal hero team mostly went with it, with only future TMNT adaptations managing to enter the mainstream since then.

Other

• Nova Spektrum in Lillestrøm, Norway used to host Christmas-themed trade fairs like JuleExpo, which was held for the last time in 2014. The next year, newcomer Oslo Christmas Show turned up to replace it, but was poorly received due to having much less to offer than JuleExpo. They responded to the negative feedback by saying they'd try to do better next time, but nothing ever materialized, and no other Christmas-themed trade fair has been held at Nova Spektrum since.

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