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- For some reasons, many of a given decade's iconic elements will invariably return to the forefront about 30 years later: As an example, the raccoon coats of The Roaring '20s returned big time in The '50s, whose unique car styling got an enormous boost in The '80s. And the pop music of the 1980s has become very influential over the music artists of the 2010s.
- The '70s. Throughout the '80s and '90s, this decade was seen as America and the UK's cultural Audience-Alienating Era. Since the late '90s, it's seen as a more innocent time. Elements from the '70s which have made comebacks since then include:
- Bell-bottom jeans.
- The afro.
- The medium-length bowl cut with the fringe.
- Rollerskating thanks to Rollerblade pushing inline skates.
- Stoners on TV.
- Disco. A great deal of popular music for the past two decades (especially between 2005 and 2011-12) has been essentially "Disco that Dared Not Speak Its Name". However, the word still has a ways to go. Thanks to bands like Daft Punk and LCD Soundsystem, it's on its way back.
- Blaxploitation also makes a comeback every few years, although this is mainly so that people can have a giggle at the loud fashions and overuse of Jive Turkey, rather than recall the genre's roots as a supplement of the Civil Rights Movement.
- Blaxploitation music is very well regarded by DJs, and record collectors. It was also sampled by a lot of rappers. Even if the fashion is cliched, the music is still cool as ever.
- Gen Xers were fascinated by the culture of the 1970s, because many of them spent their childhoods in that era. It showed in their musical tastes and their fashion sense. Many films and TV shows catered to them by invoking the aesthetics of that era, and reruns of shows from the '70s were also popular.
- The '80s. In the '90s and even the '00s, this was seen as America's Audience-Alienating Era. However, many of the fashions and styles of that decade have made a comeback, with the returning popularity of everything from Transformers to leg warmers. Yes, leg warmers.
- Leg warmers + skirts = awesome. The inverted version (leggings under skirts) seems to have made a comeback in the mid '00s after being absent for ten years. Here, it has some justification — the revived trend started with teenage girls, who used the style to exploit a loophole in many high school dress codes that established a minimum length for skirts. If you were wearing leggings underneath, you could wear as short a skirt as you wanted, since you were technically also wearing pants. Eventually, the fad expanded and they have become commonplace.
- Canvas sneakers: One of the icons of the decade, but also a target of serious hate during the 90s, to the point that Converse was hit much worse by the early-90s backlash than even Ray-Ban, even constantly slipping into bankruptcy. Nike bought the company in 2003, a time when the 80s revival was brewing, and this was approached to relaunch the model which is still extremely popular these days.
- In the 90s, Synthpop used to be the prime example for people to explain why the 80s sucked so much. About twenty years later and thanks to the rise of Electronic Music, synthesizers are mandatory if you want to hit it big in the music industry.
- Hair Metal, the other example of why the 80's were so lame, also saw a small but noticeable resurgence in popularity in the mid-00s.
- Smooth jazz, mocked throughout the 90s as "yuppie music", came back with a vengeance during the 2000s.
- Conspicuous consumption, at least until 2005, then became unthinkable around 2007. It resurfaced again in the mid-2010s as the economy began to recover, then the COVID-19 outbreak and subsequent economic collapse made it fall out of favor again.
- Fear of nuclear war, ever present during the Cold War, subsided after the collapse of the Soviet Union at the start of The '90s. However, it became widespread again in The New '10s with U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean dictator Kim-Jong Un exchanging threats throughout 2017. While this initial scare mostly cooled off after both leaders' attended a summit in 2018 and Trump left office in 2021, it resurfaced in 2022 amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which brought tensions between Russia and the West to heights not seen since the Cold War.
- While The '90s never had the cultural backlash the '70s or the '80s had, some trends from that decade are starting to come back, such as plaid flannel shirts and hi-top fades.
- Modern social dance has undergone a huge revival, starting in the '90s, this after about fifty years of dormancy. Latin clubs sprung up across the U.S., ballroom dancing got a big boost with Dancing with the Stars, and swing dancing was resurrected by college students across the US and Europe.
- Facial hair in the West has gone in and out of style in a cyclical fashion for centuries among the elite following the same basic pattern as anything else: the ruling class has facial hair, everyone else has facial hair, the ruling class doesn't want to look like the lower class, the ruling class no longer has facial hair, and so on. The last time it was "in" in the West (i.e. you would expect your average CEO/congressman/stockbroker to have facial hair) was during the first several decades of the 20th century — the last US president, for example, to have facial hair was William Howard Taft, who was President from 1909-1913.
- Possession of a moustache will lead to jokes about you being a creepy possible pedophile with an addiction to disco music (if you're older than 30) or an insufferable hipster (if you're younger than 30).
- Facial hair seems to be making a very gradual comeback, or depending on how you look at it, it already has, with the most popular style being the Perma-Stubble. It can go back to clean shaven or full on beards from here. A quick perusal of Pinterest's Men's Fashion section will show the many variety of beards worn by fashion models and actors, both current and former Silver Screen Studs. In 2015, Paul Ryan became the first Speaker of the House to sport a beard in nearly 100 years, though it is closer to the aforementioned "stubble" look than the epic beards of the 19th century. Nevertheless, this may represent a sort of turning point, as male politicians have generally been advised against sporting beards for most of the last few decades.
- Facial hair in American politics has been making a bit of a comeback in The New '20s, with Senators Ted Cruz and John Fetterman being notable examples.
- Mustaches were very common for men between about 1850 and 1915, then slowly started to disappear — partly for hygienic reasons during WWI (for instance, gas helmets required wearers to be clean shaven) and partly as a reaction against Victorian values by the Roaring Twenties. Since then only older or working-class men tended to have any facial hair other than pencil-thin mustaches, and things remained that way until about 1960, when beatniks, and after 1967, the hippie counterculture went mainstream. Thus began another golden age for the mustache, which lasted until about 2000(by which point the Baby Boomers were seen as unhip). It's yet to return in full force, although it's still quite common among certain ethnic groups (Blacks and Latinos, to give two obvious examples) and in Eastern European, Mediterranean and Arab countries where facial hair is still considered manly and/or sophisticated.
- Like facial hair, long hair on men cycles in and out of fashion. It was historically very common but it became a taboo in the west during the First World War as the military mandated "short back and sides" to prevent the spread of lice and it extended to civilians after the war as a backlash against Victorian values in the 1920s. Hair length got even shorter during the Great Depression and the Second World War which saw the popularization of buzz cuts, crew cuts and flat tops among civilians. Long hair remained a taboo until the The '60s, when The Beatles and the counterculture repopularized it. In The '70s, long hair was de rigeur. Even a middle-aged businessman's haircut would frequently extend below the ears. The Punk Rock and New Wave Music subcultures heralded a return to shorter hairstyles through The '80s, though longer styles remained popular. Hair Metal brought long hair back, albeit heavily styled. Unadorned long hair came back into fashion in The '90s with the rise of Grunge, but short hairstyles were popular as well. The 2000s continued the trend, taken to extreme levels by Black and Latino cultures in terms of short hair while the Emo subculture popularized the much-derided style of the bangs covering the eyes. Justin Bieber and One Direction popularized slightly longer hairstyles for teenage males into the early 2010s. The pendulum swung back towards shorter, "Teddy Boy"-styled hair afterwards then in the late 2010s longer haircuts became popular again after the undercut gained popularity amongst the alt-right.
- Heavy cosmetics for women, such as lipstick and eyeshadow, have faded in and out of popularity over the course of the century, literally altering the face of Western womanhood. It became standard for women in The Roaring '20s and continued throughout The Great Depression, The '40s and The '50s, until it reached the point at which pictures of women from the mid-20th century can sometimes look clownish. A more barefaced look was popularized by female folk singers (Joan Baez, most famously) beginning in The '60s, and then that has become the standard. Heavy makeup returned with a vengeance late in The '70s and The '80s. Barefaced and tanned looks returned to popularity in The '90s and The 2000s, while The New '10s have gradually reverted to heavy makeup once again. In spite of all this though, the line has not been a completely straight one and there are always exceptions.
- Suntanning, while made fashionable by Chanel in the '20s, didn't become mainstream until The '60s. It has been most popular in moments when make-up is more out than in and vice versa, though "natural" tans have been on a long term decline as the dangers of UV damage to skin and associated cancers became common knowledge and when tans are in vogue they are now likely to be spray ones.
- Women's hairstyles have also varied in many forms since The Roaring '20s, when the '20s Bob Haircut broke with the centuries-old standard of long hair, but also sparked a trend for more elaborate hairstyles, coming to a head in The '50s with the "beehive". In the late 60s and for most of the '70s, however, long and unadorned hair became the norm, but the feathered haircut led to the overproduced hairstyles of The '80s, before reverting to simpler hair in the 90s and most of the 00s. As of The New '10s, '80s-inspired hairstyles have made a return.
- Supermodel culture: It first surfaced in 60s-era Swinging London, embodying the aesthetics of the era, although it fell out of favor by the early 1970s. It then came back during the 1980s, hitting a peak around 1990, with the release of George Michael's Freedom! '90. However a move towards a more casual and frugal lifestyle during the decade made supermodels and fashion designers accepable targets exploited by films like Zoolander. During the 2000s reality shows like America's Next Top Model restored their mainstream acceptance and by the 2010s, supermodels were everywhere again, with the so-called "Instagram generation" becoming role models (dubious or not) for young women.
- Revolvers experienced this in The '90s, at least in the American civilian market. The '80s saw the rise of so-called "Wonder Nines," 9 millimeter handguns that held 15 rounds or more, vastly outstripping the six-round capacity of most revolvers. Police forces switched over immediately, and civilians took to the new guns almost as quickly. In 1994, however, the Assault Weapons Ban was passed, heavily restricting, among other things, the sale of guns with magazines that held more than ten rounds. This stripped the Wonder Nines of their chief advantage, allowing revolvers to retake market share. Even after the ban expired in 2004, this remained in effect in those states that still had their own laws on the books — revolvers are noticeably more popular in, say, New York than they are in Florida. Note that this doesn't apply to police departments — their weapons choices weren't affected by the ban, and the greater magazine capacity is incredibly useful for their work.
- Part of this popularity is that revolvers offer criminals an advantage; by not expelling casings automatically, they leave behind less forensic evidence. Less, not none, of course.
- Baby names. There are some names that never go out of style, but others run in 60- to 100-year cycles - in The '30s "Shirley" was a little girl and "Zack" was a grizzled old prospector. Come the early 21st century, Shirley's collecting Social Security and Zack's a young man in his teens or twenties. Such "time capsule names" tend to be popular for about 20 years and then become indelibly linked to the generation born when they were popular, until they're rediscovered a few decades after that generation dies off and then they become indelibly linked to the new one. One major reason for this is the tendency to name children after grandparents and great-grandparents. This is something for fiction writers to watch out for - one of the easiest ways to provoke outrage over sloppy research is to have an entire cast of 20- and 30-somethings with names that are popular baby names now but weren't between the '30s and '80s; or to have a period-set story where characters' names are typical of the generations that are that age today rather than the cohort the characters are supposed to belong to. An outlier or two is fine, but too many can be overwhelming.
- After the fall of the Iron Curtain, socialism was considered as good as dead in the United States. Later on, however, as a result of the 2007-2008 financial crisis, some Americans started to find it more appealing. As seen with some segments of the Occupy movement, socialism is coming back as a viable political theory (although the word remains a taboo in mainstream US politics). Socialism hasn't had a chance in U.S. electoral politics at anything beyond the state level (and for that matter only in the smaller states, most notably Vermont) since the 1920s and 30s, partly because of the "first red scare" that followed WWI and that the New Deal was thought to turn socialism obsolete. But it was the early 1950s' Red Scare that killed off American socialism, especially once the "Red hunters" were able to (ironically) stir up working-class resentment against "left-wing intellectuals", giving us the current Bourgeois Bohemian trope. Liberalism has since made a comeback, of course, but it is a bourgeois, cultural liberalism that most old-school socialists find obscene. Of course this all came to head in the 2016 Democratic primary when Bernie Sanders, an openly-declared socialist from Vermont did way better than expected, and in 2018 the also openly socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez surprisingly won a Democratic primary in New York and got elected to the House of Representatives. However, socialism has not been as strong among mainstream Democrats, who generally favor more economically moderate candidates such as Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden.
- Meanwhile in the UK, socialism never became much of a dirty word, as British socialism was vehemently anti-Marxist (being closer to "utopian socialism" than to "scientific socialism"). However, by the second half of the 20th century it declined as a powerful political force, "arthritically limping into the computer age", increasingly stuck in the industrial era. The Labour Party, originally a full-blown socialist party, had moved to the right under Tony Blair's leadership during the 1990s as socialism had become something of a joke, the domain of old lefties stuck in the 1970s, the days of Tony (Wedgwood) Benn, Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock. After major defeats at the 2010 and 2015 general elections, the party leadership election was won by one of those 'old lefties', long-time socialist campaigner Jeremy Corbyn. While hugely popular amongst the party membership, the party's Members of Parliament looked on in horror, convinced it meant electoral oblivion. Their vote of no-confidence and leadership challenge failed to remove Corbyn, and meanwhile the British press carried daily attacks on him note to a level unprecedented even for the British Tabloids, and when Prime Minister Theresa May called a snap election in Spring 2017, many predicted, or were even certain of, a Conservative landslide. Some even questioned whether the Labour Party could survive as a political force. In an unprecedented turnaround, however, Corbyn's socialist policies, including re-nationalisation (something that had been off the table for decades), proved remarkably popular after years of Conservative-led austerity and the fallout from Brexit, especially amongst younger voters. Although the Conservatives remained the largest party in the subsequent election, they lost their majority in parliament and Labour made substantial gains note and received their best result in yearsnote . For the time being, at least, old-school socialism is enjoying a come-back.
- In the interest of posterity, it is only fair to note that in the subsequent general election (2019), Labour ended up getting the result that pundits had expected them to get in 2017, suffering their worst result since the 1930s, with even some constituencies that had only ever had Labour MPs since their inception electing Conservative candidates. One lesson which commentators have remarked upon is that policy tends to be more appealing than ideology and while Labour had a large raft of individual policies which were popular by themselves, voters had a hard time figuring out what their priorities were, while the Conservative campaign linking everything to the very direct "Get Brexit Done" slogan left much less room for doubt.
- Meanwhile in the UK, socialism never became much of a dirty word, as British socialism was vehemently anti-Marxist (being closer to "utopian socialism" than to "scientific socialism"). However, by the second half of the 20th century it declined as a powerful political force, "arthritically limping into the computer age", increasingly stuck in the industrial era. The Labour Party, originally a full-blown socialist party, had moved to the right under Tony Blair's leadership during the 1990s as socialism had become something of a joke, the domain of old lefties stuck in the 1970s, the days of Tony (Wedgwood) Benn, Michael Foot or Neil Kinnock. After major defeats at the 2010 and 2015 general elections, the party leadership election was won by one of those 'old lefties', long-time socialist campaigner Jeremy Corbyn. While hugely popular amongst the party membership, the party's Members of Parliament looked on in horror, convinced it meant electoral oblivion. Their vote of no-confidence and leadership challenge failed to remove Corbyn, and meanwhile the British press carried daily attacks on him note to a level unprecedented even for the British Tabloids, and when Prime Minister Theresa May called a snap election in Spring 2017, many predicted, or were even certain of, a Conservative landslide. Some even questioned whether the Labour Party could survive as a political force. In an unprecedented turnaround, however, Corbyn's socialist policies, including re-nationalisation (something that had been off the table for decades), proved remarkably popular after years of Conservative-led austerity and the fallout from Brexit, especially amongst younger voters. Although the Conservatives remained the largest party in the subsequent election, they lost their majority in parliament and Labour made substantial gains note and received their best result in yearsnote . For the time being, at least, old-school socialism is enjoying a come-back.
- The use of "Frisco" by natives of San Francisco, as explained in this Chronicle article.
- Cartoon Network was a revered channel for Western Animation in the late '90s, but suffered massive Network Decay in the mid 2000s, culminating in an overdose of Canadian imports and live-action shows. Luckily, the success of Adventure Time and Regular Show has returned Cartoon Network to its former place.
- With the growth of social media and instant messaging, Internet Relay Chat looked poised to go the way of Usenet in the '00s, a place for pirates and 4chan trolls to hang out in. Instead, nearly every open source project has an IRC channel (typically on Freenode), as well as many subreddits.
- The sinking of the RMS Titanic was one of the biggest and most well-known disasters of the early 20th century and was the source of multiple book and film adaptations about passengers on board. By the 70's and 80's people had more than enough of those stories (in the issue 4 of Les Aventures Extraordinaires d'Adèle Blanc-Sec, part of the excitement is seeing whether or not she would get on board of the Titanic — and die due to being unable to escape). No one would have expected that a movie adaptation in 1997 would end up becoming the, at the time, number one highest grossing film of all time, later going down to a still strong number three (not adjusted for inflation).
- Steampunk culture in the United States: In the 1990s, it was seen as the next big thing with its blending of science fiction and retro aesthetics becoming a surprise success. After 9/11 however, American Speculative Fiction fans turned to Diesel Punk and Atom Punk, which had a stronger Eagle Land feel. By the 2010s, the millennial generation's fascination for everything British has translated into a resurgence of the culture.
- French culture in the U.S. was highly popular for generations, whether for its art, its love of jazz, and its films among other things. By the early/mid-2000s however, France's opposition to The War on Terror led to a backlash on the right towards anything that sported a French accentnote , to the point French friesnote among other things, were renamed as "Freedom fries"note . By the following decade, the backlash against said war and general Europhilia in America led to a renewed popularity of France, the terrorist attacks that have hit the country during the mid-2010s and the election of Emmanuel Macronnote only boosting said sentiment.
- Americans were huge consumers of tea until the Boston Tea Party, when coffee became the beverage of choice and tea became synonymous with "elitist" and "sissified" Brits. During the 2010s however, tea became increasingly popular in North America, mostly because of the craze over British culture during the early years of the decade and growing aversion to caffeine, especially among younger demographics (which has meant a shift in coffee consumption towards more "gourmet" experiences like Starbucks and Nespresso; its place as the quintessential pick-me-up taken over by energy drinks and some varieties of tea). At the same time, green tea became popular as a health food, particularly among women. As a result, better quality teas became more readily available and big box stores began stocking electric kettles (though generally less powerful than the average U.K. models due to the US's 120V electrical outlets compared to the 240V outlets in most other countries) in their kitchen appliance sections.
- With the rise of coffeehouse culture in the U.S. in The '90s, drip coffee was seen as something for old people or the terminally clueless by serious coffee aficionados. Real coffee came from espresso machines or a French press. But with the rise of "third wave" coffee culture, coffee lovers have rediscovered manual pour-over drip coffee makers. Ironically, it tends to be popular in the Pacific Northwest, the region responsible for popularizing espresso in the U.S.
- The attitude towards recreational drugs has undergone several cycles of both prohibition and legalization as well as more or less regulation being more popular politically and with the population at large:
- Perhaps the most dramatic is the story of alcohol prohibition, which was tried out in several countries, primarily in the first third of the 20th century, most notably in the United States between 1920 and 1933note . It backfired horribly however (while consumption did decrease opposed to popular knowledge, this was offset by increasing crime rates), and after its repeal alcohol gradually became more popular. The profile of the average beer and bourbon drinker since the 1990s has returned however to be the rowdy blue-collar layabout that became the focus of the temperance movement of the 19th century (this however does not apply to more upscale drinks such as vodka or wine, still regarded as highbrow. Even beer has gotten in on the act with the rise of craft breweries).
- Smoking is nowadays associated with the poor and uneducated in much of the West and is banned in most indoor (and several outdoor) places — a stark contrast to days past when it was considered to be tasteful and stylish, and even The Hindenburg had a dedicated smoking room, despite being filled with hydrogen. Not that it was always that way, before WWI, tobacco was associated with cowboys and others. While vaporizers (better known as "vapes") have gained popularity, these are considered to be more of a "premium" product rather than for everyday use much like cigars (which have thrived since the 1990s with the rise of "cigar bars"). On the other hand, electronic cigarettes were intended for daily usage, but they never caught on for certain reasons, one of them being their propensity to explode. Like their non-electric counterparts however, they've also quickly become associated with "low-lives" and "white trash".
- Attitudes towards hemp as a plant and its use as a drug have also varied greatly. George Washington grew it on his farmnote and the Declaration of Independence was written on hemp paper. In the 20th century an anti-drug scare campaign led to the
Unfortunate Implication of renaming it as "marijuana" to make it sound like a "Mexican" drug — succeeded in getting it banned and for a long time only The Stoner and hopeless left-wing radicals ever argued in favor of legalizing the plant. Even the non-drug cultivation of hemp became increasingly difficult and was entirely impeded by bureaucratic red tape in many places. However, after Bill Clinton stated that he "Did not inhale" weed, its acceptance began to rise once more and even people on the political right started to argue in favor of legalization with libertarian "get the government out of people's lives" arguments. By The New '10s Barack Obama was able to gleefully admit that "Of course I inhaled, that was sort of the point" and several states have passed ballot measures or laws to legalize medicinal or recreational use with a lot of Loophole Abuse going on with the former in some states. In fact Bill Maher is able to more or less openly declare his "medical" marijuana he takes under California law has more to do with getting high than with any actual medical condition.
- President Ulysses S. Grant. When he left office, he was a well-liked president and much lauded as a general, credited with winning the Civil War for the Union. However, the scandals, as well as the economic downturn, that marred his second term quickly began to take their toll on his reputation, not helped by his reputation for alcoholism. For a long time, even his military record was re-evaluated as nothing special, with Grant being credited more for being in the right place at the right time for good things to happen rather than any genuine military greatness on his own part. In the following decades, Grant's reputation has begun to recover, with modern Grant supporters pointing out that he had easily the best civil rights record of the Reconstruction presidents; Grant supported black Southerners (including undertaking a massive government crackdown on the KKK that left them crippled for four decades) and made numerous, albeit largely unsuccessful, efforts to keep the peace between whites and Native Americans in the West. Though Grant is still generally ranked as a below-average president in scholarly sources, his reputation is steadily climbing, while that of traditionally lauded presidents with bad civil rights records (such as Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson) has headed in the other direction. He tends to be regarded as closer to "well-meaning and competent leader who was stuck in a nigh-unsalvageable situation" than "drunk who almost torpedoed the country."
- The undercut hairstyle, buzzed on the sides and back but long and parted on the top, has cycled in and out of popularity as a men's haircut for over a century. It emerged in The Edwardian Era with working-class men, and despite its association with street gangs (short hair was harder to grab in a fight), it eventually became mainstream during the Jazz Age in the 1920s and '30s. The rise of the '60s counterculture saw new hairstyles take its place, but it enjoyed a revival in the 2010s thanks to celebrities like Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt, Macklemore, and David Beckham, as well as TV characters like Mad Men's Don Draper and Boardwalk Empire's Jimmy Darmody, leading to its rise in hipster culture. Unfortunately, it also became popular among members of the alt-right, who adopted it as a less threatening alternative to the skinhead/buzzcut look while also hearkening back to the Hitler Youth, causing the style to earn the pejorative nickname "fashy" around 2016 and start falling out of favor again.
- Up until 250 or so million years ago, the dominant land animals were the therapsids. Then, global climate changes forced the archosaurs on top, with them evolving in relatively short order into a huge group called the dinosaurs. These ruled Earth for 150 million years before being wiped out by some asteroid... cue some poor surviving branch of the therapsids deciding it's now their time to step in as the top dog... and whale... and tiger... and elephant... and ape...
- Glass bottles for non-alcoholic beverages. Up until the 1980s, milk and other drinks were always found in glass bottles but beginning in the 1970s, plastic became the norm... until the 2010s when the environmental effects of plastic became well-known. By the second half of the decade, glass bottles saw a resurgence. In many countries the introduction of (sometimes intentionally onerous) deposits for plastic bottles, the increasing refusal of recycling plants to handle plastic and even a "sin tax" helped repopularize glass bottles. Despite appearances even "durable" PET bottles last less cycles of being used, emptied and refilled than glass bottles.
- Similarly, by the 1990s, paper bags had been replaced by cheaper-to-make plastic bags. However, in the late 2010s many retailers began phasing out plastic bags (with many countries banning them entirely or taxing them, including a 2010s EU law to that effect) in favor of paper bags and reusable shopping bags.
- The Fantasy genre hit a low point in the early-mid '10s where many movies of the fantasy kind were Box Office Bombs, and it lost significant ground in overall popularity to the Superhero genre. There were exceptions, such as Harry Potter due to its longstanding popularity and Game of Thrones for being such a mature take on it, but overall the fear of failure was what kept many properties from being greenlit. In the late '10s, things changed. The rise of streaming (see above) has led to these concepts being perfect adaptations for the format, with their rich lore, detailed worlds, and possibilities for stories actually being ideal — an interesting reversal in what kept these stories from succeeding to begin with. The Wheel of Time, The Chronicles of Narnia, The Witcher, and The Lord of the Rings, just to name a few, are examples of stories that were announced as major selling points for their services.
- Unlike Bigfoot and the Loch Ness monster, which are consistently famous and popular cryptids, The Mothman seems to regularly fade into obscurity only to suddenly become all the rage again. This almost always happens after he stars in a new work that gains a big fanbase. For example, he seemed all but forgotten with anyone but a few paranormal enthusiasts until the movie The Mothman Prophecies came out in 2002, soon after which he received his own statue and festival in his hometown of Point Pleasant, West Virginia. Then he was mostly forgotten again for some years, but the popularity of Fallout 76 brought him into the spotlight again, including a whole lot of Internet memes as well as his own trope on this site.
- Nuclear energy seems to have undergone several cycles of popularity and lack thereof. In the 1950s, people were - by and large - excited about the "atomic age" but it took into the 1970s that commercial nuclear power really took off (and it took a lot of state or quasistate involvement of one kind or another) - aided in no small part by a certain 1973 war making clear to the entire western world that fossil fuels - and petroleum chief among them - were not infinite. However, come the mid 1980s and a certain incident on the Ukrainian / Byelorussian border (Chernobyl) and the anti-nuclear movement had an enormous surge in popularity. While this led to some decisions to phase out nuclear energy or never enter it to begin with (of note Australia, one of the world's biggest Uranium suppliers never built a commercial nuclear reactor for electricity generation - they do have research and isotope production reactors whose thermal output is incidental, rather than a power-source), by The New '10s nuclear energy seemed to have recovered popularity - only for Fukushima to throw yet another wrench into all the high-flying plans, culminating perhaps with the bankruptcy of Westinghouse, a major supplier of "Generation III+" reactors. However, with some Development Hell stuck projects finally getting completed and China becoming the second biggest nuclear energy producer (having overtaken France by some measures though not by others) in the 2020s and with Putin's invasion of Ukraine in 2022 leading to yet another fossil fuel price shock - and a fundamental re-evaluation of the "cheap natural gas" paradigm - numerous countries announced ambitious new building projects for nuclear power and/or the reversal of their prior abandonment of nuclear power - buoyed, in many cases, by rising support for nuclear power in the polls. It thus might appear that - especially in light of the whole climate issue becoming more and more pressing - nuclear is on the upswing once more, but it should be obvious by now that there have been many false springs for nuclear in the past.
- Telegraphy was one of the first telecommunications technologies when it debuted in the 19th century, but it was largely displaced by the telephone starting in the 20th century. As with other communications technologies, it got a new lease on life in the computer age, but in different forms than the old-fashioned telegram. You might be familiar with telegraphy in the form of e-mail or text messaging.
