Blogs
The thing about Crock is that it’s years-old reruns of strips whose whole vibe was already years out of date when they were new, which I know doesn’t sound like the description of something that would be interesting to read every day, but it definitely delivers a fascinating, tangled mess of weird cultural attitudes! Like, today’s strip plays on that well-known belief that “librarians don’t have sex.” I mean, how could they have sex? They’re nerds! But the punchline here undermines this widely held stereotype: the bookmobile guy does, in fact, fuck. His paramour is named “Bertha,” though, so we can be reassured in the implication that she’s at least unattractive, and some small part of the world still makes sense.
Film — Live-Action
Chon Wang: I got an idea: why don't I pretend I'm sick, and then you can attack the guard when they come in?
Roy O'Bannon: Oh, you mean the sick prisoner routine? Does that still work in China? 'Cause here it's sorta been done to death.
Roy O'Bannon: Oh, you mean the sick prisoner routine? Does that still work in China? 'Cause here it's sorta been done to death.
Literature
The entire crime-writing fraternity yesterday bade a tearful farewell to the last "locked room" mystery at a large banquet held in its honor.. DCI Chymes then gave a glowing eulogy before being interrupted by the shocking news that the 'locked room' concept had been 'murdered' — and in a locked room.
Live-Action TV
Peggy Olson: Sex sells.
Don Draper: Says who? Just so you know, the people who talk that way think that monkeys can do this.
Don Draper: Says who? Just so you know, the people who talk that way think that monkeys can do this.
— Mad Men
Podcasts
"Back in the 50's the fan-dancers were hot, right? Now you can see gonzo porn on the internet where 80 guys are fuckin' cumming on some chick's face. So you don't really wanna see the girl hiding behind the fuckin' flower fan anymore."
Web Animation
"Now, some of you may think that the genre of fantasy is an excuse to free one's imagination to create truly alien and bizarre races. But that is utterly wrong! Fantasy is all about being derivative and not getting out of your comfort zone! It is very important that the genre of fantasy remains sternly under the shadow of Tolkien, and make no attempts to push the boundaries in any way."
"Okay, I'm going to establish a new rule now: You know cover-based combat? You're not allowed to base your whole game around that any more. You can still have it, in all its chest-high wall, pop-up shooting gallery tedium, but you've gotta have something else, even if it's just a Cooking Mama-style minigame during the celebratory post-firefight barbecue. Why? Because it's boring, it's overdone, and I feel sorry for the artists. They go through all the trouble researching appropriate outfits for periods and the setting, drawing the concept art, painstakingly modeling and animating the characters, and then what? They get stuck behind bits of wall on the far side of murky rooms and you might as well have dressed them up in cardboard boxes and bunny slippers."
—Zero Punctuation on Kane & Lynch 2: Dog Days
Web Original
So... one of Bond’s big clues is a matchbook? What is this, a Mike Hammer movie? I think that was already a hoary cliché before the first time Connery made this movie. This also means the main villain actually prints up matchbooks with his logo on them, and hands them out to his evil underlings.
Adrien Brody is some black ops soldier who is literally dropped into a new planet along with other soldiers and killers... They also have a failed plot twist with Topher Grace who plays a humble doctor who is so nice and hasn't killed anyone at all and if you haven't figured out the plot twist by now you haven't seen a movie ever.
Meanwhile, Helena Bonham Carter must have seen Depp wandering around and assumed this was another Tim Burton joint, so she shows up as a brothel madam with an ivory leg that doubles as a gun (when you're seeing exploitation staples in Disney movies, you know it's time to retire them).
It’s almost as if, via some complex form of recurved self-awareness, people are so aware of how easy, how bloody easy, it is to put an interesting and novel new spin on zombies, that they then feel disinclined to bother...Of course, the reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally interesting and novel thing to do with zombies would be to JUST LEAVE THEM THE FUCK ALONE. But somehow we, as a culture, seem to have come to the collective conclusion that that would be cheating.
As a spiritual sequel to Angel One, this is a planet of women who are highly sexed and yet completely deadly — I thought we had left this kind of sexist nonsense behind us in The Original Series but here it is.
— Joe Ford
on Star Trek: Voyager, "Favorite Son"
on Star Trek: Voyager, "Favorite Son"You could not get away with something like "A Piece of the Action" or "Patterns of Force" on any of the later Star Trek shows. When the third season of Enterprise attempts to do a “western on an alien planet” in "North Star", the entire show seems to creak under suspension of disbelief.
— Darren Mooney on Star Trek: Enterprise, "The Communicator"
on Star Trek: Enterprise, "The Communicator"The entire script is based around a single gag that hasn't been funny since the 1950's (and even then, it was bordering on creaky): a man disguising himself as a woman. But not just any man: a Ferengi. Specifically, Quark. Armin Shimerman, the actor who played Quark, is obviously a talented guy with great comedic timing, but he's no Tony Curtis or Jack Lemmon. And when it comes to putting Shimerman in drag, it's fair to say that some like it. Not.
— The Agony Booth on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, "Profit and Lace"
Stories about shops like these are so common they have become a meta-cliché — there are enough tales in which the protagonists are aware such shops are a cliché to fill a decent anthology.
— GURPS Magical Items 3, on The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday
There's something about seeing "Bullet Time" special effects in Lebanese music videos that doesn't make it cool anymore.
Web Video
"The Chronicles of Riddick is a product of another age, and that sealed its doom."
"Because how better to PROVE that RWBY is JUST LIKE an anime than to give it a tournament arc? I mean, a story would have been nice, but—"
"Right, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger! Or maybe, what doesn't kill you is just killing you slowly?...The rebuttal to the cliché is, itself, now a cliché. That's how cliché it is."
"Glenn Martin is the Dumbass Dad, and his wife is the woman too good for him... Literally every sitcom and commercial since 1992. This Cliché has been beaten to a pulp, buried into the ground, grown into a poison oak tree, been cut down, and burnt into toxic fumes."
"A mean older lady in Hatena's family tells her that if she steals a particular artifact, her mom will come back home. She just believes them despite having been betrayed by each of those women in a previous episode and having negative reasons to trust them. It then turns out that the predictable liar lied and it was a trap...and then Hatena gets bondaged up in a T-pose and moans and grunts a lot while the definitely-not-an-audience-insert-character fights to save her. Now...personally, I don't find this to be particularly engaging or satisfying storytelling. I got bored with it around my thirtieth video game or so. Your mileage may vary depending on your tolerance for the sexist cliché so cliché that it's a cliché to call it a sexist cliché."
— Mother's Basement on Hatena Illusion
Western Animation
Does any kid still do this anymore?
Real Life
In "The Old Grey Church," we have the same sort of Evangelical travesty of the fashionable novel, and of course the vicious, intriguing baronet is not wanting.
Mr. Trevanian has a nice gift for bizarre characters. The chief of Search and Sanction is an albino who lives in darkness; he must also undergo periodic changes of blood because he is "one of nature's rarest genealogical phenomena"... It seems only yesterday that Sidney Greenstreet was growing orchards in a most sinister greenhouse and chuckling mirthlessly. Actually, that was thirty years ago and writers are now having a difficult time thinking up unlikely traits...
—Gore Vidal, The Top Ten Best Sellers According to the Sunday New York Times as of January 7, 1973
"Moviemaking is so male-dominated now that they think they’re being pro-feminine when they have women punching each other out."
Who killed Adventure Games? I think it should be pretty clear at this point that Adventure Games committed suicide.
The show was never afraid to go cartoonishly broad with its nerds, with their flailing arms and nasally voices, colourful too-short pants held up with suspenders, and black-rimmed glasses taped at the bridge of the nose, as they scuttled off to chess club...Like a gritty Christopher Nolan reboot of a whole genus, the 21st century Poindexters of Big Bang Theory and Community are far closer to the twitching robo-savant of Rain Man than the spluttering geeks of old, taking their cue from Michael Cera rather than Mr. Bean.
— Stuart Millard on Saved by the Bell, So Excited, So Scared
