Tunak Tunak Tun (Daler Mehndi) Critics claimed his music videos were only popular because they featured attractive women dancing. Mehndi responded by making a music video featuring nobody except multiple green-screen versions of himself. It became a massive hit and his most famous song.
Five Nights at Freddy’s - Scott Cawthon previously made a family-friendly game called Chipper & Sons Lumber Co. Critics complained that the characters looked like creepy animatronics. Rather than abandon that visual style, Cawthon decided to turn them into an actual horror game using scary animatronics.
Superman Kingdom Come - Mark Waid and Alex Ross were reacting to the 1990s trend of increasingly violent, cynical superheroes.
Their story deliberately challenged the belief that traditional superheroes like Superman were outdated. It portrayed the consequences of abandoning heroic ideals and argued that compassion, restraint, and morality were still essential to superheroes.
Spider-Man being created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko despite Stan's publisher telling him that people hate spiders and nobody would care about a mainline teenager superhero with personal problems (since at that time most teens in superhero comics were sidekicks, and superheroes were mostly role models without flaws)
Its kinda funny that they thought people wouldn't like to read about a teenager going through the struggles of life like losing a parental figure and having to find a job to help his family when people LOVE these kinds of stories
"Teenager" (as we know it) were a relatively new concept. The word itself was coined in 1910 and only became widely known as a marketing term after WW2. Before then people of "teen age" were just considered children or adults, depending on the context.
And by "depending on the context" I mean the same 14 year old would be called "just a child" if he was killed during wartime, but one of likely several "men" if he died in a coal mine collapse.
Yeah, but you have to see it in full context. Those people might have said this to Stan, but they still published Amazing Fantasy #15 with a tease for a future Spider-Man comic.
Marvel back then had an extremely limited distribution system. There was a strict limit to the number of comics they were able to publish each month. So taking a chance on an unproven concept was very risky, and yet those same people who were unconvinced still did it.
The 60s was the first time a significant number of “teens” had disposable money and could be catered to. People hadn’t spent much time beforehand thinking of what type of things teens wanted
"I'm in charge here, they pay me a shit-ton of money to give my put of touch opinions on things and then face zero consequences when I'm completely wrong."
You should've seen the '90s. It was a rough scene - Superman died, Batman got replaced with a murderous maniac, Spider-Man's symbiote suit came to life and started eating people, and Rob Liefeld was actually considered talented.
Death of Superman is a great story. Superman being asked what its like to never be scared of being defeated and responding by talking about how he fights people all the time that could kill him but he knows he has to do it while Doomsday is absolutely destroying The Justice League is one of my favorite comic sequences
Death of Superman is so wonderful because it is so good and so influential to both DC and comics as a whole. I love talking about it.
But it also came right before comic writers figured out that they were having their backs broken by preexisting lore. So, I can't really tell people to go and read that run, because I don't want to explain why Supergirl is a shapeshifting alien that is dating Lex Luthor, who is actually Lex Luthors son, but actually he is a clone of Lex Luthor that Lex transferred his consciousness into.
yeah, people joke about comic retcons, reboots, and just wiping out whole eras of the continuity, but holy shit has it been needed. we whine about how bloated the MCU is getting now, but comics get soooo much worse.
"Superheroes are too goofy" --> More serious storylines and genre deconstruction --> Cynicism becomes the norm --> "Superheroes are too depressing" --> More lighthearted storylines and genre parodies --> Silliness becomes the norm --> "Superheroes are too goofy" --> Repeat.
It's not even restricted to superheroes. Most forms of media go through this sort of thing.
art is emotion -> there is no realistic art -> art depicts real world -> there is no emotion, emotion should be in art -> there is no realistic art -> repeat
the same with nature -> humanity -> god, based on your religion -> nature -> humanity -> repeat
humans are not on the world long enough to get out of cycles, we repeat everything, hell we cant move from antic roman/greek art, still saying its the best style and moving back/from it
Watchmen was written in 86/87 and preceded the 90s angst and glorified violence. It was purposefully constructed/written/drawn to depict what these character/heroes would look like in the real world - the violence was uncomfortable and not “badass”. It actually unintentionally started the trend bc other creators took the violence but left the real message, story depth, reasoning behind. However, if you are going off the Snyder film, then yeh all that gets lost and it falls into the ultra-violence to look cool 90s schtick.
Generally speaking, the better the economy is doing, the more people like anti-heroes and darker stuff with their superheroes. Grim and gritty and all.
Conversely, when the economy’s in the shitter, people start wanting stories about hope and the importance of being uncompromisingly good in the face of evil.
My wife and I had to look up the behind the scenes of how they made the guys float in this, cos it's so fucking smoooooth and just so much better than any other effect in the show.
Turns out, rails, wire, and very good editing. Its all practical.
Doug has a very unique elegance to his movement. He has mastered the ability to toe the line of inhumanity with his body language. He's without equal if you want to portray a humanoid monster imo.
Marilyn Monroe doing a photo shoot wearing a potato sack as a dress was created in response to a gossip columnist claiming “her studio should see to it that the public doesn’t see her looking cheap and vulgar. They’d find that a few thousand $$$ invested in a wardrobe, hairdos and charm schooling for Marilyn would pay off.”
The studio decided to prove she’d look good even in a burlap sack.
That dress must have been so uncomfortable. Burlap is the worst. I remember when it was really popular in decor a few years ago. It's so itchy and sheds everywhere. I'm glad that trend ended.
Honestly one of her best shots IMO. I dont know if they found that exact bag printed or made that print but it fits her figure...well, like a piece of art.
While I'm sure Marilyn Monroe would look good even in a regular potato sack, all they're saying in this picture is "she looks great in a professionally tailored, form fitting dress whether it's made of scratchy material or soft!"
Hugh Laurie was known in the UK as a great comedian, a member of projects like Blackadder and A Bit of Fry and Laurie. Then he went on to play Dr. Gregory House. While House contains a lot of jokes and comedy, it's definitely not a comedy.
The character of House is fairly absurd and exagerated though.
Laurie definitely used his comedy chops to bring it to life. I wouldnt say its a fully dramatic performance (and its no lesser bc of it, he sure earned all those emmys).
The episode of Homicide with Robin Williams, Bop Gun is the best episode of television. He goes from being strong for his kids, to raging at the system to being completely broken sometimes all in one scene
His work in Good Will Hunting was great. He was restrained and delivered that you're just a kid speech so well.
Many times before then he's known for being the Genie, or Patch Adams, or Mrs. Doubtfire where there are moments of restraint or heavy bits, but then he's doing his high energy clown bit.
This was one of the first times that a wide audience got to see him be that character. Sure Dead Poets and Fisher King were there but they weren't drawing in the attention the way that Good Will Hunting did.
He was known more for comedy and romance/comedies at the time before Bruce Willis starred in Diehard. Now if someone sees the name Bruce Willis, most usually think of an action hero like John McClane (I'm not exception to this).
People really forget/ aren’t aware of the early part of Bruce Willis’s career. He was the lead in Moonlighting (tv comedy drama) and his first two credited film roles were in Blind Date (rom-com) and Sunset (comedy western). Then he started in Die Hard, and was a very unlikely choice given the hyper muscled leading men of the 70s and 80s, and the rest is history.
Will Ferrell played in stanger than fiction a romance and was quite good in it. My cousin put it on toward the end of his anchor man, elf era and I was really not feeling his comedy style that day only to be pleasently suprised.
It’s the complete inverse of what you said, but isn’t this why Arnold Schwarzenegger had that period where he did a bunch of comedies back to back? To show people that he can play as characters that aren’t just a muscular military guy with a gun?
Tom Hanks is another big one for this I think. Apparently he actually used to do a lot of comedy movies back in the 70's/80's but after starring as the gay lawyer in Philadelphia in the 90's his career did a complete 180 and from then on he pretty much only appeared in big-budget drama movies afterward.
The Terrance and Phillip show was specifically them responding to critics, "Oh, you think South Park is nothing but bad animation and fart jokes? No, no, this is nothing but bad animation and fart jokes."
MGMT was made off a bet too. The story goes that the guys were complaining about how dumb pop music is and how easy it is to make so someone said "okay then you do it" and they made electric feel haha
For all that he was basically a classist/racist piece of shit, Farquaad actually honored his word when it was given. Shrek's swamp was empty when he got back after handing Fiona over.
Also, this example really doesn’t prove the haters wrong.
Katzenburg was extremely talented, and was heir-apparent to the Disney empire. He got fired because he was petty and vindictive. Robin Williams refused to work with Disney over the way Katzenburg treated him, going so far as to mention it in his awards speech for Aladdin. He also drove a lot of their top internal talent away.
Shrek just proves Eisner was right. He was talented, petulant, and a pain in the ass.
And apparently, the people making Shrek were practically a B-Team, people sent on Shrek as punishment (cause the prestige project for Dreamworks at the time was Prince of Egypt. It bombed.)
Right after the disaster that was the Emoji Movie, the very next year, they decided to lock in and create one of the most revolutionary modern day animated films of all time that set new standards among audiences and also in the animated film industry.
Which also not only resulted in Sony Pictures making their most iconic comeback, but also winning and stealing the spotlight on the Oscars Best Animated Feature back in 2019
I remember when Wreck it Ralph breaks the internet came out Disney was so sure they'd win they made the dvd store display with the Animated film of the Year award plastered all over them, only to lose to Spider-Man Into the Spider-verse
Still haven’t finished more than a third of that film. First is amazing and watched too many, it’s such a basic cash grab and even in that first third I’ve seen ruins the message of the first movie.
While me and my pal saw spiderverse on its last cinema day as a thing to do and were blown away! No comparison.
If nothing else watch the two Disney Princess scenes, they're quite clever (even if the "Vanellope introduces royals to comfortable loungewear" is also a blatant marketing push for Disney-themed clothes.)
Development of Into the Spider-verse was rough. Just go watch the original first trailer. It paints a different story where Miles is already an established Spider-Man in his universe in the beginning of the movie. They pivoted quite late into making it an origin story for him. Knowing this, you can see some scenes later in the movie that feel repurposed instead of rewritten, like Miles' Dad doesn't seem to question or acknowledge that there's a new Spider-Man after the original one died.
The movie totally improved him from the comics. The Miles Morales of comics pre-Spiderverse was pretty bland to me when I tried reading them originally. Compounding this was the fact that the MCU's spider man stole Miles' main differentiating thing--having a best friend helper (Ganke Lee vs Ned).
Really ? I thought quite the contrary at the time when I read it, and it's an opinion I just don't understand. Miles' character in the original run was really original to me, he was a kid, even younger than most other heros that weren't sidekicks, where everything in his life went wrong and he still managed to be a hero despite the circumstances.
His uncle died insulting him, he wasn't the "right" spider-man, the previous spider-man once he came back was an asshole to him, and he still rose up to the challenge.
Once he got pulled into 616 though, I stopped reading because to me it became uninteresting, and that's without the whole stupid burger
Adriano Celentano, an Italian singer, released a song in fake-English, "Prisencolinensinainciusol" because he supposedly wanted to prove that songs in English went to the top of the Italian charts, simply because they were in English. So he wrote a song in fake-English and released it, it got to the top 5 in Italy, France and Belgium
The shows creator Danny Antonucci was known for making crude, gross and violent animated short for MTV at the time. He was approached by another show runner from Cartoon Network who basically dared Antonucci to make a show suitable for children. Antonucci took the challenge and thus, we got the Ed’s
The ending to that show still sticks with me. Somehow a crude, gross, violent kid's show has one of the most profound conclusions I've seen in any show for that demo.
I love this one. All because people whined a small rainbow formed in a spot where a small waterfall fell on some rocks causing a bunch of mist to cause the small waterfall.
It was quite pathetic, and was deservedly mocked with whimsyshire and even rainbow diablo 3 shorts at blizzcons
The album 14:59 by Sugar Ray was titled as such due to many critics claiming that the band was falling off and had used up their "15 minutes of fame" as the saying goes. This album went on to contain several of their biggest hits and continue to chart very well.
Also, on a similar note, Vol. 3: The Subliminal Verses was the third album by the band Slipknot. It was also the first album by said band to not feature a parental advisory sticker. This was at least in part due to lead singer Corey Taylor responding to claims that he relied on the use of profanity in his music. The album only features 2 instances of profanity.
Garth Ennis wrote the Boys out of spite. Garth Ennis writes everything out of spite, because he hates superheroes and it’s the only thing people will hire him to write in the comic medium. I think the only thing he wrote with passion was Crossed, which is unfortunate because Crossed is edgy garbage
He writes all of his war stuff with passion, and he certainly wrote punisher with passion. You can tell because they’re amazing.
The only parts of boys he wrote with passion are the military/politics stuff, when he gets more explicit into critique of the bush Cheney administration. Those parts are usually the more interesting.
I really don’t think he wrote crossed with passion; it was basically just an edgy experiment and he stopped writing it after the beginning.
Fans of the show love to glorify the comic… but the comic version of The Boys is actual trash. there is not a single aspect of the story that has some deep message outside of shock value, and the author fucking hating superheroes. That’s all the comic is a hate letter to superheroes.
Sometimes I mentally slip into toxicity and start hating on everyone and everything. Then I remember how fucking dogshit The Boys is and correct myself to be more open minded and positive again before I start ruining the things I'm passionate about too.
Had a similar realization when I was watching Toy Story 3 with friends and they asked me to stop being a cynical asshole, constantly pointing out "mistakes" and such.
Permanently stopped watching cinema sins after that.
"The Boys" comics must be up there for "most larped pieces of media", because I keep seeing people talk about how it's so much better than the show and posting edits (that consist of the same five pages) only to never talk about anything actually in the comics
Look, it's Martian Manhunter - but he's a pervert! Look it's the X-Men - but it's a groomer cult! Look, it's a crude pastiche of Teen Titans/Young Justice/New Warriors - but they're r----ds who just rescue cats from trees and have ice cream parties! Look, it's Thor - but he's an alcoholic groper! Look, it's all the 'my superpower is money' heroes - but he's a degenerate rapist! All so Ennis' quartet of the most agonizingly late-90s Donut Steel edgelord OCs plus Simon Pegg have someone to gruesomely disassemble in full color with super-strength. Essential plot lines include a Superman expie going from "that varsity kid who used to shove Ennis into lockers, but with powers" to homicidal god-complex by mistake, a central protagonist killing a superpowered baby (this is presented positively), and a drooling sub-70 IQ crude parody of Cheney knocking the President unconscious in the secure White House bunker during 9/11. It's just a subway wizard shoving his grubby finger in your mouth because he saw you reading a comic book.
"OH you like Aquaman? Well MY Aquaman is a piece of shit that does drugs. and also he gets killed by My edgy OC characters. OH you like the Flash? Well MY flash rapes people and also he gets killed by my edgy OC characters."
To be fair he doesn't hate ALL superheroes, he just hates most of them (he also specifically hates Captain America, considering his love for the military industrial complex I'm almost not surprised)
He likes Superman a lot! He's actually written some very good depictions of him. He's also a fan of Wonder Woman, Punisher, and Spider-Man but I don't know if he likes any more.
he seemly like spiderman, didn't stop him of sorting the most ridiculous over the top one shot villain for that one issue
Also, I have red other stuff of pennies and he still write it with almost as much spite as they hero stuff, I don't. Know what is his life but you can't tell me there is a reason to hate THAT much James bond spy stuff on the daily basis
Eddie Murphy told Richard Pryor he was doing a music album, and Richard hated on it, going so far as to wager $100,000 that Eddie couldn't do it. So Eddie called up Rick James and made Party all the Time, reaching #2 on Billboard's hot 100 in the US and selling over a million copies.
Tunak Tunak Tun is such a banger, and the music video is such cheesy fun. It’s like watching your friends’ dads get down at a party. Man, now I gotta rewatch it!
The Straight Story was David Lynch making a mainstream family-friendly Disney movie to show he could. It's just as good as the rest of his other works and was unsurprisingly his only G-rated movie.
Scott Cawthon, despite being kind of a weird guy, has honestly a super unique art style. I would not call myself a fan, and I would honestly say I don't really like FNAF much at all, but some of his designs are just so fucking crazy that its hard not to respect the craftsmanship at least a little (and then you remember that screenshot is from a game where a robotic coffee pot travels through an abandoned dystopian factory laden with questionable christian imagery to rescue a fetus being used as a scientific specimen).
I like how they say "recruit" as if it's some ploy to get people to join a cult and not just... Encouraging people to draw instead of typing words to output an image based on other people's work.
Kinda indirectly fits...
The US was deeply isolationist in 1940. Joe Simon and Jack Kirby wrote a character designed to combat American apathy. Publishing explicitly anti-Hitler literature was a creative and financial gamble. And they did get hate about it, but mostly it was very popular. It actually helped move the needle on public opinion.
Joe Simon's father was a Jewish immigrant from Russia, and Jack Kirby's parents were Austrian Jewish immigrants.
This dovetails into my favorite story about Jack Kirby.
“…Jack took a call. A voice on the other end said, ‘There are three of us down here in the lobby. We want to see the guy who does this disgusting comic book and show him what real Nazis would do to his Captain America’. To the horror of others in the office, Kirby rolled up his sleeves and headed downstairs. The callers, however, were gone by the time he arrived.” -Jack Kirby: King of Comics biography by Mark Evanier
My friends and I found tunak tunak on the internet when we were in high school years and years ago. I've never ever ever ever ever heard anybody else ever mentioned it until now. This is hilarious to me.
Edit:
I just went down a rabbit hole. This guy was convicted in a human trafficking case. Fuckem.
Yeah. It's like, the opposite of proving haters wrong. People criticized his animatronics looked creepy as hell, and he used that feedback to his advantage. Proving the criticism right by just cranking up the creep and changing the genre to use that to his advantage.
Kingdom is a great story, though the picture you used is from it's kinda sorta sequel JSA storyline Thy kingdom come, which has KC Superman end up in the mainline DC earth and temporarily joining the JSA
Handful of famous creators in software come to mind.
Garry Newman (of Garry's Mod; Rust fame) had at least one blog post about how his early commitment to the development of GMod was greatly spurred by a rival mod and creator that was being developed in parallel. CBA to look up the post if it even exists anymore but I believe he said the project succeeded out of spite.
John Carmack (Wolfenstein 3D; Doom; Quake; Facebook VR) is a pretty mellow guy nowadays in his rarer public appearances. But he maintains strong opinions and in earlier career established public rivalries with others. Including I wanna say the creator of the Build engine (Duke 3D; Blood). Silverman?
Then there's Linus Torvalds (Linux) who's had years (decades?) long public arguments about OS design fundamentals which I couldn't really begin to cover for lack of understanding. But I'm pretty sure his influence speaks for itself.
All three strike me as a fairly distinct Type of Guy.
Carmack highly respected Ken Silverman. Here's an interview from 1997 where he listed Ken as one of the smartest people in the industry - https://advsys.net/ken/carmken.htm
Carmack was always pretty mellow and gave everyone their praises - it's how he recruited people like Abrash and such. Romero is the one that has mellowed A LOT. Like a SHIT ton. Here's a story where he printed out another programmers photos, hanged them in the office, and encouraged the office to walk by and stab them every day.
"Romero stapled Bill’s picture to the chair, then grabbed a steak knife from the drawer. It was time for revenge." - Masters of Doom.
The person in this story is Rebecca Heineman, a legendary programmer who was great friends with Carmack, but Romero hated and still Romero has popped up every now and then to sort of diminish their programming stature. Kinda weird.
https://giphy.com/gifs/YcMs3OGd89Pxu
Community season 3 episode 1 was a song including lines like “we’re gonna get more calm and normal”, “we’re gonna stand holding hands in a brand new land far away from the borderline”, and “we’re gonna seem like a mainstream dream and appeal to all mankind”. Dan Harmon wrote it in response to the studio exec’s demands for the show’s direction.
In Snatch (2000), Brad Pitt speaks with an almost unintelligible accent. It's said that Guy Ritchie did this in response to critics, especially American ones, who complained that the accents in his previous film, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998), were too hard to understand.
Supposedly, Adriano Celentano wrote a song just to prove he could make something that would chart even if it was nonsense. Not 100% sure it fits, but it sprang to mind. Plus it's a banger.
Prisencolinensinainciusol is a song composed by the Italian singer Adriano Celentano, and performed by Celentano and his wife Claudia Mori. It was released as a single in 1972. Both the name of the song and its lyrics are gibberish, but are intended to represent what American English sounds like to people who do not understand English. The song charted in several European countries.
The Avatar sequels. People said the first one would never make its budget back. Then they said he could never do it twice. The third one less so, but it still made bank on its gargantuan budget for a third time in a row.
Avatar just completely blows my mind. It continually blows out every single box office record, but I have never heard it spoken about except to occasionally riff on it. The only thing I know about the sequel is that the most racist man alive gets a native gf, or something, and that it also broke every box office record. Again.
Marilyn Monroe did a photoshoot wearing a potato sack that’s been converted in a dress.
This was either done in response to the claim that she only looks good because she has expensive clothes, or to a fashion critic insulting one of her dresses.
Goes to show the importance of good tailoring. I'm about to start making my own clothes because I'm tired of off-the-shelf clothes, both in terms of fit and materials.
I just watched a video with Akon talking about sticking his neck out to Interscope Records on behalf of Lady Gaga.
Akon's label, KonLive, is a joint venture to have Akon help develop artists under the Interscope umbrella. Gaga was signed to it in 2007 and was mainly writing songs for other artists. Akon loved her voice on reference tracks and her ability as an artist. Gaga recorded Just Dance, and Akon sent it to head of Interscope Jimmy Iovine. Jimmy liked the track and wanted to give it to The Pussycat Dolls.
Akon apparently passionately pleaded about how impressive Gaga was and bet his label on her success. Saying something like "The Pussycat Dolls are already all-stars, this is the kind of track that creates a new all-star." Jimmy said okay let's do it, and the rest is history.
Tunak Tunak Tun was so popular, Blizzard used his dance as the dance the Male Dranei did when they were introduced in WoW's first expansion, The Burning Crusade in 2007
From Wikipedia:
"In a statement accompanying the release of her eight studio album, the country-rooted Cowboy Carter, in 2024, Beyoncé made reference to an experience of exclusion from the country music establishment that inspired her to delve deeper into the genre and formed the impetus for the album; this was widely believed to refer to the "Daddy Lessons" performance at the CMAs.[26][27] The album's lyrics further invoke this controversy, as she sings on opening track "Ameriican Requiem": "Used to say I spoke 'too country' / Then the rejection came, said I wasn’t country 'nough".[28]"
The Meat Puppets started as a hardcore punk band. The hard core punk scene rejected them for having long hair and not dressing the right way so they got spit on and bottles thrown at them. The Meat Puppets then decided hardcore punk fans suck and they were going to make country music. Their version of country was not traditional but they went on to become pretty successful
After the band’s third album, Caress of Steel, the band went on what they called the ‘down the tubes’ tour. Caress of Steel had no hits for them and received very mixed critical acclaim due to its very ‘out there’ high fantasy theming and intense conceptual vibe. Their label gave them an ultimatum, record an album with hits or they’d be dropped. What did they do ?? Recorded another insane concept album, with the titular first track being 20 minutes long. The band refused to do something that wasn’t true to themselves. The album ended up being one of their most well-received, ever.
Before that, it was the "Silver Ball" era which was not well received among target audience (aka children) and the channel became the butt of the joke among children-oriented channels.
That's when two people (whom I forgot their names) stepped in & gave the channel a total makeover, replacing the silver ball with the shapeshifting orange splat. The reaction from execs were less than pleasant. They even disapproved the channel's new theme song. Despite this, the two pushed through & Nickelodeon became the top channel for children.
5.2k
u/SatoruGojo232 1d ago edited 1d ago
Spider-Man being created by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko despite Stan's publisher telling him that people hate spiders and nobody would care about a mainline teenager superhero with personal problems (since at that time most teens in superhero comics were sidekicks, and superheroes were mostly role models without flaws)